I smiled and my reflection smiled back.
“Nice work,” I said, my voice hoarse.
I heard Alexander and Dolores talking in the front room, but I had the tap on. Their words were lost in the rush of water and the singing of pipes, but the tones of their voices were unmistakable. Alexander thoughtful, gentle, consoling. Dolores frightened and lost, not even crying. The matter-of-fact calm that comes between the blow and the pain. Traumatized. It was over for her now, except that it wasn’t. A year from now, five years, ten. It didn’t matter. There would still be a part of her here. If not in this room, then in this time when her body was not her own, when she’d been soiled to the soul. When she’d watched the same thing happen to her sister and been powerless to stop it.
What had happened to her wasn’t the kind of thing you got over. Whatever girl she had been before the wind demon took her was gone. Whatever girl she might have been if Chapin and his exorcists hadn’t handed her over to the Akaname was gone too. In my memory, I heard Midian Clark. Being a victim gets to be a habit. You stay there too long, you get comfortable. Gets to where a victim is who you are.
Was that Dolores now? Would she be one of those people who invited trouble by being afraid of it? Was she going to expect evil to jump out of every shadow, and if she did meet it with fear, would that even be a wrong call?
I wondered what I could do or say to her that would make sense. If there was a way to tell a little girl that everything was going to be all right when we both knew it wouldn’t, I didn’t know what it was. I turned off the tap, lowered my face into the warm water, let my hair float around me. When I rose up, cleaner but not clean, Dolores was crying. Not sobs, but a low keening more exhaustion than sorrow. Alexander’s voice was insistent and soft and a little desperate. Whatever the words were, I knew what they meant. Please be okay, little girl.
I took a deep breath. All right, then. I couldn’t make anything better. I couldn’t undo anything that had happened. But I could offer an example. Here’s what a brave face looks like. Do this.
I stepped back out into the room, Ozzie close at my side. Dolores looked up at me. She’d seen me before, but now I saw her recognition.
“Hey, kid,” I said with a grin that I meant more than I’d expected to. “We have got to stop meeting like this, right?”
Chapter 20
I wrapped ten hundred-dollar bills in a sheet of paper with the word Sorry written on it and shoved it under the office door before we left. My hip ached, my breath was white, and the coating of filth and slime made the night air even colder. I felt like I’d dragged myself through a thousand yards of sewer pipe. Even though no one else had come out to investigate, the darkness felt like it was watching me. Somewhere out there, the rider inside Dolores’s sister still knew it was in danger. If anything, it would be more desperate now, and I didn’t have a clue what kind of backup it could call on. So the next move was get the hell gone.
The SUV was idling, exhaust pluming out the tailpipe lke a permanent exhalation. Alexander had taken the passenger’s seat, leaving Ozzie and Dolores in the back. The dog was looking happily into the night, the girl less so, but at least she’d stopped crying. I slid in behind the wheel, buckled in, and flipped on the lights. If you didn’t know to look, the door to our thoroughly ruined motel room just seemed a little scuffed above the knob, the dent where the riders kicked it in showing as nothing more than a little discoloration. They were going to have to change the carpet to get the stink out. As I shifted to reverse, I promised to send them more money. A thousand bucks wasn’t going to cover the damage we’d done.
The roads were bad—ice and snow and other drivers who seemed dismissive of the dangers of ice and snow—but I’d been bouncing back and forth between Taos and Questa so much, it was becoming familiar. Probably if I came back in the summer, I’d have been lost, but in the black hours before dawn, I was recognizing individual snowdrifts. The heater roared, blowing its artificial desert wind against my cheek and ankles and drowning out the pop tunes on the radio. In the backsplash of the headlights, Alexander’s expression was sober.
“It’s ski season. We’re never going to find a place to stay,” Alexander said.
“I’ve already got a room,” I said. “It’s kind of craptastic, but it has a shower.”
He looked over at me.
“You have a hotel room already rented?”
“Key card’s in the glove box,” I said.
“Well,” he said. “Nice work.”
“Makes me wish I’d planned it,” I said.
When we got there, we trudged up the stairs in single file. Me and then Ozzie and then Dolores and then Alexander, like ants. Even Ozzie was looking tired, her head hanging at an angle and her tongue lolling pinkly from her mouth. I gave Dolores first bath rights. She handed out her soiled clothes. The slime and filth had begun to dry, flaking off the cloth. I took the plastic liner out of the wastebasket and put her things there. When she came out wrapped in towels, I took the next turn. First Midian’s cigarettes, now the Akaname’s stench. I washed my hair twice, scrubbed my skin with a washcloth until it hurt a little, and I still caught a whiff of sewer when I got out. I felt much better, but I wasn’t sure I’d ever really feel clean. I had one more complete outfit from my lawyer, so I put that on and threw my ruined clothes in the plastic liner with Dolores’s.
When I stepped out of the bathroom, Dolores was sitting on the edge of the bed wrapped in her towel, Alexander on the floor beside her. They were watching a morning show on TV. The anchorwoman was smiling at an old Korean woman and talking animatedly about a new movie she’d directed. They were both wearing Santa hats and the network logo was worked with computer-generated holly leaves. Ozzie, curled in a perfect circle with her nose tucked under her tail, snored gently beside them. Outside, the first blue of the coming dawn lit the windows.
“There enough hot water left for me?” Alexander asked.
“Better be,” I said. “You smell like ass.”
Dolores chuckled. She looked hausted. I wondered what her mother was going to think, waking up with one or both of her daughters missing. If I were the Akaname, I’d say Dolores had been taken by a crazy Anglo woman named Jayné who’d been staying at the Sangre de Cristo. I imagined myself explaining to the FBI that it wasn’t really kidnapping, because if I’d let her go home, the demons would have gotten back into her. Until I heard differently, I’d have to assume there was an Amber alert out for all of us. It always surprised me how much fighting against spiritual parasites could look like crime.
Alexander dragged himself to the bathroom and handed out his clothes. I stuffed all of it into the plastic liner, tied the top, and put it outside the room’s door. The sun was almost up, thin clouds glowing rose and gold in the immense blue New Mexican sky. I took the Do Not Disturb sign and hung it on the knob. Dolores was lying on her side now, her eyes glassy and empty. The show broke to a commercial for allergy medicine, and I turned off the TV.
“Get some sleep, okay?” I said. Dolores nodded and closed her eyes. There was an extra blanket in the closet, and I draped it over her. When I knocked on the bathroom door, it took a few seconds for Alexander to answer.
“Yes?”
“I’m going to hit Wal-
Mart for some fresh clothes. You stay here and guard the kid, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Don’t let anyone in.”
“I’m a Catholic priest in a hotel room with an underage girl and no clothes,” he said. “So yeah, I think I’ll try to keep a low profile.”
“Funny,” I said.
“Here all week. Tip your waitress.”
I unhooked the cable that ran from the telephone to the wall and shoved it in my pocket before I left. I didn’t think Alexander would call Chapin while I was gone, but I wasn’t a hundred percent sure. And it wasn’t a risk I had to take.
I got back two hours later with a sweater and two pairs of slacks, one of which would probably fit Alexander, pink sweats with a pattern of hearts and snowflakes for Dolores, a pair of jeans and a blouse for me, and socks and underwear for the masses. Alexander was in bed, still wrapped in his towel. The wind spirit’s wound looked fresh and pink and painful. Dolores was sleeping where I’d left her, above the bedspread and under the spare blanket, curled up like a comma. Ozzie looked up at me hopefully.
“Oh. Sorry. I didn’t think about dog food. I’m kind of new at the whole pet thing,” I said, and she sighed and put her head back down.
I put the shopping bags down by the door and went to the far side of the bed. I lay down with my clothes on, fitting onto eight inches of mattress that the other two had left me. For a moment, I wondered if this was what it felt like having a family. A man, a woman, a child, all curled up in a bed that was a little too small, all with their own thoughts and dreams and nightmares. I tried to imagine my own mother and father on a vacation someplace when I’d been a little kid, or with my big brother, who was about to have a kid of his own. I couldn’t picture it. It wasn’t that it seemed wrong onny or improbable. It was just that when I tried to put them here where I was, my mind went blank. Part of that was the trickling exhaustion that came from a sleepless, anxious night, but part of it was something else. Part of it was not knowing anymore exactly who I missed when I missed my family. My mind wandered to the other people who belonged with me: Aubrey, Chogyi Jake, Ex. Maybe them. I could almost imagine them.
I didn’t realize I’d closed my eyes until it had already happened. I left them that way, thinking I’d just rest for a couple of minutes and then go find some breakfast for us all, and woke up with the others a little bit after noon.
“YOU’RE SURE she came back wrong?” Alexander asked. “Is it possible that she was okay when we did the rite, but then the other demon was there waiting when it was over?”
Dolores took a bite of her hamburger. She’d gone for a weird Hawaiian thing with barbecue sauce and pineapple that smelled great. She chewed and shook her head. Her frown was entirely made of eyebrows.