M. Hanover - Graveyard Child

“I have something,” Chogyi Jake called. My feet were getting numb fast. The Black Sun had retreated back into my body and the adrenaline was seeping away, but my curiosity had cooked down to a solid need to know. I stepped into the scrub at the side of the road. There in the shadows lay a little knot of pale and black, like a crumpled sheet of ink-stained paper, only larger. I squatted down next to it, reaching out with my fingers. Something about it seemed strange and ominous and familiar all at the same time. I plucked at it, pulling it into the light.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said.

“You know what this is?”

“I do,” I said.

My mother had always been the one to buy things for the house. Curtains, place mats, napkins. All of that had been hers. The dish towel lying on the soiled ground was the same blue-and-yellow kind that I’d used for years to wipe up spills and wash down counters. There were surely others like it all through the city, all through the world, but at that moment I’d have bet everything I owned that this one had come from my family’s kitchen.

And half of it was stiff and dark with old blood.

“Are you sure it’s your blood?” Kim asked from my laptop. Compressed into the Skype window, she and Aubrey seemed like news announcers, each ready for their turn at the camera. The morning sun was bright and low, and I’d pulled the curtains in the guys’ room half closed, covering us all in an artificial twilight.

“Certain,” Chogyi Jake said. “We’ve tried Bonewitz’s consonance rites and the Dismas Ceremony. It’s mine. I split my lip when they attacked, and that was the cloth I used to clean myself up.”

“We figure they went back later and dug through the trash,” Ex said.

Aubrey grunted his dissatisfaction. “I wish we could run the DNA all the same.”

“You’re just saying that because you have the equipment,” Ex said.

“Well, we do,” Aubrey replied.

Kim shook her head, but there was a smile with it. On camera, she looked fuller in the cheeks, not so pinched at the mouth. Aubrey was sporting the beginnings of a mustache that absolutely didn’t suit him. Seeing them again—seeing them together—was more like coming home than coming home had been. I wished they were really there. But I understood why it was a bad idea. It hadn’t been a full six months since Aubrey had been my lover and Kim had been his ex-wife. It only felt like years ago because so much had happened in between.

“If I had to guess,” Ex said, “I’d say they were using the blood as a tracking focus. Jayné’s damn hard to find using magic, but Chogyi Jake and I are just what we are.”

“You have wards on your room?” Kim asked.

“Just the usual. Salt and ash. The Mark of Cyprian.”

“That’s it?” she asked.

“We’re at a Best Western,” Ex said.

“They allow dogs,” I added. It seemed weak.

“Okay,” Kim said. “So you’re warded enough to keep a human being from finding you. So the hypothesis is that a rider was using the blood, yes?”

“It felt like one to me,” I said. “It felt . . . not big, exactly. It felt crazy.”

“Crazy how?” Aubrey asked.

“Like, it-made-the-whole-world-mentally-ill-just-by-being-in-it crazy,” I said.

“Let’s take it as our hypothesis, then,” Kim said. “We’ll assume that a rider was using Chogyi Jake as a handle to find Jayné. To what end?”

I shook my head. The thing had come, seen me, and then vanished. It hadn’t been an attack. It hadn’t been a message. The only thing that seemed to make sense at all was that it was doing reconnaissance for something else. Something that hadn’t happened yet.

“So let’s table that,” Kim said. “Was it the Invisible College?”

“I hate to invoke Occam’s razor,” Ex said, “but that seems like the safest bet. It was a rider. They’re all riders. We know they’re nearby. They made a weirdly half-assed attack on Jayné’s family. Now we’ve got a weirdly half-assed approach on the hotel. I don’t see what we get by assuming there’s some mysterious third party involved.”

“Could it be involved with whatever Eric was doing with me and the Black Sun?” I asked. “Whatever this all is, the Invisible College was after him from the start. I mean, they got him, right? They killed him. And they were hiding the haugsvarmr that he was trying to find. So whatever he was doing here, they were probably trying to throw a wrench in the works. If we understood what Eric was doing—”

Kim shook her head. “No.”

“No?” Ex asked.

“No. We’ve got too many variables and not enough data. We can speculate all day. Make up as many stories as we want to. The fact of the matter is, we don’t know enough yet to draw any conclusions.”

“I don’t know about that,” Aubrey said.

“I do,” I said. “She’s right. Maybe if we nail down something, the rest of it will fall in line, but right now it’s all just one damn thing after another. And the closer we look at it, the weirder it gets. There’s two ends we can reach for. Either we go after the Invisible College and try to wring some answers out of them, or we go to Denver and hit the books about Eric’s predecessors. I don’t see anything else that makes sense.”

The other four stayed quiet. I felt the weight of their reluctance, and I understood it. This was my call, and there were good reasons for it. We were in an untenable position, unwarded in a public building that even invitation-excluded riders like nosferatu and cadaver sanguins could waltz right into. The Invisible College had gotten the drop on us already, at least once and probably twice. We had no natural allies in the city. We had no clear way to find the enemy, and no good guess as to what was on their agenda.

In Denver we could sit in the middle of a bank vault if we wanted to, pile on wards so thick it would take weeks to find us and weeks more to force us out; and instead of looking for a bunch of gun-toting demon-possessed wizards, we’d have to read through historical documents. The only downside was that it left my family exposed to the Invisible College and the thing from the parking lot.

But it had been years since I’d been here, and the Invisible College hadn’t bothered them in all that time. I had to think that if I went, they’d chase me.

“Okay,” I said. “Pack it up, and let’s get the hell out of Dodge.” The chorus of agreement sounded like relief. “Kim. Aubrey. Thank you, guys, so much for putting your heads together with us. Is it cool if I call you when we get to Denver?”

“I think you should,” Kim said. “I’d like to know what this whole damn thing was about.”

“You and me both,” I said. Despite everything, I really did like her.

We dropped the connection, and I sat back. Ex and Chogyi Jake looked tired. After our unwelcome visitor, we’d spent the night sleeping in shifts in their room, one person always awake with a gun in one hand and salt in the other. The only one who’d seemed happy about the whole thing was Ozzie. She preferred having the whole pack together, if only because she got more ear scratches.

“So. Occam’s razor?” I asked. “Do I know that one?”

“It’s not a spell,” Ex said. “It’s a philosophical law. Basic idea is that simpler solutions are more likely to be true. If the canary’s gone and the cat’s looking happy, there’s not much reason to postulate a dog.”

“You can explain it to me on the road,” I said.

“I’d love to,” he said with a smile. There was something about him that got more handsome after I’d seen or thought too much about Aubrey. So that was a great, huge, blinking warning sign.