Graveyard Child

chapter eighteen

“All right,” Rhodes said, running his hands over his scalp with a sound like paper against paper. “This is going to be . . . So the Invisible College? It started off as a group of natural philosophers in the 1630s. They were looking at what makes living beings different from just normal matter, and in the course of their experiments they found riders. We all made a deal. The society acted as hosts for the riders—a way to reach the physical world—and in return, the same riders would bring their knowledge and experience to new generations of the society. The idea was that we could continue research over more than one lifetime. Normally all the knowledge and experience and insight that someone gets in the course of their life either gets put in books and essays that maybe keep five or ten percent of what they actually know, or else they’re just lost. We got around that.”

“So wait a minute,” I said. “Who are you, really?”

“I’m Jonathan Rhodes, really,” he said. “But I have access to Marian Cunningham, who was host before me, and Emile Canna, who studied the kabbalah in the 1920s, and Sean Korrigan, who was a biologist and undertaker and artist in Baltimore in the 1890s. I have the things they knew and the way they saw the world. We’re all part of one longer life than any single body could carry. Or at least than it could carry without ossifying. You need to get a young person in every now and again to see things in a different way. Sean Korrigan was a decent guy for his time, but his stance on women and blacks wouldn’t fit too well in the modern world. We’re different people, but we’re part of the same continuity.”

“Okay,” I said. “I think I can follow that.”

“Abraxiel Unas was one of us. Not a person. A rider. A continuity of people through time.”

I felt my heart start to beat a little faster. I felt like I was on the edge of something, like unwrapping a present on Christmas morning, except without the joy or sense of safety.

“Something went wrong?”

“It did,” Rhodes said. “You don’t remember us telling you any of this?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Because I was there when Master Coin told this to you. I was sitting as close to you then as I am now.”

“I remember I was going to a sleepover at Monica Smith’s house and I came to in a hotel room with a tattoo and Uncle Eric. He said I’d called him from a bar, and that I’d been crying about someone named Sidney. I didn’t even know I had a tattoo until he told me about it.”

Rhodes’s face was pale under the ink.

“Yeah. That wasn’t true.”

“Picking up on that,” I said. “But the Graveyard Child?”

“Right. Sorry. It was a rider like the one I’ve got, but it went mad. One of the people it was riding was a man named Willis Ford. No one’s sure whether he drove the rider mad or if it broke him. He split from the College and started his own research. Gathering power to himself. Without the sigil work to keep him in control or the induction to help him move from generation to generation, he had to prepare bodies that would be easier to move into.”

“Qliphoth,” I said.

“He made shells. At first he’d do it by torturing someone. Traumatizing them until they were spiritually vulnerable and then keeping them in captivity until his last body grew old or infirm. Then he would move into the new skin.”

“The rider, you mean.”

“The rider and the man. Ford was a part of the new person’s consciousness just the way all my old hosts are part of mine. But each time it happened, it moved into a new mind that was broken. Every new life it stepped into was miserable and shell-shocked and angry. The illness of generations built up in it, along with the cruelty and the distance from whatever humanity Ford had possessed in the first place. Eventually it learned how to force other riders into bodies and then pull them back out. It began with small ones. Geisten and kobold. And then, over time, it moved to more and more powerful riders. Sometimes it would force several riders into the same body. Or induce possession and then exorcise the spirit, and then induce possession again so that whoever the host was to be might have gone through a dozen rounds of being ridden and having the rider ripped away.”

“Sounds like the kind of kid who tortured animals for fun.”

“No. Not fun. For knowledge. It was a vivisectionist of souls, and it learned things on its own that would have taken those of us who weren’t as bloody-minded ten times as long to discover. If we ever would have. Its plan was to eventually return to the College when it was strong and knowledgeable enough to put itself in the central position. That may not make sense, but the College centered on a single individual. Master Coin, until—”

“Yeah, really, really sorry about that.”

A shadow seemed to pass over Rhodes’s face, but he didn’t stop.

“Master Coin kept track of where it was and what it was doing. Three times he reached out to it. Tried to bring it back where we could help it. By then it had taken on the Graveyard Child’s name and started investing that with power. And then, eventually, the threat grew too great. We all agreed that it had to be stopped. And so we came to you.”

“Because I could stop it?”

“Because we saw that you were being made its heir. We thought we could help you escape. He’d already placed a rider in you. Something young but, we thought, powerful. We . . . well, we abducted you. Sorry about that.”

“In the big picture, I kind of see why. It’s weird how much all of this looks like crime, isn’t it?”

Rhodes leaned back on the bed, the spring groaning and complaining. “I hadn’t really thought about it that way, but now that you say it, yeah. It does.”

“Anyway, you drove by in the creepy windowless van and forced me in or whatever,” I said.

He looked uncomfortable at the phrasing. “We took you to the gathering, and we explained what we were. What he was. The danger you were in.”

“Must have been a hard sell,” I said. “I idolized Eric. He was the good guy through my whole childhood. The only sane-looking one in the family. I mean, put it in a different frame and it’s a very different picture. But—”

“No. You believed us at once. You told us that he’d always struck you as . . . off. That there was something wrong with him.”

I couldn’t say why that piece of information—that, among all the horror and violations that my history had become once I started looking—should be the one that made my flesh crawl. It was crawling, though. My lost weekend at sixteen was a story. Before it had been about acting out and getting too drunk to think straight. Now it was about a power struggle between generation-spanning spiritual parasites. Okay, big change. My mother had always seemed meek and broken in a way that I put down to my father and the excesses of faith. Turned out it was about shame and ritual abuse. It changed the story about who she was and what her relationship was to me. Dad, it turned out, wasn’t my bio-dad but my real uncle, and my uncle was my actual dad. Even that hadn’t changed my sense of who I was. Of the life I’d lived.

There had been some version of me that had known or guessed that something was wrong with my uncle. I didn’t remember that. Whoever that Jayné had been, she’d been wiped out of existence, and even knowing that she’d been there couldn’t bring her back. All the way back, I had loved and admired Uncle Eric. I’d trusted him, looked to him as an example of how things could be better than they were at home. Only, maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe, along with the memories of the Invisible College, Eric had done something more to my mind and memory. It left me feeling uneasy and unclean.

The door burst in with a bang like a gun firing. Rhodes leaped to his feet, the sudden squall of his will filling the room. His hands took on a wild, unearthly glow. Chogyi Jake stepped into the doorway, the shotgun in his hands and a snarl on his face that belonged on a wolf.

“Wait!” I shouted, leaping up from my chair. “Stop! Don’t shoot anyone!”

Chogyi’s eyes didn’t shift from Rhodes. The shotgun was aimed squarely at the young man’s head. Chogyi Jake’s chest worked like a bellows, and the stink of overheated iron filled the air.

“More than five minutes,” Chogyi Jake said.

“Yeah. Sorry about that. I got distracted.”

Chogyi Jake’s gaze flickered over to me for a second. It was enough to carry annoyance and amusement and chagrin. He looked back at Rhodes.

“Well. This is awkward, then,” Chogyi Jake said between clenched teeth.

“We’ve all been kind of tense recently,” Rhodes replied gruffly, the glow in his hands pulsing like a heartbeat.

“We should probably both put our weapons down.”

“I think we should.”

The two men didn’t move for a long moment, their eyes locked and ready for violence.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said, and stepped between them. Chogyi Jake didn’t resist when I took the shotgun from him. I turned back to Rhodes and lifted my eyebrows reprovingly. The glow faded to nothing. “All right. My mistake. Sorry, but let’s all just take a couple breaths and calm down, okay?”

A few seconds later Chogyi Jake shifted back, looking at the door. “I think I broke the frame.”

“We’ll buy a new one,” I said. “Not the worst thing that could have happened tonight. Jonathan. We were back at my shitty sweet sixteen.”

Chogyi Jake looked astonished. I nodded toward the dresser. He propped the broken door closed as best he could, then went and leaned against it, his expression back to the almost unreadable calm it usually was. I took my seat again, the gun across my lap. Rhodes shifted between the two of us, then sighed.

“We had a safe house ready for you. People who were ready to see to your well-being. We talked about taking the rider from you, but we were afraid that it might leave you open to the Graveyard Child. So instead we erased you.”

“My tattoo,” I said. “It’s why I’m hard to see magically. That was you guys.”

Rhodes spread his arms, displaying them. His smile was rueful. “Skin sigils are pretty much what we do,” he said. “We couldn’t use any of the standard Marks. The Graveyard Child knew them all. We fashioned one specific to you and tied it to your own qi for its power. So long as you lived, magic would not see you. Only, then you vanished.”

“Eric swooping down and doing whatever he was doing to mess with my head,” I said.

“Apparently,” Rhodes said. A gust of freezing wind blew the door open. He pushed it closed and moved a standing lamp to block it. “We didn’t know that at the time, though. We thought you might have been in league with Eric the whole time, playing along with us in a way that gave him information about us and gave you the Mark that would make it even harder to track when the rider had moved to you.

“We kept track of you, but the Graveyard Child defended you like his own. When you left for Arizona, we thought that you were trying to escape him, and we tried to reach you, but he laid a trap for us. We almost succeeded in taking away his heir. I believe that was what moved Abraxiel to take action. He planned for the next induction, when he knew where we would be.”

“And so he got Midian Clark to be the focus for him. The idea was to kill Coin and take his place.”

“Only, Master Coin reached him first.”

For a moment I was with Midian Clark. The rueful smile on his ruined lips. The yeah, you-got-me shrug when Aubrey and I had realized he wasn’t a cursed human but a rider trapped in a corpse. I wasn’t about to tell Rhodes that I still thought of the old vampire as a friend. But even if I liked him, Midian’s agenda had always been his own. I wondered how much he’d known about Eric, and about the Graveyard Child, that he’d never bothered to mention because it suited him to leave me in the dark.

“And I took out Coin, thinking he was a demon-possessed monster who’d killed my loving uncle,” I said. “And everyone assumed that the Graveyard Child had shucked out whatever was living in me and taken up residence. So the whole thing started over. Jay got Carla pregnant, and it looked like the cycle might be beginning again. So you grabbed her, lured me into a trap; except, instead of the Graveyard Child, you got the Black Sun.”

“The Black Sun?” Rhodes said, his jaw actually dropping a centimeter.

“Well, the Black Sun’s daughter,” I said. “But yeah.”

“And here we are,” Chogyi Jake said, “and we don’t know what happens next.”

“That is the question, isn’t it?” I said. “Is this something where we can shake hands and chalk it up to experience, or do we still have a problem?”

Rhodes sat on the bed again, his hands on his knees. He seemed so thin, almost too fragile for the power that was in his flesh. I wondered whether I should have felt the same about myself. I wasn’t as twiggy as he was, but the Black Sun was orders of magnitude more powerful than I was. Maybe I should have felt too small for what was in me, but I didn’t. I felt at home with her.

“You and I are fine,” he said slowly, “but I am not the Invisible College. Eduardo and Idéa have as much status in the body as I do. I can take everything you’ve said to them, and they might believe it too. But you are the one who killed Master Coin. Not Eric Heller. Not even the Graveyard Child. You. And that may not be something all of us can overlook.”

“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.”