“Calling Malkuth,” Kim said. “Like in Denver.”
“Does that let the rider out too?” I asked.
“Possibly,” Chogyi Jake said. “And if not immediately, it at least lessens the time during which the containment works. It’s a rider. After being locked away for decades, it may still be weak but it will get stronger. The prison aspect is a network of spells worked into the hospital itself. Very complex, very powerful, but only spells. They will degrade with time.”
“And then it still gets out,” I said.
“It does.”
I leaned back, my head thudding against the altar. Ex finished his circuit of the room and came to perch on the back of a pew, his feet on the seat. In his black shirt and pants, pale hair pulled back, he looked like an eagle. Kim and Aubrey sat together in the pew across from him. They weren’t quite touching, but they were closer than they would have been, I thought, if Aubrey and I hadn’t talked. Kim still didn’t know. It didn’t seem like the moment to get into that. Oonishi paced at the back of the room, looking like a wax dummy of himself brought to life. Only Chogyi Jake sat on a front bench, his hands clasped before him.
“Worst case,” I said. “What happens if it breaks free?”
Ex shrugged.
“It escapes, takes over a complex social structure. Political party, religious community, city. Maybe a country. Hard to say. Once it’s in, it uses its power to gain more control. Maybe go back to the Ahnenerbe’s plan. Yoke other riders either with mutual pacts or bindings fueled by death magic. So, five, ten years, you’re looking at a wave of American genocide, massive spiritual possession, and probably a rider with nuclear launch codes,” he said.
I said something vulgar.
“Well,” he said. “You said worst case. Being difficult to see magically gives you some protection, but you can’t count on it. If the rider has access to a thousand pairs of human eyes, it will find us. And as soon as it’s sure it can’t find a way to squirm out past being confined, that’s likely to be on its agenda.”
“Can it take control of us?” Aubrey asked.
“It already got me once,” Kim said. “And that was before it got out if its grave.”
“If it can find us, it probably will,” Ex said.
“But we can break that,” I said. “Just a little off-the-cuff cantrip did it before. Any of us should be able to do that, right? I mean, it’s not like they’re exactly being ridden. It doesn’t take an exorcism to pop them free.”
“That was before,” Ex said. “It’ll be harder now. If it finds us and takes someone over, we have to be prepared to incapacitate whoever got the fuzzy end of the lollipop.”
The silence didn’t last more than a few seconds, but it was soaked with dread. I hadn’t even considered that Aubrey or Kim or Chogyi Jake might start glowing blue about the eyes and come after me. I should have. If I’d been in the rider’s place, it’s what I’d have done.
“Let me see what I can do,” Ex said. “The ward I’ve got up should slow it down a little, but maybe there’s something I can use to give us some cover when we go back out.”
“I’m not going out there,” Oonishi said. “Are you insane? If we’re safer in here and we can’t get out of the hospital, why the hell would we set foot out that door? The police are going to get here.”
“They will,” Chogyi Jake said.
“Then I say we stay right where we are and wait for the rescue workers,” Oonishi said. He had his arms folded across his chest like an angry five-year-old. I could almost smell the fear underneath his anger.
“They will try to free the people trapped inside,” Chogyi Jake said, and even the slight reservation in his voice told me the rest. They may do more harm than good.
“Ex?” I said. “See what you can find. More protection’s better than less. What about binding it? We’re in here, we have some resources. Have we got enough to lock it back up?”
“It would be tricky, but maybe,” Ex said as he walked past me to the chaplain’s office door. “We’d need four people for the circle. And the coffin, assuming it’s still intact. If we could get to the site where the coffin is, we might be able to consecrate it again. There was a fairly detailed description of the rite in Eric’s papers.”
“I read that too,” Aubrey said. “There are some sketchy parts, but we could probably fill them in. There was a passage about the Mark of Edjidan that would be a problem.”
“That was just the initial invocation,” Chogyi Jake said. “With the rider trapped in the hospital, we might not need that layer at all. We could go directly to—”
“Who goes in the coffin?” Kim said. “It’s an interment. Someone would have to be buried with the rider.”
I’d forgotten that. We all had. Between the uncanny feeling of being trapped in Grace with the haugsvarmr and the natural urge to jump at any ray of hope, I’d been running five steps ahead and not paying attention to my assumptions. I lay my head back against the altar and let my eyes close for a moment. I had to stop this. If I hadn’t bulled ahead without thinking things through, I wouldn’t have been at Grace in the first place. Or at least I’d have had a babysitter on David Souder, and the rider would still be down in the dark where it belonged. Or if Aubrey, stuck in his confusion and hurt, hadn’t bailed instead of talking things out with me and Kim. Or if Kim hadn’t called us there in the first place. Or if Eric hadn’t put the whole damn thing into motion years ago . . .
There was too much blame to go around, too long a chain of circumstance that brought us all here. I couldn’t help blaming myself, if only because I wasn’t responsible for anybody else’s actions in quite the same way. But I had to stop now. I had to slow myself down, think things through, and not spend the thin sliver of time we had chasing after impossibilities.
I opened my eyes and sat forward.
“Okay,” I said. “So if that’s out, what else can we do?”
I looked from face to face, waiting for our eureka moment, the trick that would get us through in one piece. Something deep in the hospital bumped and shuddered like a submarine striking a reef. The light from the office behind me spilled out into the room. I heard Ex opening and closing drawers. Oonishi sat down at the pew farthest from me.
Chogyi Jake lifted his head. His eyes were calm and bright. His smile could have meant anything.
“I can go in,” he said. “I will be the sacrifice.”
TWENTY-ONE
“No,” I said. “Not going to happen. Find another way.”
My mouth had the penny-taste of fear. Aubrey’s eyes went wide, and his lips thin and tight. The light behind me dimmed, Ex standing in the office doorway. Kim looked down. In context of the chapel, she might almost have been praying.
“There are no other bindings,” Chogyi Jake said. “And even if there were, there isn’t time.”
“It’s not an option,” I said. “Think of something else.”
“There must be . . .” Aubrey began.
Chogyi Jake turned up his hands, as if offering me something.
“We have very little time,” Chogyi Jake said. “We have very little to work with, and no way to safely get other supplies. If we fail, many, many people will die. The longer we wait, the more likely that the rider will find us and kill us all. It’s the right thing.”
“You’re talking about dying. We’re not doing that. We’re just not.”
Chogyi Jake only lifted his eyebrows a little. Then what? We had to stop the rider before it broke out. We didn’t have any other way to bind it. The stakes were as high as I could imagine. If the haugsvarmr got out and took over, one man’s death was going to look like pretty small beer. But this was Chogyi Jake. This one was mine, and the world couldn’t have him.
Only it wasn’t really my call.
“If not me, who?” he said. He meant We’ve all lost families and lovers and things that were precious to us, and we’ve all survived. He meant You can lose me.
I felt like I was looking down from a sickening height. Vertigo, nausea, shock. Over my shoulder, Ex looked gray. His hand was on the door frame as if he needed it to stay standing. His gaze flickered down to mine, and I saw that all the same thoughts were running behind his eyes. And the same conclusions too.
“I can go,” Ex said. “You stay out, and I’ll go in.”
“And who performs the interment?” Chogyi Jake asked. “You have the most experience with exorcism, and that’s close to what we’re doing here. You need to be on the outside, not trying to sacrifice yourself to save me. This is my own choice. Of all of us, you should respect that.”
The words seemed to have some reference I didn’t understand, because Ex only hesitated, nodded, and stepped back into the office. I stood up, and the chapel seemed odd. I could see everything: the wood grain in the pews and walls, the subtle pattern in the carpet, the fold of cloth where Aubrey’s collar wasn’t quite down. It was the slow moment of perfect clarity in the middle of the car wreck; it was time going slow because my mind was running too fast.
I can’t do this, I thought. And then, I have to do this.
“We’ll go down,” I said. “To where the coffin was. We might not even be able to. If it’s broken or something.”
“That’s fair,” Chogyi Jake said, standing up, and I realized I’d just tacitly agreed that if it could be done, we’d do it. I noticed he was only an inch or two taller than me. I’d always imagined him as bigger than that. A tiny dark mole perched at his collarbone. Surely I’d noticed that before. Sometime in the last year, I must have seen it the way I was seeing it now. I felt like someone was pressing a balled fist up under my rib cage. I couldn’t afford to think about what that meant. This wasn’t the time to pay attention to my feelings. Not if I was going to keep functioning.