Killing Rites

to give me whatever I asked for because I’d bodysurfed in on a wave of money.

Now we drove through a handful of towns that were barely more than a few hundred yards where the speed limit went down. In a couple, I could have counted the buildings on my fingers. Twice, we passed little houses set back from the highway like some kind of suburban dimensional warp. I imagined some anonymous subdivision, thousands of identical houses with one inexplicable lot of mountain and grassland. It wouldn’t have seemed any stranger than this.

The cottonwoods by the roadside were black barked and dead looking. The names on the signs were places I’d never heard of, some of which seemed like jokes. I had a hard time believing there was a Rat, New Mexico, even if they were saying it in Spanish. Ex pointed out that there was Boca Raton in Florida, and Rat’s Mouth wasn’t particularly more dignified.

After we passed through Española, I let Ex change the road music from Pink Martini to the jazz piano that he preferred. There was more snow on the ground. At first, it only clung to the shadows where the sunlight couldn’t reach it, but every northward mile gave it more courage. By the time we were threading our way along with a frozen river to the left and sheer and towering cliffs to the right, there was as much white snow as brown earth or green pine.

I wondered what it would be like to live out here, away from the world. I had a reflexive longing for it, as powerful as hunger. To fill up the heating oil, haul in a stack of books as high as my head and enough food to get through the winter sounded like a little slice of heaven. If I’d tried it, I’d probably have been walking the fifty miles to Starbucks within the week. It was a nice fantasy. That was all.

I’d also thought that we’d stick out on the road, a gleaming back sports car twisting through the back roads of rural New Mexico. We spent about half the time from Española to Taos between a silver Lexus and a Cadillac Escalade with a ski rack mounted to its roof. The closer we got to the city, the more the traffic seemed divided. Beater pickup trucks and fifteen-year-old Saturn sedans grudgingly made way for hundred-thousand-dollar SUVs.

The car had a GPS, but Ex didn’t use it. We went straight through town and out the other side before we took an obscure fork from the main road. The road angled north and west, winding along the contours of the land. The asphalt didn’t look like it had ever been adulterated by paint. The roadside was mottled with snow and ice, but the pavement was clear. A chain-link fence rusted in the middle of a field for no discernible reason. The traffic signs we passed were crusted with old snow, the top half of the speed-limit numbers fading to gray. I didn’t realize we were getting close until Ex pulled the car to the right, eased down a short road, and killed the engine.

San Esteban spread out before us. Three streets with a few buildings on each one, like a giant had scattered a handful of gravel. About half were clapboard with pitched roofs. The others were flat-topped adobe with brown stucco and windows so deep that birds had built nests on the sills. A couple of metal Quonset huts crouched together at the north end. Once, they’d been painted in psychedelic swirls that still hung on as paint flakes. One had a gas pump out front so old it wouldn’t read credit cards.

Ex had stopped by one of the adobe buildings with the deep-set windows. At a guess the sanctuary might have been a school once. Or a nunnery. There were no signs on the building to say what it was used for now. There were no street signs. When I looked at my cell phone it was wavering between digital roam with one bar and no service. The whole town was well on its way to not existing at all. Ex put the keys in his coat pocket, took a deep ath, and nodded to himself.

“Stay here,” he said.

“Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.”

I thought he smiled a little as we got out of the car. I trailed him down the walk to the blue-painted double doors. They were wood, and so worn by the years it looked like the paint was holding them together. The air bit at my earlobes and made my nose run a little. I kept my hands stuffed deep in my pockets and reminded myself to buy gloves next time the occasion arose. And maybe a scarf. A motorcycle blatted past, the only traffic sound there was. Ex knocked on the door.

We waited. I looked around. Across the street and about twenty yards farther along, a small house hunkered down in the snow. The windows had sheet plastic over the screens and a television flickered inside, blurred to mere light and movement. On the street, a beat-up gray Yukon and a sedan that had first hit the road when I was getting out of grade school.

Thirty or forty crows perched in the bare cottonwood across the street, calling to one another and shifting uncomfortably like old men at a bus station.

There was something wrong. It wasn’t the stillness, exactly. Or the cold. Or the quiet. The world felt thin here, the spiritual world just outside ours—the place that we called the Pleroma or Next Door—close enough to touch. The sanctuary at San Esteban felt like magic, and it made my flesh crawl. Ex knocked on the door again.

“Maybe they’re out doing the thing,” I said. “Wind demon busting.”

“They’re here,” he said, nodding toward the car and Yukon.

The crows clacked at one another accusingly. There was a term, I thought, for a group of crows the same way there was for a school of fish or a pride of lions. It was right on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t quite remember it. With my black coat and hair, I felt like I should be able to spread my arms and fly up to the winter- killed tree, squat on the branches, and look down at the world.

As if alarmed that I’d even think it, the crows took to the air, cawing and beating their wings. They circled up into the hazy white sky, turned south, and departed. I watched them go, and behind me, the blue doors opened. The man who stood in the shadows beyond was maybe thirty. His skin was the brown of eggshells, and his black hair was combed straight back. A sense of weariness weighted down the air around him; I kept expecting him to sway on his feet. He wore the Roman collar under a thick wool sweater. When he spoke, it was with an accent that made me think of being eight years old with a crush on Ricky Ricardo. Old Havana, as romantic and unreal as Middle-earth.

“I’m sorry. You’ve come at a very bad time. You’ll have to go away. Come back later.”

“You don’t recognize me, do you?” Ex said.

The man in the doorway looked up, shocked. His eyes were so brown they were black, and his expression changed from a shock that was almost fear to disbelief to an incandescent joy in the course of a single breath.

“Chewy? Is that you?”

Chewy? I thought, and Ex grinned and held his hands out at his sides as if say, Here I am. Old Havana stepped out into the light. In the sun, the few gray hairs at his temples shone in the light, but they didn’t make him look old so much as prematurely gray. He took Ex in a bear hug, and I stepped back in case his enthusiasm spilled over onto me.

“What are you doing here?” Old Havana said as he returned Ex to the ground. “I haven’t heard from you in years. Not since Isabel—”

“It’s been a long time,” Ex said. “Chapin didn’t mention me, then.”

“No. Except … Were you the mysterious errand down in Santa Fe?”

“If it was yesterday, then I probably was.”

Old Havana nodded more to himself than to Ex. Looking at him more closely now, I saw he was less Desi Arnaz and more Benicio Del Toro. He had the same distance in the eyes and the same well-worn masculine pretty. He looked at me as if noticing that I was there.

“This is Jayné,” Ex said. “Janyé, this is Miguel Contreras. Father Contreras, I guess.”

Old Havana—Miguel—nodded to me, smiling. I pulled a hand out of my pocket and waved.

“Hey,” I said.

“She’s why we came,” Ex said. “We need to talk to him.”

“We’re in the middle of a ceremony.”

“Akkadian wind demon,” Ex said.

Miguel nodded, paused, then nodded again.

“We’ve been going for three days. The girl’s in the back, and the devil wants her bad. Won’t give her up. We’ve been pulling shifts.”

Ex frowned.

“You mean he came down to see me in the middle of a rite?”

“We thought it was strange too,” Miguel said. “Maybe a little less strange, seeing it’s you. Are you here to