Graveyard Child

by M. L. N. Hanover

  “You’re Rhodes,” I said, lifting my voice. I didn’t put any magic in it. It was just me talking loud enough to carry across a narrow street.

  “Jayné Heller,” he said. I thought he sounded nervous, but I was probably flattering myself.

  “You wanted me here,” I said. “So I’m here now.”

  He nodded. He had his hands in his pockets, and I had the sense he was holding something as tightly and with the same faux-casual attitude that I held the Remington. A pistol. A charm. Whatever it was, he hadn’t used it against me yet. We were two dogs circling each other, not sure yet how the fight was going to start. Who was going to take the first bite.

  “We know what you’ve been doing, Ms. Heller. It stops tonight.”

  “We can talk about that,” I said. “But I think you may not be up on everything. Or maybe I’m not. But you have to let the girl go.”

  “She’s under our protection,” Rhodes said. “Her and the child she’s carrying. You can’t have them.”

  “Not a negotiating point,” I said. “But maybe if you—”

  The shots came from the back of the house. Two shotgun blasts with maybe half a second between them. Someone screamed, but I couldn’t tell if it was a man’s voice or a woman’s. I brought up my shotgun, still in its bag, and started running across the street.

  This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Ex was supposed to use the spell called Calling Malkuth; he was supposed to damp down their magic before anything else happened. The fact that he hadn’t meant the firefight was starting with the bad guys at full strength. It was happening too early.

  On the porch, Jonathan Rhodes pulled his hand out of his pocket and gestured at me. A fine arc of gray dust puffed out, thin as ashes. It felt like a sledgehammer to my chest. I staggered back, gagging, and then I wasn’t driving anymore. The Black Sun dropped to one knee on the dead brown lawn and lifted a hand palm out toward Rhodes. His snarl was made of anger and fear. His teeth were deformed, carved into strange, inhuman shapes.

  He came off the porch, launching himself straight at me and blocking the path to the doorway. Chogyi Jake appeared from my right. He’d taken his gun out of the duffel bag, and its barrel was trained on Rhodes’s head. He might just as well not have been there at all from the attention the tattooed man paid him. I raised my own weapon.

  Time seemed to slow down. I saw his eyes grow wide, not with fear or surprise but a kind of joy. Like this was the battle he’d been waiting for, and now, at last, he had it. The marks on his face shifted, remaking themselves under his skin. I pulled the trigger. The shotgun kicked like a car wreck, and the end of the duffel bag blew open. Rhodes was five, maybe six feet from the end of the barrel. It was as good as a mile. Hundreds of tiny sparks flashed around him, the bright metal of the buckshot vanishing. He grinned, stepped forward, and kicked at me. My body dropped back, letting the gun fall to earth, and caught his ankle against my crossed forearms. Chogyi Jake fired, and the flash came again. If Ex had managed his cantrip—if the powers of the riders had been pushed back—it would have shredded Rhodes’s skin. Or at least drawn blood.

  He pushed down with a shout, landing on the foot he’d kicked with and twisting forward, driving his elbow toward my temple. Even with the unnatural reflexes of my rider, the blow glanced off my skull. I staggered back. Chogyi Jake racked a fresh shell and fired again. He was at point-blank range now. I saw the hot gasses from the muzzle flash make ripples in Rhodes’s shirt, but he still ignored it. I jumped back from a kick that sank his heel inches into the dead brown sod. Another scream came from the back of the house. Unmistakably a man this time.

  Ex.

  I broke away, racing for the back of the house, legs pumping with so much force I felt the grass under me sliding. I ripped out divots.

  A single exterior bulb cast a harsh pool of light in the space between the house itself and the shed in the back. It was like a lit theater stage in the dim night. Ex knelt in the middle of the circle, steadying himself with one hand. His shotgun lay on the ground in front of him. His head hung forward, the cascade of loose hair hiding his face. His left leg from the knee down was soaked with blood. I was at his side in seconds, and it was still too long.

  He looked up, his face pale and stony with pain. I tried to speak, but my body wasn’t my own. Instead, I put my arm around him, staring into his eyes in mute fear. For a moment he seemed not to find me, his attention swimming. He found me, his eyes focusing. His smile was tight.

  “Well, that could have gone better.”

  I tried to ask about Jay, about Carla, about what had happened, but the Black Sun wouldn’t give me control. Instead, she looked back. Jonathan Rhodes was walking down the side of the house toward us. I was aware distantly of lights in the neighboring houses, of voices raised in fear. Somewhere nearby, a car engine roared and tires shrieked against pavement. I hoped it was Jay, and I hoped he had Carla with him. It would suck to die like this for nothing. Ex shifted, tried to stand, and yelped in pain. Rhodes came to the edge of the light. His eyes seemed to glow.

  Something moved on my left. The other man, Eduardo Martinez, stepped out of the darkness. I turned around. The woman, Idéa Smith. I’d made the classic mistake. I’d come too far forward and ignored my flanks, and now they were all around me. I felt a growl low in my throat. Ex shot out a hand, reaching for the shotgun, and the woman gestured. Her will was like a whip, and the shotgun ripped itself out of Ex’s hands and stuck hard to the icy earth. My body went still, waiting for an opportunity I wasn’t sure would come. These were the people who had killed Eric. They knew what they were doing.

  They opened their arms, and I felt the web of energy sparking between them, pressing against me like a cage. The Black Sun turned, shuddering, but the circle was complete. There was no way out. The three began chanting, and the invisible net grew stronger with each syllable that locked into the ones behind and before. Rhodes lifted his arms. The black ink shifted in his skin, words in arcane languages forming, growing sharp, and then breaking apart. The vast flow of meaning burned off him, pushing me back to the center of the circle. Ex took my hand. His fingers were cold.

  “By your name I bind you,” Rhodes said, and his voice was dry and vast and older than the flesh it rode in. “Puer Mórtuus, I bind you.”

  The cage grew closer, pressing in against me. His tongue was black now, his eyes bright and nacreous, like mother-of-pearl. He took a step in, and the other two stepped in with him. The air thickened, and I struggled to breathe. The stink of overheated metal overwhelmed me.

  “By your name I bind you,” he said. The words tapped against me like hailstones, and I felt the division between reality and the Pleroma thinning, the mindless, blind spirits thrashing in distress. “Abraxiel Unas, I bind you.”

  Ex was shouting at me, his lips pulled back with the violence of the call. I couldn’t hear him. Everything was silent except the deep, constant pressure of the riders pushing against me. I rose to my knees, then sank again, my head bowed. Ex tried to shake me. The blood on his hands was wet and cold.

  They were close now, their fingertips almost touching. Arcs of power danced between them, so powerful they were almost visible. My hands clenched in fists, fingernails digging into my palms, and I was also trapped in the tight space behind my eyes.

  Rhodes’s voice rang with triumph and joy.

  “By your name I bind you. Graveyard Child, I bind you.”

  The trap was complete. I felt it close for the last time, and then wash away around me. Together, the Black Sun and I looked up into his eyes. They were the common brown of a human being now. The marks on his skin were only ink again. His smile spoke of exhaustion and pleasure and victory.

  “Those aren’t my names,” I said.

  There was a moment of shock and fear in his expression, and my body unfolded, legs and gut and back twisting, every muscle firing, bones creaking with the strain of sinking my right fist, knuckles down, into the soft place just below his rib cage. Ex
rolled forward with a cry, scooped up his shotgun, and fired wild. The woman ducked back, her hand up to cover her face. Rhodes doubled over, his breath whooshing out of him. I got my feet under me and brought an elbow down hard between his shoulder blades, and he fell. Martinez tried to rush me, but the Black Sun danced out of his path and kicked at the back of his knee as he passed.

  I scooped up Ex, holding him to me like he was a child. He didn’t seem to weigh anything at all. He lost his grip on the shotgun, and it clattered to the ground behind us as I sprinted out into the dark. The SUV wasn’t far. Chogyi Jake’s shoulders and head were a shadow in the driver’s seat. The running lights came on and a great puff of white rose up from the tailpipes.

  Ex clung to me, his hands around my shoulder, his head pressed against me.

  I ran.

  chapter fifteen

  The emergency room at Wesley Medical Center wasn’t the worst I’d been to. Which meant, in part, that I wasn’t actively worried about people trying to kill me. The halls were clean and bright, the intake nurse was calm and professional, and they got Ex into a room within ten minutes of our pulling up to the front door. The triage nurse and a couple of techs in blue scrubs cut away Ex’s pant leg and washed it down while I held his hand. I claimed to be his fiancée and that was enough to get me into the room with him, while Chogyi Jake was stuck in the waiting area.

  Ex’s color was coming back, though he was still pale. Swaths of dried blood were flaking off his hands and cheek. Between his black eye and mine, we looked pretty rough, which I didn’t figure was likely to make the doctors more responsive. If I’d seen us, I’d have dialed straight to drug-addicted spousal abuse too. The nurse on duty came by after an hour and sprayed something on his wounded foot that seemed to take the edge off the pain. They weren’t dosing him up with any pills more powerful than Tylenol, probably on the assumption that we’d shot him in the foot ourselves in a bid to score pain medication.

  Somewhere nearby, a woman was groaning and calling for someone named Steven. Over the previous few months and years, I’d been in more hospitals than I liked, and other than making me feel profoundly self-conscious and unwelcome, this one wasn’t bad. A nurse came and drew some blood for routine testing. She had a discreet bandage on the side of her nose to cover up the piercing there.

  I held Ex’s hand while she did it, more for myself than him, and I didn’t let go when she left. After a few minutes his breath got heavy, slow, and regular. I assumed he was sleeping until he spoke.

  “What is it with your family and firearms?”

  “My family and . . . You mean Jay did this?”

  “What we get for bringing civilians in,” he said. “We were waiting just past the shed. The warding was light there, and we had a decent line of sight on the back of the house. They brought her to the back when you showed up on the street. I figured the longer we could put off using the cantrip, the longer it was until they noticed us. Jay went up the back steps and waved at her through the window. She came out, and he put his gun under his armpit and blew my foot off.”

  “It’s not off,” I said. “It doesn’t even look all that bad.”

  “It looks like a sausage with a dozen little raisins where the blood’s clotting.”

  “I was comparing it to blown off,” I said. “It looks better than that.”

  Ex smiled without opening his eyes, and I smiled with him.

  “They got away?”

  “I think so,” I said. “He’s not answering his cell.”

  “And the homestead?”

  “I don’t think Mom and Dad are likely to accept my calls anytime soon,” I said. “What about the other shot? I heard two.”

  “After he shot me, the other two noticed we were there. I tried to slow them down.”

  “It worked,” I said.

  “Sort of,” Ex agreed. “The trap. They were working a binding, weren’t they?”

  “Trying to,” I said. “They didn’t do a great job of it.”

  “Well, thank God we’re all the Keystone Kops,” he said.

  We waited. The woman who was calling for Steven had stopped. I texted Curtis to see if he’d heard any news, and Chogyi Jake to let him know that I hadn’t. I listened to the nurses talking at their station, I paced quietly beside the bed. The monitors said that Ex’s heartbeat was regular, his blood pressure a little high. I wanted to go find Jay and Carla, wherever they were. I kept suffering visions of them in some dark place, caught by Rhodes and his cabal. Of course, if I left, I’d start imagining the Invisible College coming to the hospital to finish the job. We were too scattered, and we didn’t know enough. One worry followed the next, anxiety building on anxiety, and behind it all was the sense that I’d forgotten something. Something important.

  The doctor arrived about three hours later, and I had to tell myself that the long delay only meant that Ex’s condition wasn’t bad enough to get worried about. He was a young man, probably not more than a year or two ahead of me, but he affected a world-weary attitude. Maybe he’d even earned it.

  “So you did this to yourself, or did you have help?” he asked.

  “Little help,” Ex said.

  “That was my guess,” the doctor said.

  “Is he going to be all right?” I asked.

  “Sure,” the doctor said. “We’ll numb him up, dig the shot out of him, and send him home. We see this kind of thing every night. Only thing that’s strange about this one is that he came in sober. There’s going to be a form to fill out, though. Police like us to let them know when someone comes in shot. In case it matches up with something that happened.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “That wouldn’t be the case here,” he asked, “now, would it?” I didn’t know what to say, and a few heartbeats later the doctor shook his head. “Well, I’ll need to fill out the form, so you two start thinking about what you want to say on it.”

  “We’re not as bad as we look,” I said.

  He smiled at me. His eyes were gentle.

  “If I was one to pass judgment on people, I’d be in the wrong job,” he said. Honestly, I could have kissed him.

  The whole thing start to finish took another four hours. I left during the extraction of the shot, since they wouldn’t let me stay in the room. Chogyi Jake had gone across the street and gotten McDonald’s. I didn’t realize how late it had gotten until I saw he’d ordered off the breakfast menu. I still hadn’t heard from Jay or Curt or my parents, and I still had the growing unease that came from something only half-forgotten. Something I was supposed to take care of and hadn’t.

  We got back to the hotel with the late winter sun just beginning to lighten the sky. Ex’s foot was wrapped with pads and gauze until it looked almost like a cast. He’d been given the option of a crutch but turned it down. The doctor hadn’t offered pain medication, and Ex hadn’t pushed for it. When we went in through the lobby, I had my arm around him on one side, Chogyi Jake had his arm around him on the other. The woman at the counter looked a little alarmed but didn’t say anything.

  When we got to their room, Chogyi Jake used the key card. The electronic lock wheezed open. The first thing that struck me was the smell of shit and rank urine. Both beds had been stripped, the coverlets pulled to the floor. A pillow had been ripped apart, the stuffing strewn on the carpet.

  I knew what I’d forgotten.

  “Ozzie! Oh my God,” I said. “What did you do?”

  Her claws tapped against the bathroom tile, and she came trotting out, tail wagging so hard it swung in a circle, tugging her hips along after it. She looked from me to Ex and back, her canine expression caught between worry and delight.

  “In her defense,” Chogyi Jake said, “we were gone much longer than we expected.”

  “I know, but she trashed the place!”

  “She was worried,” Ex said, scratching her behind the ears. “Weren’t you? Weren’t you a worried dog?”

  I flapped my hands in wordless distress. The truth
was I felt guilty. How was I going to save innocent people from the overwhelming power of riders when I couldn’t get it together enough to look after a Labrador?

  “Any chance we could bunk in your room?” Ex asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course. Take her too. We didn’t feed her either.”

  “Where are you going?” Ex asked.

  “To give housekeeping a lot of money.”

  By the time I got back to my room, Ex was already stretched out on the second bed and snoring softly. Chogyi Jake lay beside him, eyes closed in what could have been meditation or sleep. Ozzie was curled up on the foot of my bed, chewing contentedly on her right front paw in a way that meant all was forgiven—on her end, anyway. I put the Do Not Disturb thing on the door, changed into some sweats, and crawled into bed.

  I hoped that sleep would come quickly, but I was disappointed. My mind kept looping back on itself: Where was Jay, was Carla all right, what if the Invisible College went after Mom and Dad and Curt, didn’t people get blood clots in their feet and die from it and what if that happened to Ex, why didn’t the binding spell Rhodes put on me work, was I a bad pet owner . . . The waterfall of fears and anxieties promised to run on forever. I stared up at the ceiling, watching tiny web works of light that snuck in at the edges of the curtain shift and brighten and fade as the sun rose. I tried to meditate the way Chogyi Jake had taught me, but I’d fallen out of practice and I couldn’t seem to maintain my focus for more than a few seconds at a time.