“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 you know? If my rite had gone through, at the end of it, I’d have been sitting at the table just like Dolores’s family did, and saying how much better I felt and how grateful I was. And if I seemed a little off, it would have been because I’d just been through this huge thing, so of course I’d be a little forgetful or irritable or whatever. How would you know?”
“They’ve been doing this for years,” Ex said. “At some point somebody would have noticed.”
“Yeah, and that would be me,” I said. “I noticed.”
In the silence, Ozzie lay down. Dolores slipped off her shoes and scratched the old dog’s back with her toes.
“If one of the priests is ritually impure,” Alexander said, “they might have been open. I know Tamblen fights against his nature, but—”
“Please,” I said. “He’s just gay. He’s not ritually impure.”
“Homosexuality is a sin,” Alexander said. “I’m not saying Tamblen is a bad man, only that—”
“Everyone’s unclean,” I said. “You told me that. You were the one who went through everybody’s problems. Your doubt, and Carsey’s lust, and Tomás’s gambling. If we’re looking for who’s pure, I’m pretty sure everyone looks bad. But you’re not possessed. Ex isn’t. It’s not about purity.”
“I think,” Ex said, “we need to consider this from Chapin’s perspective. What if the Akaname isn’t in one of the priests? It could still be waiting nearby for a steady supply of vulnerable people.”
“That’s not what happened,” Dolores said. Her voice had enough exasperation for both of us. “It tried to get in when the other one was in there too. It went on at the same time.”
“Then icould have been anyone,” Ex said. “Miguel or Chapin or Tamblen. Any of us who were there.”
“No,” I said. “Not for Dolores.”
“What?”
“Everyone was there for mine because we were doing the short form. They’d been working on Dolores for days, and thought they’d be doing it for days more,” I said, then turned to the girl. “When the wind thing got loose, it was because the other one was trying to get in. That’s when it happened?”
Apparently eye rolling starts sometime well before the eighth birthday. “That’s what I said.”
“But Chapin was talking to us, Ex,” I said. “He was right there in the room with us when it happened. So it can’t have been him.”
Ex’s scowl almost covered the relief. It didn’t completely let Chapin off the hook, but it sure made things look better. Alexander cleared his throat. His eyes were narrow.
“Carsey and I were going in to relieve Chapin and Tomás,” he said. “If we’re all still willing to assume I’m not being ridden—““We are,” I said. “At least I am.”
“—then that means Carsey or Tomás.”
“St. Francis,” I said.
They looked at me. I wasn’t sure quite what I’d meant. I wasn’t even a hundred percent positive I was the one who’d said it. But something was shifting in the back of my mind.
“The Mark of St. Francis,” I said. “I was wearing it and it stopped the Black Sun. But it didn’t stop the Akaname. So if the group’s compromised, then maybe the Mark was broken. Maybe whoever made the medallion left a hole the Akaname could get through.”
Alexander shook his head.
“That would take a level of control and power that—“
“That you couldn’t do without a rider,” I said. “But that’s the point, right? Even small fry like the Akaname are better with magic than people are. So if someone who knew the rituals had a rider, he could maybe do things that he couldn’t have by himself. The Black Sun helped you cast the Akaname out of Dolores, Alexander. You couldn’t have done that alone.”
“If I’d had time—”
“You didn’t have time,” Ex said. “She has a point. Even if a normal man couldn’t make a sabotaged Mark, someone with a rider might. And Tomás made the Mark.”
“Ex,” I said. “You said he was kind of before and after for you. He went away for his final vows and then came back. Do you remember where he went?”
“Japan,” Ex said. “A mission in Japan. Where Akaname are more common. And if he had been possessed by something while he was there and had it cast out, it wouldn’t have been that hard to conceal. He was already part of the group. Chapin wouldn’t have areason to examine him again when he came back.”
We sat in silence for a moment, but I felt like crowing. My heart was a great big bubbling fountain of I’ve-got-you-now.
“Well, okay, then,” I said. “I think we’ve got a hypothesis.”
Chapter 22
If I’d tried to, I couldn’t have pointed to the change that came in that moment. I only knew that it had happened. It wasn’t just that Alexander and Ex stopped arguing against the rider-in-priest’s-clothing idea. It was also something in the way they looked at me, the way they held themselves. When I was a kid, my older brother, Jay, had shown me how to get iron filings out of the sand in the school sandbox. He’d had a sheet of white paper with a bunch of black dirt on it until he put a magnet under it, and then like magic, everything lined up. It was like that now. The case against the angel-voiced Tomás came together and now we were all pointing in the same direction.
Almost.
Chogyi Jake’s smile was as pleased and enigmatic as ever. Alexander leaned back on the couch, whistling low. Even Dolores seemed pleased that we’d figured it out. Only Ex looked like he was braced for a blow. He met my eyes and looked away. The pain would probably have been invisible to someone who didn’t know him as well as I did.
“Hey,” I said to him. “Can I borrow you for a minute? You guys talk amongst yourselves.”
I stepped out the back door. Snow covered the hot tub’s deck. The air bit, and the calling of crows was like the announcement of a funeral. Ex closed the door behind us, the latch clicking into place. In the sunlight, he looked even paler. His white-blond ponytail was loose. His eyes were bloodshot, and he still moved stiffly when he twisted. I wondered how the wounds on his back were doing.
“Hey,” I said.
He nodded.
“I think one of us owes the other an apology,” I said, “but I’m not sure how it goes.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“You know that stuff I said about how much I appreciate everything you did for me?”
Ex leaned against the wall, his arms crossed.
“I do.”
“I meant all of it.”
“I know you did,” he said.
“We only had the information that we had,” I said. “There were two ways to read it. I went one way and you went the other. I was right, but it wasn’t like you could have known that. We made our judgments and we acted on them.”
“Nothing else we could have done,” Ex agreed.
“We’re cool, then?”
“Of course we are. Why wouldn’t we be?”
I pushed my hair back from my eyesbove us, a thousand icicles glittered and shone like tiny transparent teeth.
“Maybe because you chained me up in a cellar, and you were going to feed me to a shit demon. Or how about because I beat you unconscious and spent days running while you worried yourself sleepless. It seems like someone here ought to have some hard feelings about something.”