“Thundercats are go?” I asked.
“I believe we are prepared, Miss Jayné,” Chapin said. “If you are ready to reject the demonic power within you, we will free your soul.”
I almost said Nifty. Smarting off was a reflex now. It was the way I told myself that I could deal with whatever made my heart race and my mind start to fishtail under me. Just then it felt disrespectful and small.
“Thank you,” I said instead.
“WHEN THE time comes, you must reject it utterly,” Tomás said, squatting beside me on the floor. “It will try to trick you, but whatever happens, you must not waver. Be your strength.”
“Stone strong and waver-free,” I said. “That’s me in a nutshell.”
He patted me gently on the back of the neck as he rose to take his place, and I tried to smile. I felt like I was about to jump out of an airplane. My chest was tight, and I didn’t want to breathe so much as pant. The place at the back of my neck where Tomás had touched me tingled, and the small of my back where the tattoo was itched like I’d sat in poison oak. I had to put it all aside.
I knelt on the floor more or less where I’d first seen Dolores. The six priests were all around me: Father Chapin in front of me, Ex to his right, Carsey to his right. Tamblen was directly behind me, and Tomás and Miguel to either side. We’d covered the windows, but the midday sun pressed in at the edges. The only other light in the room came from the single white candle. A single stick of incense gave the room a sweet smell. The bricks under me were cold. I wondered whether a space heater would have been too secular for the occasion. It seemed like it might be worth trying.
The consecrated ceremonial robe was rough cotton cut like a sack, and since I was only wearing it and the medallion-enhanced Ace bandage, I was pretty cold. I stared at the still, yellow flame, focusing myself like a meditation. The energy of magic—my qi, my soul, whatever name it goes by—was narrowed to that one bright spot. I could barely see the faces of the priests past it. When Father Chapin lifted his palms toward me, they were pale spots in the darkness.
He began reciting the names of saints, the others echoing him. After the first five or six, the flame began to shift back and forth—toward him and away and toward him again like seaweed in the waves. I’d been part of magical rituals before, and I could feel the combined will of men around me starting to cohere. By the time Father Chapin ran out of saints, the air around me was about equal parts oxygen and raw magic. Time seemed to stretch. I didn’t know how long they’d been chanting, but the candle had burned lower than just a few minutes could explain. I felt disoriented and had to work to pull my qi back into place.
“I come in the name of Christ, and in His holy name I command you, beast. Reveal yourself!”
It was like a bus speeding by, missing me by inches. The combined will of the men pounded past me, violent and intense and hot as a burning coal. In my gut, just below my navel and about three inches in, something shifted. Writhed. I gritted my teeth.
“Reveal yourself!”
Another hit.
Come on, I thought, pressing the words toward the thing living inside me. It’s going to happen anyway. Fighting’s just going to make it hurt worse.
“Reveal yourself!”
The candle flame in front of me ballooned, fire bursting up and out. By the light of it, I could see Chapin’s face clearly. He was smiling like this was exactly what he’d wanted. I felt my fists clench, but I hadn’t clenched them. The growl came from low in my throat, and it sounded like despair.
“In the name of God,” Father Chapin said, and the others repeated it. The words had a pressure like diving too deep underwater. My ears ached. “In the name of God, I command you. Reveal your name!”
“Why are you doing this to me?” my voice said without me.
“Reveal your name!”
“I am innocent.”
Father Chapin shook his head. The darkness around us weighed in against me, and I knew that whatever I was feeling, the rider was suffering a hundred times worse than I was.
“Innocence is the claim you make. What is your name?”
I felt my jaw clench. I had the sense that the rider had already made a mistake, already given up more than it had meant to. The candle sputtered, the flame fading to a pale blue sphere with a glowing ember at its center. I wondered, when this was over, whether I’d ever dream about the desert again. Was losing that emptiness and stillness part of the price of being just Jayné?
“Reveal your name!” they all shouted together. I could feel each of them. Chapin was like a strap of leather, hard and unforgiving. Carsey was like a knife, cold and focused and precise as mathematics. Tomás’s will was wide and deep and strong, like a pillow over the face. Tamblen—strong, silent Tamblen—felt like a request, the weakest of all of them, but implacable and patient and unbreakable. Miguel’s voice had the raw tenacity and violence of a bare-knuckle fighter’s jab.
And Ex.
In the midst of the riot of personality, I felt Ex. His guilt and his longing, his deep internal pain carried in silence and forged into a weapon. For a moment, I caught a glimpse of a girl who looked a little like me: dark hair cut in a bob, mouth a little wider than mine, cheeks a little more generous. Isabel, I thought. He was using Isabel, and I realized t could follow his lead. I brought the night in Grace Memorial, the guilt and horror of killing someone who didn’t deserve to die, and I wrapped myself around it. It was the most painful, terrible thing I ever experienced, and I held it like a knife so hot it burned me.
“Reveal your name!” they shouted again, beating at the rider. I stabbed at it too, adding myself to the assault. The thing inside my skin shrieked, but only I could hear it.
Something cold brushed against my neck, surprising me. I smelled sewage. What the hell was that?
“Reveal your name!”
“I am my mother’s daughter,” the rider said, almost too softly to hear. But Chapin had been waiting for it. He pounced on the words, pointing a finger at me—at it—as if in accusation.
“That is the path by which you have taken this woman. Reveal your name!”
There, trapped in my skin with the rider like we were sewn in the same sack, I lost my balance. The bus didn’t miss me this time. The room spun around me. A part of me that wasn’t my body hurt. The sewage smell was getting worse.
“Beast, in the name of God and all His saints, in the name of Christ and His apostles, I command you! Surrender your name!”
My head lifted, and my body stood. I felt the effort it took, like a giant rising against a mountain of chains. When it spoke, my voice trembled with defiance and fear.
“I am Sonnenrad, the Voice of the Desert,” the rider said. “I am the Black Sun and the Black Sun’s daughter.”
Silence fell on the room. I saw triumph in Father Chapin’s expression.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, you are.”
Chapter 12
I’d seen exorcisms before, mostly as performed by Ex going it alone in the field. I hadn’t understood how difficult the rites he’d performed were. He was the expert. I made sure he had what he needed, and he did the rest. If afterward he’d seemed a little sapped, he hadn’t complained about it. So I had figured that, taxing as it might be, it couldn’t be that punishing.
Bad call.
I had thought forcing the rider to give us its name had been bad, and it had been. The next part was worse. The combined will of the six men around me was a constant source of pain, even though the burning and nausea and disorientation I felt was just the spillover of what the rider was absorbing.
“… qui ambulavit super aspidem et basiliscum, qui conculcavit leonem et draconem, ut discedas ad hoc hominae …”
After the second hour, time had stopped having any meaning. The candle I’d used at the ceremony’s beginning was gone—kicked over and stomped into the brick under my feet. I didn’t remember doing that. My skin felt hot, like I had a bad sunburn. My vocal cords strained with screaming. At one point, the rider had fallen to the ground, writhing in a pain that felt like bathing in acid secondhand. The fall left my lip bleeding, and the taste of blood hadn’t left my mouth since.
“Ecce Crucem Domini, fugite, partes adversae!” Chapin shouted, waving a crucifix at me. It was enchanted like the medallion that still burned and blistered my arm. The rider couldn’t look at it.
“Stop this,” it cried. “You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what this means!”
The Latin kept on beating at it, the syllables a medium for the power behind it. It didn’t feel holy. It didn’t feel like the cleansing power of a glorious God. It felt like violence, but I’d put in for this, and I was going to see it through. Caught in the space behind my eyes, I pressed myself hard as a stone and endured.
For what seemed like weeks, the rider didn’t shift. It just took the abuse like a mountain in a windstorm. But slowly, at first by degrees so small I could barely feel it, they started to pull it away. It felt like someone ripping off a scab. Something I’d always thought was part of me started to ache and then burn and then—painfully—to lift at the edges.
And once it started losing, it kept losing. I felt its frenzy, its frantic search for something in me to hold on to. I kept my will tucked tight, small and safe, and put everything I could spare into pushing it away.
When it came for me, I knew we were close to the end.
The desert had changed. The stones bore long, black scorch marks. The sky, usually vast and blue, was hazy with smoke and a shining curtain like the aurora that hurt to look at. We stood there, the two of us. We were both bleeding from the lip, but mine was red where hers was white. She held her hand out to me, begging me to take it. And despite everything, I wanted to. I put my hands behind me, locking my fingers around the opposite wrist. The wail of despair wrenched itself out of the desert to the room where my physical body shook against the floor like someone in a seizure. For a moment, I could see it all at once, and I knew the rider was losing its grip.