M. Hanover - Graveyard Child

“Is it a species or an individual?” I asked.

“We don’t know that yet,” Chogyi Jake said. “Tamblen recommended checking an archival source in Vienna. He’s trying to get up permission, but with the new year coming up we may not hear anything until next week. So, with the old financial records in Denver, that’s two great huge stacks of records to go through.”

“One’s a massive collection of arcane secrets and obscure references, and the other one’s in Europe,” I said with a grin. “How do you kill it?”

Ex and Chogyi Jake exchanged a glance. “We don’t know yet,” Ex said. “You had a hypothesis. How does this all fit into it?”

“Unfortunately, pretty well,” I said.

“Walk us through it,” Ex said, scowling.

“All right,” I said, holding up the chopsticks like a pointer. “Here’s what we know. Eric got a bunch of money that’s been getting passed down through my family since forever, and when he died, he passed it on to me.”

“So are you thinking that the wealth itself is carrying the rider?” Chogyi Jake asked.

“No. Hold on. I’ll get there. The next thing we know is that Eric used my mother to build someone who’d been possessed since literally before birth,” I said, raising my hand. “And he was looking to cut a deal with a massive rider that could, in theory, have been strong enough to bind the Black Sun on a permanent basis. The haugsvarmr bound her in the 1940s, remember?”

“That seems like a lot of work to wind up where you started from,” Ex said. “Invoke the Black Sun, create a daughter organism, then track down something to get rid of the daughter. How does that get you anything?”

“It gets you a shell,” Chogyi Jake said, nodding.

“Right,” I said. “And if we think about what happened to Eric, it sounds like the same song in a different key. He got ridden young. Not as young as me, but still when he was a kid. And the rider got shucked out of him. And the one thing we know about folks who’ve had riders is that they’re more open and vulnerable when the next one comes.”

“You’re saying that Eric was preparing you to be possessed by some other spirit?” Chogyi Jake asked.

“I’m saying there’s been a rider crawling down my family tree since God knows when. And each generation, it grooms some poor new kid, puts a rider in them, lets it get comfortable, then shucks it out and leaves the kid open, vulnerable, and gasping.”

“Only, that didn’t happen to you,” Ex said.

“Didn’t, did it? Because Eric got killed before I was ready. I still had a tenant, and I didn’t even know. But everything else was in place. The money came to me. The property. All the things that the Graveyard Child’s been hoarding over the past who knows how many generations dropped into my name, just like they’d dropped into Eric’s when his uncle died. And I’ll bet you dollars to donuts we can trace versions of the same story all the way back to forever.

“Eric left me everything he had but didn’t warn me about anything. Also, Eric wasn’t stupid. That looks like a contradiction.”

“Unless . . .” Chogyi Jake said.

“Unless I wasn’t supposed to be the one in control of the body when the money all came,” I said. “Someone else was supposed to be driving. Someone who already knew all about the money and the resources and the big, big picture. I was being groomed to be the next one eaten literally since before I was born.”

We all let it stand in the air for a second. It changed everything.

I’d started off thinking of Eric as a demon hunter, and of myself as his heir. Even when I’d figured out he was an evil sonofabitch, I didn’t cast him as a victim. Not until now. And with the money and the weird magical powers, I’d cast myself in the hero’s role. I was the kick-ass enemy of darkness, just like my idealized uncle. I could fight and win every time. I could get any outfit I wanted, go anywhere I chose. Other people whose lives were touched by riders were the ones who were really in trouble. People like Aaron the cop being ridden by a haugtrold or Dolores in New Mexico with the akaname or, it turned out, my mother. They needed help because they were powerless. Because they weren’t like me.

Only, even with being able to beat everyone else in the room when it came to a fight, even with the kind of money that made Bruce Wayne feel like he needed a nicer suit, I’d still been set up. The power that had been going back for generations and leaving women and men destroyed and broken in its wake didn’t care if I could win a fistfight. I was just another kind of tool to it. I’d gotten incredibly lucky, and what the luck earned me was the time to figure that out on my own.

Now that I knew, I was going to have to get smart.

“The reason that there’s no resources on the Graveyard Child,” Chogyi Jake said.

“Same as the reason Jayné didn’t get scheduled for orientation,” Ex said. “You don’t need to tell someone what they already know. The one rider that the Graveyard Child would never need to research is the Graveyard Child.”

“And the Invisible College is still looking to take me out,” I said, “because whatever grudge they had against the Graveyard Child, they don’t think it’s finished. They think it got out of Eric and into me.”

“Which may be why they’d try to keep Carla away,” Chogyi Jake said.

“If they thought her baby was getting lined up to be the new sacrifice, sure,” I said. “I don’t know if the Graveyard Child did something in particular to piss them off, or if the riders in the Invisible College are naturally predisposed to hate it, or if it’s some kind of weird altruism thing. But they’ve been trying to break the cycle. First by killing Eric, and now by threatening its hold on Carla, using her as bait, and trying to bind it.”

“But because the Black Sun was never cast out of you, the Graveyard Child never got in,” Ex said. “The binding failed.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Now they may figure that out on their own. Or they may not.”

“They’ve kept trying for years at least,” Chogyi Jake said. “It would seem odd if they gave up the effort now. I mean, assuming you’re right about all this.”

“And so the next attempt could be some clever bastard with an enchanted sniper rifle,” I said. “I will be under threat from a huge magical conspiracy for the rest of my life unless I can get them to call off the hunt.”

They were silent for a moment. I could see both men thinking it through, looking for cracks in the theory. As the seconds passed, I felt more and more sure they wouldn’t find any. It was still only a theory, a story that fit the facts, but maybe not the only one that did.

“We can go back to the Water Street house,” Chogyi Jake said. “Or get someone to deliver a message to it. If we can arrange some kind of parley, maybe—”

“Or they can use that to set a new trap with a different outcome,” Ex said. “And that’s assuming that they haven’t taken off. If I were in their position, I don’t know that I’d be hanging around, waiting to see if Jayné had a truckful of fertilizer and diesel she wanted to park outside my place. If Eric was possessed by the Graveyard Child, it made him kind of a prick about that kind of thing.”

“Agreed,” I said. “We have to assume they’re on the lam. The longer it takes for us to confirm this, the more likely it is that something bad’s going to happen. And by that I mean worse than me assassinating their head guy.”

“Having done that does make a simple conversation seem less plausible,” Chogyi Jake said mildly.

“Twelve hours ago, they were here. In Wichita,” I said. “They’re scared, and keeping a very low profile is what they do best. We aren’t going to get a better chance than this. Not anytime soon. We have to hunt them down now.”