M. Hanover - Graveyard Child

I pressed my ear to the door again. It was quiet. I imagined her on the other side, maybe inches from me.

“I can help Jay,” I said. Nothing. “I can save the baby, Carla. Open the door, and I swear in the name of Jesus Christ, Lord of Lords, that I will help you save your baby. I swear it in His name.”

The trick is to know your audience. The lock clicked. The knob turned and Carla pulled the door open. She looked like hell. She wore a dirty nightgown that showed how big her belly had grown. The dark, exhausted circles under her eyes were as dark as the blood pooled under mine, and the whites of her eyes were pink. Her skin looked gray and her wrists were red and angry. Ligature marks. Sometime recently she’d been tied against her will, and I was pretty sure it hadn’t been when she was with Rhodes.

“What did you do?” she asked. “What did you do to him?”

“Made him nervous, I think,” I said. And then, simply, “There’s a demon in him. It’s not Jay. It’s the thing inside him.”

Tears tracked down her cheeks. The cold was making gooseflesh on her arms and legs, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“I want to go home now,” she said.

“All right,” I said. “I can help you do that.”

She shook her head slowly and opened her arms. I walked across the threshold and embraced her. Her body felt hot as a fire, and she folded against me. “He’s the devil,” she murmured. “He’s the devil, he’s the devil, he’s the devil.”

I turned to look back. Chogyi Jake stood in the snow. He wasn’t smiling.

“I think we’ve got confirmation,” I said.

“I believe we do,” he said.

We didn’t pack her anything, just put a coat over her nightgown and took the car. When I looked for her purse, she told me it was gone. Her ID, her money, her cell phone. Everything was gone. After Jay got her from the Invisible College’s safe house, he’d taken everything away.

The Best Western, despite having the most forgiving cleaning staff in Christendom, wasn’t safe anymore. I didn’t know where to take her, so instead I drove, as if movement by itself was a kind of defense. As if the Graveyard Child couldn’t find us.

“He told me that he’d kill me if I left again,” she said. “He said that I was his. I didn’t mean to hurt him. I thought I had to go. The tattooed man said that . . . my baby . . . and that you were . . .”

“The tattooed man and I kind got our wires crossed,” I said. “We’re cool now, though. Nothing bad is going to happen to you now. We’re going to make sure you’re all right.”

She licked her lips and looked up at me.

“How?” she asked. I didn’t have an answer. I needed shelter. Safety. I needed a base of operations I could count on being secure.

I needed a home.

“Gentlemen?” I said. “I am open to suggestions.”

“Are we thinking short term or long?” Ex asked.

“Either. Both.”

“A sacred place,” Chogyi Jake said. “In the short term. After that, it will depend on the situation with Jay.”

“We can go to church,” I said, but Chogyi Jake grunted softly and shook his head.

“Someplace we thought the rider unlikely to have been already,” he said. “Better if it was someplace he wasn’t familiar with. A Buddhist temple would be best for what I have in mind.”

“We’re in Kansas, ” Ex said. “Where are we going to find a Buddhist temple here ?”

“Fairmount,” I said. “That’s where the Zen center is anyway. I think there’s one out on South Hydraulic by the exit from 35 too, but I’m not sure about that.”

The silence in the car was broken only by the wind, the engine, and Ozzie’s steady breath.

“That was my prejudices showing, wasn’t it?” Ex said.

“We love you anyway,” I said, making a careful U-turn.

At the temple, Chogyi Jake spoke quietly with a kind-faced woman who listened to him intensely. Ex and Carla and I sat in a waiting room, drinking tea from Dixie cups while the wind howled at the windows. Now that Carla was out of that oppressive, grim house, she seemed to be rallying a little. There was more color in her cheeks, and the fever-heat that had radiated from her before was lessening. Despite all that, she looked empty and lost and alone. I wondered if I’d looked like that once myself. Seemed likely.

“He woke up this morning and listened to his voice mail,” she said. “That was the last time I saw him. He just left. He didn’t tell me where he was going. He said that I had to stay in the house. He took my shoes. He took all my shoes away so I wouldn’t leave.”

“I’ll get you new shoes,” I said. “Did he say where he was going?”

“I asked. He said he didn’t answer to me,” she said.

“Has he been like this before?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “But then he’s so sorry. He’s so sweet. He’s my little Jay-bird.”

Ex stood up. I could see the anger in his expression, even if Carla couldn’t.

“I’m going to take the dog for a walk around the block,” he said.

“She’s not going to thank you for that,” I said.

“I know,” Ex said, limping manfully back toward the door.

I watched him go.

“Did I piss him off?” Carla asked. Her voice sounded tired.

“You didn’t,” I said. “He blames himself because he didn’t keep this from happening to you. He does it with everyone.”

“That’s dumb.”

“He’s dumb sometimes.”

Chogyi Jake came in and nodded to me. As I walked out into the hall, the kind-faced woman went in behind me.

“The good news is that they have had some experience with riders here, and have connections with a women’s shelter. I believe they will be able to keep her safe until we can arrange a way to get her safely back to Florida and her family.”

“The Graveyard Child can buy plane tickets too,” I said. “I’m not sure there will be any place safer than here. Hell, for that matter, I’m not sure where we can go. This thing is a bad one.”

Chogyi Jake paused, leaning against the yellow-brown wall. The inked calligraphy behind him reminded me of Jonathan Rhodes. The air had the faintest ghost of incense.

“It is,” he said. “I believe the time will come when we have to confront it. But now isn’t that time. It has the advantage of its own environment. It has places of physical and spiritual power to draw from. And by the nature of its host, it has certain protections we don’t.”

“You mean that, since it’s in Jay, I won’t kill it,” I said.

“And it won’t hesitate to kill us. Yes. I think the time is right for a strategic retreat. We go to Denver and research its habits, learn about its goals and its strengths and weaknesses. Consult with the Invisible College and Sabine Glapion. Aubrey and Kim. Tamblen and Carsey and the rest of Father Chapin’s exorcists. We have a network of support that we can bring to bear on this problem. If you and Ex and I can’t solve it, the others will find a way.”

I felt myself frowning. Everything he said made sense, and I hated it. I wanted to make Carla and her baby safe in some long-term, permanent way. The truth was that no one gets that, ever. The bad guys might come after her, or she might get cancer, or escape from Jay and the Graveyard Child and fall in love with some other, more mundane abusive asshole. The best I could do was the best I could do.

“I don’t have to like it, though, right?”

“No. You don’t,” he said.

“So wait for the storm to break, then gas up and get out of here?”

“And we will need to make a call to your lawyer,” Chogyi Jake said. “Roshi Annabel is an uncompromising negotiator, and I’m afraid we’ve promised her a great deal of money for taking care of Carla.”