Page 125 of The Midnight Knock

Hunter said nothing.

Ryan looked at his watch. It was a few minutes shy of 6:25. “I’m going to grab some shut-eye. I might need your help later, getting Polly out of here.”

“You know where to find me.”

Ryan left Hunter and headed around the corner of the motel. He went around back, listening as the man took a long pull on his cigarette. Ryan walked in the dirt so the creaky boards of the porch didn’t betray him. He needed sleep, badly.

He wasn’t going to get it anytime soon.

The back door of room 9 opened without a sound. A tall boy with brown hair and deep eyes stood there, a shotgun braced against his shoulder and aimed at Ryan’s head.

This must be Ethan. Somehow, Ryan knew that even though the boy was holding a gun, Ethan didn’t want to hurt him. Instead of being afraid, Ryan pulled his eyes from the shotgun, back to his watch. Back to the time.

6:30.

The time, Ryan thought. Why was the time so—

And then he remembered. All in a rush, just like that: Ryan remembered last night, and with a sensation like a loose tooth being pulled from the gum, his headache evaporated. He stood very still for what felt like forever, his mind reorganizing itself in a blur, and then he gave Ethan a nod. He knew the score.

Ethan lowered the shotgun, motioned for Ryan to come inside. He did, his feet silent as a cat’s.

Ryan whispered, “She doesn’t have much time left.”

Ethan nodded. The boy was way, way ahead of him. “You need to do exactly as I say.”

THE CEREMONYSARAH

6:30 p.m.

The Chief had been disgusted by this entire process. Back in the Huntsville visitor’s center, during one of their long talks before he died, the old man had said, “Trapping people against their will isn’t a good way to make any sort of power work,” he’d said. “It’s probably why we’re in this mess in the first place. My father said the Te’lo’hi ceremony should last for a few hundred years. It’s barely been five decades.”

“So we fix it. We know how, right?”

“Sarah, you don’t understand. The ceremony, it requires a catalyst. It… it’s not like the dances and sacred rituals of any tribe I know. It’s darker. Barbaric. I’m not sure it’s even Indigenous at all. Dad said the forefathers would have never come up with it on their own. He said it must have had an outside source.”

“Like what?” Sarah had said. “Aliens?”

The Chief had fallen silent a long time. “That may not be as unrealistic as it sounds.”

Sarah hadn’t much cared about the forefathers. She was “Apache, sort of, I guess,” as her mother once described it. The Chief was a distant relation, and his father had clearly been far more devoted to the old ways, the old world. In Sarah’s branch of the family, the last people to take any real interest in the old world, were a distant uncle and some forgotten cousins—Thomas and Tabitha and their archaeologist father—all three of whom had vanished off the face of the earth one night in 1955. “And let that be a lesson,” Sarah’s mother had said. The lesson, apparently: marry a white man and forget the past, just like her mother had done.

Sarah hadn’t cared about the past, the old tribes, the violence that had paved over them like the tiles of a great white reliquary. Shehadn’t had the fortitude to be that heartbroken by everything that had happened to her people. She would have been angry and devastated every minute of every day, and who had the time for that? What would it change?

In the visitor’s center of Huntsville, she had said to The Chief, “Whatever’s in that mountain, it’s trying to get out. You know it. I know it. So what kind of catalyst are we talking about here?”

“Murder, Sarah.Yourmurder. Just like my father’s before you.” The Chief had held her gaze, sat very still. “Hence our disgust. The tribes of this continent, almost to a man, hated the idea of a human sacrifice. Any stories you heard about it north of Montezuma were almost always propaganda by the white man. But there’s no getting around it. My father said it’s what had to be done. And according to the journal you brought me last time, I’d say he was right. But think about it, really. Do you have any idea what you’re signing up for?”

Sarah had studied the old man through the prison’s perforated glass. They had a room to themselves, which was apparently a favor from the guards on behalf of The Chief, or some friend of The Chief’s, she never understood. Prison politics were like border politics, as she’d quickly learned: money and power, mirrors and feints. On a table in front of her, Sarah had laid out a notebook, a felt-tip pen, and a small photograph.

She’d pressed the photograph to the glass. The Chief had studied it for a long time.

He’d said, “Are those your boys?”

Sarah had nodded. She’d tucked the picture away without looking at it for herself. She couldn’t bear to, most days. Not if she wasn’t planning to spend the next forty-eight hours obliterated. “They’ll be seven and nine.”

“What happened?”

“Custody court. I lost.” It was a long story with a simple solution. She’d once been a ferocious drinker. She’d been blazed on chardonnay one summer afternoon, had gone to pick the boys up from a friend’s house and crashed into a highway embankment. One broken arm. One sprained little neck. Two protective orders filed by theirfather. Granted. Sarah’s life had been downhill ever since. Her tenure at the university, her home in Austin: all up in smoke.