Graveyard Child

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 died 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 an 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.”

“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?”