When I got to the part about tracking down Dolores and Alexander, I went into a lot more detail. The whole story took less time to get through than I expected. Chogyi Jake sat forward, listening carefully. I’d forgotten how powerful it could be to have someone paying attention that intensely. Ex leaned on the back of the couch, his arms folded. The lines around his mouth were deep, and his eyes didn’t show anything. He seemed angry, but as Alexander and Dolores chimed in, confirming everything I said, I started thinking it was more pointed at himself than at me.
I brought us up to the present—driving up to the condo, finding them here—then stopped and spread my hands. There you have it. Chogyi Jake laced his fingers over one knee, tilted his head in thought, and frowned.
“How does the dog fit in?” he asked.
Ozzie, stretched o beside the fire, snored.
“She’s mine,” I said. “I got a dog. Her name’s Ozzie.”
“Does she have a rider in her?” Ex said. “Someone that got displaced into the dog’s body, like Aaron back in Denver?”
“Nope,” I said.
“You just got a dog.”
“Yeah.”
The pause lasted about three heartbeats. Ex shrugged.
“All right,” he said.
“We should call Father Chapin,” Chogyi Jake said. “There’s no reason for him to re-create the ceremonial space for the St. Anthony’s Cross.”
“Good point,” Ex said.
“St. Anthony’s Cross?” I asked as Ex went up the stairs, dialing his cell phone as he went.
“Father Chapin and the others were working under the assumption that the rider had taken control of you,” Chogyi Jake said. “It seems that tracking you using magic is still as difficult as it ever was, but they felt they should try. The St. Anthony’s Cross is a ritual for divining a person’s location.”
“If they couldn’t find me, why would they be setting it up again?”
“They were going to find Alexander.”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, that would work, wouldn’t it?”
“It was the hope. The concern was finding him before you killed him.”
“Before I … Yeah, wow. Ex and I just had two completely different days, didn’t we?”
Upstairs, Ex started talking. The ceiling creaked as he walked in the room over our heads. His voice was soft, and I heard relief in it. Dolores raised her hand.
“Where’s the bathroom?” she asked.
“Up the stairs, and turn right,” I said. “You can’t miss it.”
“The rider was … I mean the one that …” Alexander said, then stopped, pointed at me, and started again. “The rider in her appeared to be very passive. As far as I could see, it only really took control when Jayné was in immediate physical danger. When the crisis passed, it seemed to give her entirely free rein.”
Dolores padded up the stairs. Ex went quiet, listening, I assumed, to something on the phone.
“Unlike the Akaname,” Chogyi Jake said. “I have to say, I’m surprised to find those here.”
“Wait,” I said. “You know about them? I mean, you know what they are?”
“Filth-lickers,” Chogyi Jake said. “They’re common in Japan and China, but I’ve never heard of one in the Americas.”
“So they’re a whole bunch of different riders that are all related?” I said. “It’s not just one big demon taking control of a bunch of bodies at once.”
“No,” Chogyi Jake said. “It’s not a haugsvarmr. They’ve very minor riders. Not mindless, but not strong or smart. Any of them could infect someone who was already vulnerable. They survive at all by being hard to detect and spreading quickly.”
“Like the cockroaches of the rider ecology.”
“More field mice, but yes,” Chogyi Jake said.
“They seemed like pretty strong field mice to me,” I said.
“Yes. It’s interesting that your rider was able to cast out the wind demon without a great deal of effort but then struggled with the Akaname,” Chogyi Jake said.
“You think these are some kind of superstrength version? Cockroaches on steroids?”
“I was thinking more that the rider in you may be injured. As I understand, the exorcism was very nearly complete when you stopped it. I’d be surprised if it came through unharmed.”
The idea brought a stab of guilt.
“You spend much time in the East?” Alexander asked, changing the subject.
“I spent two years traveling there when I was younger,” Chogyi Jake said. “I needed to break off connections with a group of people I’d been close to, and it seemed like a good opportunity for that.”
“Alexander?” Ex called. “Father Chapin would like a word.”
Alex stood up, wincing, and walked slowly up the stairs. I almost told Ex to bring the phone down; Alexander’s wounds were still bothering him, and making him climb stairs at almost nine thousand feet above sea level seemed rude. But Chapin probably wanted to talk with him someplace I couldn’t hear them, which was probably why Ex went upstairs too. That, and maybe to give me and Chogyi Jake a minute.
With someone else, I might have gone for pleasantries.
“How bad was it?” I asked.
Chogyi Jake’s smile was a constant in my world, but I’d learned to read its subtle variations. He looked down now, and the amusement in the corners of his eyes sharpened.
“Bad. I don’t think he’s slept since you left. And Father Chapin … wasn’t pleased that Ex called me.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not Catholic,” Chogyi Jake said. “Father Chapin has sacrificed a great deal to the path he’s chosen. I knew that about him from Ex’s stories. One of the tenets of his tradition is that all other traditions are wrong. No one has said it, but I think that by including me, Ex might have been seen as disloyal.”
“But you know me,” I said. “If anyone would be able to track me down, it’d be you two. I mean, if I had been taken over by abstract evil, I’d totally want you on the case.”
“Yeah. Well. Sorry about that.”
“No. I admire him, in a way. There’s a purity to him that’s …”
“Freaky?”
“I was going to say remarkable, but freaky works. And he’s an important man in Ex’s life.”
“Yeah, it kind of had that brought-home-to-meet-the-family feeling sometimes,” I said.
Ozzie sighed, stretched, and struggled to her feet. I put out my hand, and she came to me, ready to have her ears scratched. I chewed on my lip for a second. Dolores was going to be done washing her hands, and she’d come back down. Ex and Alexander wouldn’t be talking to Chapin forever. If I wanted to clear the air, this was my chance.
“So hey,” I said. “Talking about how Ex called you in and all that? Yeah, I think I maybe owe you an apology. I’ve been keeping you kind of at arm’s length these last few weeks.”
“You have,” he said. From anyone else, it would have felt like an accusation. From him, it was just agreeing that the sky was blue. I was grateful he hadn’t tried to make light of it, say that I hadn’t been, and that if I had, it didn’t matter.
“I was doing kind of a rebound thing with Ex,” I said. “I mean, there was also the thing where I’m possessed. And what happened in Chicago. And Aubrey. It all got mixed together. I never thought it right out loud, if you know what I mean, but if you’d been here, you’d have put it in perspective. And I kind of didn’t want perspective. I wanted to make the mistake and not think about how it was a bad idea.”
“Are you certain that it is?” Chogyi Jake asked. “A bad idea, I mean.”
“Which part?”
“Do you love Ex?”
Ozzie chuffed impatiently and pushed her head against my palm to get me petting her again. I started to speak, stopped, tried again.
“I love my brothers. I love my mom. And I love Aubrey and you. I don’t think there are two times in my life I’ve used the word love and meant exactly the same thing by it. No matter what I say about Ex, it’s going to mean something different.”
“I think that’s a powerful insight,” Chogyi Jake said.
“You’re just not going to give me anything, are you?” I said, grinning. “You’re just going to listen to whatever I say and make me think through all of it for myself.”
“Yes,” he said, his grin answering mine.
“I missed the hell out of you.”
Dolores came down the stairs wiping her hands on her shirt, then came over to sit next to me. I watched her open and close her hand, the fingers uncurling slowly as a blooming flower and then folding back to a fist.
“Feels nice, doesn’t it?” I said.
“What does?” she asked.
“Being in control of your own body again. Not having something else calling all the shots.”
Her expression was hard, but she nodded. Between the wind demon and the Akaname, she hadn’t been in control of her own flesh much in a long time. I wondered if being young made that harder or if children were built to have other people making decisions for them in a way that softened the blow. Probably that was wishful thinking on my part. Please be okay, little girl.
When I’d been her age, my little brother had still been in diapers and my older just in middle school. It had been the first time I’d gone to school without a sibling there with me, and I’d known that another one was coming up behind me. There had been a freedom to that. A sense—however small, however brief—that I was my own person and not just a part of the larger unit that was my family.
I wondered about her sister, Soledad. She was firmly in the middle of her adolescence, when girls were building who they were independent of their families. To be ridden then, to have those first green shoots of autonomy and independence crushed flat, might be worse. I wondered if she’d gone home to her mother and Dolores’s yet, and what the rider said. It wasn’t hard for me to imagine myself in her place, trapped and powerless while the rider drove me out into the night and I strained to go back for my sister …