At the hospital, three men in white uniforms and a woman in green scrubs transferred Alexander onto a gurney. The long, deep cut wasn’t bleeding so much as starting to weep a little blood, but the wounded priest was able to move his arm a little and he was trying to speak. I took those as good signs. Chapin stood next to a doctor whose face made me think of India even though her accent was pure Boston. The sun was already edging down toward the western horizon, pulling our shadows out long and reddish. It wasn’t quite four o’clock yet. The night was going to be long.
Once Alexander got rushed inside, Ex pulled himself back into the Yukon and drove it off toward the parking spaces. Chapin and the doctor exchanged a few last words, and the doctor went back inside. Chapin huddled down in his clothes. He looked older than he had before, his skin gray, his eyes bloodshot where they weren’t bloody. And there was something else. It was in the way he held his shoulders and the timbre of his voice. Anger maybe. Or fear.
“I will stay here,” Chapin said. “Until we are sure he is stable. Xavier says the two of you will find rooms in the city. We will … regroup, yes? Once we have had opportunity to finish here, we will regroup.”
“All right,” I said.
We stood silently. In the distance, I heard the Yukon’s door crash open and closed, and then the almost subliminal sound of Ex getting in the sports car. An old man in a bright green parka walked out of the ER, speaking Spanish into a cell phone. Neither Chapin nor I moved. I figured that was as close as I was going to get to permission to speak.
“So this stuff I’ve been seeing? The unnatural fighting and weird powers? I’m thinking it’s not just a psychological issue,” I said.
“I see your point,” he said.
“So we can skip the shrink?”
“We can.”
Chapter 6
I never went skiing when I was a kid. Other kids in school did, but only the rich ones. They’d come back from vacation talking about exotic places like Lake Tahoe and Park City. A couple of kids from church—Jacob and Stacey Corman, putting too fine a point on it—always made sure to have a little sunburn when they came back to school after Christmas break. Snowburn, they called it. They’d show off their pinked skin like peacock feathers until their mother got angry, started lecturing about the sin of pride, and threatened never to take them again.
Taos was apparently just the sort of place the Cormans went to. Finding a place to stay was harder than I’d expected, and Christmas vacation was exactly the problem. A few nights were easy. An open-ended stay-until-whenever widtd running up against previous bookings pretty fast. Jacob and Stacey were making my world less pleasant one more time. Ex and I sat in the Mercedes outside the hospital, the engine purring away just to keep the heater going, while I made a series of increasingly frustrating calls. In the end, I gave up and called my lawyer’s private line. She put me on hold for ten minutes and came back with an address halfway up to the ski valley where I now had a rental condo waiting. When she asked if I needed anything else, I almost laughed. I fed the address into the GPS.
“You want to drive?” Ex asked.
“Really?” I said.
He nodded.
“Are you okay? Did you get hurt?”
“I’ve had better days,” he said, and handed me the key.
We traded places and headed out. Going up the mountain was also more of an adventure than I’d expected. The road was narrow, twisting through the high mountains. It had been plowed and salted, but the ice and snow still clung to the blacktop in places. The falling-rock signs were reinforced by the occasional basketball-sized boulder at the roadside. I turned the heater up to full blast and thumbed on the heating pads hidden in the seats. Ex laid back in the dark leather of the passenger’s seat, eyes closed. He looked pale, and I thought he might be sleeping except that when I hit a bump or rough patch, he hissed a little under his breath.
At about nine thousand feet above sea level, there was a turnoff marked by a tiny, unreadable wooden sign. I waited for three sets of SUV headlights and one pickup truck to pass, then made the left turn and headed up the hill. The road twisted and turned among the high, snow-laden pine trees. I could feel the ice in the way the tires struggled to keep their grip. I more than half thought the last little rise was going to strand me or send me backward, but the little car made it. I pulled up to Spirit House Condominiums. It was five closely built structures huddling close enough to make good use of the limited space but with the distance to leave each one private. There were lights on in four of them. The fifth was dark, the windows looking out at the night like blind eyes.
I pulled into the carport, gravel and snow crunching under the wheels. Ex looked ragged enough that I left him in the car while I scouted the place. The wind had been cold before. Here, it was frigid. I left the headlights on while I went out, exploring the front entrance. It had a little alcove, a thick wooden archway, and a bench where people could put on or take off complicated footware. The door was locked, but a key hung from the knob by a thick rubber band. I tried it. It worked. Low security.
Inside, the lights were soft orange-gold glows, barely enough to cast shadows. A little mood-rich, but they worked. Small kitchen, check. Recessed conversation pit by gas fireplace, check. Through the picture window in the back, I could see the dark lump that was probably a hot-tub cover. A thin stairway led to the second floor and more bedrooms. In a pinch, the place would probably have slept eight. It was plenty for us.
When I came back out, Ex was pulling himself out of the car, stiff and awkward. He walked in toward the house, silhouetted by the headlights so that I didn’t see how bad he looked until he was almost to me.
“Hey. What’s the matter?”
When I put my arm around him, his back was wet. When I looked at my fingers, I saw blood.
“What the hell?”“It’s okay,” he said. “Just get me inside.”
At the little kitchen, I leaned him against the counter and ran back out to shut off the headlights. When I returned, he’d pulled off his shirt. Two deep gouges scored his back, one beginning at the shoulder and digging down to the middle of his shoulder blade, the other starting at the middle of his spine and running down over his kidney. A thin red smear mottled his skin, dark and dried at the edges, fresh and bright where blood still leaked from the wounds.
“Jesus!” I said, shutting the door behind me. “What happened?”
He chuckled, then bent over in pain, resting his weight on the kitchen counter.
“Well, there was this wind demon,” he said, smiling through the pain. “We had a little fight.”
“You’re hurt.”
“Little bit. Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you say something when I asked?”
“Like what? ‘Ouch’? That would have helped.”
I drew him closer to the sink. The hot water ran icy cold a few seconds before it went warm. I found an old dish towel in a drawer. Water and blood mixed, sheeting down Ex’s side. Under the mess, the skin around the wounds was red and angry. When I started cleaning out the actual gouges, he winced.
It felt strange, touching him. We’d been very careful over the weeks together to keep our physical contact down to taps on the shoulder or steadying hands. I was washing him now, my palm against his side, my fingers feeling the ridges and valleys of his rib cage. I pressed the wet cloth against him and watched him respond to it. He wasn’t wincing now. Even with the wounds to excuse me, it felt dangerous and sweet, and I found myself being gentler and taking longer than I probably needed to.
“You’re going to need stitches,” I said. “I can’t believe you, Ex. We were just at a hospital. I mean, we were right there.”
“It would have attracted too much attention,” Ex said. “Father Chapin and I agreed that it would be better to keep outside involvement to a minimum. And I don’t need stitches.”
“Yeah, well, he didn’t see your back.”
“He did.”
I stopped dabbing, but I didn’t take my hand away. Ex looked over his shoulder at me. His white-blond hair had blood in it, and his eyes held as much sorrow as exhaustion. I shifted my hand between his shoulder blades, and he looked away. I went back to cleaning up. When I’d done as much as I could, I left him there and went upstairs. There were towels in the two bathrooms, and I used them to improvise bandages.
We moved him to the couch where he could lie on his belly. Between the blood and the water, his pants were sopping, and I put a blanket over him so that he could pull them off without compromising his modesty. He pushed his clothes out from under it and collapsed forward with a sigh. I turned up the thermostat by the stairway, and the gas fire grate hissed to life, orange flames licking the ceramic logs.
“I can call in a doctor,” I said. “Seriously, I’ll call my lawyer, and she’ll find someone.”
“And do what?” he asked. “It’s all right. I’ve had my tetanus shots. I’m clotting up. There’s nothing to do but wait. What about you? Are you feeling all right?”
I tried turning. The pain was more a deep ache than a sharp stab.
“Bruised,” I said. “Not broken, I don’t think.”
“What about your knee?”
I looked down. I’d forgotten ripping my jeans there, but my kneecap peeked out into the room, grimy with dirt and blood of my own.
“Way better than your back,” I said, sitting on the floor. The warmth of the fire pushed gently against my neck.
“Well,” Ex said through his smile, “that’s a good minimum, I guess.”
We were silent for a moment, the only sound the muttering of the flames and the quiet ticking of a clock. Ex put his head down on his arms, his face toward me. He looked tired and distant. His hair was unbound, spilling across his face, softening him. Here I was, alone in a secluded mountain cabin with a man wearing a blanket. I watched the firelight flicker on his skin. It should have felt weird. It didn’t.