“Aaron,” I said. He was a cop in Denver who’d been living in his girlfriend’s German shepherd while a haugtrold ran his original body. Nice guy.
“Aaron,” Aubrey agreed. “I never really thought about what it’s like for them. Having something else in their body with them.”
“Only now you’ve been there,” I said.
He started to speak, then only nodded. His robe gaped open at the neck. Raw red gouges started at his collarbone and ran down and to his left. Claw marks.
“It was… intense,” he said. “I was still in there. The whole time, I was aware of everything. Well, until you knocked me out, at least.”
“Yeah, well,” I said. “Sorry about that.”
“No. Don’t be. I knew you might have to kill me. When we were in the hallway, in the dark, I knew that the only way to really stop the rider was going to mean breaking my body bad enough that… I was rooting for you. I wanted you to.”
“I wouldn’t hurt you,” I said. “If there was any way not to, I would never hurt you.”
“It didn’t give you a lot of choice,” he said. “I could feel it too. The thing. Marinette. It was like my mind and its mind were hooked up at the back.”
“You knew what it was thinking?”
“What it was feeling, more like. It had this energy. Wild and angry and… I don’t know how to say this. Confident? I was standing there, peeking in at the ritual with you two, and then it was like someone had thrown me in a prison cell about five inches behind my eyes. But I could feel the anger. It hates Amelie Glapion—I mean hates her—but it hates Karen worse.”
“I guess it would,” I said. “Karen’s like the kick-ass rider hunter, right? The thing in Glapion’s a rival and an exile and all, but at least it’s one of their kind.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” Aubrey said. He swallowed, the delicate mechanism of his throat shifting under the skin. “I think I tried to kill Ex. After the exorcism part started up, I get a little fuzzy. But I think I hurt him.”
“Nothing he can’t come back from,” I said. “Chogyi promised that a little rest, and the padre will be right as rain, whatever that means.”
Aubrey smiled. It was the first time that morning I’d seen him smile, and it looked like it hurt.
“I see why they do it,” Aubrey said. “The rider cults? The ones like Glapion’s where people actually invite things into them? I get it now.”
“I don’t.”
“There’s this amazing sense of power. Marinette could have done… well, not anything, but almost. More than I could ever dream of. She was invulnerable and wild. Feral. I could feel it. I participated in it in a way I can’t exactly explain. The only thing I didn’t do was control it.”
“Power without responsibility,” I said. “Every girl’s dream.”
“If I had been there as part of the cult. If it had been something I wanted,” Aubrey said, then took a long, slow, shaking breath. “I don’t think I know how to talk about this.”
“You’re doing fine,” I said.
“No, I’m not,” he said. “The words don’t fit around it.”
“Of course they don’t,” I said. “That’s all right.”
“I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t stop it from killing you,” he said. “And it was inside of me. My body… I just couldn’t…”
There had been a time, no doubt months or years before, when I’d thought that Kim and the divorce papers were the most important issue between me and Aubrey. It couldn’t have only been minutes. I would never be that shallow. Just then, watching Aubrey start to weep, the wife and legal proceedings didn’t matter at all. I leaned forward and took his hand in mine. His knuckles were skinned. Eyes closed, he wrapped his fingers with mine. He looked up at me.
I had seen Aubrey naked. I had seen him in the throes of orgasm. I had seen him unconscious and helpless as a baby. I had never seen him as vulnerable as he was at that moment. I moved up the bed, pulling his arm around my shoulder, and held him as he rocked gently forward and back. There was blood on his robe. His body smelled like musk and clean sweat and the peculiar almost-pepper that was just him. He cried like he’d lost something precious, his arms tight around me.
I wept too. And I rocked him.
And I kissed him.
Here’s the thing about sex. It’s like music or language or anything really human and complicated. It can express anything; love or lust or anger, loss or sorrow. I kissed Aubrey, and he kissed me back. He was gentle at first, and then it was hard and rough and desperate. And I met him, pressure for pressure and power for power. Grief for grief. I pulled open his robe, my fingertips tracing wounds that hadn’t fully stopped bleeding. He pulled off my shirt, his hand resting on my side where my old scars had almost turned white.
“Aubrey,” I said.
“Please,” he whispered.
I put my hands in his hair, holding him. I didn’t remember moving in to straddle his lap, but I was there now, and it felt perfectly right. His breath was deep as if he’d been running. Mine was too. I leaned to the side, rolling onto the bed with him still locked between my knees.
“Yes,” I said.
There were a hundred things to say. Sane, rational, responsible things. You’re still married. You’re vulnerable. We don’t really know what we are to each other. We should be careful.
I didn’t even manage Do you have a condom?
The last time I’d had sex, it had been with Aubrey. He had been gentle and giving and funny and beautiful. Now we were different people, and our bodies were saying something else to each other. He was strong and selfish, angry and rough. Once, we had made love; now, we were fucking. And even as I pulled him into me, even when I crawled on top of him, I was there as witness to his pain.
We ended the way we began, locked in each other’s arms, crying. I had cataloged all the injuries on his flesh. The scrapes, the scratches, the bruises and cuts. I had kissed them all. He tried to thank me, but I pressed my fingers to his lips until he gave up the effort.
He fell asleep first, his skin glowing a little in the soft sunlight of early afternoon. His breathing became slower, deeper. More peaceful. I pulled the blanket up over us both. Once again, things hadn’t gone to plan. I wondered lazily if they ever would. I appeared to really suck at planning. I let my eyes flutter closed.
In my dream, I stood alone and naked in the desert. A gentle wind was blowing across the stones and sand. I knew with the logic of dreams that this austere, lifeless landscape was my home and that it was sacred. There was something I was supposed to do there, and I didn’t remember what precisely it was. I knew I was in time, but that a moment would come—and sooner rather than later-when I would have to act. I tried to remember what exactly I had agreed to do.
Far above, a hawk that was also Chogyi Jake cried out. When I looked up, there were two suns in the sky. One was the burning disk I was used to, and the other was darker. Instead of radiating light and heat, it was radiating purification. I opened my arms to it, recalling that this was what I’d been meant to do. Something bigger than mountains whispered my name, and I woke up.
The knock came again. Hard pounding at the door. I lifted myself up. Aubrey muttered in his sleep as I fished his robe off the floor. I heard a voice I recognized. Ex.
“Aubrey!” he said, words muffled by the closed door between us. “Get up! Jayné’s missing!”
I fumbled the security bar off and opened the door. Ex looked ill. His skin was gray, his eyes redrimmed, his pale blond hair hung to his shoulders. He opened his mouth to further announce my absence, went pale, and then blushed a deep scarlet.
“Yeah,” I said. “Could you maybe give us just a minute?”
NINE