“What’s the matter?” Alex asked.
“Slight change of plan,” I said. “Nothing we can’t handle. Just hang tight.”
In the distance, I heard the sliding doors open. Ex’s voice was too faint for me to make out the words, but the cadence of his speech, the roughness in his voice, was perfectly familiar. And then Chogyi Jake’s reply, asking something. I paused. I couldn’t go back to Alexander’s room. I couldn’t face my friends and former allies. I pushed the wheelchair briskly, not running. They’d be able to hear my footsteps, and it would have sounded weird to have someone running. I turned down a corridor leading toward Pediatrics and Nuclear Medicine. My hands were shaking, and my heart felt like it was about to force its way out between my ribs and leave on its own. I got about twenty feet down the new corridor. The voices were getting louder. It was hard to breathe. They were behind me. They were right behind me.
“Are you okay?” Alexander asked, his voice barely a whisper.
This is an anxiety attack, I thought. I saw Chogyi Jak in a hospital, and the last time I did that was in Chicago. So now I’m having an anxiety attack.
Great.
“I just really hate hospitals,” I said, trying to keep the tremor out of my voice. Ex’s voice started to fade. They’d gone past the turn. I flipped Alexander around. “Okay. We should be good now. Just stay calm.”
“Calmer than you,” Alexander said, and it took me a few seconds to realize he’d just made a Big Lebowski joke.
I walked fast. The irrational, unbending fear was still alive in me, but I was holding it together so far. At the corner, I caught a glimpse of their backs disappearing down the hallway toward Alexander’s room. I had maybe a minute before they got there. I walked fast. Out through the waiting room, out through one set of doors and then another, out to the biting cold of the open air. And then I ran, pushing Alexander before me. When we hit the asphalt, the wheelchair bounced and jittered in my hands. Alexander leaned back into the seat like he was afraid of falling out. The SUV was fifty feet away, Ozzie already standing up in her seat, wagging and barking like she was my cheerleading section. I didn’t know if the raging urge to flee was sensible or an absolute overreaction. The plan wasn’t changing either way.
I unlocked the doors with the button on my key ring fob, the red brake lights flashing twice. Ex’s little black sports car was across the row and about eight spaces down, mud spattered on its side up to the windows. As I helped Alexander up into the backseat, I wondered where Ex had been driving. Where he’d been looking for me. Ozzie stood awkwardly on the passenger’s seat, wagging and looking back at Alexander like I’d brought him as her new toy.
“You’re good?” I asked him. In the pale light of moon and streetlight, he looked a little gray.
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “Just a little more activity than I’ve had lately.”
“Okay,” I said, and closed the door with a satisfying clump. I felt a little guilty about leaving the wheelchair in the parking lot, but I didn’t see an alternative. I lost a second peering around the dark parking lot before I realized I was looking for something like a shopping cart return at a grocery store. I opened the driver’s door and stepped up.
“Jayné! Stop!” Ex shouted, and I turned to look. He was sprinting out from the hospital. From where I was, the dome light was probably silhouetting me perfectly. I hesitated. Part of me wanted to wait, to let him reach me. If he was with me—he and Chogyi Jake both—the next part would be easy. I wouldn’t have to worry about Alexander’s health. We could all track down Dolores together. We could prove I was right.
“Ex!” I yelled.
“Fight it! You can fight it!”
Or he could lock me up in the cellar again. Right.
I closed the door and started the engine. I pulled out of the parking space too fast, wrenching the steering wheel hard to the right and gunning the engine. In the rearview mirror, Ex glowed red. Chogyi Jake was ten or fifteen feet behind him, and darker. I sped toward the end of the row. There wasn’t a cutout, only a gay concrete stretch of curb. If I wanted to get out, I’d have to turn back toward them or else jump the curb.
“You might want to hold on to something,” I said.
The SUV bounced up with a sound like a car wreck, but it didn’t stop. The back wheels hit the curb just as the front ones came down. Ozzie slid to the floor, her claws scrabbling at the plastic mat. The steering wheel spun out of my hands. I wasn’t the one who grabbed it, but the rider kept control only until we crossed the sidewalk and thumped down onto the street. I was the one who turned us to the right, cutting off a white Nissan and heading toward the traffic light. I couldn’t see Ex or Chogyi Jake, but I figured they were grabbing Ex’s sports car, heading for the actual driveway. Coming after me.
“You solid back there?” I shouted.
“I’m all right,” Alexander said.
I didn’t have time to figure out how badly he was lying. Half a block ahead of us, the light turned red. Two ranks of cars hit their brakes, but there wasn’t a median, so shifting left into oncoming traffic—headlights almost blinding me—was easier than it probably should have been. I leaned on the accelerator and hoped there weren’t any police at the intersection. That the cars heading toward me would stop. That I wasn’t about to kill myself or Alexander or some poor bastard who just happened to be turning right at the wrong time.
I reached the intersection, cutting hard to the right. Someone honked from much too close, and I passed in front of all the cars that had stopped for the red. I was pretty sure I was going exactly away from Questa, but my plan was to just keep going straight until I was sure Ex wasn’t behind me, and then figure out the navigation later. Ozzie got back up in her seat. In the permanent twilight of traffic it was hard to be sure, but I thought she looked indignant. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The steering wheel was pulling to the left. It hadn’t done that before. Alexander’s voice was more composed than I’d expected.
“Are you doing all right up there?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m good. A little freaked out, but holding it together.”
“Where are you taking me?”
I thought about it for a few seconds, but I couldn’t come up with a reason not to tell him.
“Questa,” I said. “Where Dolores was.”
“You think that the wind demon took her again?”
“No, not the wind demon. The other one. I think when you guys were trying to kick out the wind thing, she felt the same thing I did. The other rider. And I think her sister probably got taken over when she got her treatment. Maybe they got Dolores when she went back home. I don’t know. But if we find her, we’ll find the other rider. Or, well, it’ll find us.”
There was a long pause. A small car with four teenage boys zipped around me, music blaring from it. So I wasn’t the only maniac on the road. Nice to know.
“It’ll find us?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I ddn’t know where to find Dolores, so I went to Questa and stirred things up. The next part of the plan is that we hole up there and wait for the rider to come to us.”
“And why will it do that?”
“To get rid of me. Because I know about it and can rat it out to you and Chapin and the rest.”
“Only now, I’ll be there too.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“All right,” Alexander said. “Just wanted to make sure I understood what we were in for. You’re driving too fast.”
I looked at the speedometer and slowed down. My knuckles ached from gripping the wheel, and it was hard to get them to relax. When the streetlights started getting fewer and farther between, I pulled over, got out my cell phone, and dug around until I found where we were and a route back to the hotel. And, I hoped, Dolores. I twisted around in my seat. Behind me, Alexander still had his hand on the oh-shit handle. His eyes were closed. I felt a stab of sympathy for him. Being the chosen of God always did seem to suck.
“You want me to stop for coffee or something?” I asked. “Could be a long night.”
He opened his eyes, tried for a smile, and shook his head.
“Take me to Nineveh,” he said.
Chapter 18
The Sangre de Cristo motel office was dark by the time we got back. The place was built like a strip mall: a long parking lot along the front, a small covered walkway, with numbered doors leading into all the rooms. I pulled in at mine and killed the headlights. The window to the left showed the flicker of a television, the one to the right was dark. A light wind had picked up, and dry snow blew across the blacktop like sand in the desert, making patterns like snakeskin.
“Wait here,” I said.
The air was cold and dry and smelled of wood smoke and pine. I unlocked the door, pushing it open gently. The room was dark. The bed—just one—lurked against the far wall. The dresser was nearest me with a television on top it so wide and thick, it was probably older than I was. I stood in the doorway for five long breaths, waiting. I’d been gone for a couple of hours. If Dolores and her sister had gotten my message, they could be here waiting. But the only things that came out of the darkness were the ghostly scents of spent cigarettes and old perfume and the muffled voices and canned laughter from the television next door. I flipped the light switch, and muddy yellow light filled the room. Pin-striped wallpaper, fake-quilt print bedspread, carpet that showed the years of strangers’ feet. A single chair huddled apologetically in the corner and the bedside table had lost some of its veneer, the particleboard showing through. The heat came from a little electric unit along the floorboard that clicked to life in the cold draft seeping in past me. I checked the closet—empty except for an ironing board, an ancient-looking iron, and a half dozen coat hangers. The bathroom was also empty. White porcelain sink and a toilet small enough for a five-year-old, a tub and shower with a white plastic curtain on a bar that bent out to make the tub seem bigger than it was. On the way back out, I looked under the bedh a telediv height="0em">