“Only, that didn’t happen to you,” Ex said.
“Didn’t, did it? Because Eric got killed before I was ready. I still had a tenant, and I didn’t even know. But everything else was in place. The money came to me. The property. All the things that the Graveyard Child’s been hoarding over the past who knows how many generations dropped into my name, just like they’d dropped into Eric’s when his uncle died. And I’ll bet you dollars to donuts we can trace versions of the same story all the way back to forever.
“Eric left me everything he had but didn’t warn me about anything. Also, Eric wasn’t stupid. That looks like a contradiction.”
“Unless . . .” Chogyi Jake said.
“Unless I wasn’t supposed to be the one in control of the body when the money all came,” I said. “Someone else was supposed to be driving. Someone who already knew all about the money and the resources and the big, big picture. I was being groomed to be the next one eaten literally since before I was born.”
We all let it stand in the air for a second. It changed everything.
I’d started off thinking of Eric as a demon hunter, and of myself as his heir. Even when I’d figured out he was an evil sonofabitch, I didn’t cast him as a victim. Not until now. And with the money and the weird magical powers, I’d cast myself in the hero’s role. I was the kick-ass enemy of darkness, just like my idealized uncle. I could fight and win every time. I could get any outfit I wanted, go anywhere I chose. Other people whose lives were touched by riders were the ones who were really in trouble. People like Aaron the cop being ridden by a haugtrold or Dolores in New Mexico with the akaname or, it turned out, my mother. They needed help because they were powerless. Because they weren’t like me.
Only, even with being able to beat everyone else in the room when it came to a fight, even with the kind of money that made Bruce Wayne feel like he needed a nicer suit, I’d still been set up. The power that had been going back for generations and leaving women and men destroyed and broken in its wake didn’t care if I could win a fistfight. I was just another kind of tool to it. I’d gotten incredibly lucky, and what the luck earned me was the time to figure that out on my own.
Now that I knew, I was going to have to get smart.
“The reason that there’s no resources on the Graveyard Child,” Chogyi Jake said.
“Same as the reason Jayné didn’t get scheduled for orientation,” Ex said. “You don’t need to tell someone what they already know. The one rider that the Graveyard Child would never need to research is the Graveyard Child.”
“And the Invisible College is still looking to take me out,” I said, “because whatever grudge they had against the Graveyard Child, they don’t think it’s finished. They think it got out of Eric and into me.”
“Which may be why they’d try to keep Carla away,” Chogyi Jake said.
“If they thought her baby was getting lined up to be the new sacrifice, sure,” I said. “I don’t know if the Graveyard Child did something in particular to piss them off, or if the riders in the Invisible College are naturally predisposed to hate it, or if it’s some kind of weird altruism thing. But they’ve been trying to break the cycle. First by killing Eric, and now by threatening its hold on Carla, using her as bait, and trying to bind it.”
“But because the Black Sun was never cast out of you, the Graveyard Child never got in,” Ex said. “The binding failed.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Now they may figure that out on their own. Or they may not.”
“They’ve kept trying for years at least,” Chogyi Jake said. “It would seem odd if they gave up the effort now. I mean, assuming you’re right about all this.”
“And so the next attempt could be some clever bastard with an enchanted sniper rifle,” I said. “I will be under threat from a huge magical conspiracy for the rest of my life unless I can get them to call off the hunt.”
They were silent for a moment. I could see both men thinking it through, looking for cracks in the theory. As the seconds passed, I felt more and more sure they wouldn’t find any. It was still only a theory, a story that fit the facts, but maybe not the only one that did.
“We can go back to the Water Street house,” Chogyi Jake said. “Or get someone to deliver a message to it. If we can arrange some kind of parley, maybe—”
“Or they can use that to set a new trap with a different outcome,” Ex said. “And that’s assuming that they haven’t taken off. If I were in their position, I don’t know that I’d be hanging around, waiting to see if Jayné had a truckful of fertilizer and diesel she wanted to park outside my place. If Eric was possessed by the Graveyard Child, it made him kind of a prick about that kind of thing.”
“Agreed,” I said. “We have to assume they’re on the lam. The longer it takes for us to confirm this, the more likely it is that something bad’s going to happen. And by that I mean worse than me assassinating their head guy.”
“Having done that does make a simple conversation seem less plausible,” Chogyi Jake said mildly.
“Twelve hours ago, they were here. In Wichita,” I said. “They’re scared, and keeping a very low profile is what they do best. We aren’t going to get a better chance than this. Not anytime soon. We have to hunt them down now.”
“Agreed,” Chogyi Jake said. “But do you have any thoughts as to how it might be done?”
I picked up my cell phone. My lawyer answered on the third ring.
“Jayné, dear. Is everything all right?”
“It’s a little messy, actually,” I said. “But body and soul are still more or less together.”
“What can I do to help?”
I took a deep breath. After all this time, I still felt like I was asking permission.
“I need a miracle,” I said. “The three top-ranking members of the Invisible College were in the city last night, and I think the chances are pretty good that they’ve made a break for it. I need to find at least one of them, and I need to do it very, very quickly.”
“That’s going to be difficult,” my lawyer said. “The week between Christmas and New Year’s is always difficult, and those particular ladies and gentlemen are surprisingly challenging to keep track of.”
“You remember how you said I didn’t spend as much money as Eric used to?”
“Yes, dear?”
“I don’t care if we break the bank doing this. If it means spending everything down to the floorboards, I’m okay with that. I just need these people found.”
The line was quiet for so long, I thought I’d lost the connection. Or that she’d hung up on me. When at last she did speak, I could hear the smile in her voice.
“Well, dear. That’s a horse of a somewhat different color, now, isn’t it?”
chapter seventeen
It was snowing as I drove out of town. The traffic on the highway was sparse, and made mostly of long-haul truckers throwing gray slush up behind them as they sped to make time. Low gray clouds held in the light from the city even as it faded away behind me. The oncoming headlights caught the swirl of huge, feathery flakes. The red brake lights before us seemed softer and farther away. The radio was infomercials, canned sermons, pop songs, and one lonely sex advice show relayed in from the West Coast. I cycled between them incessantly until Chogyi Jake stopped me by putting in some Pink Martini.
It was almost midnight. It was the twenty-ninth of December. If the year had a dead spot, this was it. The long, cold hours when everything that had been going to happen in the long, slow trip around the sun had already happened and nothing new could quite begin. I felt like we’d stepped outside time, outside the ebb and flow of the normal human world and into a kind of bleak, surreal mindscape. The night had been directed by David Lynch.
I hunched over the steering wheel, my knuckles aching. The heater’s white-noise thrumming rose and fell as I accelerated or braked. I was pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to do that. The sense of anticipation and fear crawled up my spine. I wanted to go faste
r, to be there already, and I wanted to slow down for fear of what was coming.
We passed through Newton and Herington. Junction City was still twenty minutes ahead of us. We were coming close.
“Are you certain you want to do this?” Chogyi Jake asked.
“Nope,” I said.
“And are you determined to do it regardless?”
“Yep.”
“Can I ask why?”
I glanced over at him. His face was calm, but he looked older than he had back when we’d all started together in Denver. As if the years had been longer for him than for the rest of us. I wondered what he would have done if it hadn’t been for me and Eric and the fortune that I’d used to hire him and Ex and Aubrey. Whatever it would have been, I hoped he didn’t regret missing it.
“You mean besides the obvious not wanting to be hunted by a cabal of riders?”
“Yes, besides that.”
I grinned. No one else would have moved past me so gracefully or been able to put me at ease while he did it. It was what I loved him for.
“I want to know if I’m right,” I said.
“Is it important that you be?”
“It changes who Eric was. If he was being ridden, it changes why he did everything he did. To my mother. To Kim. To me.”
Chogyi Jake made a small sound in the back of his throat. “So we’re trying to save Eric. Not the man himself, of course, but what he meant.”
Half a mile later I answered. “Would that be a problem?”
“Not at all,” he said.
Leaving Ex had been difficult, not just because he’d insisted that he was well enough to come but also because part of me badly wanted him there. We’d gone through so much together that leaving him behind seemed like going to the fight unprepared. It wasn’t true, but it seemed that way.
In point of fact, the list of reasons to leave him behind was as long as my arm. The first one was he’d been shot in the foot a day before, and the rest of them didn’t matter. If things went pear-shaped at the motel where—according to my lawyer—a credit card associated with Jonathan Rhodes had been used to guarantee a room, I couldn’t have him bursting in on his bloody foot and trying to save me. It was a scenario that commanded the ugly place in the Venn diagram where ugly overlapped with plausible.
In the end, he’d agreed to stay with Ozzie if we promised to call him before we headed in and again when we came out. With his hair pulled back, he’d looked like some kind of very severe bird, and I’d seen in the way he held his shoulders and the lines at the sides of his mouth how much it cost him to let me go on alone. I knew how much it meant to him that he protect me, even when he couldn’t. Maybe especially when he couldn’t. Giving the concession of telling him when the parley, if there was a parley, started and ended was a small price. It gave him a sense of being in control when he wasn’t. Not that he’d be able to do anything if it went bad. For one thing, I’d taken the car, and he wouldn’t have been able to rent one before morning. And by morning it was all going to be over.
One way or the other.
The GPS informed me that my turnoff was coming up on the right, and my gut went tighter. It was too soon and it couldn’t happen soon enough. I put on the blinker, watched, and then drifted to the right, turning onto a thin road that was already slick with ice and snow. I slowed the SUV down to thirty and it still felt optimistic.
American Eagle Lodge and Motor Hotel sat half a mile off U.S. 77. Twelve units squatting in an L around a gravel driveway. Except for the lights in the office building and two of the rooms, it would have looked abandoned. It didn’t even have the neon Vacancy/No Vacancy sign that I’d assumed was a guild requirement for creepy old motels.
We were a little over two hours from Wichita, in the middle of nowhere. The land was flat and anyone coming off the highway would be visible from the office, at least, if not the rooms. It didn’t matter. I hadn’t come here to be subtle. I pulled to the side of the road and killed the engine. The sudden silence was profound. I rubbed my palms together, but the anxiety lighting up my spine was the kind that came after you’ve already jumped off the high dive. Turning back wasn’t an option for me now. I was just wondering how big the splash was about to be.
I took my cell phone out of my pocket. There were still two bars. Pretty good, considering. I’d already programmed in the number for the hotel. Now I called. It rang four times. Five. Six. I started to wonder if the American Eagle looked on a post-midnight presence as a luxury when I saw a flicker of movement. In the distant office, someone was coming to the desk. From this distance I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, but I saw them scoop up the phone, heard the click on the line.
“Hello?” the voice said. A man’s, and slurred with sleep or alcohol or both.
“You have a guest,” I said. “A young man traveling alone. I need to speak with him. It’s an emergency.”
“Miss, we get a lot of young men traveling alone one time and another. I don’t make a practice of waking them up.”
“This is the credit card number he gave you,” I said, and read off the account number, expiration date, and three-digit confirmation code. I went slowly enough that he had time to pull up his records, fast enough that he didn’t have space to interrupt me. “I don’t know which room he’s in, but I need to speak with him, and I need to do it now.”
“Are you with the police?” the man asked.
“Not yet,” I said. “But you should put my call through.”
“I can take a message, miss, but it’s pretty late at night.”
I was tempted to make threats. Have him look out his window and turn on my headlights so he could see that I was right there. That even if he called the cops, I’d be there before help could arrive. I wanted to use the Black Sun’s power to scare him into doing what I wanted. Instead, I took a deep breath.
“Please,” I said.
The tiny sigh on the other side of the connection meant I’d won.
“If I get in trouble for this . . .”
“You won’t,” I said. “Thank you so much.”
I watched him make some small movement on his desk. My phone clicked, went quiet, clicked again, and the ringing started. I watched the rooms to see if a light went on, but nothing changed. The ringing stopped. He didn’t speak.
“Jonathan,” I said. “It’s Jayné. We need to talk.”
The sharp intake of his breath was weirdly gratifying. Some part of me liked being the scary one in the scenario, if only because it meant he thought I might be dangerous.
“How did you find me?”
“Bribes,” I said. “There are probably half a dozen people who are going to be a little more corrupt and a lot richer in the new year. Look, don’t freak out on me here.”
“What do you want from me?”
“To talk,” I said. “That’s all.”
“Okay. I’m here. So talk.”
“I think this is more of a face-to-face thing,” I said. He was silent. “If I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead now. You know that, right?”
“You won’t break me,” he said, and I had the sick image of Rhodes downing a bottle of cyanide to avoid being captured by the enemy. That would be just great.
“I want to talk truce,” I said. “We got off on the wrong foot. Mistakes were made. I’m not looking for a higher body count, and I think you aren’t either.”
He was quiet again.
“You know it’s not in me,” I said. “I’m not the Graveyard Child.”
“All right,” he said, the syllables trembling a little. “Okay. I’ll meet with you. But I decide the time and the place.”
“Yeah, that’s not actually going to work for me. I was thinking more like right now.”
A moment later the curtains on the room at the far south end of the motel shifted. It wasn’t much. Just enough for someone to look out. I thumbed on the engine, lighting up the headlights, and then killed it again.
“Hi,” I said.
He laughed, and it wasn’t in victory. I’d heard the I’m-so-fucked laugh coming out of my own throat often enough to recognize it.
“I’m not seeing a lot of options,” he said.
“Make a break for your car and try for an extensive chase sequence,” I said. “Works in the movies.”
The lights went on in his room.
“Come in,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said, and dropped the connection. I drove to the parking lot. I didn’t understand why the crunching of gravel against the tires sounded so loud until I realized I hadn’t turned the music back on. Chogyi Jake reached into the backseat and brought up his shotgun. Of all the ones we’d bought at the Walmart, his was the only one left. I put the SUV into park.
“If I don’t call or come out in five minutes,” I said, “or, you know, in the event of bloodcurdling screams . . .”
“I understand.”
I undid my seat belt. It hissed against me as it retracted. Even the smallest thing was grabbing my attention now. It was strange to watch myself being afraid without actually feeling it. I wondered if it was her influence or just where my head was. Or if there was a difference between the two.
“If I don’t make it out, take care of Ex and Ozzie for me.”
I’d meant it as a joke, but even then as a ha-ha-only-serious one. Chogyi Jake put his hand on my wrist for a moment, then let go. “Are there any other messages you’d want me to pass along?”
I paused for a moment, wishing he’d taken the line a little less seriously. Was there anyone I’d want to pass a message to? I thought of Jay and Carla. My parents. Little Curt about to graduate high school. I thought of Aubrey, who had made the transition from lover to ex-lover to nice guy I used to sleep with so gracefully that it sort of called everything that had come before into question.
“No,” I said. “I’m good.”
“Be careful.”
I opened the door and slid down to the ground. As I closed it behind me, Rhodes opened his door. He was wearing a pair of blue jeans and a shirt that looked like it had been slept in. He hadn’t bothered with a glamour. He was thinner than I’d remembered him. The thin stubble of hair on his scalp showed that he was balding a little. If he’d been human, he’d have passed for a junior system administrator. He stepped back as I came close, gesturing me in. I nodded. As I passed through the door, I felt the echo of his wards like a change in the air pressure.
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