M. Hanover - Graveyard Child

“In the big picture, I kind of see why. It’s weird how much all of this looks like crime, isn’t it?”

Rhodes leaned back on the bed, the spring groaning and complaining. “I hadn’t really thought about it that way, but now that you say it, yeah. It does.”

“Anyway, you drove by in the creepy windowless van and forced me in or whatever,” I said.

He looked uncomfortable at the phrasing. “We took you to the gathering, and we explained what we were. What he was. The danger you were in.”

“Must have been a hard sell,” I said. “I idolized Eric. He was the good guy through my whole childhood. The only sane-looking one in the family. I mean, put it in a different frame and it’s a very different picture. But—”

“No. You believed us at once. You told us that he’d always struck you as . . . off. That there was something wrong with him.”

I couldn’t say why that piece of information—that, among all the horror and violations that my history had become once I started looking—should be the one that made my flesh crawl. It was crawling, though. My lost weekend at sixteen was a story. Before it had been about acting out and getting too drunk to think straight. Now it was about a power struggle between generation-spanning spiritual parasites. Okay, big change. My mother had always seemed meek and broken in a way that I put down to my father and the excesses of faith. Turned out it was about shame and ritual abuse. It changed the story about who she was and what her relationship was to me. Dad, it turned out, wasn’t my bio-dad but my real uncle, and my uncle was my actual dad. Even that hadn’t changed my sense of who I was. Of the life I’d lived.

There had been some version of me that had known or guessed that something was wrong with my uncle. I didn’t remember that. Whoever that Jayné had been, she’d been wiped out of existence, and even knowing that she’d been there couldn’t bring her back. All the way back, I had loved and admired Uncle Eric. I’d trusted him, looked to him as an example of how things could be better than they were at home. Only, maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe, along with the memories of the Invisible College, Eric had done something more to my mind and memory. It left me feeling uneasy and unclean.

The door burst in with a bang like a gun firing. Rhodes leaped to his feet, the sudden squall of his will filling the room. His hands took on a wild, unearthly glow. Chogyi Jake stepped into the doorway, the shotgun in his hands and a snarl on his face that belonged on a wolf.

“Wait!” I shouted, leaping up from my chair. “Stop! Don’t shoot anyone!”

Chogyi’s eyes didn’t shift from Rhodes. The shotgun was aimed squarely at the young man’s head. Chogyi Jake’s chest worked like a bellows, and the stink of overheated iron filled the air.

“More than five minutes,” Chogyi Jake said.

“Yeah. Sorry about that. I got distracted.”

Chogyi Jake’s gaze flickered over to me for a second. It was enough to carry annoyance and amusement and chagrin. He looked back at Rhodes.

“Well. This is awkward, then,” Chogyi Jake said between clenched teeth.

“We’ve all been kind of tense recently,” Rhodes replied gruffly, the glow in his hands pulsing like a heartbeat.

“We should probably both put our weapons down.”

“I think we should.”

The two men didn’t move for a long moment, their eyes locked and ready for violence.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said, and stepped between them. Chogyi Jake didn’t resist when I took the shotgun from him. I turned back to Rhodes and lifted my eyebrows reprovingly. The glow faded to nothing. “All right. My mistake. Sorry, but let’s all just take a couple breaths and calm down, okay?”

A few seconds later Chogyi Jake shifted back, looking at the door. “I think I broke the frame.”

“We’ll buy a new one,” I said. “Not the worst thing that could have happened tonight. Jonathan. We were back at my shitty sweet sixteen.”

Chogyi Jake looked astonished. I nodded toward the dresser. He propped the broken door closed as best he could, then went and leaned against it, his expression back to the almost unreadable calm it usually was. I took my seat again, the gun across my lap. Rhodes shifted between the two of us, then sighed.

“We had a safe house ready for you. People who were ready to see to your well-being. We talked about taking the rider from you, but we were afraid that it might leave you open to the Graveyard Child. So instead we erased you.”

“My tattoo,” I said. “It’s why I’m hard to see magically. That was you guys.”

Rhodes spread his arms, displaying them. His smile was rueful. “Skin sigils are pretty much what we do,” he said. “We couldn’t use any of the standard Marks. The Graveyard Child knew them all. We fashioned one specific to you and tied it to your own qi for its power. So long as you lived, magic would not see you. Only, then you vanished.”

“Eric swooping down and doing whatever he was doing to mess with my head,” I said.

“Apparently,” Rhodes said. A gust of freezing wind blew the door open. He pushed it closed and moved a standing lamp to block it. “We didn’t know that at the time, though. We thought you might have been in league with Eric the whole time, playing along with us in a way that gave him information about us and gave you the Mark that would make it even harder to track when the rider had moved to you.

“We kept track of you, but the Graveyard Child defended you like his own. When you left for Arizona, we thought that you were trying to escape him, and we tried to reach you, but he laid a trap for us. We almost succeeded in taking away his heir. I believe that was what moved Abraxiel to take action. He planned for the next induction, when he knew where we would be.”

“And so he got Midian Clark to be the focus for him. The idea was to kill Coin and take his place.”

“Only, Master Coin reached him first.”

For a moment I was with Midian Clark. The rueful smile on his ruined lips. The yeah, you-got-me shrug when Aubrey and I had realized he wasn’t a cursed human but a rider trapped in a corpse. I wasn’t about to tell Rhodes that I still thought of the old vampire as a friend. But even if I liked him, Midian’s agenda had always been his own. I wondered how much he’d known about Eric, and about the Graveyard Child, that he’d never bothered to mention because it suited him to leave me in the dark.

“And I took out Coin, thinking he was a demon-possessed monster who’d killed my loving uncle,” I said. “And everyone assumed that the Graveyard Child had shucked out whatever was living in me and taken up residence. So the whole thing started over. Jay got Carla pregnant, and it looked like the cycle might be beginning again. So you grabbed her, lured me into a trap; except, instead of the Graveyard Child, you got the Black Sun.”

“The Black Sun ?” Rhodes said, his jaw actually dropping a centimeter.

“Well, the Black Sun’s daughter,” I said. “But yeah.”

“And here we are,” Chogyi Jake said, “and we don’t know what happens next.”

“That is the question, isn’t it?” I said. “Is this something where we can shake hands and chalk it up to experience, or do we still have a problem?”

Rhodes sat on the bed again, his hands on his knees. He seemed so thin, almost too fragile for the power that was in his flesh. I wondered whether I should have felt the same about myself. I wasn’t as twiggy as he was, but the Black Sun was orders of magnitude more powerful than I was. Maybe I should have felt too small for what was in me, but I didn’t. I felt at home with her.

“You and I are fine,” he said slowly, “but I am not the Invisible College. Eduardo and Idéa have as much status in the body as I do. I can take everything you’ve said to them, and they might believe it too. But you are the one who killed Master Coin. Not Eric Heller. Not even the Graveyard Child. You. And that may not be something all of us can overlook.”