“They know it’s made from mud and stucco, right?”
“Pour enough gasoline on it,” he said with a shrug, “and you can burn water.”
“Cheerful thought,” Tamblen said.
The not-sound ran through me again. Another attack turned aside by the weakening wards and protections built into the sanctuary. It would keep stopping the riders until it didn’t. Chogyi Jake stood, walked to the doorway, and peered into the next room like he was checking to see if he’d left the lights on. The pistol was in his hand again.
“Okay,” I said. “So if we keep Carsey on nursing duty, that gives us six folks on our side. Seven, counting the Black Sun. They’ve got a hundred or so riders, just one of which almost kicked our collective ass less than an hour ago.”
“Yes,” Ex said.
“And we’re totally surrounded, right?”
“Right.”
“Also, there’s an eight-year-old girl who will eventually be delivered back to her family and taken by demons again if we can’t get out of here,” Alexander said.
I pressed my palms against my eyes until little globs of color appeared. Chapin’s ragged breath was the loudest sound, but just below it there was something else. Inhuman voices lifted together.
“We could call the police?” Carsey said.
“No offense,” I said, “but I don’t think a bunch of dead cops is going to help. Do we know anybody with a helicopter less than an hour from here?”
“Creative thought, but I don’t even think the medevac from Albuquerque could get here in an hour,” Miguel said.
“We’re on our own, then,” I said. I thought about it for a few seconds, trying it from every angle I could think of. “We’re not going to make it.”
“No,” Ex said. “We aren’t. But if we do it right, a few of us might get out in the chaos. I think we should take the fight to the riders. Concentrate all our effort in one place, and then sneak as many people as we can out the other side.”
He was right, but the weight of implication behind the plan was vicious. The wounded—Tomás and Chapin—would have to be abandoned. For the distraction to be effective, most of us would have to be part of it, meaning most of us were about to die. Including me, because I had the Black Sun’s daughter living inside me, and if there was a distraction, she’d have to be part of it.
I didn’t want to die. The primitive monkey part of my brain was screaming and bouncing around the inside of my skull just to remind me how much I didn’t want to die. But if that wasn’t an option, at least I didn’t want to die for nothing. And that was all the choice I had left. I felt like a balloon with its string cut, spinning up into the sky.
“Well,” I said.
“Yeah,” Ex replied. Meaning he’d thought all the same things I had and come to the same conclusions. “There’s a kind of beauty in heroic last stands.”
“Remember the Alamo,” I said.
“I thought we lost that one,” Carsey said. “Didn’t we lose that one?”
“Depends what you mean by
The gallows humor was as comforting as anything could have been. It didn’t quiet my fear, but it made it easier to ignore. Another wave of not-quite-sound. This one felt closer, more threatening. Time was running out.
“Who makes a break for it?” I asked.
“Alexander and Miguel,” Tamblen said.
“They’re hurt but not incapacitated,” Carsey said. “They’ll be the least use in a fight and still have a decent chance of getting away. And, more to the point, Alexander’s young enough that he’ll have more years spinning fantastic tales of our glory. If Tamblen went over the fence, he’d tell it all in three sentences and a shrug.”
Tamblen grinned. “True,” he said.
For a moment, I saw it. Just a glimpse. For a moment, here in death’s waiting room, I knew how these men had been a family. The shared jokes and the shared secrets, the sorrow and the dedication and the willingness to die together. It made them beautiful, and for the moment I was part of it. I rose first.
“Well,” I said. “If we’re going to do this, we’d better get going. Hate to be late for the party.”
Ex stood up too, and Chogyi Jake stopped pacing to come stand by me. I felt Aubrey’s absence just then, and I was more grateful than I could express that he wasn’t there. A weird kind of peace settled over me. I wondered if it was from my own mind, or if my rider was letting her feelings be known. I couldn’t tell the difference.
“We should go out the main doors,” Carsey said, still pressing the bloody cloth to Chapin’s side. Chapin looked like a man made of wax, less realistic than some of the crucified saviors on the walls. “It’s the widest entrance. And there’s a window on the north side wide enough for the runners to squeeze out.”
“Do we try to press out into them or open the doors and fall back, try to get them to follow us inside the sanctuary?” I asked.
“Stop!”
For a moment, I couldn’t tell who’d spoken. Then Chapin opened his eyes. I was amazed that he was conscious, but he turned his head toward me, pointing with two bloody fingers.
“You … submit to me, to my will …”
I had to laugh.
“Seriously? I’m about to go sacrifice my life to save a couple of your boys, and we’re still on how I’m the beast and evil?”
He shook his head. His face was white. Even his lips had lost all color.
“You mistake me, Miss Jayné,” he said. “There is another way, but I cannot do this. You must submit yourself to my will. I will guide you. I will guide the
Slowly, I walked to him. Three steps had never seemed like such a long way. He tried to smile, his bared teeth hardly paler than the gums they sat in. He’d bled white, but he held on to consciousness through brute force of will. All around us, the others had gone silent.
“I’m listening,” I said.
“I am an old man. I have many, many years of finding the thin places between the demon and its prey. I have freed many, many people.”
“That didn’t work out all that well,” I said.
“Be quiet! Listen!” His shout was only a change in the sape of his mouth. It didn’t have more power than a whisper. “With only the human will given us by God, I have defeated the lords and presidents of Hell. With the power of a few brave souls, I have conquered demons. To do so much with so little can only be accomplished with great knowledge. Much practice. With the power that lives within you and the craft of the life behind me, these little evils can be broken. Even though they number in the hundreds.”
He wanted to work together. An hour ago, he’d been willing to risk his own death to keep me in chains, and now he wanted something closer than an alliance. The desperation burned off him, or if not desperation, certainty.
“Can he do that?” Carsey asked of no one in particular.
I knelt beside the dying man. Pride flickered in his eyes. Pride and defiance and fear. The non-sound washed over us again and left the smell of sewage behind it. Something physical crashed far down at the end of the building, followed by the sound of voices raised in anger.
“Jayné?” Chogyi Jake said. “Whatever we do, we need to do it very, very soon.”
“You still think she’s evil,” I said.
Chapin’s throat worked, half swallow, half spasm.
“It is,” he said.
“And you’d still work with us?”
His smile was built from regret. His eyes were seeing something else now, something only he remembered.
“I will save my little boys,” he said. “If the price is damnation, I pay it. Take me.”
