Graveyard Child

chapter fourteen

There are a lot reasons that dealing with riders felt like crime. The first one—the most important one—is that I never wanted the police involved. I’ve got nothing but respect for cops. They’ve got a rough job, and an important one. But when they’re around, they’re the authority. Explaining that they shouldn’t arrest me because the guy I just shot is really a demon from another plane of existence would actually be worse than just insisting on speaking with my lawyer. I had faith in my ability to buy my way out of almost any amount of legal trouble short of murder, but it was always easier to stay out of the legal system than to get out once I was in it.

Another reason was that most of what I did and had done for years now involved doing something other people—often violent and powerful people—didn’t want me to do. Abducting a girl before a New Orleans voodoo cult could put a rider in her, for instance, although that one hadn’t really gone as expected.

But the thing that made my job and criminal work most similar was this: I didn’t care what other people wanted. For a thief or a murderer, that was because very few people are up for being robbed or killed. Really taking into account what the person on the other end of the knife wanted, including them in the dialog, pretty much meant you weren’t a thief and murderer anymore. For me, it was more complex. I could want the best for the people I dealt with, but I couldn’t assume they wanted the best for themselves anymore.

Riders are like any kind of parasite. They change the organism they’re living in. A caterpillar parasitized by some kinds of wasp larvae will defend the larvae even while they are eating it alive. Toxoplasma gondii bacteria make its host mouse like the smell of cat in order to get the mouse eaten and the bacterium into the cat’s gut, where it is happiest. An ant with fungal parasites will climb to the top of a blade of grass and wait for a cow to come eat it. People with riders don’t have free wills the way normal folks do. They are puppets on strings, and if they are even still in their bodies, they may not even know they are being controlled. For all I knew, Rhodes and his buddies hated the things they were doing now.

For that matter, if I hadn’t had a rider, I might never have fallen from grace with the church. I might not have left home. All the choices I had made in my whole life were suspect. I knew it, and it didn’t change anything. I had to pretend that I had made all my own choices at the same time that I was willing to put theirs down to being controlled by spirits and ghosts. The irony wasn’t lost on me.

I stood at the corner, looking down the dark street. My right hand was in a cheap vinyl duffel bag, my fingers wrapping the stock and trigger of a Remington 870 Express. The nice thing about shotguns, at least for me, is I didn’t have to have great aim. Chogyi Jake stood beside me, blowing warmth into his cupped hands.

The house looked different in the night, but not so much that I didn’t recognize it. The single tree close to the road. The porch and porch swing. Darkness had turned the white walls to gray, and the blue of its neighbors almost black. It was the same house I’d seen in the vision, though. No doubt about it.

“Are you all right?”

“About to walk into a trap,” I said. “Feeling a little nervous.”

“We still have options,” he said. “We can call the police. Report her as having been kidnapped.”

“Wouldn’t do any good,” I said. “And it would put a bunch of innocent people in danger.”

“Better if the people in danger aren’t innocent?” he asked, and I smiled.

“If they’re shooting at anyone, better that it’s us. At least we know to expect it.”

He shifted, swinging his own cheap duffel bag off his shoulder, putting his own hand in to match my own.

“This isn’t your fault, you know,” he said.

“It’s my responsibility, though. That’s close enough. I’m trying to take a lot of comfort in the fact they were packing rock salt before.”

“Is that working?”

“Not really,” I said. “You ready?”

Chogyi Jake nodded and we started down the street. The cold and the dark meant there was no one else out. I stopped at the sidewalk across the street from the Invisible College’s safe house. The shotgun felt heavy and unpleasant in my hands. The lights burned white in the windows, and I could feel the force of the wards pushing my awareness away. I remembered being in science class in middle school and having the teacher—a short, mean woman with red hair and bad teeth—show us that we all had a blind spot. She went on about how everyone had a little glitch in their field of vision where the optic nerve was attached to the retina, but I was just sitting at my desk, playing at making the tip of my finger disappear. Move it an inch, it appeared. Shift back and it was gone. The house was like that too. There and gone. It made my head ache a little to look at it.

“They get to shoot first,” I said.

“Is that why you asked Ex to stay with your brother?”

“You don’t think Ex would let them take a free shot at me?”

“I think he wouldn’t.”

“I think you’re right,” I said. I didn’t want to cross the street and step directly into their wards and devices. I didn’t want to stay here and slowly freeze until they noticed me. Or if they had already, until they did something about me. “I feel like Lloyd Dobler.”

“Who?”

“Guy in a movie. Never mind.”

I was sure by now they’d noticed me, but nothing kept happening. It was my move, and their home court advantage. I drew my will up, letting the force of it pool in my throat. The Black Sun didn’t add anything to it. Whatever I started with, it would be only a human effort. I imagined her waiting in the space behind my eyes, as tense as I was and watching for our next move.

“Hey,” I called, pushing the word out. It was invisible, but I felt it break against the wards and shatter. That was fine. I hadn’t meant to get through, just knock. Maybe ten seconds later the door swung open. My gut went tight. Even in the dead of winter, my palms were sweating against the shotgun. I smelled overheated iron, like an empty skillet left too long on an open flame, and a vast pressure of qi curled over me. Whatever the riders were in those people’s skins, they were strong. And worse, they were smart.

He came onto the porch. Jonathan Rhodes in blue jeans and a thick knit sweater. If it hadn’t been for the intricate tattoos, he could have been anyone. Instead, he looked like a refugee from some deeply disturbing carnival. When I had killed Randolph Coin, it had been with an enchanted bullet. I hadn’t shot him with it, even. Just pressed the ensorcelled metal to a wound and kicked the rider in him loose. He hadn’t stopped breathing all at once. For the first time I wondered if that meant the man—the shell—had been alive at the end, empty of its rider and wounded past all hope of survival. I wondered whether Jonathan Rhodes had any bullets like that one, and if there might be a rifle trained on me right now.

“You’re Rhodes,” I said, lifting my voice. I didn’t put any magic in it. It was just me talking loud enough to carry across a narrow street.

“Jayné Heller,” he said. I thought he sounded nervous, but I was probably flattering myself.

“You wanted me here,” I said. “So I’m here now.”

He nodded. He had his hands in his pockets, and I had the sense he was holding something as tightly and with the same faux-casual attitude that I held the Remington. A pistol. A charm. Whatever it was, he hadn’t used it against me yet. We were two dogs circling each other, not sure yet how the fight was going to start. Who was going to take the first bite.

“We know what you’ve been doing, Ms. Heller. It stops tonight.”

“We can talk about that,” I said. “But I think you may not be up on everything. Or maybe I’m not. But you have to let the girl go.”

“She’s under our protection,” Rhodes said. “Her and the child she’s carrying. You can’t have them.”

“Not a negotiating point,” I said. “But maybe if you—”

The shots came from the back of the house. Two shotgun blasts with maybe half a second between them. Someone screamed, but I couldn’t tell if it was a man’s voice or a woman’s. I brought up my shotgun, still in its bag, and started running across the street.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Ex was supposed to use the spell called Calling Malkuth; he was supposed to damp down their magic before anything else happened. The fact that he hadn’t meant the firefight was starting with the bad guys at full strength. It was happening too early.

On the porch, Jonathan Rhodes pulled his hand out of his pocket and gestured at me. A fine arc of gray dust puffed out, thin as ashes. It felt like a sledgehammer to my chest. I staggered back, gagging, and then I wasn’t driving anymore. The Black Sun dropped to one knee on the dead brown lawn and lifted a hand palm out toward Rhodes. His snarl was made of anger and fear. His teeth were deformed, carved into strange, inhuman shapes.

He came off the porch, launching himself straight at me and blocking the path to the doorway. Chogyi Jake appeared from my right. He’d taken his gun out of the duffel bag, and its barrel was trained on Rhodes’s head. He might just as well not have been there at all from the attention the tattooed man paid him. I raised my own weapon.

Time seemed to slow down. I saw his eyes grow wide, not with fear or surprise but a kind of joy. Like this was the battle he’d been waiting for, and now, at last, he had it. The marks on his face shifted, remaking themselves under his skin. I pulled the trigger. The shotgun kicked like a car wreck, and the end of the duffel bag blew open. Rhodes was five, maybe six feet from the end of the barrel. It was as good as a mile. Hundreds of tiny sparks flashed around him, the bright metal of the buckshot vanishing. He grinned, stepped forward, and kicked at me. My body dropped back, letting the gun fall to earth, and caught his ankle against my crossed forearms. Chogyi Jake fired, and the flash came again. If Ex had managed his cantrip—if the powers of the riders had been pushed back—it would have shredded Rhodes’s skin. Or at least drawn blood.

He pushed down with a shout, landing on the foot he’d kicked with and twisting forward, driving his elbow toward my temple. Even with the unnatural reflexes of my rider, the blow glanced off my skull. I staggered back. Chogyi Jake racked a fresh shell and fired again. He was at point-blank range now. I saw the hot gasses from the muzzle flash make ripples in Rhodes’s shirt, but he still ignored it. I jumped back from a kick that sank his heel inches into the dead brown sod. Another scream came from the back of the house. Unmistakably a man this time.

Ex.

I broke away, racing for the back of the house, legs pumping with so much force I felt the grass under me sliding. I ripped out divots.

A single exterior bulb cast a harsh pool of light in the space between the house itself and the shed in the back. It was like a lit theater stage in the dim night. Ex knelt in the middle of the circle, steadying himself with one hand. His shotgun lay on the ground in front of him. His head hung forward, the cascade of loose hair hiding his face. His left leg from the knee down was soaked with blood. I was at his side in seconds, and it was still too long.

He looked up, his face pale and stony with pain. I tried to speak, but my body wasn’t my own. Instead, I put my arm around him, staring into his eyes in mute fear. For a moment he seemed not to find me, his attention swimming. He found me, his eyes focusing. His smile was tight.

“Well, that could have gone better.”

I tried to ask about Jay, about Carla, about what had happened, but the Black Sun wouldn’t give me control. Instead, she looked back. Jonathan Rhodes was walking down the side of the house toward us. I was aware distantly of lights in the neighboring houses, of voices raised in fear. Somewhere nearby, a car engine roared and tires shrieked against pavement. I hoped it was Jay, and I hoped he had Carla with him. It would suck to die like this for nothing. Ex shifted, tried to stand, and yelped in pain. Rhodes came to the edge of the light. His eyes seemed to glow.

Something moved on my left. The other man, Eduardo Martinez, stepped out of the darkness. I turned around. The woman, Idéa Smith. I’d made the classic mistake. I’d come too far forward and ignored my flanks, and now they were all around me. I felt a growl low in my throat. Ex shot out a hand, reaching for the shotgun, and the woman gestured. Her will was like a whip, and the shotgun ripped itself out of Ex’s hands and stuck hard to the icy earth. My body went still, waiting for an opportunity I wasn’t sure would come. These were the people who had killed Eric. They knew what they were doing.

They opened their arms, and I felt the web of energy sparking between them, pressing against me like a cage. The Black Sun turned, shuddering, but the circle was complete. There was no way out. The three began chanting, and the invisible net grew stronger with each syllable that locked into the ones behind and before. Rhodes lifted his arms. The black ink shifted in his skin, words in arcane languages forming, growing sharp, and then breaking apart. The vast flow of meaning burned off him, pushing me back to the center of the circle. Ex took my hand. His fingers were cold.

“By your name I bind you,” Rhodes said, and his voice was dry and vast and older than the flesh it rode in. “Puer Mórtuus, I bind you.”

The cage grew closer, pressing in against me. His tongue was black now, his eyes bright and nacreous, like mother-of-pearl. He took a step in, and the other two stepped in with him. The air thickened, and I struggled to breathe. The stink of overheated metal overwhelmed me.

“By your name I bind you,” he said. The words tapped against me like hailstones, and I felt the division between reality and the Pleroma thinning, the mindless, blind spirits thrashing in distress. “Abraxiel Unas, I bind you.”

Ex was shouting at me, his lips pulled back with the violence of the call. I couldn’t hear him. Everything was silent except the deep, constant pressure of the riders pushing against me. I rose to my knees, then sank again, my head bowed. Ex tried to shake me. The blood on his hands was wet and cold.

They were close now, their fingertips almost touching. Arcs of power danced between them, so powerful they were almost visible. My hands clenched in fists, fingernails digging into my palms, and I was also trapped in the tight space behind my eyes.

Rhodes’s voice rang with triumph and joy.

“By your name I bind you. Graveyard Child, I bind you.”

The trap was complete. I felt it close for the last time, and then wash away around me. Together, the Black Sun and I looked up into his eyes. They were the common brown of a human being now. The marks on his skin were only ink again. His smile spoke of exhaustion and pleasure and victory.

“Those aren’t my names,” I said.

There was a moment of shock and fear in his expression, and my body unfolded, legs and gut and back twisting, every muscle firing, bones creaking with the strain of sinking my right fist, knuckles down, into the soft place just below his rib cage. Ex rolled forward with a cry, scooped up his shotgun, and fired wild. The woman ducked back, her hand up to cover her face. Rhodes doubled over, his breath whooshing out of him. I got my feet under me and brought an elbow down hard between his shoulder blades, and he fell. Martinez tried to rush me, but the Black Sun danced out of his path and kicked at the back of his knee as he passed.

I scooped up Ex, holding him to me like he was a child. He didn’t seem to weigh anything at all. He lost his grip on the shotgun, and it clattered to the ground behind us as I sprinted out into the dark. The SUV wasn’t far. Chogyi Jake’s shoulders and head were a shadow in the driver’s seat. The running lights came on and a great puff of white rose up from the tailpipes.

Ex clung to me, his hands around my shoulder, his head pressed against me.

I ran.