Killing Rites

At the pulpit, the archbishop said the Mass. I followed along as best I could. It had been a long time since I’d gone to church, and when I had, it had all been in English. Here, it was all Requiem aeternam dona eis, Dominae. On the one hand, it seemed like it didn’t have anything to do with Chapin as a man. On the other hand, it was what he’d dedicated his life to. What he’d died for.

The requiem began, the notes of the organ rising toward heaven. I felt like an impostor. I folded my hands in my lap and waited. Somewhere nearby, a man was sobbing uncontrollably. I didn’t know who. When the time came to go forward for communion, the three men shuffled past me with sour expressions on their faces. The urge to go up to the front and take the body and the blood tugged at me, but I couldn’t. I imagined Ex trying to retake his vows, unable to say the words because he couldn’t mean them. I was there. I got it.

When the recessional finally came, Chogyi Jake and I stood out on the steps. The sun was warm, even in the winter air. The snow had melted off everywhere except the deepest shadows where it still lurked, dark and light at the same time. The other attendees streamed out past us, heading left toward the parking lots or the plaza. Ex appeared at my side. In the three days since he’d kissed me as the sanctuary burned, he hadn’t touched me, and he didn’t touch me now.

“I’m going to need a few minutes,” he said.

Looking back through the doors into the beautiful darkness of the cathedral, I could see Alexander, Carsey, and Miguel talking together. Tamblen sat in a pew beside them, his head still bowed in prayer. They were all that remained of Ex’s previous family. Alexander looked up, his gaze meeting mine. He lifted a hand, and I waved back.

“As long as you want,” I said. “There’s no rush.”

He walked back in with his shoulders stiff. The gouges on his back hadn’t healed yet. My bruised rib still ached sometimes when I breathed in too deeply. My feet hurt a lot, but they’d pretty much stopped bleeding. From all I’d heard, rebuilding the sanctuary was dicey, and there were still a couple of dozen Chapin’s group had “saved” in the last few years who hadn’t been part of the attack. I guessed tracking down the remaining filth-lickers trumped fixing the architecture, but it wasn’t my call to make.

I watched the cars go by, one after another, going about the business of the world. Most of the people on the street didn’t know or care what had happened in San Esteban. I envied them that.

“How are you feeling?” Chogyi Jake asked.

“Tired,” I said. “Weirdly lonesome. Undercaffeinated.”

“Lonesome?”

“Yeah. Can’t explain that,” I said. “But I do.”

“Do you miss Aubrey?”

“Sure,” I said. “Are he and Kim … Are they happy, do you think?”

“Yes. They’re happy. And they’re sad. Confused, grateful, hurt, angry. They’re all those things, and will be, I think, for a while before they find a place of relative calm.”

“Do you think they’ll make it?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about you?” I asked. “Are you still angry that I ditched you in Chicago?”

I smiled when I said it. I wanted it to be a joke.

“Yes,” he said gently. “I am. But the anger comes from being hurt. When the one fades, the other will.”

“I know it doesn’t help, but I’m really sorry.”

“No,” he said. “That helps.”

I looked back. Ex and Miguel were walking away from us. Miguel had an arm over Ex’s shoulder, like they were brothers or lovers. Intimates. I knew how I would have felt if Chogyi Jake or Ex or even Aubrey had given me the runaround for weeks. Months. I’d have been a lot less Zen about it.

“Forgive me?” I said.

“Yes,” Chogyi Jake said.

Four men came out of the cathedral. Two I didn’t recognize, one was the archbishop, and the last was Tamblen. He nodded at me as they passed. A truck drove by playing music loud enough to shake the air. Charming.

“Jayné!”

Dolores ran up, throwing her arms around me and grinning. She looked so bright and delighted, I had to smile back. Funeral black couldn’t keep her down. The marks of what she’d been through were invisible. She’d lost her body twice now to beings of terrible power. No matter how much she looked like a child, no matter how bright her eyes were, she and I both knew that her life had been touched by fire. There would always be a scar.

And we both knew it was true for me too.

“Hey, kid,” I said. “You’re looking better.”

“I get to go back to school after Christmas,” she said, bouncing on her toes. I wondered if I’d ever been that happy at the idea of going to class. Probably, but I didn’t remember it. “Where’s Ozzie?”

“Back at the ranch,” I said. “Holding things down. How’s Soledad doing?”

Dolores wrinkled her nose.

“She’s a little fragile,” she said. Her inflection was so adult, I was sure she’d been hearing her mother and grandmother saying it.

“Well, be a little patient with her. She had a hard time.”

“I hd a hard time too,” she said, frowning.

“We all did.”

The new voice was sharp as a cracking stick.

“Dolores, come here.”

The three women stood at the curb below us. The oldest one stared up at me with something that bordered on hatred. The youngest—

Soledad—wouldn’t look at me. Dolores hesitated for half a breath, then gave me a fast hug.

“I love you,” she said, then turned and bounded down to her family. Her grandmother’s eyes fixed on me as she crossed herself and spat over her shoulder. Her grip on the little girl’s arm was steely as they walked away.

“Well, that seemed uncalled-for,” Chogyi Jake said.

“Yeah, well,” I said. “I didn’t really keep my situation a secret from Dolores, and they’ve got a thing about people with riders living in them. Got to say it’s honestly come by.”

“I suppose so. And you?”

“And me what?”

“How do you feel about people with riders?”

I squinted up at the sun. The only thing it radiated was heat and light. The question hung in the air for a few seconds. A sparrow sped by us, its dust-brown wings fluttering.

“You know,” I said, “I think there’s a coffee shop down there on the left. Buy you a cup?”

“All right.”

THE BLACK Sun.

Once I had the laptop in range of a real wireless connection, I found encyclopedias’ worth of information. It was central to the Nazi occultism. In some traditions, it was the burnt-out antisun that heralded regeneration, in others it was the actual physical ball of burning gas that seemed to rise in the east and set in the west every day, called “black” because it was made from matter and was therefore spiritually impure. The Black Sun was the symbol of Left-Hand path groups like the Temple of Set, or it was a name for Jesus. It was Blavatsky’s Invisible Sun around which the universe revolves, it was a cult of Finnish serial killers in the 1960s, it was the most powerful crime syndicate in the Star Wars universe.

When we went into Santa Fe, I downloaded everything I could find. Back at the ranch, I sat on the couch and read until my eyes hurt. Chogyi Jake and Ex were in full research mode with me, and the dinner conversation was equal parts theosophy and alchemy and whether we had enough coffee beans for the morning. After four days, I felt like I knew less than when I’d started.

I kept waiting for her to reach out and point me in the right direction. Pick out a particular document or point my finger at a sentence or a symbol that would draw a line through the rest of it. She was as quiet as the dead. I knew she was in there, but I didn’t know what shape she was in. My half exorcism and