Killing Rites

complete when you stopped it. I’d be surprised if it came through unharmed.”

The idea brought a stab of guilt.

“You spend much time in the East?” Alexander asked, changing the subject.

“I spent two years traveling there when I was younger,” Chogyi Jake said. “I needed to break off connections with a group of people I’d been close to, and it seemed like a good opportunity for that.”

“Alexander?” Ex called. “Father Chapin would like a word.”

Alex stood up, wincing, and walked slowly up the stairs. I almost told Ex to bring the phone down; Alexander’s wounds were still bothering him, and making him climb stairs at almost nine thousand feet above sea level seemed rude. But Chapin probably wanted to talk with him someplace I couldn’t hear them, which was probably why Ex went upstairs too. That, and maybe to give me and Chogyi Jake a minute.

With someone else, I might have gone for pleasantries.

“How bad was it?” I asked.

Chogyi Jake’s smile was a constant in my world, but I’d learned to read its subtle variations. He looked down now, and the amusement in the corners of his eyes sharpened.

“Bad. I don’t think he’s slept since you left. And Father Chapin … wasn’t pleased that Ex called me.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not Catholic,” Chogyi Jake said. “Father Chapin has sacrificed a great deal to the path he’s chosen. I knew that about him from Ex’s stories. One of the tenets of his tradition is that all other traditions are wrong. No one has said it, but I think that by including me, Ex might have been seen as disloyal.”

“But you know me,” I said. “If anyone would be able to track me down, it’d be you two. I mean, if I had been taken over by abstract evil, I’d totally want you on the case.”

“Yeah. Well. Sorry about that.”

“No. I admire him, in a way. There’s a purity to him that’s …”

“Freaky?”

“I was going to say remarkable, but freaky works. And he’s an important man in Ex’s life.”

“Yeah, it kind of had that brought-home-to-meet-the-family feeling sometimes,” I said.

Ozzie sighed, stretched, and struggled to her feet. I put out my hand, and she came to me, ready to have her ears scratched. I chewed on my lip for a second. Dolores was going to be done washing her hands, and she’d come back down. Ex and Alexander wouldn’t be talking to Chapin forever. If I wanted to clear the air, this was my chance.

“So hey,” I said. “Talking about how Ex called you in and all that? Yeah, I think I maybe owe you an apology. I’ve been keeping you kind of at arm’s length these last few weeks.”

“You have,” he said. From anyone else, it would have felt like an accusation. From him, it was just agreeing that the sky was blue. I was grateful he hadn’t tried to make light of it, say that I hadn’t been, and that if I had, it didn’t matter.

“I was doing kind of a rebound thing with Ex,” I said. “I mean, there was also the thing where I’m possessed. And what happened in Chicago. And Aubrey. It all got mixed together. I never thought it right out loud, if you know what I mean, but if you’d been here, you’d have put it in perspective. And I kind of didn’t want perspective. I wanted to make the mistake and not think about how it was a bad idea.”

“Are you certain that it is?” Chogyi Jake asked. “A bad idea, I mean.”

“Which part?”

“Do you love Ex?”

Ozzie chuffed impatiently and pushed her head against my palm to get me petting her again. I started to speak, stopped, tried again.

“I love my brothers. I love my mom. And I love Aubrey and you. I don’t think there are two times in my life I’ve used the word love and meant exactly the same thing by it. No matter what I say about Ex, it’s going to mean something different.”

“I think that’s a powerful insight,” Chogyi Jake said.

“You’re just not going to give me anything, are you?” I said, grinning. “You’re just going to listen to whatever I say and make me think through all of it for myself.”

“Yes,” he said, his grin answering mine.

“I missed the hell out of you.”

Dolores came down the stairs wiping her hands on her shirt, then came over to sit next to me. I watched her open and close her hand, the fingers uncurling slowly as a blooming flower and then folding back to a fist.

“Feels nice, doesn’t it?” I said.

“What does?” she asked.

“Being in control of your own body again. Not having something else calling all the shots.”

Her expression was hard, but she nodded. Between the wind demon and the Akaname, she hadn’t been in control of her own flesh much in a long time. I wondered if being young made that harder or if children were built to have other people making decisions for them in a way that softened the blow. Probably that was wishful thinking on my part. Please be okay, little girl.

When I’d been her age, my little brother had still been in diapers and my older just in middle school. It had been the first time I’d gone to school without a sibling there with me, and I’d known that another one was coming up behind me. There had been a freedom to that. A sense—however small, however brief—that I was my own person and not just a part of the larger unit that was my family.

I wondered about her sister, Soledad. She was firmly in the middle of her adolescence, when girls were building who they were independent of their families. To be ridden then, to have those first green shoots of autonomy and independence crushed flat, might be worse. I wondered if she’d gone home to her mother and Dolores’s yet, and what the rider said. It wasn’t hard for me to imagine myself in her place, trapped and powerless while the rider drove me out into the night and I strained to go back for my sister …

“What about you?” Dolores said. “Are you you, or are you it?”

“I’m me,” I said. “The one inside me doesn’t take over very much, and then not for very long.”

“Why not?”

“Because she’s a little kid like you,” I said. “She’s a really strong little kid, but she’s young. I get the feeling she’s been young for a pretty long time.”

“She isn’t like the ones I had,” Dolores said. “The ones I had sucked.”

“Yeah. They really did.”

“I like yours,” she said, making the pronouncement. The official Dolores seal of approval.

Clumping feet announced the end of the cell phone call to Chapin. Ex and Alexander came down together. They both looked exhausted. As they walked down the stairs, their footsteps fell slowly out of sync.

“Chapin wants us back at San Esteban,” Ex said.

“I’m shocked,” I deadpanned. “We’re not going, though. Right?”

Alexander sat on the couch’s armrest and leaned forward, catching his breath. His skin was getting grayer, and the angle he held his shoulders at was changing. Even though I was pretty sure he wouldn’t go, I was tempted to take him back to the hospital. Ex leaned against the counter between the little living room and the kitchen, his arms crossed. The two priestshanged a glance.

“What exactly we should do next is open to debate,” Ex said. “If we’re certain that the group has been compromised, going back there is problematic. But I don’t see how we walk away either. Whether they are coming from inside the group or not, we’ve clearly got an infestation.”

“And there’s the reason you came in the first place,” Alexander said. “I don’t mean to be rude, but we haven’t addressed that yet.”

“Nothing’s happening with the Black Sun until the rest of this is sorted out,” I said. “Not open to debate. You’re telling me Chapin’s not convinced he’s got a cuckoo in the nest?”

Ex shook his head. The gas fire behind me turned off with a tiny pop.

“It’s a hard argument to make,” he said. “Akaname can be subtle when they want to. They have to be, because they’re so weak. But how likely is it that a rider could live in a society of men dedicated to destroying riders and never be noticed?”

“Seems pretty damn likely to me,” I said. “Who’d look there? And, not to put too fine a point on it, how would