“Stop,” my rider said. Or I did. It was getting hard to tell the difference. The force of our combined will was like an explosion. The thing riding Dolores’s sister turned toward me. Cold pressed out from it. A black, snake-long tongue slid out from between the girl’s lips, lolling down almost to her belly. Foul saliva dripped in ropes toward the floor.
“The Desert has no hold over us,” it hissed. “We stand with the Father Ba’al.”
“I don’t see Father Ba’al here,” my rider said. Soledad’s blackened eyes flickered once, looking behind me, and my body shifted, bending at the knee and swinging back an arm to meet Dolores in mid-leap. I caught her like a baseball, and my arms lifted the little girl over my head. From my distant place behind my eyes, I could feel her writhing, the slick feeling of her skin against my palms. The smell was nauseating. But even when the dark tongue draped down, smearing filth across my cheek, the Black Sun didn’t flinch. Alexander sat up, scooting on his ass until his back touched the wall. His eyes were wide, his face flour-dusted pale.
“I am the Black Sun’s daughter. These people are under my protection,” my rider said. The voice was like mine, but deeper. More certain. “The dog’s under my protection too, so don’t fuck with her.”
“Your protection means nothing,” Soledad said. Above me, Dolores was whimpering. Her thrashing was growing wilder. “We came to end you, and we will.”
“You came to kill Jayné Heller,” my rider said. “And you came because she tricked you. She was the bait in this mousetrap, and I am the hammer.”
Ozzie, backing up from the older sister, growled. Her bared teeth were worn and yellowed, but the old dog’s expression promised murder. Soledad looked back at her, then at me, then at Alexander rising slowly to his feet. Above me, Dolores began to wail. The older sister whirled, extending the axe so smoothly it seemed like part of her arm. My body had to move back to avoid the blade, and Soledad sprinted for the door.
“Don’t leave me!” Dolores cried, but she was already gone. The unnatural darkness lessened a degree. The smell of filth became a little less overpowering. Alexander limped to the doorway.
“Let it go,” my rider said, struggling to hold the thrashing child above me. “You can find it later if you need to. We have what we came for.”
“We can’t stay here,” Alexander said. He was winded. Gasping for breath. If he doesn’t pull it together, I thought, we’re going to have to take him straight back to the hospital. “The noise. The police. They’ll come.”
“They might,” my rider said. “But they aren’t here yet and she is.”
My body turned a half step, shifted to the right, and slammed my burden down on the bed. The force of it broke the frame. The mattress tilted in toward the wall, headboard rattling. My hand was around the girl’s throat, and it felt like I was holding ice. The other rider’s tongue licked out, slathering my face with outhouse slime.
“Take its name,” my rider said.
Alexander stood beside the bed and lifted a thin silver cross. Behind him, Ozzie sat back, scratching her shoulder with a rear paw. When Alexander spoke, his voice was shaking.
“I come in the name of Christ, and in His holy name I command you, beast. Reveal your name!”
The thing in Dolores said something obscene and arched its back, trying to break free. The white sheet beside Dolores’s head was smeared yellow-green.
“In the name of God, I command you! Reveal your name!”
Alexander’s will batted against me like a moth blundering into a window. I heard footsteps coming behind us, but my body wasn’t my own. I couldn’t turn my head to look. Dolores shouted again, her voice deep as a gravel pit, her words sexual and delighted in their perversion. Jesus, I thought, there’s a kid in the room.
“Reveal your—”
“What the hell is going on in here?” a man’s voice said. My head turned toward the door. A Hispanic man in his middle sixties stood in the shattered frame. His white hair was wild from the pillow. When he caught sight of the thing writhing on the bed, his mouth went tight and thin. He looked from it to me to Alexander and back again.
“We have it under control,” Alexander said. “I’m a priest.”
“Okay, padre,” the old man said. “You need a shotgun? I got a shotgun.”
“No, it’s all right,” Alexander said. “We’ve got it covered. Thanks, though.”
The old man nodded, crossed himself, and stepped back into the night. A woman’s voice called out, and the old man said something in a calm, certain tone.
“There are times I love New Mexico,” Alexander said, and then turned his attention back to the girl. “In the name of Christ, the Lord, reveal your name!”
“I don’t answer to your God.” Dolores leered. “You and your—“
My rider’s will rose up from the base of my spine, gathered in my throat, and pushed down my arm. When it reached my hand, the thing in Dolores shrieked. Ozzie, at my side, barked twice and looked up at me, wagging. She seemed to be having a good enough time.
“Reveal your name!” Alexander said, pressing the thin silver cross forward. I felt my rider trying to gather her power for another strike, and I tried to add my own qi to hers. I had a momentary sense of gratitude, and then we bore down on the girl again.
“Akaname!” it screamed. “I am Akaname of the tribe of Akaname of the legion of Akaname.”
“How did you get in this girl?” my rider asked, but Alexander shook his head.
“Don’t talk to it. Talking to it gives it power,” he said. And then, lifting his voice in a ragged shout: “In the name of Christ the Redeemer, I command you to leave this child.”
His will was stronger this time, but I could see the cross trembling in his hands. I’d been on the other end of this rite, and I had the sense of what it would take. He didn’t have it in him. He was too weak, too injured, too tired. The thing inside of me hadn’t had it particularly easier. Between the fight with the wind demon and my own near exorcism, I didn’t know how much juice she had left in her. Like it was reading my mind, the Akaname smiled. Dolores’s lips were black, and the dark tongue lolled out of her open mouth.
“I will not,” the Akaname said. “She is mine. Forever, she is mine. Shi-neh!”
“We have to do this together,” my rider said, looking up at Alexander through locks of my hair. “Will you let me help you?”
I saw him hesitate like a video holding a frame a little too long. It was asking him to cooperate with the kind of beast he’d dedicated his life to fighting against. The betrayal would be small. He just had to make common cause with a rider for a f minutes, just this once. The advantages were unmistakable. Going forward with the rite without joining his will to ours might kill him and exhaust us without ever freeing Dolores. And still, if he’d said no, I would have understood. Chapin would have refused.
“All right,” he said.
My free hand took his. Still locked in my own head, I felt an echo of him: the bone-deep weariness and the excitement. He had surrendered himself to this ceremony like a swimmer heading out to sea without keeping the reserves to come back. The Akaname writhed, trying to sit up or slide out from my rider’s grasp. The shattered bed creaked and dropped another couple of inches as another support gave way. Tendrils of shadow swirled in the air around us like living smoke.
Alexander took a deep breath, nodded. He was ready. I threw all my own will behind the force rising in my body. Alexander’s eyes were closed, his lips moving in silent prayer, and I felt him beside me. The Black Sun, Sonnenrad, the Voice of the Desert, swirled around us. For a moment, the motel room was gone, and we crouched in a vast, empty plain. Something like a sun but not radiated something that wasn’t heat. The vastness flickered, and we were back in our little room with the chintzy wallpaper and the ruined bed and the stench. But when Alexander spoke, his voice had a weight and authority I hadn’t known he lacked until just then. The words seemed as solid as mountains, and implacable as the sea.
“In the name of God, I command thee, demon. Go.”
The sensation of the rider leaving her body was eerie. My hand was pressed hard against Dolores’s chest, fingers digging in to keep a grip despite the slime. As Alexander’s last word resonated, echoing in a space larger than the room we were in, I felt an icy mist rise between my fingers. It bit at the skin between my fingers, burning like acid, and then dissipated. The scent of the raw sewage boiled up, and I felt more than heard Alexander gagging as he sank down to his knees. His breath was heavy and ragged, like a man who’d just run a race. And then the enemy was gone. The room grew brighter as the unnatural darkness fled, and I had my hand on a little girl instead of a demon.
Her eyes were just brown again, but shocked and empty. Her gaze shifted for a few seconds, disoriented and lost, before fixing on me. And I was driving. My body was once again my own. I stepped back, and her skin made a wet squelching sound. Dolores started to say something, and then her face became a mask of disgust. She rolled to her side and vomited. I stroked her hair while Alexander rose slowly to his feet and stumbled to the bathroom. I heard the water running in the sink, and by the time Dolores had control over her guts again, he was back, a wet white towel steaming in his hand. Dolores sat up, her arms held out from her body, trying not to touch herself.
“Oh God,” she said.
“I know,” Alexander said, handing her the towel. “It’s okay, though. It’s over.”
I stepped into the bathroom, grabbed a hand towel, and started scraping the layer of muck off of my body. Ozzie followed me, wagging and smiling. We might smell like Roto-Rooter’s worst night, but we’d won, and she knew it. The version of me in the mirror looked like something from a cheap horror film where they were skimping on the effects. My hair fell over my face. Even after a brisk toweling, my skin looked shiny and slick. My was pale and my eyes bloodshot.
