Tears poured down Carsey’s cheeks. His eyes locked on mine, and he shook his head in refusal. Glass broke, a window shattering and the shards dancing on brick. Then a second shattering, and the unmistakable roaring of fire.
“Give him here,” I said. Carsey closed his eyes, bent down, and together we scooped the old man into my arms. Chapin’s head turned toward me, nestling between my shoulder and my neck like a sleeping child’s. His breath was soft against my skin. When I stood, I had more than my own strength.
“Go,” I said. “All of you. Now. I don’t know if we can do this, but even if we fail, I will give you the best distraction you’ve ever seen.”
“I’m coming with you,” Ex said. Chogyi Jake didn’t speak, but his smile was enough to tell me he was being polite. He would be two steps behind me whichever way I walked. White smoke was trickling in from the rooms west of us, the fire burning between us and the blue doors at the front. I hefted Chapin and walked toward the flames.
We ran through the rooms as the images of Hell split and curled; real fire consumed them. Christ burned on cross after cross as we passed them. I felt Chapin’s heartbeat and the patterns of his shallow breath, and the answering pulse of the rider rising up inside me. An eerie serenity came over me. I heard Ex and Chogyi Jake coughing, but the smoke and heat didn’t bother me. I had a sense of peace that had nothing to do with the conflagration. My rider welled up around me again, and I slipped back behind my eyes, curling up in the space that was my own, but as I did, I tried ull Chapin’s soft, fluttering breath with me, to keep my connection with him and the three of us together. The roaring of the fire and the riotous anger of the attackers were quieter than his gentle breath, like they’d had the volume turned down almost to nothing.
I had worked group rituals before. I had felt the different personalities of the people involved touching one another, supporting one another, making the group stronger than the whole. This was nothing like that. We were something else, something new. I breathed in Chapin’s breaths, and my footsteps changed. I sank into my knees and hip, the power of the stride riding lower. I walked the way a man walked, and I saw the world with a vision that belonged to the closed eyes resting against me. We weren’t priest or possessed or spirit, but we also were. It felt as natural as falling.
In the spreading fire before me, two bodies seemed to condense out of the smoke. A young man and an old woman sprinting toward me, hands spread wide and black tongues whipping through the searing air. Still carrying Chapin across my forearm, I waved one encumbered hand. The motion was simple and graceful, and the will it directed was cold and hard as a chisel. I felt it strike a fault line too subtle to see at the place where soul and demon met, and I felt my enemies shatter. The black tongues vanished. Man and woman stumbled, fell screaming, and Ex and Chogyi Jake hunched forward to grab them and haul them away from the flames. Five more were waiting at the broken blue doors. I could feel Chapin’s joy in slipping forward, ahead even of our bodies, and popping the riders off their victims like crushing ticks between his thumbnails. The Akaname shrieked, falling back into the abstract space of the Pleroma.
I stepped into the doorway, and they were waiting for me. The crows whirled through the sky, drawn by the battle and fleeing from it. The snow glowed blue from the moon and red from the flames, and on it, rank upon rank of rider stood, with rifles and blades, baseball bats and demonic, whipping tongues. I turned my head to where Ex and Chogyi Jake were crouched behind the doorway, their heads low to keep from breathing the smoke. Seven others were with them. People who had been my enemy moments before, and now were my charges. The innocents I had spent my life protecting.
“Stay here,” I said, and my own voice seemed distant, drowned, not entirely my own.
I stepped out into the mob. Their foul voices rose up together, their combined will hitting me like a hard wind. A rifle cracked, and I shifted my weight, letting the bullet slip by me like a bee in a meadow. An aluminum baseball bat already stained with someone’s blood swung toward Chapin’s head, and I turned just enough that it ruffled his close-cropped hair as it passed. A boy in a pale sheepskin coat ran for me, knife in hand, and I bent one knee, twisted, and slid away out of his reach.
They tried to stop me with the raw press of bodies, the riders using the flesh they’d stolen to limit my movement. I danced through the assault, untouchable, like I was walking between raindrops, and my threefold will reached out to devastate my enemies. I could see our power swirling around me like a white aurora, shifting with Chapin’s attention, striking with my rider’s strength. I felt their cries of horror and despair. I watched the lolling, evil flesh of their filthy tongues boil away into smoke. The black eyes faded to blue and brown and white. And with every one, I felt the old warrior bare his teeth in triumph.
Dolores’s sister, Soledad, appeared amid e crowd, her mouth a square gape of rage. The red steel axe swung toward me and the old man in my arms. Freeing her took no more than a breath. She and Dolores had almost beaten me in the hotel, days or weeks or years before, and now breaking her bonds was just one note in a symphony. It was the grace and knowledge of a lifetime translated into a few moments of transcendence. Our dance was the final product of Father Chapin’s life lit from within until, together, we glowed brighter than the sun, violence without the violence. I never hit anyone, never felt the bones give way under my foot or fist, only reached out with our combined will where Chapin showed us, and they fell before us like mown grass.
And then it was over. I stood in the winter night, my enemies sent broken back to Hell. The ground was littered with the confused, stumbling people from whom the unclean spirits had fled. The sky was a mosaic of crows and floating embers and stars.
The three of us looked around, suffused with the combined sense of profound satisfaction and desolating regret.
The work of a lifetime, now finished.
I fell back into the world like I was waking from a dream. There were voices all around me, crying and shouting. Someone to my right was retching violently, and the sanctuary was in flames, the heat radiating out into the darkness. Fire spat out from a half dozen shattered windows, and men still coated with nauseating greenish slime were throwing handfuls of snow into the flames. As if that could stop it.
Ex touched my shoulder, and I turned. There was blood at the corner of his mouth and soot streaked his face and hair. He was grinning.
“Are you okay?” he shouted.
“I think so,” I said. “Where is everyone? Are they okay?”
“I don’t know. Chogyi Jake’s over there. The others went toward the back like you told them. I think they made it out, but I’m not sure. I’ll go check for stragglers.”
“Don’t go alone,” I said. “We cleaned these out, but there may be more Akaname out there. I may have missed some.”
The fire lit half his face in the warmth of red and gold, and the moon shone white-blue on the other. He shook his head.
“You didn’t,” he said. Before I could say anything else, he leaned in, kissed me on the lips, and then turned and marched off into the night. The fatigue was sudden and absolute. My arms ached. My legs burned from the muscles out. Slowly, gently, I put Father Chapin down in the snow. His eyes opened, tiny glittering slits between the lids.
“Not bad for an old, gutshot guy,” I said, and his lips widened a millimeter.
He opened his mouth, trying to speak, but I could no more hear him than I could turn dim the moonlight. I shifted forward on my knees, leaning into him until his breath warmed my earlobe.
“I am sorry, Miss Jayné,” he whispered, “that I could not save you.”
It was the last thing he said.
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapin’s funeral filled the cathedral in Santa Fe. Men and women, white haired and weak with age to babies still in strollers. It seemed like a lot of people knew one another. On the way in, there had been lots of quiet conversations and long-held hand clasping. I sat in the back in a pew beside three old men who pointedly didn’t look at me and Chogyi Jake. Every now and then, I caught sight of the back of Ex’s head far ahead of us. Near the altar. Miguel sat to his left, Carsey to his right. Carsey was getting a little bald spot. I hadn’t noticed that before.
