M. Hanover - Graveyard Child

“Agreed,” Chogyi Jake said. “But do you have any thoughts as to how it might be done?”

I picked up my cell phone. My lawyer answered on the third ring.

“Jayné, dear. Is everything all right?”

“It’s a little messy, actually,” I said. “But body and soul are still more or less together.”

“What can I do to help?”

I took a deep breath. After all this time, I still felt like I was asking permission.

“I need a miracle,” I said. “The three top-ranking members of the Invisible College were in the city last night, and I think the chances are pretty good that they’ve made a break for it. I need to find at least one of them, and I need to do it very, very quickly.”

“That’s going to be difficult,” my lawyer said. “The week between Christmas and New Year’s is always difficult, and those particular ladies and gentlemen are surprisingly challenging to keep track of.”

“You remember how you said I didn’t spend as much money as Eric used to?”

“Yes, dear?”

“I don’t care if we break the bank doing this. If it means spending everything down to the floorboards, I’m okay with that. I just need these people found.”

The line was quiet for so long, I thought I’d lost the connection. Or that she’d hung up on me. When at last she did speak, I could hear the smile in her voice.

“Well, dear. That’s a horse of a somewhat different color, now, isn’t it?”

It was snowing as I drove out of town. The traffic on the highway was sparse, and made mostly of long-haul truckers throwing gray slush up behind them as they sped to make time. Low gray clouds held in the light from the city even as it faded away behind me. The oncoming headlights caught the swirl of huge, feathery flakes. The red brake lights before us seemed softer and farther away. The radio was infomercials, canned sermons, pop songs, and one lonely sex advice show relayed in from the West Coast. I cycled between them incessantly until Chogyi Jake stopped me by putting in some Pink Martini.

It was almost midnight. It was the twenty-ninth of December. If the year had a dead spot, this was it. The long, cold hours when everything that had been going to happen in the long, slow trip around the sun had already happened and nothing new could quite begin. I felt like we’d stepped outside time, outside the ebb and flow of the normal human world and into a kind of bleak, surreal mindscape. The night had been directed by David Lynch.

I hunched over the steering wheel, my knuckles aching. The heater’s white-noise thrumming rose and fell as I accelerated or braked. I was pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to do that. The sense of anticipation and fear crawled up my spine. I wanted to go faster, to be there already, and I wanted to slow down for fear of what was coming.

We passed through Newton and Herington. Junction City was still twenty minutes ahead of us. We were coming close.

“Are you certain you want to do this?” Chogyi Jake asked.

“Nope,” I said.

“And are you determined to do it regardless?”

“Yep.”

“Can I ask why?”

I glanced over at him. His face was calm, but he looked older than he had back when we’d all started together in Denver. As if the years had been longer for him than for the rest of us. I wondered what he would have done if it hadn’t been for me and Eric and the fortune that I’d used to hire him and Ex and Aubrey. Whatever it would have been, I hoped he didn’t regret missing it.

“You mean besides the obvious not wanting to be hunted by a cabal of riders?”

“Yes, besides that.”

I grinned. No one else would have moved past me so gracefully or been able to put me at ease while he did it. It was what I loved him for.

“I want to know if I’m right,” I said.

“Is it important that you be?”

“It changes who Eric was. If he was being ridden, it changes why he did everything he did. To my mother. To Kim. To me.”

Chogyi Jake made a small sound in the back of his throat. “So we’re trying to save Eric. Not the man himself, of course, but what he meant.”

Half a mile later I answered. “Would that be a problem?”

“Not at all,” he said.

Leaving Ex had been difficult, not just because he’d insisted that he was well enough to come but also because part of me badly wanted him there. We’d gone through so much together that leaving him behind seemed like going to the fight unprepared. It wasn’t true, but it seemed that way.

In point of fact, the list of reasons to leave him behind was as long as my arm. The first one was he’d been shot in the foot a day before, and the rest of them didn’t matter. If things went pear-shaped at the motel where—according to my lawyer—a credit card associated with Jonathan Rhodes had been used to guarantee a room, I couldn’t have him bursting in on his bloody foot and trying to save me. It was a scenario that commanded the ugly place in the Venn diagram where ugly overlapped with plausible.

In the end, he’d agreed to stay with Ozzie if we promised to call him before we headed in and again when we came out. With his hair pulled back, he’d looked like some kind of very severe bird, and I’d seen in the way he held his shoulders and the lines at the sides of his mouth how much it cost him to let me go on alone. I knew how much it meant to him that he protect me, even when he couldn’t. Maybe especially when he couldn’t. Giving the concession of telling him when the parley, if there was a parley, started and ended was a small price. It gave him a sense of being in control when he wasn’t. Not that he’d be able to do anything if it went bad. For one thing, I’d taken the car, and he wouldn’t have been able to rent one before morning. And by morning it was all going to be over.

One way or the other.

The GPS informed me that my turnoff was coming up on the right, and my gut went tighter. It was too soon and it couldn’t happen soon enough. I put on the blinker, watched, and then drifted to the right, turning onto a thin road that was already slick with ice and snow. I slowed the SUV down to thirty and it still felt optimistic.

American Eagle Lodge and Motor Hotel sat half a mile off U.S. 77. Twelve units squatting in an L around a gravel driveway. Except for the lights in the office building and two of the rooms, it would have looked abandoned. It didn’t even have the neon Vacancy/No Vacancy sign that I’d assumed was a guild requirement for creepy old motels.

We were a little over two hours from Wichita, in the middle of nowhere. The land was flat and anyone coming off the highway would be visible from the office, at least, if not the rooms. It didn’t matter. I hadn’t come here to be subtle. I pulled to the side of the road and killed the engine. The sudden silence was profound. I rubbed my palms together, but the anxiety lighting up my spine was the kind that came after you’ve already jumped off the high dive. Turning back wasn’t an option for me now. I was just wondering how big the splash was about to be.

I took my cell phone out of my pocket. There were still two bars. Pretty good, considering. I’d already programmed in the number for the hotel. Now I called. It rang four times. Five. Six. I started to wonder if the American Eagle looked on a post-midnight presence as a luxury when I saw a flicker of movement. In the distant office, someone was coming to the desk. From this distance I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, but I saw them scoop up the phone, heard the click on the line.

“Hello?” the voice said. A man’s, and slurred with sleep or alcohol or both.

“You have a guest,” I said. “A young man traveling alone. I need to speak with him. It’s an emergency.”