“If I don’t make it out, take care of Ex and Ozzie for me.”
I’d meant it as a joke, but even then as a ha-ha-only-serious one. Chogyi Jake put his hand on my wrist for a moment, then let go. “Are there any other messages you’d want me to pass along?”
I paused for a moment, wishing he’d taken the line a little less seriously. Was there anyone I’d want to pass a message to? I thought of Jay and Carla. My parents. Little Curt about to graduate high school. I thought of Aubrey, who had made the transition from lover to ex-lover to nice guy I used to sleep with so gracefully that it sort of called everything that had come before into question.
“No,” I said. “I’m good.”
“Be careful.”
I opened the door and slid down to the ground. As I closed it behind me, Rhodes opened his door. He was wearing a pair of blue jeans and a shirt that looked like it had been slept in. He hadn’t bothered with a glamour. He was thinner than I’d remembered him. The thin stubble of hair on his scalp showed that he was balding a little. If he’d been human, he’d have passed for a junior system administrator. He stepped back as I came close, gesturing me in. I nodded. As I passed through the door, I felt the echo of his wards like a change in the air pressure.
The room was if anything more squalid than the exterior promised. The greenish wallpaper showed its seams, and the bed seemed to apologize for itself. The lock was mechanical, and the chain looked like it had rusted where the links touched. I sat at a tiny writing desk, and the chair groaned under me. Rhodes closed the door but he didn’t lock it. We both knew that if it came down to unpleasantness, a couple cheap locks and a hollow-core door weren’t going to make a difference.
“Well,” I said. “This is awkward. I think we got off on the wrong foot. You and the others. You’ve got something against the Graveyard Child, right?”
Rhodes didn’t speak, just stood there, arms folded across his chest. His lips were pressed thin, and I couldn’t tell if it was from fear or anger. The markings on his face acted like a mask, obscuring all the fine details of his expression.
“Okay,” I said. “So here’s the thing. I’m not the Graveyard Child. I have a rider in me, but it’s not that one. And I think maybe we’re on the same side.”
He shook his head in a gesture of disbelief.
“You’ve got brass ones, I’ll give you that,” he said. “So now we’re on the same side again, are we? You broke the temple. You killed Coin. And now you think you can waltz in here and smile and pretend it never happened?”
“Yeah. I know. That was a mistake, and if I could take it back, I would.”
“No,” Rhodes said. “You don’t get to switch sides every time the wind blows. You made your choice and you acted on it, and now the consequences are your problem.”
It was fear. It showed when he spoke and in the way he moved, but it was also standing firm in spite of the fear. He was scared of me, but he wouldn’t let it rule him.
“Let me explain,” I said. “I didn’t even know about riders until Eric died. All I knew was that he’d been killed and that Coin had been part of it. I thought I was protecting myself. And yeah, okay, there was a kind of vengeance kick too, but I didn’t know what was—”
The sound was something between a laugh and a cough. He stepped close to me, his eyes flashing. His hands were balled into fists.
“Goddamn. You really thought you could lie your way out of this? I was there. I was with you. Did you think I wouldn’t remember you, or did you just forget about me?”
I had planned out a hundred different ways this conversation could go. Everything from apocalyptic battles that ended with me watching everyone I cared about die, to hugs and beer and pizza. This hadn’t been on my list.
“You were with me?”
“I saw you take the oath. You knew everything.”
I could feel the power radiating from him like heat.
“Okay, the only thing I don’t understand is every word you just said.”
He blinked. Under his mask of skin, his expression shifted, changed. He tilted his head and narrowed his eyes.
“The induction,” he said.
I held up my hands, palms open, and shook my head. Rhodes sat on the edge of the bed. Springs squeaked under him. I couldn’t imagine how anybody could sleep on something that loud.
“Holy shit,” he said. “You really did forget me, didn’t you?”
“I’m guessing we ran into each other before somewhere?” I said.
He pressed his hand to his mouth. His eyes flickered in the middle distance, like he was looking for something in the empty air. I had the uncomfortable feeling that I’d been left behind, but I waited for him. He did the laugh-cough thing again.
“You really . . . you don’t know?”
“Really don’t,” I said.
“I met you . . . God, was it ten years ago? Not the last induction, but the one before.”
“The one before?”
He nodded.
“We came to you when you were leaving church on the Thursday before the rites. You came with us. I gave you that flower. You don’t remember any of it?”
I felt a little dizzy. If this was a trick, a way to get me disoriented and off my guard, it was working pretty well. The Invisible College held their inductions every seven years—prime number. Like cicadas. Midian Clark had told me that. The ceremony I’d broken up had been in August. Right over my twenty-third birthday, in fact. So seven years before that would have been . . .
Sixteen. Oh, holy shit, it would have been my sixteenth birthday. The one where I’d lost two days.
I felt the world drop a little, like an airplane hitting a rough patch of air. I was suddenly deeply aware of the half-finished tattoo at the base of my own spine. The one that I didn’t remember getting. The one Uncle Eric had helped me hide from Dad.
“What happened?” I said.
chapter eighteen
“All right,” Rhodes said, running his hands over his scalp with a sound like paper against paper. “This is going to be . . . So the Invisible College? It started off as a group of natural philosophers in the 1630s. They were looking at what makes living beings different from just normal matter, and in the course of their experiments they found riders. We all made a deal. The society acted as hosts for the riders—a way to reach the physical world—and in return, the same riders would bring their knowledge and experience to new generations of the society. The idea was that we could continue research over more than one lifetime. Normally all the knowledge and experience and insight that someone gets in the course of their life either gets put in books and essays that maybe keep five or ten percent of what they actually know, or else they’re just lost. We got around that.”
“So wait a minute,” I said. “Who are you, really?”
“I’m Jonathan Rhodes, really,” he said. “But I have access to Marian Cunningham, who was host before me, and Emile Canna, who studied the kabbalah in the 1920s, and Sean Korrigan, who was a biologist and undertaker and artist in Baltimore in the 1890s. I have the things they knew and the way they saw the world. We’re all part of one longer life than any single body could carry. Or at least than it could carry without ossifying. You need to get a young person in every now and again to see things in a different way. Sean Korrigan was a decent guy for his time, but his stance on women and blacks wouldn’t fit too well in the modern world. We’re different people, but we’re part of the same continuity.”
“Okay,” I said. “I think I can follow that.”
“Abraxiel Unas was one of us. Not a person. A rider. A continuity of people through time.”
I felt my heart start to beat a little faster. I felt like I was on the edge of something, like unwrapping a present on Christmas morning, except without the joy or sense of safety.