“He’s a darling boy, and very intense, but he seems a bit histrionic sometimes.”
“He just hates not being the one in control,” I said.
“Well, that’s true of us all, I suppose. Is there anything else I can do for you right now?”
“Nope,” I said. “I’m good.”
I got in the SUV, started up the engine, and paused. It was Sunday afternoon, with a couple of hours still before sundown. Questa was half an hour away. If it all worked out right, I could find Dolores tonight and get her back to Chapin and Ex in the morning with her story to back up mine. Except …
Except she wasn’t the only one who’d gotten an exorcism recently. Was it her sister? Someone else in her immediate family had been ridden and cured before she had, and I was pretty sure it had been her sister. And if all of Chapin’s exorcisms came with a secret toy surprise like mine, that meant at least one person in Dolores’s household was being ridden right now. Or maybe everyone. Hell, all of Questa could be one big rider colony for all I knew.
And for that matter, I was making an assumption about Chapin too. I was thinking there was only one ringer in the circle. What if that wasn’t true? What if all of them were under the control of something else? I leaned against the steering wheel. I couldn’t go running after this like I was chasing fireflies. I had to think it through. Ozzie yawned massively and lay down on the passenger’s seat.
Being with Aubrey for as long as I had, I’d learned a few things by osmosis. Things like this: parasitic systems have structure. By watching what a parasite did, you could figure out something about its life cycle. A mycoplasmic infection made mice seek out the smell of cat urine? Pretty fair bet that the parasite wants to get inside a cat. A carpenter ant crawls down out of its nest in the forest canopy and latches onto the bottom of a low-hanging leaf? The fungus that’s about to pop its head open would probably like to rain its spores down from about that height. So if a rider is taking the risk of hanging out with exorcists in order to get fresh victims, that meant something. Specifically, it meant that the benefit it got from being around exorcisms outweighed the risk of being discovered by the kinds of guys who were professionally not in favor of spiritual parasites. Which meant …
I sat back and pulled the folded envelope from my pocket. Midian’s letter was still inside. I plucked it out.
Getting a rider’s like a drinking game. Once you start losing, you keep losing—getting ridden opens you up and getting closed again is tricky.
So this particular rider needed people who were easy to possess. People who were already vulnerable. I remembered something that Aubrey had said once about hospitals being a great breeding ground for infection because there were so many people there with crappy immune systems. An infection that wouldn’t be able to survive in a normal person would have all kinds of room to grow if you gave it a community of people who couldn’t fight it off. And if that was the kind of rider I was looking at, then what it was doing made sense.
So unless Questa was hip-deep in people who’d already been ridden by something else, Stinky’s pool of possible victims was going to be limited.
And it meant something else.
I pulled up my phone and turned the envelope over. I took the extra minute to put Chogyi Jake’s number into the address book before I called. It rang five times and rolled to voice mail. I growled in frustration and waited for the beep.
“Hey. It’s me. Find out if any of Chapin’s boys has had a rider. It may be important. But be discreet about asking. Don’t be obvious. I’ll check back in later.”
I dropped the connection and sat back. Ozzie considered me with wet eyes.
“I think it’s going pretty well,” I said. And then, still out loud, “Okay, listen up. I’m heading toward Dolores and her family. Chances are pretty good that there’s going to be a rider there and it won’t want us to take her back. If you think you’re too weak to take this thing in a fair fight, tell me now, and we’ll find a different plan.”
I waited. The guy with the kids finished gassing up his station wagon and pulled out. A girl maybe thirteen in a huge blue down coat walked across the street and into the store. A car drove by slowly, thumping out a bass line that was rendering anyone inside it deaf and sterile.
“I can,” I said, unaware that I intended to until the words came out. The voice had an exhaustion I didn’t feel myself.
Ozzie scrambled to her feet, whining anxiously. Her head was tilted.
“Yeah, I know,” I said, scratching the dog between the ears. “It freaks me out too. But she’s on our side.”
For now, anyway, I thought while I started the engine.
THE ROAD to Questa was lousy driving—hard-packed snow where it wasn’t ice. I took it slow enough that I didn’t feel the immediate danger of skidding into the oncoming lane but as fast as I could manage. The sun was sliding close to the horizon, and people were already turning headlights on. I wasn’t sure I’d make it back to the hotel outside Taos if I could find a room on Questa that kept me from driving back in the dark. Or one with a dry carpet. Part of me rebelled at the idea of having two hotel rooms at the same time, but with a few thousand dollars in my pocket, it was hard to get too worked up over the loss.
All through New Mexico, I’d passed little houses sitting back off the highway. Sometimes they were by themselves, sometimes in clumps of three or four sharing the same mile of asphalt. Except for a car-parts store and the whitewashed and ominously named Sangre de Cristo motel, Questa seemed less like a town than a few of those random, lonely, improbable buildings that had landed together. The main street was the highway, and the two lanes divided by the broken yellow line looked cosmopolitan compared to the side streets. Sidewalks would have been an affectation. Yellow-gray grass and scrub pressed in on the road, none of it rising much above knee-high, and the difference between a road and a driveway wasn’t immediately obvious. Leafless cottonwoods, some chopped back so viciously it was amazing they’d lived through it, stood in the snow, and huge hills rose up to the east. I squinted through the rose and orange light of a glorious, gaudy sunset, looking for road signs and comparing what I saw to the map on my phone. Cisneros Road. The corner of Cisneros Road and Cisneros Road. Old Cisneros Road …
The house sat back from the road. Pitched roof, pale stucco, with a raised wooden deck for a front porch and a dish antenna aiming its gray platter at the sky. The sunset reddened the house and left everything in the shadows gray. The flickering blue and white of a television lit the windows. At the side, a familiar car assured me from its bumper that I couldn’t be Christian and pro-choice. The plate was GODSWRK. So bingo.
I hopped out of the car. The air was cold, and only getting colder. I considered letting Ozzie out to sniff the local fire hydrant equivalents and decided against it. I wanted the option of a fast getaway if things went poorly, and whistling for the dog while unholy spirits attacked me sounded like bad tactics. The snow was solid as rock under my feet. Road salt covered the deck. I took a deep breath and knocked on the door. Inside, a little dog yapped and growled. A man’s voice snapped something I couldn’t make out, and the door opened a crack.
He was maybe sixty years old, white hair with a sprinkling of black. The wrinkles in his face looked like they’d been carved there by a sculptor who’d gotten a little carried away. A gold crucifix hung at his neck.
“Hi,” I said. “Eduardo Garcia?”
His eyes narrowed, but he didn’t close the door.
“I’m not buying anything,” he said. “Fixed income.”
“I’m not selling. I’m looking for a girl named Dolores. I think you might know her.”
He paused. I could see him thinking. I smiled, doing my best innocuous.
“You got the wrong house,” he said and closed the door.
Inside, the little dog started barking again. I stood silently for a few seconds, wondering what to do. My first impulse was to keep pestering the guy until he admitted that he knew Dolores and told me where she lived, but the small, still voice of wisdom suggested that strategy was more likely to end in gunplay that I wasn’t really up for. And I didn’t even know if I was looking at small-town suspicion or demon-cult stonewalling. I walked back to the SUV, got behind the wheel, and sat for a few minutes. The curtains shifted open an inch and then closed. I figured he was on the phone right now, warning Dolores’s family that a twentysomething Anglo girl was looking for them.
Okay, so no element of surprise, but at least I’d shaken the tree. What was going to happen next? He’d warn Dolores. If the rider had gotten into Dolores in the time since her exorcism, it would see me as a threat and either run like hell or come after me. If it hadn’t gotten into Dolores, it was still almost certain to be in her sister, and she would hear about it and either run like hell or come after me. If it ran, the chances were pretty slim I’d be able to catch it. I didn’t even have a last name to work with, and
If it attacked, I’d be able to fight it off or else I wouldn’t. I needed backup. I needed Chogyi Jake or Aubrey. Or Kim. Someone who already knew about riders and how they worked. Someone who Ex and Chapin would trust, since anything I said was going to be discounted as a propaganda leaflet from the Black Sun. Here I was, spitting distance from one of the most experienced groups of exorcists in the world, possessed, and still totally on my own. Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.
Unless …
I paused, turning the new idea over slowly. There were holes in it. Risks. But even if I failed, I wouldn’t be any worse off than I was now. I got back out of the car, walked back up to the door, knocked again. The little dog inside sounded like it was about to have a seizure. Eduardo didn’t open the door. I knocked again, and kept it up every few seconds for what felt like an hour but was probably three or four minutes. When the door opened, he had a rifle in his hand, so I’d called the gunplay thing right.
“If you don’t—” he started.