“I know,” I said. “That’s why I want to go outside of them.”
“Still not following,” Ex said.
“Indulge me. I have a hypothesis.”
The bathroom door opened, and Chogyi Jake stepped out. I was past him in a second.
“What’s the plan?” he asked.
“Two-fisted tales of research,” I said.
“Does it include eating?”
“As long as it isn’t room service, go wild,” I said, and closed the door.
The hot water didn’t run out, and I gave it every opportunity to. I stood under the steaming blast long past when I needed to. The heat of the water relaxed the muscles along my back and shoulders, and the steam fog felt like luxury. Slowly, I felt my mind becoming clearer, more focused. The long night of fear had scrambled me, left me ignoring anything that wasn’t happening just then. Now it was over, and I could start putting the pieces together. There had been so many mysteries in my life for so long, I’d gotten used to ignoring things that didn’t fit. Now, maybe for the first time, I was starting to see a pattern that put everything in place. It was ugly, but that was all right with me. I’d faced ugly and I could do it again. What I needed was true.
The Invisible College had tried to bind me. It had failed. And that was the piece of the puzzle that made everything else make sense. Eric’s childhood. My childhood. The ritual hollowing out of my mother. The more I looked at it, the more sense it made. Certainty settled around me like a cloak.
I got it now. I knew.
The only thing that was left was confirmation.
When at last I got out and toweled off, I felt better than I had in weeks. Maybe months. Grounded. I put on my robe and waited for the steam to clear off the mirror. I heard Ex and Chogyi Jake talking in low voices. Ex puzzled and annoyed. Chogyi Jake calm but perplexed. Something equal parts dread and excitement tightened my chest.
The scent of chicken in garlic sauce and curried shrimp filled the room as I stepped out. The white folded cardboard boxes lined the black dresser. Chogyi Jake was in the little overstuffed chair by the window with a white paper cup of what I assumed was green tea in his hand and a plate of food on his knee. I picked one of the containers up, grabbed a pair of cheap break-them-apart-yourself chopsticks, and folded myself back into bed. Outside, the sunlight seemed wrong. It took me a few seconds to realize that, after waking up and taking a shower, I was expecting it to be morning instead of afternoon.
“What have we got?” I asked, and popped a piece of broccoli into my mouth.
“I don’t know how you figured out that it wouldn’t be in our books,” Ex said. He was still on the bed, his injured foot propped up under four pillows to help it drain. “You were right, though. I sent an email to Carsey and Tamblen.”
I nodded. “And what did the Vatican’s best have to say?”
“Not a lot, but they’d at least heard of it,” Ex said. “It’s a gamchicoth form.”
“And for the people playing along at home, that means . . . ?”
“It’s unpleasant,” Chogyi Jake said, “even as these things go.”
“It’s called a devourer,” Ex said, “but that’s kind of a misnomer. From what Tamblen said, it’s more like slaver ants. It’s a rider that uses other riders to do its work.”
I felt myself growing still as they went on.
“It’s got a reputation for being viciously intelligent, as long-lived as a varkolak or a ravana. Strong, mean, more than a little sadistic, but also risk averse.”
“Is it a species or an individual?” I asked.
“We don’t know that yet,” Chogyi Jake said. “Tamblen recommended checking an archival source in Vienna. He’s trying to get up permission, but with the new year coming up we may not hear anything until next week. So, with the old financial records in Denver, that’s two great huge stacks of records to go through.”
“One’s a massive collection of arcane secrets and obscure references, and the other one’s in Europe,” I said with a grin. “How do you kill it?”
Ex and Chogyi Jake exchanged a glance. “We don’t know yet,” Ex said. “You had a hypothesis. How does this all fit into it?”
“Unfortunately, pretty well,” I said.
“Walk us through it,” Ex said, scowling.
“All right,” I said, holding up the chopsticks like a pointer. “Here’s what we know. Eric got a bunch of money that’s been getting passed down through my family since forever, and when he died, he passed it on to me.”
“So are you thinking that the wealth itself is carrying the rider?” Chogyi Jake asked.
“No. Hold on. I’ll get there. The next thing we know is that Eric used my mother to build someone who’d been possessed since literally before birth,” I said, raising my hand. “And he was looking to cut a deal with a massive rider that could, in theory, have been strong enough to bind the Black Sun on a permanent basis. The haugsvarmr bound her in the 1940s, remember?”
“That seems like a lot of work to wind up where you started from,” Ex said. “Invoke the Black Sun, create a daughter organism, then track down something to get rid of the daughter. How does that get you anything?”
“It gets you a shell,” Chogyi Jake said, nodding.
“Right,” I said. “And if we think about what happened to Eric, it sounds like the same song in a different key. He got ridden young. Not as young as me, but still when he was a kid. And the rider got shucked out of him. And the one thing we know about folks who’ve had riders is that they’re more open and vulnerable when the next one comes.”
“You’re saying that Eric was preparing you to be possessed by some other spirit?” Chogyi Jake asked.
“I’m saying there’s been a rider crawling down my family tree since God knows when. And each generation, it grooms some poor new kid, puts a rider in them, lets it get comfortable, then shucks it out and leaves the kid open, vulnerable, and gasping.”
“Only, that didn’t happen to you,” Ex said.
“Didn’t, did it? Because Eric got killed before I was ready. I still had a tenant, and I didn’t even know. But everything else was in place. The money came to me. The property. All the things that the Graveyard Child’s been hoarding over the past who knows how many generations dropped into my name, just like they’d dropped into Eric’s when his uncle died. And I’ll bet you dollars to donuts we can trace versions of the same story all the way back to forever.
“Eric left me everything he had but didn’t warn me about anything. Also, Eric wasn’t stupid. That looks like a contradiction.”
“Unless . . .” Chogyi Jake said.
“Unless I wasn’t supposed to be the one in control of the body when the money all came,” I said. “Someone else was supposed to be driving. Someone who already knew all about the money and the resources and the big, big picture. I was being groomed to be the next one eaten literally since before I was born.”
We all let it stand in the air for a second. It changed everything.
I’d started off thinking of Eric as a demon hunter, and of myself as his heir. Even when I’d figured out he was an evil sonofabitch, I didn’t cast him as a victim. Not until now. And with the money and the weird magical powers, I’d cast myself in the hero’s role. I was the kick-ass enemy of darkness, just like my idealized uncle. I could fight and win every time. I could get any outfit I wanted, go anywhere I chose. Other people whose lives were touched by riders were the ones who were really in trouble. People like Aaron the cop being ridden by a haugtrold or Dolores in New Mexico with the akaname or, it turned out, my mother. They needed help because they were powerless. Because they weren’t like me.