I was the one playing this game.
“It’s me,” I said. “Jayné. The real one. I had one little twitch a while back, but things have been really quiet otherwise.”
The three of them exchanged glances. Chapin had the best poker face, but I grew up in my father’s house. I’d been faking contrition since before I could fit all the right consonants into Sorry.
“Look,” I said, “you were right. It had a trick. I fell for it. It was just that right there, in the moment …”
“Satan is the lord of lies,” Chapin said. I could see he was choosing his words carefully. “There is no shame in being fooled by him.”
“Maybe not once,” I said. “If it gets to be a habit, that’s more of an issue.”
Chapin knelt just far enough away from me that if I made a break for him the chain would pull me up short. I felt like a Doberman. Chapin rubbed his palm across his chin, the sound of skin against whiskers like wind moving sand.
“I am not certain what you mean by this, Miss Jayné,” he said.
I sighed, looked down, hoisted an eyebrow. I couldn’t say “All better, trust me again.” It was the sort of thing you’d do if you were planning to make a break. Since that’s exactly what I was planning, this was when to look different. I had to be the smart-ass girl struggling to admit she wasn’t so smart after all. Bluff and bravado over a creamy center of vulnerability.
“I went into this pretty sure I wasn’t going to slip,” I said. “Turns out that was optimistic. Right now, sitting here? Yeah, I don’t think it’s going to happen again. Fell for it once. Know the score. Ready to take it on, right? But I was wrong then, and I might be wrong next time we go in.”
Ex nodded almost subliminally. A tiny ghost of a smile touched Carsey’s lips. I smiled, a little nervously. They’d want to see a little shame. Nothing says sincerity like eating crow. And since I was putting all the stress on what happened after we started the next rite, I was also taking the focus away from what happened between now and then. I felt a pang of guilt at the deception, but I’d killed an innocent man. Lying to Chapin—as the man said—wasn’t exactly the low rung in my hierarchy of sins.
“What do you suggest?” Chapin asked.
“Well, I’m not going to insist we keep the chains on, but I think we’re going to have to treat me as a hostile witness. I don’t think it’s safe to assume I won’t break when the pressure’s on. So we kind of have to assume I’m going to, right? Then if I do hold it together, pleasant surprise.”
Chapin didn’t smile so much as shift his eyes. The effect was the same.
“I believe you are correct,” he said. “We have been preparing a slightly different ritual. Harder and longer, I think. If you can reject the spirit during this, it will be better. But it is not required.”
“When do we start?” I asked.
“Right away.”
“Cool,” I said, locking my jaw. I couldn’t let them take me back there. I couldn’t let them start. If I didn’t have time, there couldn’t be an opportunity. Which was probably why Chapin had arranged it this way. He was a professional. I had to give him that. “Any chance I could hit the bathroom? Maybe get a fresh outfit? This one’s kind of stinky.”
I saw him hesitate. It was like watching a movie with one skipped frame, there and gone before I could quite register it.
“Of course,” he said. “But under guard.”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” I said.
They took off the manacles. Outside, the sky was clear. The stars filled the sky like smoke from a fire. I hopped across the snow, yipping as the cold bit at my toes. Inside, Tomás and Miguel were kneeling before a circle chalked on the floor. Tamblen stood at the doorway, quietly apologetic. Candles the off-white of fresh cream burned all around, and sweet incense thickened the air. As I stepped through the double doors and into the warmth of the room, it occurred to me that for sure the other rider was in the room with me right now. I didn’t let myself look at them and wonder. I couldn’t let anyone see I was thinking about it. I had the powerful physical memory of smelling sewage and the numbing thickness forcing itself down my throat. I hoped the moment of fear read as dread of the punishing ceremony we were all about to begin.
“Just stopping by the little girls’ room,” I said. “Then we’ll get the party started.”
“I’ll take her,” Ex said, putting his hand on my elbow.
I had maybe five minutes. To the bathroom, back from it. I thought about crawling out the bathroom window before I remembered how small it was. Something else then. Whatever happened, I couldn’t step into that circle.
I walked through the kitchen, past the box of donuts that I’d bought years ago, in some different lifetime. I passed a crucifix. The Christ figure’s face seemed turned away from me in particular.
“Don’t be worried,” Ex said as we came to the bathroom door.
A surge of hope rose up in me. He knew about the other rider. I was going to be all right. And then he spoke again, and the hope wen away.
“Lots of people fail the first time out. It’s not that bad. We will beat this thing. I promise.”
I opened the door. Inside, the bathroom was tiny. If I went in, there was no place to go but back out. So this was it. My opportunity. My moment. I looked at Ex and smiled with a brick of lead in my gut. He was doing this—all of this—because he needed redemption for the girl he’d failed before, and because he loved me. It was written in his expression. I hated what I was about to do.
“You know I really appreciate all this,” I said, meaning every word. “Facing up to Chapin for me. Chasing me down in the middle of the night. All of it. You’ve been a really good friend to me.”
“Jayné—”
“I mean it. It’s meant a lot to me.”
His eyes met mine. There were tears in them.
“I couldn’t do anything less. I won’t say it’s all been easy. Or fun. But if I had it to do again, I would.”
“You say the sweetest shit,” I said. And then, regret in my chest like a tumor, I turned my attention inward. “All right. Now.”
My left hand took his wrist, snapping it down, and my right rose to clamp his throat, turning him. My body slipped in next to his, my arm around his throat and my rider pulling him off his feet before he had the chance to scream. His feet touched the wall, and he kicked off awkwardly, trying to break my grip. My rider rolled with the motion, using it to shift my hand off his throat and lock my forearm in its place. Then, his head pressed against mine, I rocked back a few degrees and cut off his air.
You’ll snap his neck, I tried to shout. Don’t hurt him. But the rider was in control now, and I might as well have been talking to the thin fella on the crucifix. Ex batted at me awkwardly, tried to flip around, and then convulsed. My arms held him for a few seconds after he went limp, and then lowered him softly to the floor. My rider paused long enough that I could see Ex was still breathing, and then she turned, padding through the brick-floored rooms like a cat. At the blue front doors, she paused, gathered herself, and threw my body out into the snowbound night, sprinting through the high snow with an intensity that could have been fear or joy or both.
THE HIGHWAY barely deserved the name. Two lanes stretched out in the darkness, no wider than a residential street. The snowplows had been through, clearing the asphalt and throwing walls of snow up at the shoulders. I stood in the middle of the lane, my hand up, and hoped that the oncoming headlights would stop. And that my ragged white ceremonial gown wasn’t too see-through. No way around it, this wasn’t going to be a high-dignity day.
The headlights slowed, shifted to the side like the driver was thinking about going around me, and then stopped. I couldn’t see the vehicle itself past the glare, but it was big enough to be a truck or SUV. The passenger’s door opened and a wide, burly man stepped out toward me. He was wearing a black puffy coat with iron-on patches at the elbow and sleeve and a baseball cap that had Guajira printed on it in fading red letters.
“Hey,” he said, an then paused. “You okay? You got car trouble or something?”
It was a pretty obvious assumption to make. Inappropriately dressed, somewhat bloody woman in the middle of a lonely stretch of country road. Car trouble. Sure.
“Something like that,” I said through my chattering teeth. “I could really use a lift.”
A voice came from the driver’s side, a low masculine voice speaking Spanish. The man in front of me shouted back into the light. I promised myself that if I didn’t collapse from hypothermia and die here in the wilderness, I’d make a point of learning a language besides English. The driver shouted something short, and the man in the hat shrugged and turned back to me. I noticed he had a thin mustache and a tattoo on his neck. If I’d seen him at a bar or walking along a street, I’d have been wary of him.
“We can give you a ride, sure.”
“Thanks,” I said, and walked to the passenger’s door before he could change his mind. It was a pickup truck, white where it wasn’t muddy. The man behind the wheel was bigger than the one who’d gotten out, and older. Gray at his temples and thick, callused hands. I hauled myself up and scooted into the middle of the long bench seat. The man in the hat got in after me. The cab smelled like WD-40 and pot, and the back window was covered by Gothic-lettered stickers in loving memory of someone who’d died three years ago and young. I thought about all the stories I’d heard about girls going hitchhiking and coming to bad ends. I thought about all the stories I’d heard about people picking up mysterious hitchhikers who turned out to be more dangerous than they seemed. The truck’s heater was running full blast, and nothing in my life had ever felt better.
“Me llamo Ramón, y este pendejo llame Marcos,” the driver said. “Como te llamas, eh?”