M. Hanover - Graveyard Child

“That’s what I mean, though,” I said. “He didn’t seem . . . powerful. Or maybe powerful but not sophisticated. I mean, he used the frigging Oath of the Abyss.”

“Maybe he’s got a thing for shotguns,” Ex said, racking and ejecting another round and another until the gun was empty and half a dozen blue shells rolled on the spare bed. “All power, no subtlety.”

My phone buzzed. A text message from Curtis: ru OK? What the f was that?

“I suspect he was one of the younger leaders within the College,” Chogyi Jake said. “Someone with ties and experience, but still subordinate to Coin.”

I thumbed a message back to Curt: I’m fine. Don’t worry. I’ll be in touch.

It was weak, but I didn’t know what else to tell him. This didn’t seem like the moment to go into the whole issue of spiritual parasites and secret societies. Partly because he might think the whole thing was exciting, and the last thing I wanted was my little brother poking his hands into the hornet’s nest. The less involved he was—the less involved all of them were—the better it would be for everybody.

“We knew that Coin was involved in holding the haugsvarmr under Grace Memorial,” Ex said, “because killing Coin was what let that damned thing call for help.”

“Which is why Eric was in Denver in the first place,” I said. “To get rid of Coin and find the thing under Grace and . . .”

“Yeah,” Ex said, switching to the second weapon. “That’s the question, isn’t it? And what? Make some kind of deal with it. It got its freedom and Eric got fill-in-the-blank.”

“We’ve already figured that Eric wasn’t exactly one of the good guys,” I said. “The Invisible College was working against him. They might be on the side of the angels, right?”

“I think there’s room in all this for more than two sides,” Ex said. “Eric was a sociopath and a rapist, but that doesn’t mean Coin wasn’t at least as bad or worse. The Pleroma is full of these things, and that they all fight among each other doesn’t mean that half of them are angels and half are demons. They’re—”

He broke off, looked away, and started ejecting shells from the second gun. I knew what he was going to say and why he’d stopped. They’re all demons. The words were as clear as if he’d spoken them. To Ex, all riders were demonic, and all of them needed to be stopped. Even the one in me. That it had saved my life and his a dozen times over didn’t matter to him. In his world, I was still someone to be saved, and she—it—was what I needed saving from. I folded my hands across my knees and looked away. I’d made my deal with the Black Sun, and it hadn’t done anything yet that made me think it wasn’t my ally. And still, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure Ex was wrong.

“Well, we can’t leave,” I said. “Not the way things stand now. And we can’t go to my folks and start asking questions.”

“So what does that leave us?” Ex asked as he started to break down the shotguns.

Ozzie yawned, stretched, and started to snore wetly. I poked her with my toe, but she ignored me. Outside the window, the traffic from the highway made a low, constant hum. Tires against asphalt. The moon was just shy of full, spilling cold, blue light across the parking lot.

“I think we should try to make contact with my mother outside of the house. No one’s going to go against Dad in his own home. Not if he’s laying down the law like this. But if we can get her when she’s out shopping or coming home from church or something, maybe I can talk to her.”

“What about your brothers?” Chogyi called. “They seemed quite approachable.”

“Probably are, but they’re also the least likely to know anything. Jay’s not that much older than me, and he’s got his fiancée and her family and the wedding thing to worry about. Curt’s younger and probably knows even less than I did.”

“Does your mother attend church by herself?” Chogyi Jake asked.

“Sometimes,” I said. “But even if her schedule’s the same as it was when I was living there, this wedding thing’s going to throw it off. Plus which, my dad’s going to be on high alert. Plus which, Carla and all her family are going to be around.”

“So follow her around,” Ex said, “and hope for a chance.”

“And hope no one else is following her around in order to take a crack at us when we start doing it.”

“Sounds like our usual kind of plan,” Ex said, smiling grimly.

My phone buzzed again. Curtis. Who were those guys? Were they in a gang or something?

“Hmm,” Ex said, frowning down at the disassembled steel.

“Anything interesting?”

“Nope. The serial numbers are still on them, though.”

“Can we trace them? See who they were sold to or something?”

Ex smiled like I’d made a joke.

“This is America,” he said. “There’s no Carfax for guns. About the best we can hope for is that they were stolen. And then all we’ll really know is who they were stolen from.”

“Is there any juju on them?”

“Not that I can see,” Ex said. “Maybe on the shells, though.”

“No,” Chogyi Jake said, stepping back into the room. His hand was out flat, carrying something gently. “No magic. But look at this.”

It wasn’t quite a powder. More like tiny pale stones flecked with bits of red and black color. I frowned and put my fingers out to touch it. It didn’t burn or feel cold. I didn’t get the weird flesh-crawling feel I sometimes did around magically charged items. It just felt like it looked. Innocuous.

“Rock salt?” Ex said.

“I think so,” Chogyi Jake said. “It dissolves the way I’d expect it to. I haven’t quite brought myself to taste it, but—”

“We should check the other shells,” Ex said. It took us about half an hour to slit the plastic open on all of them. Before we were done, Ozzie had woken enough to become interested in what we were doing and then get bored by it again. All of the shells were the same. Black powder and mundane salt. Ex went back to the disassembled guns, lifting each piece to his eyes and shifting it so that the light played across the surfaces.

“There’s no rust,” he said. “I can’t believe they’ve used salt rounds in these guns. At least, not on a regular basis.”

“Why use them at all?” I asked.

“Because you didn’t want to hurt anybody,” Chogyi Jake said.

“That’s what I was thinking,” I said. “So if they weren’t looking to hurt anybody, what were they doing?”

For what seemed like forever, none of us spoke. When Ex broke the silence, his voice was soft.

“Curiouser and curiouser.”

I was at a coffee shop in Phoenix a few years back when I heard that my uncle was dead. The man on the other end of the line was very gentle, very solicitous. All I knew then was that Uncle Eric—the one relative who’d always been on my side, swooping in whenever I was in trouble—had been killed. After we hung up, I sat still for half an hour, trying to figure out how I felt. Stunned, horrified, sad. I had the impulse to call home and talk to my parents, but even then I knew it wouldn’t be welcome. Dad had forbidden us all to speak to Eric with more or less the same fervor he’d used to forbid me to go to ASU.

I didn’t call. Instead, I’d packed up the thin membrane of my own failed life and flown out to Denver, expecting to execute his will and hide out from my collegiate failures for a couple weeks.

Back then, I printed up all the directions to things off MapQuest. When Ex tracked me, he had to sneak a GPS tracker into my backpack. Now, planning out our next approach to my mother, it was all Google Maps and Street View, and I’d had the GPS trackers pulled out of my phone and car. Actually, so that Ex couldn’t find me when I didn’t want to get found. Some things time changes quickly.