Graveyard Child

by M. L. N. Hanover

  “What about a pact?” I asked. “When . . . God, I feel like a terrible human being. Okay, when I was fighting Coin, he offered to make a pact. A binding. If I didn’t act against him, he’d let me go. At the time that sounded like a kind of spiritual slavery, and I was still pretty bent about Eric, so I turned him down. Any chance the offer is still open?”

  “Maa—aaybe,” Rhodes said, pulling the word out to three syllables. “If you’re serious, it might be something we can do. But if you have the Black Sun in you as well—”

  “I will consent to this,” my mouth said without me. “The sabiendos are no enemy to me.”

  Rhodes’s eyes went round and wide enough that I could see the whites all around the irises. It was hard not to smirk a little.

  “Was that . . . ?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That was her. So what do you think. We have a deal?”

  Rhodes seemed lost in thought, but his voice was as sharp as ever. “It would need to be binding on your allies as well. No offense.”

  “None taken,” Chogyi Jake said. “I am willing, but our friend Ex may be more difficult to convince.”

  “I’ll talk him into it,” I said. “We can make this work. But it needs to cover all of you guys. And that freaky bloodhound thing too. I don’t know what that was, but seriously, if we do this, I want it kept on a leash.”

  Rhodes shifted his focus to me. The wind blew the door against the standing lamp with a clunk, and then another one.

  “Bloodhound?” he said. “What bloodhound?”

  A chill crawled up my spine and I felt a fear that was deeper and colder than anything I’d felt on the drive out here.

  “The thing that tracked us to the hotel,” I said. “About a head and a half smaller than you? Black poncho. Creepy as hell. The one that was using Chogyi Jake’s blood from the big battle of the kitchen table?”

  Rhodes shook his head. “We didn’t track you. We’d convinced Carla you were dangerous. There was nothing else we needed to do.”

  “All right,” I said. “Then what the fuck was that thing?”

  The silence lay over the room for a long moment, each of us thinking the same thing, but none of us willing to say it. To make it real.

  “It’s not dead,” I said, and the words were stark. “The Graveyard Child. You killed Eric, but it didn’t die. It’s here. It’s here, and it knows I’m here too.”

  Rhodes went pale under his ink. “That’s not good news. It has to have found a host. Someone else who’d been prepared besides you.”

  I rose from the chair, clutching the shotgun. Chogyi Jake wasn’t leaning against the dresser anymore. I saw my own alarm mirrored in his face.

  “It knows where we’re staying,” I said. “Ex is alone.”

  “I think we should leave,” Chogyi Jake said. “I think we should leave now.”

  “Be in touch, okay?” I said to Rhodes over my shoulder as I walked out. “Your people call mine. Like that.”

  “Yes. Of course. But be careful. If it is Abraxiel and he manages to empty you after all, you won’t be able to keep him out of you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Spiffy.”

  chapter nineteen

  I bent over the wheel, trying to will the SUV faster. The engine groaned and roared. The snow made a tunnel that was almost but not quite aligned with the road. I could feel the surface of the highway in the small movement of the steering wheel, the slickness and the growing ice. Two hours out to Rhodes’s hideout; forty-five minutes, more or less, talking to him; and now two more hours back. I plucked my phone out of my pocket, keeping one eye on the red glow of the brake lights on the trailer in front of me. It was hardly doing fifty, and there was just slightly too much oncoming traffic to pass.

  “Let me dial,” Chogyi Jake said. “It won’t help anyone if we wreck on the way back.”

  “Okay,” I said. A pickup truck blew by, heading the other direction, and I pulled out to pass the trailer just as a new set of headlights appeared, coming toward me. I said something obscene and pulled back. Chogyi Jake put the phone on speaker, each ring tightening the knot in my stomach. The call dropped to voice mail.

  “Call him again,” I said.

  At the second ring of the second call, I lost patience and pulled onto the shoulder, gunning the engine and passing the trailer on the right to the music of his outraged honking. I pulled back onto the road proper on the fifth ring, and I only fishtailed a little bit.

  “Here,” Ex said. “I’m here.”

  “Are you okay?” I snapped.

  Ex’s reply came slowly. He sounded drugged. “I’m fine. Are you all right?”

  “Put up any wards you can. The Graveyard Child’s alive,” I said. “It knows where we’re staying.”

  “All right,” Ex said. “Was there a reason we thought it was dead? And what’s it want with us?”

  I brought him up to speed in short, telegraphic sentences. Before I was half done, I could hear the small sounds of his preparations. The hiss of a match head as he lit candles or incense, the clattering of the curtains on their rails as he closed them, the squeak of the spout on a container of salt. It took me less than two minutes to tell him the bare bones of what he needed to know.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m going to let you go and focus on getting the wards up.”

  “We’ll be there as soon as we can,” I said.

  “All right, but don’t push too hard. It looks nasty out there, and I don’t want to have the state patrol pulling your corpses out of a ditch because you hit a patch of ice.”

  I glanced over at Chogyi Jake who was looking back at me placidly. I let the speedometer drop back down to the speed limit.

  “I’ll be careful,” I said. “Just really try to be alive and whole when we get back, okay?”

  “Depend on it.”

  He dropped the connection and Chogyi Jake put the phone away. I went back to focusing on the road and trying not to let the speed creep too high up on me.

  “We should have brought him with us,” I said. “Ozzie too.”

  “And who else?” Chogyi Jake asked. “Your brother and his fiancée? Your parents? Would you have brought Curtis with us too?”

  “The whole damn pack,” I said. And then: “I could rent a bus.”

  The minutes clicked by, each seeming longer than the one before. The snowfall thickened and slacked off and thickened again. Through good luck and viciously focused control, I didn’t manage to slide off the road before Wichita, and it was still the deep darkness when I pulled into the motel parking lot and let the engine die. All around us, the world was silent, the snow consuming what little noise there might have been. About an inch had accumulated on the pavement, and my tire tracks were the only things to mar the whiteness. I got out of the car and swept my gaze across the edge of the lot. I more than half expected the evil little figure to be there, grinning at me like it had just crawled out of its formaldehyde jar. My shudder had nothing to do with the cold. I turned to go inside.

  “Jayné,” Chogyi Jake said.

  “Hmm?”

  “You’re carrying a shotgun.”

  I looked down at my hands. I didn’t remember scooping it out of the backseat, but clearly I had. I tried to imagine what the lady at the counter would think when the girl with the black eyes who’d come in that morning fresh from the ER with her friend who’d been shot waltzed through with a firearm in her hands. Still, I hesitated.

  “If it comes to that,” Chogyi Jake said, “it won’t be enough to help.”

  Reluctantly, I put it back in the car, locked the doors, and shrugged deeper into my coat. The clock behind the main desk said it was almost four a.m. My driving time hadn’t been as good as I’d hoped. At the door of my room, I knocked. There was no answer. My mind flooded with images of Ex and Ozzie gutted and bits of their bodies thrown around the room or else missing. When I opened the door, the room was empty, the beds made, and fresh towels in the bathroom. I felt myself starting to panic, bu
t Chogyi Jake only nodded toward the corridor.

  “He may have moved to our room,” he said.

  When we got there, Ex let us in, and I had to restrain myself from yelling at him for switching rooms. It wasn’t that he’d actually done anything wrong, but I was stressed and tired and anything was ready to set me off.

  “Anything?” Chogyi Jake asked.

  “All quiet,” Ex said. “Nothing got past the wards, and as far as I can tell, nothing tried.”

  Ozzie was stretched out on the bed that was still made. I noticed that the room didn’t stink and the ruined pillows had all been replaced. I gave a small prayer of thanks to whatever gods or saints watched over hotel cleaning staffs and sat at the table, my phone in front of me, uncertain what I should do next. Having come this far, I wanted nothing more than to get in the car, drive back to the house outside Santa Fe, and board it up like we were waiting for the apocalypse. Just knowing that the evil, grinning little thing was out there, that it had destroyed my family generation after generation—that it was in some repulsive sense my father—made me want to get out of the world and collapse the tunnel back. And after that, maybe shower for a year or two.

  I wasn’t sure what it meant that, even with that, it felt weird calling people at four thirty in the morning. The only thing I could guess was that I was compartmentalizing the hell out of things. Yes, an arcane evil from beyond the grave that had stalked my family, broken my mother’s mind, and made the rest of our lives into a living hell—the thing that seemed to squeeze all the sanity and rightness out of the air just by breathing it—was alive and in the city. But four thirty a.m. was an inappropriate time for phone calls.

  I started with Jay. His phone rolled straight to voice mail without so much as a ring.

  “Hey, big brother, we’ve still got problems. I found out what the Illustrated Man Fan Club was actually doing, and turns out they aren’t the biggest threat. Call me when you get this.”

  When I called home, Dad picked up, sounding groggy and pissed.

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Jayné. Look, there’s a problem. The demon that was in Eric when he did all those things? It’s here. You need to get the family and—”

  “Don’t call again,” he said, and hung up.

  “Great,” I said to the dead connection.

  “Problem?” Ex asked.

  “Nothing I should be at all surprised by.”

  I sent Curtis a text: Bad shit coming. Call me but don’t let Dad know. B careful.

  It was woefully insufficient, and I knew it. But it was all I had to work with. I wished now that I’d told Curtis more about riders and magic and the surreal messes I’d found myself in when they were happening. He’d been my safety valve. My touchstone with some other, safer world. But that had been an illusion, and there was only one world after all. I’d thought I could shield him from the ugly truths of possession and magic, and all I’d actually managed was to make sure he wasn’t ready when trouble came. I put away my phone and took out my laptop, checked a few news sites and a couple of Web comics. Fidgeted. Put the laptop away. Chogyi Jake was on the bed next to Ozzie, and it wasn’t perfectly clear which of them the snores were coming from. Five in the morning. The snow was still falling.

  Ex leaned over from his bed and put his hand on my shoulder.

  “You should sleep,” he said. “It’ll be all right. I’ll keep watch.”

  “That’s what you do, isn’t it?”

  “Sometimes,” he said. “When it needs doing.”

  He didn’t take his hand away, and I didn’t want him to. The simple warmth and weight of a human hand felt like the best security blanket in the world just then. It wasn’t the prelude to anything else, nothing about it was flirtation or foreplay. That was what made it all right.

  “It had a plan,” I said. “It was going to hollow me out and take over my life, and when that didn’t work out, it had something else it could fall back to.”

  “You sound jealous,” he said.

  “I am. I can’t remember the last time I had a clear idea of what I’d be doing next week. This thing plays with decades. With lifetimes. Can you imagine what it would be like to have that kind of time to plan through?”

  “I’m supposed to be planning for my immoral soul,” Ex said. “But honestly, no. I can’t imagine living on that kind of time scale.”

  “It’s got to be pissed off that I got its stuff, though,” I said. “Maybe we should go out and spend everything quick before it . . .”

  Ex turned me around slowly, the hand on my shoulder drawing me back until I faced him. Then he took his hand away. In the light from the desk lamp and the backsplash of city lights from the snow, he looked younger. His black eye was already fading toward a weird green. I wondered what mine looked like. Whether my nose was going to be the same shape it had been before Rhodes broke it. I wondered if anything was ever really the same after it broke. Even things that healed were different. I felt a rush of exhausted tears come to my eyes.

  “I wish I had a plan,” I said. “I wish I knew what I was doing next.”

  “We’ll decide in the morning.”

  “I don’t mean just that. I mean . . . I mean where do you see yourself five years from now? Or ten? Or twenty? I’m pretty sure I’m not going to spend the rest of my life bouncing from crisis to crisis and emergency room to emergency room. But I don’t know what that looks like. And it does.”

  Ex stretched his neck, the vertebrae popping like a wet stick.

  “It’s also apparently mind-warpingly crazy and evil besides,” he said.

  “But with a solid investment portfolio,” I said. “Did you ever see it? I mean, you worked with him. I’m sure you didn’t think, Hey, this guy’s clearly possessed. Would you look at that? But from here, looking back, were there signs?”

  Someone in a nearby room turned on the shower. The pipes sang.

  “No. I didn’t suspect anything at the time, and I can’t think of anything that in retrospect should have looked suspicious. He seemed like exactly what he claimed to be. Whatever this thing is, it can pass for human. It may take years to track this thing down. It may take our whole lives. But we can do it.”

  “Do we have to?”

  “Yes,” he said, and he was right. I had come into this thinking that Eric had been some kind of spiritual fixer, the guy who came in when there was trouble and faced down the demons. He’d been just the opposite, but that didn’t change things for me. If anything, it confirmed it. The Graveyard Child. The haugsvarmr. The body-hopping serial killer that had ruined Karen Black. They were madness, and I was in a position to do something about them. And so yes, I had to.

  “And the Black Sun?” I asked. “Are you going to have to fight her too?”

  “She’s a demon,” Ex said. “Sooner or later, yes. That’s going to be a problem. But she’s not at the top of my to-do list.”

  I chuckled.

  “Suppose that’ll have to do.”

  I rose and walked to the window, put my fingertips to the glass. The cold pressed through, but not as badly as I’d expected. The world was the soft orange-gray of city lights captured by the snow. I let the future fade away for a second. The need for a plan, for certainty. I just took in the moment and let it be beautiful. My hometown, in snow.

  “Can I ask you something?” Ex said.

  “You can ask me anything.”

  “You don’t seem freaked out. Why not?”

  “I don’t seem freaked out?” I said, laughing a little through the words. “Seriously?”

  “Well, maybe a little. But compared to what I expected . . . I mean, in the last few days you found out that your father wasn’t your real father, that your mom was ritually abused by your uncle, and you’re the product of that abuse. That your mother is probably insane because of what happened to her. That you had your mind altered by this Graveyard Child thing; that you almost escaped the whole thing once, only you don’t remember; and that the thin
g that’s responsible for it all is not only still alive but it seems like it may be tracking you. By just about any scale, that’s a pretty bad week.”

  “True,” I said. And then a moment later: “I’ve had worse.”

  Ex sighed and Ozzie sighed with him. “You have, haven’t you? You know, I think back to the girl I met in Denver.”

  “You mean when you were helping hide the corpses of the Invisible College people I’d helped Midian kill?”

  “That was the night.”

  “And what do you think about when you think about that girl?”

  Ex’s expression went sober. “That she was fragile. And she was lost. When you found out reality wasn’t what you thought it was, it shook your world. All of it. Now it’s happened three or four times in as many days, and you’re wondering what your long-term plan should be. You’re not the same person you used to be.”

  “I am, though.”

  “All right,” Ex said. “Then maybe I’m just seeing how much better you are at being her. Now, lay down and close your eyes. You don’t have to sleep, but you do have to rest.”

  The pillow felt better than it had any right to. I kept looking outside for the first light of dawn, but it would be hours yet. There was traffic, though. Men and women going to their work, the city pulling itself awake after another long night’s rest. I felt my mind beginning to wander. I wondered what Jonathan Rhodes had done about his broken door and whether Jay would ever find a way to be happy married to Carla. If Curtis would have the courage to go to a secular university, and whether it would be easier for him because he was a guy and the youngest.

  My closed eyes felt perfectly comfortable and my body still and calm. Somewhere inside me, the young Black Sun might be resting or thinking or waiting for some event or opportunity. The more I’d learned about her, the more I trusted her. Not a perfectly rational response, I thought, but at least it’s mine.