M. Hanover - Graveyard Child

“He may have moved to our room,” he said.

When we got there, Ex let us in, and I had to restrain myself from yelling at him for switching rooms. It wasn’t that he’d actually done anything wrong, but I was stressed and tired and anything was ready to set me off.

“Anything?” Chogyi Jake asked.

“All quiet,” Ex said. “Nothing got past the wards, and as far as I can tell, nothing tried.”

Ozzie was stretched out on the bed that was still made. I noticed that the room didn’t stink and the ruined pillows had all been replaced. I gave a small prayer of thanks to whatever gods or saints watched over hotel cleaning staffs and sat at the table, my phone in front of me, uncertain what I should do next. Having come this far, I wanted nothing more than to get in the car, drive back to the house outside Santa Fe, and board it up like we were waiting for the apocalypse. Just knowing that the evil, grinning little thing was out there, that it had destroyed my family generation after generation—that it was in some repulsive sense my father—made me want to get out of the world and collapse the tunnel back. And after that, maybe shower for a year or two.

I wasn’t sure what it meant that, even with that, it felt weird calling people at four thirty in the morning. The only thing I could guess was that I was compartmentalizing the hell out of things. Yes, an arcane evil from beyond the grave that had stalked my family, broken my mother’s mind, and made the rest of our lives into a living hell—the thing that seemed to squeeze all the sanity and rightness out of the air just by breathing it—was alive and in the city. But four thirty a.m. was an inappropriate time for phone calls.

I started with Jay. His phone rolled straight to voice mail without so much as a ring.

“Hey, big brother, we’ve still got problems. I found out what the Illustrated Man Fan Club was actually doing, and turns out they aren’t the biggest threat. Call me when you get this.”

When I called home, Dad picked up, sounding groggy and pissed.

“Who is this?”

“It’s Jayné. Look, there’s a problem. The demon that was in Eric when he did all those things? It’s here. You need to get the family and—”

“Don’t call again,” he said, and hung up.

“Great,” I said to the dead connection.

“Problem?” Ex asked.

“Nothing I should be at all surprised by.”

I sent Curtis a text: Bad shit coming. Call me but don’t let Dad know. B careful.

It was woefully insufficient, and I knew it. But it was all I had to work with. I wished now that I’d told Curtis more about riders and magic and the surreal messes I’d found myself in when they were happening. He’d been my safety valve. My touchstone with some other, safer world. But that had been an illusion, and there was only one world after all. I’d thought I could shield him from the ugly truths of possession and magic, and all I’d actually managed was to make sure he wasn’t ready when trouble came. I put away my phone and took out my laptop, checked a few news sites and a couple of Web comics. Fidgeted. Put the laptop away. Chogyi Jake was on the bed next to Ozzie, and it wasn’t perfectly clear which of them the snores were coming from. Five in the morning. The snow was still falling.

Ex leaned over from his bed and put his hand on my shoulder.

“You should sleep,” he said. “It’ll be all right. I’ll keep watch.”

“That’s what you do, isn’t it?”

“Sometimes,” he said. “When it needs doing.”

He didn’t take his hand away, and I didn’t want him to. The simple warmth and weight of a human hand felt like the best security blanket in the world just then. It wasn’t the prelude to anything else, nothing about it was flirtation or foreplay. That was what made it all right.

“It had a plan,” I said. “It was going to hollow me out and take over my life, and when that didn’t work out, it had something else it could fall back to.”

“You sound jealous,” he said.

“I am. I can’t remember the last time I had a clear idea of what I’d be doing next week. This thing plays with decades. With lifetimes. Can you imagine what it would be like to have that kind of time to plan through?”

“I’m supposed to be planning for my immoral soul,” Ex said. “But honestly, no. I can’t imagine living on that kind of time scale.”

“It’s got to be pissed off that I got its stuff, though,” I said. “Maybe we should go out and spend everything quick before it . . .”

Ex turned me around slowly, the hand on my shoulder drawing me back until I faced him. Then he took his hand away. In the light from the desk lamp and the backsplash of city lights from the snow, he looked younger. His black eye was already fading toward a weird green. I wondered what mine looked like. Whether my nose was going to be the same shape it had been before Rhodes broke it. I wondered if anything was ever really the same after it broke. Even things that healed were different. I felt a rush of exhausted tears come to my eyes.

“I wish I had a plan,” I said. “I wish I knew what I was doing next.”

“We’ll decide in the morning.”

“I don’t mean just that. I mean . . . I mean where do you see yourself five years from now? Or ten? Or twenty? I’m pretty sure I’m not going to spend the rest of my life bouncing from crisis to crisis and emergency room to emergency room. But I don’t know what that looks like. And it does.”

Ex stretched his neck, the vertebrae popping like a wet stick.

“It’s also apparently mind-warpingly crazy and evil besides,” he said.

“But with a solid investment portfolio,” I said. “Did you ever see it? I mean, you worked with him. I’m sure you didn’t think, Hey, this guy’s clearly possessed. Would you look at that? But from here, looking back, were there signs?”

Someone in a nearby room turned on the shower. The pipes sang.

“No. I didn’t suspect anything at the time, and I can’t think of anything that in retrospect should have looked suspicious. He seemed like exactly what he claimed to be. Whatever this thing is, it can pass for human. It may take years to track this thing down. It may take our whole lives. But we can do it.”

“Do we have to?”

“Yes,” he said, and he was right. I had come into this thinking that Eric had been some kind of spiritual fixer, the guy who came in when there was trouble and faced down the demons. He’d been just the opposite, but that didn’t change things for me. If anything, it confirmed it. The Graveyard Child. The haugsvarmr . The body-hopping serial killer that had ruined Karen Black. They were madness, and I was in a position to do something about them. And so yes, I had to.

“And the Black Sun?” I asked. “Are you going to have to fight her too?”

“She’s a demon,” Ex said. “Sooner or later, yes. That’s going to be a problem. But she’s not at the top of my to-do list.”

I chuckled.

“Suppose that’ll have to do.”

I rose and walked to the window, put my fingertips to the glass. The cold pressed through, but not as badly as I’d expected. The world was the soft orange-gray of city lights captured by the snow. I let the future fade away for a second. The need for a plan, for certainty. I just took in the moment and let it be beautiful. My hometown, in snow.

“Can I ask you something?” Ex said.

“You can ask me anything.”

“You don’t seem freaked out. Why not?”

“I don’t seem freaked out?” I said, laughing a little through the words. “Seriously?”

“Well, maybe a little. But compared to what I expected . . . I mean, in the last few days you found out that your father wasn’t your real father, that your mom was ritually abused by your uncle, and you’re the product of that abuse. That your mother is probably insane because of what happened to her. That you had your mind altered by this Graveyard Child thing; that you almost escaped the whole thing once, only you don’t remember; and that the thing that’s responsible for it all is not only still alive but it seems like it may be tracking you. By just about any scale, that’s a pretty bad week.”