Graveyard Child

by M. L. N. Hanover

  What had they called me? Puer Mórtuus? Abraxis something or other? Graveyard Child was the only one I remembered for sure. I felt like I’d heard the term before. Like it had something to do with the constant fighting that went on between riders in their own environment. I couldn’t place it.

  When my phone rang, I was the only one awake, and I answered almost immediately.

  “Jayné?” Jay said as I crawled out of bed and slipped into the bathroom, closing the door behind me so I wouldn’t wake anybody up by talking.

  “Where are you?” I said.

  “I’m okay. We’re okay. I did what you said. I got Carla on a plane. It took a while, but she’s going to Memphis. I gave her enough money to get a hotel for a few days. They won’t be able to find her there, will they?”

  “They might,” I said, “but I don’t think they’ll have reason to. Their plan failed, and bait’s not much use without a trap.”

  “What . . . what happened?”

  “You mean after you shot Ex?” I asked, more sharply than I’d mean to.

  The line was quiet for a moment.

  “After that. I’m . . . I’m really sorry about that. I should have been more careful. And . . . I shouldn’t have left him behind like that.”

  “Well, yeah, they’re going to take away your gun safety merit badge,” I said. “But getting out was the right thing to do. The whole point of being there was to get Carla out safely. Ex knew it wasn’t safe. We all knew.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “Don’t mention it,” I said. “Turns out this is what I do these days. I’ll need to talk to Carla, though.”

  “Why?” Jay asked.

  “See what she heard. What she saw. She was with the bad guys for hours, and they might have been in touch with her before she went.”

  “They were,” Jay said. “They told her that you were possessed by a demon and that it was going to leave your body and take over the baby. That whole thing at the house? They did it to force you into doing magic in front of her, so that she’d believe them. She said she texted them when you showed up at the house. She’s sorry about it now, though. Really.”

  “It’s a big world,” I said. “Everyone screws up. It’s all right. Still, when she’s somewhere she can use the phone, I’d like to ask her a few questions.”

  “She’s not going to want to do that. She’s scared of you, sis. And no offense? You’re kind of scary.”

  I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. I hadn’t turned on the overhead fixture, since it would have meant cranking up the exhaust fan with it. The only light coming off my phone. Between my bruised face, hair that spoke of a night at the ER, and the pale glow spilling across my cheek, I did look like a poster for the sort of movie that parents don’t let their kids see.

  “We’ll work something out,” I said. “Where are you?”

  “I’m at a friend’s house. He’s out of town for the holiday, and I had a spare key so I could water his plants. I figure they wouldn’t know to look for me here. Also . . . I hope this is okay. I called Dad. I told him that the guys who broke into the house were still around, and that he should be careful. I hope that’s all right?”

  “It is. I’d have done it myself, if he was taking my calls,” I said. And then, a second later, “You didn’t go with her.”

  “I didn’t, did I?” Jay said ruefully. “I thought about it. They’re still here, though. Those people. I told her I was staying until I had everything with them resolved.”

  “Yeah, that’s going to be tricky.”

  “I’m not sure it was true when I said it. I don’t know if we’re going to get married after all.”

  “What about the baby?”

  “I don’t know.” The words were so simple, and the way he said them was so rich, so complicated.

  “You know what you’re hoping for?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t even have that.”

  I wished he were with me instead of talking across the phone. I wanted to see his face, take his hand. Offer some kind of comfort. He was trapped. If he stayed with Carla and the baby, he would be living a life he didn’t want in a loveless marriage. If he didn’t, he was going to spend the rest of his life hauling along the knowledge that he was the kind of guy who’d get a girl pregnant and leave her.

  “Sorry,” I said. It sounded powerfully inadequate, even to me.

  “What about you guys?”

  “Holed up. Licking wounds, figuratively speaking. I’ve got some things I need to follow up on.”

  “The bad guys? Did you . . . are they still around?”

  “I didn’t kill them,” I said. “Got away, though. And I have some things I want to look into. They were doing something, and they did it wrong. If I can figure what they were trying for, I’m hoping it’ll aim me in the right direction.”

  “I want to be in on it,” Jay said. “Whatever you wind up doing, I want you to let me know.”

  “You’re feeling guilty about shooting Ex, aren’t you?” I said, teasing him.

  “I am,” he said. “And I also just got my sister back. I’d rather not have her just vanish again.”

  My tears weren’t a surprise, really. I should have expected them.

  “I love you too,” I said. “You know that when I said these guys were my family now, I didn’t mean that you weren’t, right?”

  “Of course I knew that,” he said. “Dummy.”

  I laughed a little. “We’ll get through this.”

  “We will. We’ll track those bastards down wherever they go.”

  “Yeah. First, get some rest. Can I reach you here when we’re up?”

  “Absolutely. I’m going to try to get a little sleep myself.”

  “Take care of yourself,” I said.

  When I crawled back into bed, my brain felt less like an accident in a fireworks factory. Talking to Jay, knowing he was safe, even for very narrow definitions of safe, calmed me down. I pulled the blankets up to my chin and snuggled down into the pillows. Ozzie stood up, walked around in a circle, and lay down again with a contented sigh. I knew what she meant.

  In the darkness, I listened to Ex’s soft snoring and Chogyi Jake’s slow, deep breath. I felt every time Ozzie shifted, chasing dream rabbits. My mind started to drift. I was glad, I decided, that Ozzie had wrecked the other room. If it had just been me and her in the place, it wouldn’t have felt right. Part of that came from spending the last day fighting and afraid, but part was just that these were my people. This was my pack, and having us all together in the same room was right. This was the way it was supposed to be.

  I reached my mind down, deep into my body. Thank you, I thought. The Black Sun didn’t respond. Maybe she was asleep too. I didn’t know if riders did things like that, but I couldn’t see why they wouldn’t. She was part of my pack as well. Part of my self.

  Back in college, a deeply unethical teaching assistant had told me that there were two kinds of family: the one that you’re born into, and then the one that you make for yourself. He’d been trying to seduce me at the time, but that didn’t make the sentiment wrong. I had made myself a family, and it was one that I liked a lot. I would always be my parents’ daughter. That was just history, and there was nothing that could change that. But what that meant was up to me and the people—and the dog—I kept with me.

  I closed my eyes and listened to the cars on the highway, the voices in the hall, the breath of my family. I slept.

  And when I slept, I dreamed.

  chapter sixteen

  I stood in the desert at night. Wind whipped the bare earth, but I wasn’t cold. The sky was black and starless. A dark scorch mark ran alongside me as I walked or ran or floated through the emptiness. I knew both that it wasn’t real and that it was the result of my abortive efforts to exorcise the thing living inside me. I looked at the damage with a real curiosity. If they could put me in one of Oonishi’s fMRI machines back in Chicago, would they be able to find what part of me had di
ed in order to make this scar? Or maybe this wasn’t a sign of death. Only change.

  And then she was there with me. Or we were there together. Or I was doubled. There wasn’t a good word for it. I cast two shadows in the light from an invisible moon.

  Her face was cracked. The Jayné mask that had been so perfect for so long had black marks running through its cheeks. I lifted my hand to her, and I also pulled my head back so that she couldn’t touch my damaged self.

  It’s okay, one of us thought. I won’t hurt you.

  Fingertips brushed against the broken mask, and more of the pale ceramic fell away. There was flesh under it, dark as the midnight sky. I kept peeling away the mask, uncovering her and being uncovered. The air touched my dark cheeks for the first time. The Black Sun looked at me with eyes like my own set in an inhuman face. Inhuman, but beautiful.

  I will outgrow you, she said. Not yet, but not long from now. The change has begun, and we can’t escape it. We can’t even slow it down.

  The elation I felt was human. I took her hand, and her false skin shattered, letting our fingers entwine for the first time ever.

  It’s all right, I said. We’re ready. We will be ready.

  I’m frightened, the rider said in a voice that was soft as a whisper and vast as mountains.

  “I’m not,” I said with my real voice, and, by saying it, woke myself up.

  “You’re not what?” Ex asked.

  The hotel room was still dim, but someone had shifted the curtains so that a little bit of sunlight came through. It wasn’t the full-on cave darkness that it had been. More a kind of winter twilight. The water was running in the bathroom, the shower splashing. I put my hand to my hair, suddenly aware of how much I smelled like sweat and unwashed me, and wondered if hotels ever ran out of hot water. At my feet, Ozzie raised her head. Her tail thumped against the mattress twice. I leaned forward and put my hand on her side, scratching her ribs. She put her head back down with a contented canine smile.

  “I’m not awake,” I said.

  “You can keep sleeping,” Ex said. “We’ve only been down for a few hours.”

  “No, I’m fine,” I said, and yawned so wide my jaw cracked. “I heard from Jay while you guys were asleep. He’s fine. Carla’s safely out of town.”

  “And your family?” Ex said.

  They’re mostly in the room with me, I thought. “Dad’s warned. I don’t know what more we’d do, even if we could.”

  “I don’t like it,” Ex said.

  “I’m not thrilled either,” I said, yawning again, but less prodigiously. “But it’s what I’ve got. How’s your foot?”

  “Swollen. Has a bunch of holes in it. So what’s our next step here? Is it time to head for Denver and hit the archives?”

  I pulled the blankets back and sat up. My body felt sore and achy and the ghost of a headache was floating somewhere at the back of my neck. Given how bad last night could have gone, I felt pretty good about it.

  “Not yet,” I said. “Do you remember much of the binding spell Rhodes and his buddies tried on me?”

  “Some of it, yes,” Ex said.

  “The names they tried to bind me with, Puer Mórtuus. Graveyard Child. And the other one.”

  “Doc,” Ex said. “The last one you can never remember is always Doc.”

  “Doc sounded more like Abraxis something.”

  “Abraxiel Unas. I remember that much.”

  The shower water stopped and I heard the metallic hiss of the curtain opening. I pushed my hair back. I really wanted that shower next.

  “Ring any bells?” I asked.

  “No,” Ex said. “But I’ve been looking around on the online resources. I’m seeing some footnotes in the London resources. Nothing solid, though.”

  I laced my fingers together. What had been a half-formed suspicion slid into my consciousness like the back of my head was serving it up on a platter. If Ex couldn’t find information on a rider, either it was the most obscure entity in the catalog or something else was going on.

  “Go outside our resources,” I said.

  Ex frowned. “To where?” he asked. “Eric put together the most comprehensive collection of occult literature and theory maybe in the world. Seriously, any one of the places we’ve visited had caches as good as the best museums and universities.”

  “I know,” I said. “That’s why I want to go outside of them.”

  “Still not following,” Ex said.

  “Indulge me. I have a hypothesis.”

  The bathroom door opened, and Chogyi Jake stepped out. I was past him in a second.

  “What’s the plan?” he asked.

  “Two-fisted tales of research,” I said.

  “Does it include eating?”

  “As long as it isn’t room service, go wild,” I said, and closed the door.

  The hot water didn’t run out, and I gave it every opportunity to. I stood under the steaming blast long past when I needed to. The heat of the water relaxed the muscles along my back and shoulders, and the steam fog felt like luxury. Slowly, I felt my mind becoming clearer, more focused. The long night of fear had scrambled me, left me ignoring anything that wasn’t happening just then. Now it was over, and I could start putting the pieces together. There had been so many mysteries in my life for so long, I’d gotten used to ignoring things that didn’t fit. Now, maybe for the first time, I was starting to see a pattern that put everything in place. It was ugly, but that was all right with me. I’d faced ugly and I could do it again. What I needed was true.

  The Invisible College had tried to bind me. It had failed. And that was the piece of the puzzle that made everything else make sense. Eric’s childhood. My childhood. The ritual hollowing out of my mother. The more I looked at it, the more sense it made. Certainty settled around me like a cloak.

  I got it now. I knew.

  The only thing that was left was confirmation.

  When at last I got out and toweled off, I felt better than I had in weeks. Maybe months. Grounded. I put on my robe and waited for the steam to clear off the mirror. I heard Ex and Chogyi Jake talking in low voices. Ex puzzled and annoyed. Chogyi Jake calm but perplexed. Something equal parts dread and excitement tightened my chest.

  The scent of chicken in garlic sauce and curried shrimp filled the room as I stepped out. The white folded cardboard boxes lined the black dresser. Chogyi Jake was in the little overstuffed chair by the window with a white paper cup of what I assumed was green tea in his hand and a plate of food on his knee. I picked one of the containers up, grabbed a pair of cheap break-them-apart-yourself chopsticks, and folded myself back into bed. Outside, the sunlight seemed wrong. It took me a few seconds to realize that, after waking up and taking a shower, I was expecting it to be morning instead of afternoon.

  “What have we got?” I asked, and popped a piece of broccoli into my mouth.

  “I don’t know how you figured out that it wouldn’t be in our books,” Ex said. He was still on the bed, his injured foot propped up under four pillows to help it drain. “You were right, though. I sent an email to Carsey and Tamblen.”

  I nodded. “And what did the Vatican’s best have to say?”

  “Not a lot, but they’d at least heard of it,” Ex said. “It’s a gamchicoth form.”

  “And for the people playing along at home, that means . . . ?”

  “It’s unpleasant,” Chogyi Jake said, “even as these things go.”

  “It’s called a devourer,” Ex said, “but that’s kind of a misnomer. From what Tamblen said, it’s more like slaver ants. It’s a rider that uses other riders to do its work.”

  I felt myself growing still as they went on.

  “It’s got a reputation for being viciously intelligent, as long-lived as a varkolak or a ravana. Strong, mean, more than a little sadistic, but also risk averse.”

  “Is it a species or an individual?” I asked.

  “We don’t know that yet,” Chogyi Jake said. “Tamblen recommended checking a
n archival source in Vienna. He’s trying to get up permission, but with the new year coming up we may not hear anything until next week. So, with the old financial records in Denver, that’s two great huge stacks of records to go through.”

  “One’s a massive collection of arcane secrets and obscure references, and the other one’s in Europe,” I said with a grin. “How do you kill it?”

  Ex and Chogyi Jake exchanged a glance. “We don’t know yet,” Ex said. “You had a hypothesis. How does this all fit into it?”

  “Unfortunately, pretty well,” I said.

  “Walk us through it,” Ex said, scowling.

  “All right,” I said, holding up the chopsticks like a pointer. “Here’s what we know. Eric got a bunch of money that’s been getting passed down through my family since forever, and when he died, he passed it on to me.”

  “So are you thinking that the wealth itself is carrying the rider?” Chogyi Jake asked.

  “No. Hold on. I’ll get there. The next thing we know is that Eric used my mother to build someone who’d been possessed since literally before birth,” I said, raising my hand. “And he was looking to cut a deal with a massive rider that could, in theory, have been strong enough to bind the Black Sun on a permanent basis. The haugsvarmr bound her in the 1940s, remember?”

  “That seems like a lot of work to wind up where you started from,” Ex said. “Invoke the Black Sun, create a daughter organism, then track down something to get rid of the daughter. How does that get you anything?”

  “It gets you a shell,” Chogyi Jake said, nodding.

  “Right,” I said. “And if we think about what happened to Eric, it sounds like the same song in a different key. He got ridden young. Not as young as me, but still when he was a kid. And the rider got shucked out of him. And the one thing we know about folks who’ve had riders is that they’re more open and vulnerable when the next one comes.”

  “You’re saying that Eric was preparing you to be possessed by some other spirit?” Chogyi Jake asked.

  “I’m saying there’s been a rider crawling down my family tree since God knows when. And each generation, it grooms some poor new kid, puts a rider in them, lets it get comfortable, then shucks it out and leaves the kid open, vulnerable, and gasping.”