M. Hanover - Graveyard Child

“What about a pact?” I asked. “When . . . God, I feel like a terrible human being. Okay, when I was fighting Coin, he offered to make a pact. A binding. If I didn’t act against him, he’d let me go. At the time that sounded like a kind of spiritual slavery, and I was still pretty bent about Eric, so I turned him down. Any chance the offer is still open?”

“Maa—aaybe,” Rhodes said, pulling the word out to three syllables. “If you’re serious, it might be something we can do. But if you have the Black Sun in you as well—”

“I will consent to this,” my mouth said without me. “The sabiendos are no enemy to me.”

Rhodes’s eyes went round and wide enough that I could see the whites all around the irises. It was hard not to smirk a little.

“Was that . . . ?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That was her. So what do you think. We have a deal?”

Rhodes seemed lost in thought, but his voice was as sharp as ever. “It would need to be binding on your allies as well. No offense.”

“None taken,” Chogyi Jake said. “I am willing, but our friend Ex may be more difficult to convince.”

“I’ll talk him into it,” I said. “We can make this work. But it needs to cover all of you guys. And that freaky bloodhound thing too. I don’t know what that was, but seriously, if we do this, I want it kept on a leash.”

Rhodes shifted his focus to me. The wind blew the door against the standing lamp with a clunk, and then another one.

“Bloodhound?” he said. “What bloodhound?”

A chill crawled up my spine and I felt a fear that was deeper and colder than anything I’d felt on the drive out here.

“The thing that tracked us to the hotel,” I said. “About a head and a half smaller than you? Black poncho. Creepy as hell. The one that was using Chogyi Jake’s blood from the big battle of the kitchen table?”

Rhodes shook his head. “We didn’t track you. We’d convinced Carla you were dangerous. There was nothing else we needed to do.”

“All right,” I said. “Then what the fuck was that thing?”

The silence lay over the room for a long moment, each of us thinking the same thing, but none of us willing to say it. To make it real.

“It’s not dead,” I said, and the words were stark. “The Graveyard Child. You killed Eric, but it didn’t die. It’s here. It’s here, and it knows I’m here too.”

Rhodes went pale under his ink. “That’s not good news. It has to have found a host. Someone else who’d been prepared besides you.”

I rose from the chair, clutching the shotgun. Chogyi Jake wasn’t leaning against the dresser anymore. I saw my own alarm mirrored in his face.

“It knows where we’re staying,” I said. “Ex is alone.”

“I think we should leave,” Chogyi Jake said. “I think we should leave now.”

“Be in touch, okay?” I said to Rhodes over my shoulder as I walked out. “Your people call mine. Like that.”

“Yes. Of course. But be careful. If it is Abraxiel and he manages to empty you after all, you won’t be able to keep him out of you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Spiffy.”

I bent over the wheel, trying to will the SUV faster. The engine groaned and roared. The snow made a tunnel that was almost but not quite aligned with the road. I could feel the surface of the highway in the small movement of the steering wheel, the slickness and the growing ice. Two hours out to Rhodes’s hideout; forty-five minutes, more or less, talking to him; and now two more hours back. I plucked my phone out of my pocket, keeping one eye on the red glow of the brake lights on the trailer in front of me. It was hardly doing fifty, and there was just slightly too much oncoming traffic to pass.

“Let me dial,” Chogyi Jake said. “It won’t help anyone if we wreck on the way back.”

“Okay,” I said. A pickup truck blew by, heading the other direction, and I pulled out to pass the trailer just as a new set of headlights appeared, coming toward me. I said something obscene and pulled back. Chogyi Jake put the phone on speaker, each ring tightening the knot in my stomach. The call dropped to voice mail.

“Call him again,” I said.

At the second ring of the second call, I lost patience and pulled onto the shoulder, gunning the engine and passing the trailer on the right to the music of his outraged honking. I pulled back onto the road proper on the fifth ring, and I only fishtailed a little bit.

“Here,” Ex said. “I’m here.”

“Are you okay?” I snapped.

Ex’s reply came slowly. He sounded drugged. “I’m fine. Are you all right?”

“Put up any wards you can. The Graveyard Child’s alive,” I said. “It knows where we’re staying.”

“All right,” Ex said. “Was there a reason we thought it was dead? And what’s it want with us?”

I brought him up to speed in short, telegraphic sentences. Before I was half done, I could hear the small sounds of his preparations. The hiss of a match head as he lit candles or incense, the clattering of the curtains on their rails as he closed them, the squeak of the spout on a container of salt. It took me less than two minutes to tell him the bare bones of what he needed to know.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m going to let you go and focus on getting the wards up.”

“We’ll be there as soon as we can,” I said.

“All right, but don’t push too hard. It looks nasty out there, and I don’t want to have the state patrol pulling your corpses out of a ditch because you hit a patch of ice.”

I glanced over at Chogyi Jake who was looking back at me placidly. I let the speedometer drop back down to the speed limit.

“I’ll be careful,” I said. “Just really try to be alive and whole when we get back, okay?”

“Depend on it.”

He dropped the connection and Chogyi Jake put the phone away. I went back to focusing on the road and trying not to let the speed creep too high up on me.

“We should have brought him with us,” I said. “Ozzie too.”

“And who else?” Chogyi Jake asked. “Your brother and his fiancée? Your parents? Would you have brought Curtis with us too?”

“The whole damn pack,” I said. And then: “I could rent a bus.”

The minutes clicked by, each seeming longer than the one before. The snowfall thickened and slacked off and thickened again. Through good luck and viciously focused control, I didn’t manage to slide off the road before Wichita, and it was still the deep darkness when I pulled into the motel parking lot and let the engine die. All around us, the world was silent, the snow consuming what little noise there might have been. About an inch had accumulated on the pavement, and my tire tracks were the only things to mar the whiteness. I got out of the car and swept my gaze across the edge of the lot. I more than half expected the evil little figure to be there, grinning at me like it had just crawled out of its formaldehyde jar. My shudder had nothing to do with the cold. I turned to go inside.

“Jayné,” Chogyi Jake said.

“Hmm?”

“You’re carrying a shotgun.”

I looked down at my hands. I didn’t remember scooping it out of the backseat, but clearly I had. I tried to imagine what the lady at the counter would think when the girl with the black eyes who’d come in that morning fresh from the ER with her friend who’d been shot waltzed through with a firearm in her hands. Still, I hesitated.

“If it comes to that,” Chogyi Jake said, “it won’t be enough to help.”

Reluctantly, I put it back in the car, locked the doors, and shrugged deeper into my coat. The clock behind the main desk said it was almost four a.m. My driving time hadn’t been as good as I’d hoped. At the door of my room, I knocked. There was no answer. My mind flooded with images of Ex and Ozzie gutted and bits of their bodies thrown around the room or else missing. When I opened the door, the room was empty, the beds made, and fresh towels in the bathroom. I felt myself starting to panic, but Chogyi Jake only nodded toward the corridor.