“We wouldn’t want to intrude,” Chogyi Jake said.
“Of course not,” she said in a way that could have meant You wouldn’t be intruding or Of course you wouldn’t want that with equal facility. Chogyi Jake’s smile was warm and open as always. What I knew of his life pretty much precluded caring much about whether my mother approved of him, but he wasn’t going to be rude about any of it. He was good that way. Still, I felt the warring urges to sweep my friends away from her impeccably polite disapproval or to stand up for them. I hadn’t been in the house five minutes, and I had already reverted to eighteen.
“Where’ve you been?” Curtis asked, curiosity and enthusiasm blinding him to every uncomfortable nuance and subtext.
“Santa Fe,” I said. “And parts of northern New Mexico, but we spent Christmas in Santa Fe.”
“You have friends there?” Beside him, Carla was checking something on her cell phone.
“Sort of,” I said.
“Well, you know the wedding’s the third,” Curtis said, flopping onto a kitchen chair. “A bunch of Carla’s family’s coming in. They’re having it at the church.”
The way he said it made it seem impressive, like that wasn’t the normal place for a wedding. And then I imagined Pastor Michael with his carefully combed hair and constant chummy grin welcoming a pregnant girl up to the altar, and it got a little impressive for me too.
“It’s good to see you,” Jay said. “We’ve been worried.”
“No reason to be,” I said. “Sorry I’ve been scarce.”
Jay smiled.
“It’s just good to see you again. I’m glad you came for this.”
Mom finished serving water to Chogyi Jake and Ex, and turned to me.
“Well? Sit down, sit down. No point us all standing around like straws. How’s college treating you, dear? Have you picked a major?”
Ex’s eyebrows rose. His glance at me said You really have been out of touch, haven’t you?
“Is . . . is Dad . . . ?”
“He’s in the garage,” Mom said, nodding toward the door at the side of the TV room. As if I might have forgotten how to get there. “He’s working in there.”
“I’m just . . .” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
The garage was his space. The side wall was covered in Peg-Board, with the outlines of his tools to mark where each of them should hang. A few nuggets of cat litter crunched under my feet, escapees from the pile he kept under the car to soak up dripping engine oil. He sat at his workbench, his back to me. The directional lamp lit his hands, the white sleeves rolled halfway up his forearms. He was organizing a can of mixed screws, plucking them into piles by thickness, dividing them into Phillips and flathead. It was like watching a kid playing jacks. The kind of thing people always meant to do but never got around to. Unless there was something else that they particularly didn’t want to do.
“So,” I said. “I guess you knew I was coming.”
“Your mother said so,” he replied. His voice was low. In another man I would have called it sullen, but this was my father, so all I could really hear was disapproval. “You here to borrow money?”
“I don’t need money,” I said, chuckling. Nothing I had bought—houses, cars, tickets to Europe, stays in expensive hotels—could even make a dent in the fortune Eric had left me.
He turned to face me. I’d been prepared for a lot of things. Anger, dismissal, the empty coldness that came when he withheld his affections as punishment. There was more than that in him. There was hatred. And also sorrow.
“Well,” he said. “I guess that answers that, then, doesn’t it?” He turned his back to me, his fingers shifting the little bits of metal. The scraping sound was like claws against stone.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Look, I understand that you’re angry with me. And I understand why. But I need to ask you some questions.”
“Why would I be angry with you? What you do with your own’s got nothing to do with me. You just leave me and my family out of it.”
It felt like a slap. I actually had to fight to catch my breath.
“Your family?” I said. “They’re yours, are they?”
“They are,” he said.
“And I’m not.”
“Not anymore,” he said. “Not like you are. You made your choices. I made mine.”
It was like being hollowed. If he’d turned and struck me, I’d have rung like a bell. There was that much nothing in me. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to say it. When I did speak, I almost expected it to be her—my rider—taking control, but the voice was all me.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” I said, pulling the obscenity out in slow, deliberate syllables. His shoulders bunched, but he didn’t turn back. Didn’t rise to the bait. I was crying now, the tears actually stung. “I mean, goddamn it.”
“I won’t have that kind of language in my house,” he said. His voice sounded thick. Whether it was rage or tears of his own, I didn’t know and it didn’t matter.
“Yeah, because language is what’s important to you. Saying the right words. Actually being a good man? Actually treating me with respect or listening to me or even being in the house to say hello to me when I show up would be wildly un-Christlike. No, hiding in your garage so that I have to come back out here, and then treating me like shit, and telling me I’m not your family anymore—that’s way better than cursing.”
I had my hand halfway to his shoulder. I’d intended to shake him, or turn him around to face me, or something. I don’t know what. The invisible wave hit me like the shock of a bomb without the explosion.
Chi. Raw will. Magic. Whatever you wanted to call it, I’d felt it enough times to recognize it. Someone—or something—had just released a lot of power. Too much power to have come from a human.
Inside the house, glass shattered and my mother screamed.
Dad pulled a drawer open and took out a pistol. The barrel gleamed in the light, clean and freshly oiled. His glance at me was fear and vicious anger. Whatever was in there, whatever had happened, he was going to head in like he could handle it.
He was going to get himself killed.
“No. Stay back,” I said, jumping for the door. “I’ll take care of this.”
“Fuck you,” my father said.
chapter three
My father and I bolted out into the TV room practically together. The air stank of heated iron, and my mother wasn’t the only one screaming. The first thing I saw was Carla squatting on the kitchen floor, her hand to her belly and her eyes wide. Ex stood in front of her, his hands in fists. The television and the kitchen windows were shattered, and three people were standing by the kitchen table. Two were holding pump shotguns, one at Curtis, one at Chogyi Jake. The third was turning to look at me.
Every square inch of the intruders’ skin was marked with ink. The first time I’d seen anything like this, I’d been in an apartment in Denver, talking with a vampire. Back then I hadn’t known what any of the markings meant. After three years of studying, I recognized some. The swirling cross of the Mark of Enki. The angled, cruel letters of the Goetic alphabet. They were wizards. They were the same wizards who had killed my uncle, who had hidden the viciously evil haugsvarmr under Grace Memorial Hospital.
The Invisible College was standing in my parents’ kitchen.
The one without the gun lifted his hands and shouted, and the sound was more than sound. It carried the weight of will. The ragged, meat-tearing noise of it staggered my father back into me, and I put my hand between his shoulder blades to steady him. The wizard’s jaw unhinged, and his mouth gaped wider than a normal human’s could have. I acted without thought, and I didn’t act alone. I felt my body breathing in, taking the power of the wizard’s tainted shout into my lungs, pulling his power out of the air. It wasn’t something a human could do, but the Black Sun was with me, guiding me.