Only, even with being able to beat everyone else in the room when it came to a fight, even with the kind of money that made Bruce Wayne feel like he needed a nicer suit, I’d still been set up. The power that had been going back for generations and leaving women and men destroyed and broken in its wake didn’t care if I could win a fistfight. I was just another kind of tool to it. I’d gotten incredibly lucky, and what the luck earned me was the time to figure that out on my own.
Now that I knew, I was going to have to get smart.
“The reason that there’s no resources on the Graveyard Child,” Chogyi Jake said.
“Same as the reason Jayné didn’t get scheduled for orientation,” Ex said. “You don’t need to tell someone what they already know. The one rider that the Graveyard Child would never need to research is the Graveyard Child.”
“And the Invisible College is still looking to take me out,” I said, “because whatever grudge they had against the Graveyard Child, they don’t think it’s finished. They think it got out of Eric and into me.”
“Which may be why they’d try to keep Carla away,” Chogyi Jake said.
“If they thought her baby was getting lined up to be the new sacrifice, sure,” I said. “I don’t know if the Graveyard Child did something in particular to piss them off, or if the riders in the Invisible College are naturally predisposed to hate it, or if it’s some kind of weird altruism thing. But they’ve been trying to break the cycle. First by killing Eric, and now by threatening its hold on Carla, using her as bait, and trying to bind it.”
“But because the Black Sun was never cast out of you, the Graveyard Child never got in,” Ex said. “The binding failed.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Now they may figure that out on their own. Or they may not.”
“They’ve kept trying for years at least,” Chogyi Jake said. “It would seem odd if they gave up the effort now. I mean, assuming you’re right about all this.”
“And so the next attempt could be some clever bastard with an enchanted sniper rifle,” I said. “I will be under threat from a huge magical conspiracy for the rest of my life unless I can get them to call off the hunt.”
They were silent for a moment. I could see both men thinking it through, looking for cracks in the theory. As the seconds passed, I felt more and more sure they wouldn’t find any. It was still only a theory, a story that fit the facts, but maybe not the only one that did.
“We can go back to the Water Street house,” Chogyi Jake said. “Or get someone to deliver a message to it. If we can arrange some kind of parley, maybe—”
“Or they can use that to set a new trap with a different outcome,” Ex said. “And that’s assuming that they haven’t taken off. If I were in their position, I don’t know that I’d be hanging around, waiting to see if Jayné had a truckful of fertilizer and diesel she wanted to park outside my place. If Eric was possessed by the Graveyard Child, it made him kind of a prick about that kind of thing.”
“Agreed,” I said. “We have to assume they’re on the lam. The longer it takes for us to confirm this, the more likely it is that something bad’s going to happen. And by that I mean worse than me assassinating their head guy.”
“Having done that does make a simple conversation seem less plausible,” Chogyi Jake said mildly.
“Twelve hours ago, they were here. In Wichita,” I said. “They’re scared, and keeping a very low profile is what they do best. We aren’t going to get a better chance than this. Not anytime soon. We have to hunt them down now.”
“Agreed,” Chogyi Jake said. “But do you have any thoughts as to how it might be done?”
I picked up my cell phone. My lawyer answered on the third ring.
“Jayné, dear. Is everything all right?”
“It’s a little messy, actually,” I said. “But body and soul are still more or less together.”
“What can I do to help?”
I took a deep breath. After all this time, I still felt like I was asking permission.
“I need a miracle,” I said. “The three top-ranking members of the Invisible College were in the city last night, and I think the chances are pretty good that they’ve made a break for it. I need to find at least one of them, and I need to do it very, very quickly.”
“That’s going to be difficult,” my lawyer said. “The week between Christmas and New Year’s is always difficult, and those particular ladies and gentlemen are surprisingly challenging to keep track of.”
“You remember how you said I didn’t spend as much money as Eric used to?”
“Yes, dear?”
“I don’t care if we break the bank doing this. If it means spending everything down to the floorboards, I’m okay with that. I just need these people found.”
The line was quiet for so long, I thought I’d lost the connection. Or that she’d hung up on me. When at last she did speak, I could hear the smile in her voice.
“Well, dear. That’s a horse of a somewhat different color, now, isn’t it?”
chapter seventeen
It was snowing as I drove out of town. The traffic on the highway was sparse, and made mostly of long-haul truckers throwing gray slush up behind them as they sped to make time. Low gray clouds held in the light from the city even as it faded away behind me. The oncoming headlights caught the swirl of huge, feathery flakes. The red brake lights before us seemed softer and farther away. The radio was infomercials, canned sermons, pop songs, and one lonely sex advice show relayed in from the West Coast. I cycled between them incessantly until Chogyi Jake stopped me by putting in some Pink Martini.
It was almost midnight. It was the twenty-ninth of December. If the year had a dead spot, this was it. The long, cold hours when everything that had been going to happen in the long, slow trip around the sun had already happened and nothing new could quite begin. I felt like we’d stepped outside time, outside the ebb and flow of the normal human world and into a kind of bleak, surreal mindscape. The night had been directed by David Lynch.
I hunched over the steering wheel, my knuckles aching. The heater’s white-noise thrumming rose and fell as I accelerated or braked. I was pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to do that. The sense of anticipation and fear crawled up my spine. I wanted to go faster, to be there already, and I wanted to slow down for fear of what was coming.
We passed through Newton and Herington. Junction City was still twenty minutes ahead of us. We were coming close.
“Are you certain you want to do this?” Chogyi Jake asked.
“Nope,” I said.
“And are you determined to do it regardless?”
“Yep.”
“Can I ask why?”
I glanced over at him. His face was calm, but he looked older than he had back when we’d all started together in Denver. As if the years had been longer for him than for the rest of us. I wondered what he would have done if it hadn’t been for me and Eric and the fortune that I’d used to hire him and Ex and Aubrey. Whatever it would have been, I hoped he didn’t regret missing it.
“You mean besides the obvious not wanting to be hunted by a cabal of riders?”
“Yes, besides that.”
I grinned. No one else would have moved past me so gracefully or been able to put me at ease while he did it. It was what I loved him for.
“I want to know if I’m right,” I said.
“Is it important that you be?”
“It changes who Eric was. If he was being ridden, it changes why he did everything he did. To my mother. To Kim. To me.”
Chogyi Jake made a small sound in the back of his throat. “So we’re trying to save Eric. Not the man himself, of course, but what he meant.”