Like extortion, maybe.
I pushed my hands deeper into my pockets, scowling all the way up the walk. Jay strutted beside me. I couldn’t tell if we were a united front against Dad or if he felt like he was being marched to the gallows. Guilt and resentment at being made to feel guilty wrestled at the back of my head. Ex and Chogyi Jake came up behind us.
Jay rang the doorbell. For a long moment I thought no one would come. Maybe they weren’t home. Maybe they just didn’t open the door to me and mine. Then the porch light came on, a pale echo of the falling sun, and the door opened.
“Hey,” Curtis said. “Jayné. Jay. What’s . . . ah . . . what’s up?”
The forced casual tone, the way he didn’t step aside to let us in. He was under orders. I understood that, and a flare of anger came up in me. It wasn’t a position Mom and Dad should have put him in.
“Came to see Dad,” Jay said. “Can you get him?”
“Sure,” Curt said with obvious relief. “Hang on a sec.”
He closed the door and his muffled voice came through it, calling for my father.
“Thank you,” I said.
“For what?” Jay asked.
“For getting Curt off the hook. Not making him feel weirder about being the family bouncer.”
Jay looked at me.
“What?” I asked.
“That’s what you worry about? Whether Curt feels awkward?”
“It’s one thing,” I said. “Global warming kind of freaks me out too.”
Jay shook his head. It was the same tight motion Dad used when he was angry and not safely at home where he could blow up. I shifted from one foot to the other, trying to decide what I’d do if they left us standing out in the cold. Go around to the back door, maybe. Or kick in the front and see if Dad shot at me. Not like I’d be the first. I felt like I was back at grade school, waiting to see the principal.
The door opened again and Dad was there. He crossed his arms and looked down at us.
“I thought I told you not to speak with her,” Dad said.
“I need her help.”
“You don’t need anything she’s got on offer,” Dad said.
“Good to see you too,” I said, and Chogyi Jake touched my shoulder. He was right. There was nothing I could say that wouldn’t escalate things. I bit my lip and looked down. Dad was wearing cheap suede slippers with fake lamb’s wool. Grampa shoes. I couldn’t think why that should make me sad.
“I need to talk to you,” Jay said. “And my sister does to.”
“She’s not your sister. Not anymore.”
“She’s my sister,” Jay said, his voice growing stronger. “And I need to talk to you. Please let us come in.”
Dad’s face was set. He had more gray at his temples than I remembered.
“Carla’s gone,” Jay said.
I couldn’t say what I’d expected, except that it wasn’t this. Dad froze for a moment, like a video feed stuck on a single frame, and then for a moment his face seemed to cave in on itself. An enormous sorrow seemed to drown him, and I thought he might actually start to weep. It would have been slightly less strange if he’d grown wings and sang Ethel Merman tunes. The moment passed, and he was himself again. He stood back, nodding us inside.
“You and your friends can wait here,” he said to me, nodding to the front room. “I want to speak to my son in private.”
I ate the pain. There was nothing else to do with it.
The Christmas tree looked a little more disreputable than before. The needles were browning and falling away, and it left the tinsel looking cheap. Vulgar. A clown suit on a corpse. My mother appeared in the kitchen doorway, her eyes wide and hopeful. I sat on the good sofa and didn’t look at her. I was afraid she’d offer to take my rider again, and I didn’t want to see the desperation in her eyes once more. My father’s voice cracked from the TV room like a whip, and she vanished. I leaned my head against the wall and closed my eyes. Chogyi Jake sat beside me. I knew him from the way he moved.
“You know where we could be right now?”
“Where?” he asked.
“Literally anyplace but here. Doesn’t that sound great?”
Ex chuckled. He was by the picture window, looking out at the street. Jay and Dad were talking, low masculine voices like the murmur of a car engine on a long, unpleasant drive. I took off my sunglasses, and the room seemed unnaturally light.
“Is something bothering you?” Chogyi Jake asked.
I started to answer, paused, shook my head. There were too many answers to the question, and I couldn’t even start to pick out just one to start with. It was Ex who spoke.
“You mean besides her brother’s asshole guilt trip? She’s worried that because she’s getting as much information as we can before we hang our asses out in front of Jonathan Rhodes, she’s just as bad as Eric.” He turned and looked at me. His eyes were flat with outrage. “And her father’s treating her like she’s been dipped in shit.”
“He’s not really my father,” I said, wondering how exactly Ex had gotten me in the position of defending Dad.
“He raised you,” Ex said. “He’s your father. And having met him, I think you turned out great.”
“Thanks. I think,” I said.
“He’s had a difficult life,” Chogyi Jake said. He was facing Ex, but I knew the words were meant for me. “Living with a lover who not only betrayed him but who was wounded by it. Raising the child of that betrayal as his own. I assume he took comfort in his faith, but many men in his place would struggle. Fear or sorrow or even love can come out as anger.”
“Yeah, sucks to be a patriarch,” Ex said.
“Guys,” I said. “They’re in the next room, right? Maybe cover this later.”
“Sorry,” Ex said. “Just a little pissed off right now.”
My father’s voice was raised now, and it had taken on a rhythm, like a preacher in his groove on Sunday morning. Jay’s voice was a counterpoint, moving into the spaces and gaps. It was all like a grim, uncomfortable music, and it was as familiar to me as breathing. It would go up, spiraling louder and louder until it reached some kind of crisis, and then come crashing back down to that uneasy post-storm calm that passed for peace in my childhood. I tried not to listen, not to have my belly tighten in response.
“Okay, Invisible College,” I said. “Any speculation about what they’re up to?”
“Trap,” Ex said.
“Trap,” Chogyi Jake agreed. “Absolutely.”
“Okay,” I said, sighing. “Well, that took a few seconds. Anyone else got a way to distract me from this thoroughly awful day? Limericks? Crossword puzzles? Seriously, I’m open to anything.”
“Have we considered whether they necessarily have ill intentions?” Chogyi Jake asked.
“Thought that was covered in ‘trap,’ ” I said.
“Perhaps. But what do they believe they are trapping? You are the heir of Eric Heller. Once when we faced them before, we thought we knew what that meant. Since then, it’s turned out to be something very different. Perhaps this doesn’t have to be the situation we’re expecting.”
“Don’t know about that,” I said. “I mean, yes, Eric was a terrible, terrible person, but Randolph Coin did try to throw me off a skyscraper. Why he did it matters less than that he did, right?”
Chogyi Jake nodded at me to continue. Everything in his face and body said Maybe. I didn’t want to, but the words came anyway.
“I mean, okay, that was after we killed his bodyguard and tried to shoot him, but . . . Ah, jeez. We’re not the bad guys again, are we?”
“I don’t buy it,” Ex said. “The whole enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend thing is naive. Sure, the riders fight against each other. Just because there’s a war in hell doesn’t keep the devil’s enemy from being a demon.”
“What do you remember about that battle? Anything that he might have said to you?”
“It was a long time ago,” I said, “and I may not have been thinking my st
raightest. I mean, there was the are-you-sure-you-want-to-do-this? jazz where he offered to do some kind of binding pact where we didn’t hurt each other. I figured that just meant he thought I might win.”
“Did win,” Ex said.
“Had some help,” I said.
He smiled. “You’re welcome.”
“And anyway, I didn’t go after them first. They killed Eric and, okay, maybe that was doing the world a favor. But the first time I saw any of them, they had guns in their hands. Four of them broke into that second apartment and started unloading at me.”
Chogyi Jake nodded and pressed his fingers to his lips. I could almost hear him thinking, and it was hard not to follow my own path through the problem.
“There’s a hole in that,” Ex said. “How did they know you were there?”
“I screwed up the wards,” I said. “Crossed the threshold without fixing the line behind me.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But how did they find you? You don’t show up when people are using spells, remember? It doesn’t matter what wards you broke when you came through. They wouldn’t have seen you.”
“The only other one there was . . . oh.”
“Midian Clark,” Chogyi Jake said. “Who is a vampire. And was plotting with Eric to assassinate their leader.”
“Only then there I was too,” I said. “And when they came to the house here, they were loaded with rock salt. Mundane, unaltered rock salt. So that if anyone did get shot, the chances were better that they wouldn’t get killed. Unless, you know, high blood pressure. Shit.”
I leaned forward on the couch. I didn’t want it to be true. More than that, I didn’t want it to be even plausible. Like a voice on an old tape, Randolph Coin came back to me. You are determined to walk in his footsteps.
And I even knew what I’d said back. Yeah. Really am.
“Hold on,” Ex said. “I said it before. Yes, they were Eric’s enemy. We always knew that, but that doesn’t make them good. Whatever he was doing with the Black Sun and the haugsvarmr and you, standing against it doesn’t make the Invisible College into angels and paladins. That thing they sent looking for us?”
I leaped for it. “That’s true. I don’t know what that thing was, but it wasn’t good. Rotten to the core, more like.”
“I wonder if there is a way that we could reach out to them,” Chogyi Jake said. “Speak with them without the necessity of violence—”
“No,” Jay said, stepping out from the kitchen. I realized belatedly that I hadn’t heard Dad’s voice for a couple minutes. I wondered how much of our conversation they’d listened to. I was pretty sure the whole demons, guns, and vampires bit wasn’t going to help my standing in the family. “We’re not doing anything to warn them that we know where they are. Or where Carla is. We do nothing that might put her in more danger.”
Dad came in behind him. If I’d thought Jay was growing to look like Dad before, it was twice as clear with the pair of them standing side by side. Behind them, I saw Curt’s legs pulling back up the stairs. So he’d been eavesdropping too. Well, it made sense. If I’d had the chance at his age, I’d have snooped too.
In the kitchen, Mom started putting away dishes, the familiar clatter of china and glass both commonplace and foreign. It was as if by acting like things were normal, she could force reality to be normal and regular and comprehensible. Maybe that was how she’d gotten through the last two or three decades. Once I carried angels in my flesh, but now I need to get the boys to soccer.
Someone had said to me once that the only people who called themselves crazy were sane. That anyone who’d really been down the road to madness only wanted to be normal again. I’d never thought to apply that to my own family. Or myself.
I stood up, pulling my overcoat straight.
“Jay tells me that Carla’s gone off with the people that attacked you here,” Dad said. “And that you won’t help unless I do what you want.”
“That’s an extreme reading of the text,” I said.
“Watch your mouth,” Dad said. “You watch your mouth with me.”
If he’d hit me, it wouldn’t have hurt worse. I felt it in the space just below my rib cage. The anger was so raw, so vicious, and it was my dad. After everything and all the things I’d done, it was my daddy yelling at me. The shame ballooned out from it and I tried not to weep.
This is why I didn’t want to come here, I thought. This is why I was scared to go home.
“I told you once you weren’t welcome here,” he almost-shouted, “and now you’re back. You’re already on thin ice with me, and I will not have you treat me with disrespect in my own house.”
Jay put a hand on Dad’s arm, and he sputtered into silence. His face was thick and flushed, his hands in fists. His eyes shifted over me like I was the enemy. Like he was looking for a place to strike. Fear or sorrow or even love can come out as anger. I felt the tears coming to my eyes, and I willed them away. I couldn’t show weakness. I had to speak, but I couldn’t. I had to bring him to a place where he could tell me what he knew, that he could save me. I couldn’t do it.
The bloom started just below my sternum. It was a subtle thing—warm and close and secret. It pressed down into my belly, up into my throat. The hurt didn’t fade. If anything, it came more clearly into focus. But my ability to stand it grew. I saw the sorrow in everything. In what my mother had suffered, and in what my father had suffered as a result. In the loving home they could have had, and didn’t. In the childhood I could have had. And Jay. And Curtis. I saw the sorrow in the love behind the fear and rage my father’s eyes. Love that had gone septic now. Unreachable as the moon.
“I’m sorry,” I said. We said. “I do respect you, and I wouldn’t have broken your rule if there weren’t great need. I think Carla and her baby are in danger, and I need your help to save them.”
Dad’s eyes narrowed and his head turned a degree away from me, not trusting what he’d heard. I stood solid, a single line connecting me to the center of the earth. If he’d hit me with a truck, I wouldn’t have moved.
Thank you, I thought. Her only response was a sense of wordless acknowledgment.
“What do you want from me?” Dad asked.
I took a deep breath, let it out through my nose just the way Chogyi Jake had taught me. It would have been so easy to say I want to know about my real father. The words were right there on the tip of my tongue, ready to fire. It wouldn’t cost me anything.
“I want to know about Uncle Eric,” I said. “Who he was. What he was into. How he went bad.”
Dad’s scowl deepened.
“He’s gone, and you’re in his place,” Dad said. “What does any of the past matter?”
“Maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know. And I won’t until you tell me what happened,” I said. It was the truth, and something in Dad seemed to hear it. He ran his palm over his chin. For a long, breathless moment, no one spoke.
“Come with me, then,” he said.
chapter twelve
“You should go,” Dad said as he stepped into the kitchen. Mom’s eyes went wide, and she hesitated. Dad shot a look at her that would have peeled paint, and her face went pale. “Go upstairs and see that Curtis is doing his work. This isn’t a conversation you need to hear.”
Mom’s mouth worked, her lips making a wet sound, and then she lowered her eyes. “Yes, dear,” she said, almost too quietly to hear. She passed out of the room like a ghost. Dad gestured to the chairs. The table was new. The wood still smelled of sap and varnish. Chogyi Jake and Ex and I sat while Dad walked down the steps to the TV room and toward the garage.
“You leave too, Jay,” Dad said. “This is between me and her. You don’t have to expose yourself to it.”
“I don’t care if we haven’t said our vows yet. My wife’s in danger,” Jay said. Dad stopped, looking back over his shoulder. He might almost have been proud of Jay’s answer.
“As you choose,” Dad said. He ducked into the dimness of the garage and Jay took a
seat at my right hand. It was only a few seconds before Dad came back. He had a massive book in his hand, leather bound and ancient looking. I’d seen the family Bible a few times. Usually, Dad read out of a common, hard-bound Bible, but when something especially momentous rolled through our lives, we knew it because he pulled this out and read from it. I felt an echo of excitement that belonged to a little girl I hadn’t been in a decade and a half: if he’s brought this out, things were serious. As if they hadn’t been before.
Dad placed the Bible on the table and looked around. I realized we’d taken all four chairs, but before I could do anything about it, Ex stood up and offered his. Dad sat in it without looking at him. He put his hands on the massive book, closed his eyes, gathered himself.
“I had two siblings,” he said, turning the book over and opening the back cover. Blank pages flipped through his fingers. “Eric and Nadine. You wouldn’t remember Aunt Nadine. She died when she was eight. Caught a fever. She was the oldest, and then Eric and then me.”
He paused. There on the page a vast tree of names grew, written in different hands over the course of centuries. I hadn’t known it was there before. And halfway down the page, I saw Nadine Heller, Eric Heller, Gary Heller. Of the three, only my father’s name was linked to anything—Margaret Fournier—and then, from them, Jason Heller, Jayné Heller, Curtis Heller.
My hand reached out without me, fingers pressing the page. I didn’t see it at first, and then I did. The names traced a line back up the page, not always connected, or not directly. Michael Bishop Heller. Amelia Norwich. Nellie Skinner-Bowes. Anderson Skinner-Bowes. Elmer Bowes. There was no entry for Sarah or Toomey Conaville. Nothing for Elias Barker, but for six generations, the men and women who had controlled Eric’s money had been members of my family. Jay looked over at me, and I pulled my hand back. I felt like I’d cut open an apple and found a line of rot running through it.
“He was a good brother, when we were young,” Dad said, leaning in toward the table. “He watched out for me. Saw to it that I went to church, even when your grandfather was too drunk to take us.”
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