Graveyard Child

chapter three

My father and I bolted out into the TV room practically together. The air stank of heated iron, and my mother wasn’t the only one screaming. The first thing I saw was Carla squatting on the kitchen floor, her hand to her belly and her eyes wide. Ex stood in front of her, his hands in fists. The television and the kitchen windows were shattered, and three people were standing by the kitchen table. Two were holding pump shotguns, one at Curtis, one at Chogyi Jake. The third was turning to look at me.

Every square inch of the intruders’ skin was marked with ink. The first time I’d seen anything like this, I’d been in an apartment in Denver, talking with a vampire. Back then I hadn’t known what any of the markings meant. After three years of studying, I recognized some. The swirling cross of the Mark of Enki. The angled, cruel letters of the Goetic alphabet. They were wizards. They were the same wizards who had killed my uncle, who had hidden the viciously evil haugsvarmr under Grace Memorial Hospital.

The Invisible College was standing in my parents’ kitchen.

The one without the gun lifted his hands and shouted, and the sound was more than sound. It carried the weight of will. The ragged, meat-tearing noise of it staggered my father back into me, and I put my hand between his shoulder blades to steady him. The wizard’s jaw unhinged, and his mouth gaped wider than a normal human’s could have. I acted without thought, and I didn’t act alone. I felt my body breathing in, taking the power of the wizard’s tainted shout into my lungs, pulling his power out of the air. It wasn’t something a human could do, but the Black Sun was with me, guiding me.

“No,” I said, softly and with enough power that the house shuddered with it. The unarmed man closed his too-wide mouth and smiled like he’d won something. He glanced down at Carla, but she didn’t see it. She was staring at me.

The report of my father’s gun was deafening, but it was only sound. Without the power of will behind it, it was empty as an echo. The unarmed man’s hand flickered, plucking the bullet from the air. Carla shrieked and put her hands up over her ears. My father fired twice more. The man batted the bullets away, his face twisted in concentration. His eyes fixed on me.

He was young. His shaved head left him looking thin and oddly fragile despite the tattoos and the intense power burning off him. I had the brief image of a boy trying to hold on to a fire hose. His will arced out, invisible and unmistakable as a pressure change, and with an almost physical click I was in the familiar space just behind my own eyes.

I was being ridden.

My body went still as a stone, and I could see the wizard’s eyes narrow. He’d sensed the change. My father was shouting, holding the gun in front of himself like a cross. I squatted a little, lowering my center of gravity, and kicked gently at the back of his knee, taking him out of the fight without actually hurting him. As he went down, the rider in me moved past him. The other two—the ones with the shotguns—were an older man with brown skin and a dusting of white hair and a thin, pale woman with eyes the color of gas flame. I remembered the first time the Invisible College had attacked me, Midian Clark walking among the conquered firing bullets into their heads. One of them had been a woman who could have been this woman’s twin.

My body didn’t hesitate. With one hand on the rail to steady me, I swung up the three steps from the TV room to the kitchen. The shattered glass glittered on the floor. The older man started to turn his shotgun away from Chogyi Jake and toward me. In the corner of my vision, my father hunched behind his overstuffed chair as if it would give him cover. My left hand slapped the shotgun barrel up, not grabbing it but striking hard enough to make the man stagger back. I kicked three times at his left knee. He fired the shotgun as he fell, shattering the overhead lights, but Chogyi Jake was on him, controlling both the shotgun and the fall.

“Surrender!” the young man shouted, his will pressing against me like a storm wind. Behind him the woman shifted, her shotgun tracking away from Ex and Carla. The Black Sun kicked past the young man, slamming my foot into the kitchen table. It slid across the room, breaking against the woman’s hip. I saw the tabletop scar from my jack-o’-lantern carving snap in half.

I stepped in, driving my elbow up toward the young man’s throat, but he was at least as fast as I was. I felt his counterstrike in my stomach without seeing where it came from. My breath left me, and it was my turn to stagger. My feet slipped on the glass and I dropped to my knees. I caught a glimpse of my mother and Curtis huddled under the dining room table. Good, I thought, stay there.

The young man stood above me, his hands out before him. His eyes had turned a uniform bloody red. The rider paused, resting on my fingertips and the balls of my feet. Distantly, I could feel her uncertainty. He turned his palms toward me with a word I didn’t recognize, and an invisible sledgehammer hit me in the chest.

I heard Ex calling my name, but it seemed to come from a long way away. Carla was screaming too. I wondered where Jay was. Getting help, I hoped. Calling the police. By the time they came, it would all be over, one way or the other, but at least he wasn’t in the room. It was one less person I needed to protect. Time seemed to be moving strangely. Slowly but discontinuously. I was falling to the floor, my heart a bloom of pain, and then I was on my knees again. I felt the rider’s will gathering in my right hand, and I tried to add my own to it. When I hit the wizard, the blow lifted him off his feet and threw him against the counter. His head hit the cabinet, splintering it. Half a dozen coffee mugs skittered down around him like snow, shattering on the floor. I leaped, but he was already elsewhere.

“You cannot defeat us!” he shouted, but it wasn’t true. His strength was fading. A feral grin pulled at my lips. He was already growing weaker. The Black Sun and I? We were just warming up.

I surged across the debris-strewn kitchen, hammering at him with my fists and my will. I felt him shifting from assault to defense, and I leaned into it. The blue-eyed woman staggered to her feet, and I spared enough attention to kick the shotgun out of her hands and send her back into the living room. I felt a little explosion behind me, and the older man Chogyi Jake had been fighting ran past me, unarmed and limping, for the front door. The rider glanced back. Chogyi Jake was on one knee in the dining room, blood running from his nose and mouth. He had the shotgun in his hand. Behind him, Mom was curled against the far wall, her face pale. I didn’t know where Curtis had gone. I could only hope he wasn’t chasing after them.

The unarmed wizard’s eyes had lost their bloody look and gone for a soft brown.

“What do you want from me?” the Black Sun asked. The power in her words reached into the man, pulled at him. He choked a little, trying not to speak, then bit down on his tongue hard enough that blood pinked his teeth.

“Jayné!” Ex shouted. “Behind you.”

I turned.

In the TV room, my father had found his feet. He stood at the end of the couch, holding the pistol with both hands. The barrel shifted from the wizard to me, then back again, as if he wasn’t sure who was the real threat. Fear boiled off him like steam. He was a middle-aged man with a paunchy belly and jowls that were starting to sag. Redness like a rash crawled up his sternum toward his neck. This was the man I’d feared so much. This was the man who’d dominated my life so deeply that I’d fled my home and my friends—a whole life—just so I could say I’d done something of my own.

And now he was going to shoot me.

“Gary!” my mother shouted, her voice low and rough. “You put that down!”

I could count on one hand the number of times my mother had used Dad’s given name. He shifted the gun toward the boy again, then back toward me. I waited for the muzzle flash, horrified. He lowered the gun. As I turned back toward the wizard, he drove his forehead into the bridge of my nose. I heard the cartilage break more than felt it. He opened his mouth and shouted wordlessly.

The Oath of the Abyss was the common name of a terrible spell. The rough guess I’d been given was that each time someone used it, it dropped their life span by about a year. I’d seen it done twice, both times by Aubrey. From a normal human, it was enough to rock back a rider. Now, from the wizard and whatever spirit was riding his body, it was like getting a hurricane full in my face. The Black Sun staggered, and I felt it lose control of my muscles for a moment. We were both standing there, trying to keep my feet. The overheated iron scent broke, and the kitchen only smelled like the cold breeze through the broken windows. The young wizard sagged, his gaze unfocused and lost.

“Stop him,” I tried to say, but my face felt like a rubber mask, and it sounded more like Ob em. The wizard turned, hobbling for the front door, and I went after him as best I could. The ground seemed to be shifting more or less in time with my heartbeat. When I got to the front yard, the older man was gone and the sound of a motorcycle blatting away was already fading. The blue-eyed woman was on another motorcycle, and she started it as I staggered down the front steps. The young wizard threw himself across the back of the bike, his arms going around the woman, his head collapsing against her like a puppet with its strings cut. The motor screamed out, and they started moving.

Ex’s hand on my elbow was the only thing that kept me from collapsing on the lawn. A red mark around his left eye was deepening toward blue. When it was done blooming, it would be a black eye as profound as any I’d seen. Chogyi Jake came out of the house, shotgun still resting comfortably in his arm. His chin and neck were a single slick of blood.

“Have to go after them,” I said. “Where’s the keys?”

“We can’t catch them,” Ex said.

“They were here,” I said. “They attacked my family.”

“They’re on motorcycles. We’re in an SUV. Even if there was a chance we could catch up with them, which there’s not, none of us are fit to drive. We’re more likely to run into a light post.”

I sank down to the dead brown grass and let the chill of the air sink into my skin. My body was trembling uncontrollably with shock and the aftermath of the fight. Carefully, I probed my ribs and was pleasantly surprised not to feel the sharp pain that would have meant I’d broken them. Again. I let my head sag down onto my knees while Ex rubbed his hand against my back. The contact comforted.

“How bad?” I asked.

“I don’t think anyone’s hurt.”

I looked over at Chogyi Jake. He was wiping the blood off his face with the back of one hand. My nose felt wide and hot and solid with blood.

“Not badly hurt,” Ex said. “And anyway, it’s just us.”

Just us. Just me and him and Chogyi Jake. Not my family. Not civilians.

“Should put the guns away before the police get here.”

“Good point. I’ll get them into the trunk. We might be able to find something useful from them.”

I nodded. Exhaustion pulled me toward the ground. My breath was bright white plumes. I listened to Chogyi Jake and Ex talking. The sound of the SUV’s door opening and closing. There still weren’t any sirens. Not yet. I tried to stand up and staggered. The hand that steadied me was Jay’s. His expression was closed. I wouldn’t have been surprised by anything—shock, anger, even excitement—but he only put his arm around me and helped me back into the house. The front door was hanging from its top hinge, the lower two having been ripped out of the frame. I didn’t know when that had happened. In the living room, the Christmas tree seemed out of place and vaguely obscene, like a jaunty hat on a corpse. Mom was in the kitchen, sweeping up glass like it was just another mess, and her job was to clear it all away before anyone saw. The furnace was roaring, trying to cope with the icy air flowing in through the shattered windows. Jay angled me toward the good sofa and sat down with me.

“That was dramatic,” he said.

“Yeah. Sorry about that.”

“You know what it was about?”

“No. Yes,” I said. “I’m not sure.”

He nodded. When I’d left, he’d already been living in an apartment with three other young men from church. He’d put on about twenty pounds and added the beginnings of wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. I’d missed a lot of the changes in his life, and he’d missed out on mine. Chogyi Jake came out of the kitchen with a dish towel full of ice and handed it to me. I pressed it against my injured nose and almost yelped from the pain.

“I think it’s broken,” Jay said.

“It is,” I said.

“So is this what you’ve been doing all the time you were gone?”

“More of it than you’d expect, actually,” I said, smiling weakly.

“Who were those freaks?”

“It’s a long story,” I said, “and I don’t actually know most of it. They’re . . . part of what I came home to find out about.”

He smiled, and for just a second I could see the boy he’d been.

“So you didn’t just come for the wedding,” he said.

I grinned. It made my nose hurt.

“Sorry,” I said.

Carla and Curtis came into the room. Two of the knuckles on his left hand were skinned raw, but other than that they looked okay. Physically, anyway. Carla’s eyes were wide, and her right hand was on her belly. She stepped toward us, hesitated, and almost collapsed beside Jay, her head on his lap. I thought there was more than confusion in her eyes. Fear. Sorrow. Love. She wouldn’t look at me. I couldn’t blame her. She’d been getting ready for her wedding, not an armed assault. I didn’t know enough about shock and miscarriage, but even if she’d only watched her fiancé’s family get gunned down in front of her, I had to figure it wouldn’t be good for the baby.

My blood reddened the ice pack, and the throbbing pain slowed and widened until it felt like my whole face was beating in time with my heart. My mother came and collected Jay and Carla, shepherding them back into the kitchen. She didn’t meet my eyes either, and I didn’t rise to follow them. Curtis popped his head around the corner for a second, but he didn’t stay either. I coughed, and a blood clot that felt about the size of a dime came down from my sinuses. I spat it into the dish towel and then sat there, miserable, listening to the low sound of voices and the scratching of broomstraw against glass. I heard sirens in the distance, getting closer. We needed to get together and make sure our stories all matched. We needed to make sure the police had a version of events that would let them write the whole thing off and not get involved.

Chogyi Jake came back out of the kitchen with a fresh towel of ice, and we traded. He was mostly cleaned up, but his upper lip was a little swollen. At least it wasn’t bleeding anymore.

“This could have gone better,” I said, and he smiled, because it was funny and it also wasn’t.

“It wasn’t the conflict I’d anticipated,” he agreed.

My father stepped and put a hand on Chogyi Jake’s shoulder.

“I’m going to ask you to wait outside, sir,” he said.

Chogyi Jake smiled but didn’t move. He’d offered to hurt people for me before, and I knew he was entirely willing to stand his ground in my father’s house if I wanted him to. I caught his gaze and nodded. It was all right. I mean, what the hell? It wasn’t like he was going to shoot me. I chuckled a little at the thought, and Dad scowled at me.

“Of course,” Chogyi Jake said, as if it hadn’t been my decision. His step was careful as he walked out the shattered front door, and I wondered how extensive his injuries really were.

“Police are going to want to talk with you,” my father said.

“Yup.”

“It’s all right with me if they want to talk with you here. But once you’re done, I want you and your boyfriends out of my home. Forever, you understand? You don’t have a place here. This is my house, and my family. Any business you have, you can take up with me. And you haven’t got any business with me.”

I looked up at him, a sneer plucking at my lips. In the story, the prodigal son is the one who gets the fatted calf. I didn’t know what I’d hoped or expected from him or any of them, but the truth was the trip had failed before the enemy wizards attacked. It had failed the second my father and I had started breathing the same air. You haven’t got any business with me.

“Fine,” I said.