The shadow stopped, turned to look back. The cigarette was pointing toward her. She swallowed, loosening the knot in her throat.
“I’m not going to remember any of this? Really?”
“You’re already forgetting, kid.”
“I won’t know I saw you.”
“Nope.”
She nodded. The red of taillights on the horizon. The stars overhead like snowfall.
“Thank you,” she said. “I owe you one, okay?”
The shadow was still for a long moment. A pang of fear touched Marisol. When he spoke, he sounded tired.
“I know you’re not going to remember I said this, but just in case it gets through, lodges somewhere in the back of your head, I’ll give it a shot. You’ve got a bad fucking habit. And if you don’t stop it, it’s going to get you killed. So listen close, okay?”
“Okay,” Marisol said.
The shadow shifted his burden, took a drag on his cigarette. She felt a chill that was only half about the cold of the night. She waited.
“Next time you see someone like him or like me, walk away. You can’t make friends with predators, mi hija. That’s just not how it works.”
Chapter 2
“So, Miss Jayné,” Father Chapin said, pronouncing my name correctly: Zha-nay. Either he knew a little French or he’d been coached. “You believe you are … possessed?”
“Yes,” I said.
He wasn’t what I’d expected. I only knew a few things about him—that he’d been my buddy Ex’s mentor back when Ex had still been studying for the priesthood, that he ran some kind of Jesuit exorcism squad, that he was presently working just south of the Colorado border in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico. It had left room for me to imagine some kind of Old West demon hunter. If he’d walked into the ran. &ouse wearing a black duster with a Sergio Leone movie soundtrack playing in the background, it would have been closer. Instead, he looked like someone’s pharmacist or grocery manager. Close-cropped, wiry white hair, a beard that was more a collection of individual whiskers each doing their own thing, and watery blue eyes that were a little red about the rims. He was a small man too, hardly bigger than me. His shirt was dark to match his slacks, and he didn’t even have the Roman collar.
I felt cheated.
He took a sip of the coffee I’d made while we waited for him. It was a little after six at night, and already an hour past sundown. If he was anything like me, the caffeine would keep him awake until bedtime. The pine log burning in the fireplace popped, scattering embers like fireflies inside the black metal grate. Above us, shadows danced between the vigas.
“What leads you to suspect this?” he asked.
“All right,” I said, took a breath, blew it out. “This goes back a little way. About a year and a half ago, my uncle died. Got killed. Murdered. It turned out he’d left me everything he had, and he had a lot. Like more than some small nations a lot.”
“I understand,” Father Chapin said.
“It also turns out that he was involved with riders. Demons, or whatever. We call them riders. Spirits that cross over from Next Door and take people over. Like that. I didn’t know anything about it, so I was flying blind for a while.”
“How did you discover your uncle’s involvement with the occult?”
“There was a guy staying in one of his apartments. He turned out to be a vampire.”
“The varkolâk,” Ex said. “Midian Clark. I mentioned him before.”
“So there was that,” I said. “But then I started getting these weird powers, you know? Wait. That sounds wrong. I don’t mean like I can fly or turn invisible or anything. It was just that when someone attacked me, I’d win. Even if I really shouldn’t have. That, and everyone tells me I’m sort of invisible to magic. Hard to locate. We figured that Eric—that’s my uncle—had put some kind of protection on me.”
“What did it feel like?”
“What did what feel like?”
“When you felt you should have lost in some conflict, but didn’t.”
“Oh. It’s like my body just takes over. Like I’m watching myself do things, but I’m not really driving that car.”
“I see. Thank you. Go on.”
I looked over at Ex. He was sitting at the breakfast bar, looking down at the couch and overstuffed chairs like a bird on a perch. His white-blond hair was tied back in a ponytail and he wore his usual basic black pseudo-priestwear. Looking at Father Chapin, I could see where his fashion sense came from.
I wished the others were there too—Chogyi Jake and my now ex-boyfriend Aubrey. Kim. The ones who’d been there from the beginning. I wasn’t sure what to say that I had eready told Father Chapin. I felt like I was at the doctor’s office trying to explain symptoms of something without knowing quite what information mattered.
“It isn’t fading,” Ex prompted.
“Yeah. That’s right. It’s not,” I said. “The guys always told me that magic fades, you know? That when someone does some sort of mojo, it takes upkeep, or it starts to lose power. We were looking through my uncle’s things for months, and we never found anything about putting protections on me. We never used any kind of magic to keep them up. But instead of getting weaker, it seems like I’m getting stronger.”
“Have you found yourself taking actions without intending to?”
“Like what?”
He took another sip of coffee, his thick white eyebrows knotting like pale caterpillars.
“Walking places without knowing that you meant to go there,” he said. “Picking up things or putting them down. Saying words you didn’t expect to say.”
“No,” I said. And then, “I don’t know. Maybe. I mean, everyone does things like that sometimes, right?”
“Have you been sexually active?”
“Excuse me?”
“Have you been sexually active?” he asked again with exactly the same inflection.
I shifted on the couch. The blush felt like someone had turned a sunlamp on me. When I glanced over at Ex, he wasn’t looking at me. I didn’t want to go into any of this, but I especially didn’t want to talk about my love life with Ex in the room. We’d both been pretty good about ignoring that he wanted to be part of it. Hauling out the fact that he wasn’t seemed rude.
Still, in for a penny, in for a pound.
“A couple of times in college. And since last year, I had a boyfriend for a while, yes,” I said. “Aubrey. But we’re not seeing each other anymore.”
“Why not?”
“It turned out that my uncle—the one I inherited everything from?—wasn’t exactly a good person. He used magic to break up Aubrey and his wife. To make her have an affair with my uncle. The phrase rape spell came up. When we figured that out, Aubrey kind of needed to go resolve that with her.” I paused. “It’s not really as Days of Our Lives as it sounds.”
“No other sexual activity?”
“None,” I said.
“Are you Catholic?”
“No.”
“What is your relationship with God?”
I shrugged. “Well, we used to be really close, but then I went away to college. The whole long-distance thing was really a drag, so we’re kind of seeing other deities.”
No one laughed. I felt my own smile go brittle. I shook my head and tried againheight="0em">
“So, look, my parents are evangelical. We went to church all through my childhood, but the older I got … it just didn’t work for me. I decided to go to a secular college. Took a while to save up the money, but … Anyway, I haven’t been to church since then. Haven’t talked to my parents either.”
Father Chapin’s smile was a relief, if only because it meant he was skating over the “seeing other deities” comment. I was a little bit annoyed with myself for wanting him to like me as much as I did.
“What did you study?”
“I majored in prerequisites,” I said. When he looked quizzical, I said, “I dropped out after a couple semesters. Then Uncle Eric died. Since then, I’ve been kind of busy.”
The old priest sighed, wove his fingers together on one knee, and leaned forward. I had the feeling we’d just been making small talk and he was ready to get into the real business. I didn’t know what he was going to talk about if my messed-up family, my faith breakdown, Eric’s death, and my sexual history were just the warm-up.
“Xavier tells me that you have recently killed a man.”
“Who’s Xavier?” I asked. “You mean Ex?”
“He tells me the man was an innocent and willing sacrifice, and that you—”
“All this stuff started a long time before that,” I said. “It’s not related.”
“Still, to take such an action could have—”
“It’s not related,” I said again, and my voice shook a little. My heart was racing. I felt a pang of anger at my body for reacting so obviously. Wasn’t I supposed to be the cool-as-a-cucumber demon hunter?
“I’m not here to judge you, young miss,” he said. “I know something of the circumstances.”
“Then you know I’ve been seeing this freaky shit a long time before Chicago,” I said. “If I’ve got a rider, I’ve had it since at least last year. Maybe longer.”
“Yes,” Father Chapin said. “Yes, I understand. Thank you for your candor.”
The pine log popped again. The quiet got awkward.
“So, what do we do?” I said. “Is there someplace we should go and get our exorcism on? Some kind of rite to keep things together until we’re full power? What?”
Father Chapin looked pained. He scratched at an eyebrow with the nail of his right pinky, smiling down toward the coffee table as he spoke.
“There are many things we will need to do. Little steps. Little steps to be sure that our action is right, yes? Move forward with our eyes open.”