Graveyard Child

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 faster, 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.

The room was if anything more squalid than the exterior promised. The greenish wallpaper showed its seams, and the bed seemed to apologize for itself. The lock was mechanical, and the chain looked like it had rusted where the links touched. I sat at a tiny writing desk, and the chair groaned under me. Rhodes closed the door but he didn’t lock it. We both knew that if it came down to unpleasantness, a couple cheap locks and a hollow-core door weren’t going to make a difference.

“Well,” I said. “This is awkward. I think we got off on the wrong foot. You and the others. You’ve got something against the Graveyard Child, right?”

Rhodes didn’t speak, just stood there, arms folded across his chest. His lips were pressed thin, and I couldn’t tell if it was from fear or anger. The markings on his face acted like a mask, obscuring all the fine details of his expression.

“Okay,” I said. “So here’s the thing. I’m not the Graveyard Child. I have a rider in me, but it’s not that one. And I think maybe we’re on the same side.”

He shook his head in a gesture of disbelief.

“You’ve got brass ones, I’ll give you that,” he said. “So now we’re on the same side again, are we? You broke the temple. You killed Coin. And now you think you can waltz in here and smile and pretend it never happened?”

“Yeah. I know. That was a mistake, and if I could take it back, I would.”

“No,” Rhodes said. “You don’t get to switch sides every time the wind blows. You made your choice and you acted on it, and now the consequences are your problem.”

It was fear. It showed when he spoke and in the way he moved, but it was also standing firm in spite of the fear. He was scared of me, but he wouldn’t let it rule him.

“Let me explain,” I said. “I didn’t even know about riders until Eric died. All I knew was that he’d been killed and that Coin had been part of it. I thought I was protecting myself. And yeah, okay, there was a kind of vengeance kick too, but I didn’t know what was—”

The sound was something between a laugh and a cough. He stepped close to me, his eyes flashing. His hands were balled into fists.

“Goddamn. You really thought you could lie your way out of this? I was there. I was with you. Did you think I wouldn’t remember you, or did you just forget about me?”

I had planned out a hundred different ways this conversation could go. Everything from apocalyptic battles that ended with me watching everyone I cared about die, to hugs and beer and pizza. This hadn’t been on my list.

“You were with me?”

“I saw you take the oath. You knew everything.”

I could feel the power radiating from him like heat.

“Okay, the only thing I don’t understand is every word you just said.”

He blinked. Under his mask of skin, his expression shifted, changed. He tilted his head and narrowed his eyes.

“The induction,” he said.

I held up my hands, palms open, and shook my head. Rhodes sat on the edge of the bed. Springs squeaked under him. I couldn’t imagine how anybody could sleep on something that loud.

“Holy shit,” he said. “You really did forget me, didn’t you?”

“I’m guessing we ran into each other before somewhere?” I said.

He pressed his hand to his mouth. His eyes flickered in the middle distance, like he was looking for something in the empty air. I had the uncomfortable feeling that I’d been left behind, but I waited for him. He did the laugh-cough thing again.

“You really . . . you don’t know?”

“Really don’t,” I said.

“I met you . . . God, was it ten years ago? Not the last induction, but the one before.”

“The one before?”

He nodded.

“We came to you when you were leaving church on the Thursday before the rites. You came with us. I gave you that flower. You don’t remember any of it?”

I felt a little dizzy. If this was a trick, a way to get me disoriented and off my guard, it was working pretty well. The Invisible College held their inductions every seven years—prime number. Like cicadas. Midian Clark had told me that. The ceremony I’d broken up had been in August. Right over my twenty-third birthday, in fact. So seven years before that would have been . . .

Sixteen. Oh, holy shit, it would have been my sixteenth birthday. The one where I’d lost two days.

I felt the world drop a little, like an airplane hitting a rough patch of air. I was suddenly deeply aware of the half-finished tattoo at the base of my own spine. The one that I didn’t remember getting. The one Uncle Eric had helped me hide from Dad.

“What happened?” I said.