“Back to the hotel?” he asked as I shut the door. Chogyi Jake trotted to a side lot where his rental was parked, nose out for a fast getaway. “Jayné?”
“Hmm? Oh. Right. Yes, back to the hotel.”
Ex slid out into traffic, and I craned my neck. Mom was still in the restaurant. Still at our table. Her head was in her hands. The urge to go back to her was powerful and doomed.
“You all right?” Ex asked.
I’m fine fought with Hell no. The streets slid away under the tires, and I didn’t say anything. He didn’t ask again. All I could remember was my mother’s face as she asked me to put the rider back into her; all I could see was the hunger there.
chapter seven
“I mean, I knew my family was screwed-up.” I sat on the edge of my bed, one leg folded under me. The mattress made a soft huffing sound under my weight. Like an exhalation. “But oh my God. That was . . .”
“Kind of reframes your whole childhood?” Ex said.
“Does.”
Chogyi Jake stood beside the little in-room coffeemaker, a black coffee cup in one hand and a tea bag in the other. The machine gurgled and spat heated water into a pot. Chogyi Jake’s stubble was getting long again, his scalp fading into a dark halo. He’d shave it again soon. Ex’s smile would have looked cruel and a little judgmental if I hadn’t known that most of his judgments were on himself or the world. I knew these men well enough to read the way they held their bodies, the way they spoke, and dressed. We’d been in almost constant company since I’d arrived in Denver. Since I’d begun this chapter in my life. It was the kind of intimacy that you got with family. Small indications that grew into a larger whole, that drew along a whole cloud of implications behind it.
Except that apparently family could still surprise me. I could live with someone for years—live my whole life with them and know how to read their moods like a sailor reading the weather in a sunrise—and miss the huge, defining, central fact of their whole damn life. I thought of my father, even if he wasn’t exactly my father, and his sullen anger. I thought about the times he’d yelled at my mother that I hadn’t understood why. That made more sense now. But there were other things.
When I was eight, the whole family got the flu at the same time. The whole house was sick for a week and a half, and it was my father, suffering and weak, who brought me bowls of soup to eat in bed and medicine for the fever. Another time, when I was ten or eleven, I lost control of my bike and scraped a patch of skin the size of my palm off my left hip. Dad tended to the wound, and afterward he got his own bike out of the garage and showed me how to ride with my center of gravity lower.
If he wasn’t really my father, if I was the cuckoo in the nest, and, more to the point, if he knew that, then all the little moments of caring—the Band-Aids and the kiss-it-and-make-it-betters and the birthday presents and the sticks of gum for a good grade on a test—changed too. They weren’t the bare minimum.
If I had been the constant reminder of his wife’s betrayal—if he’d swallowed the humiliation of raising another man’s daughter not even knowing who the other guy was—then all of those moments of kindness, of love, became deeper and stranger and more profound than I had known. And my ignorance had been part of his gift to me. I was his daughter. His viciously controlled, better-damn-well-do-what-he-said, in-by-curfew, and sixteen’s-too-young-to-date daughter, yeah. But his. And I’d never questioned that he was my father.
Even now, even knowing that Eric had provided the sperm donation that led to me, Dad was still my dad. I couldn’t change that. And I couldn’t change the resentment I felt toward him either. I could only know intellectually that it might not be as justified as I’d thought, and the dissonance was profound.
“Earth to Doris,” Ex said.
“What?” I snapped.
“I asked if you wanted a cup of tea,” Chogyi Jake said. “Several times.”
“Oh. Sorry. Yes.”
“Green?”
“Nasty-ass Lipton,” I said, “if you’ve got it.”
“Nasty-ass Lipton it is,” Chogyi Jake said.
“So the question is what Eric was up to,” Ex said, scratching Ozzie’s ears and looking at her like she might know the answer. “It sounds like the Mark of Salim al-Assad. Binding different riders into the same host body until he got the one he was looking for. Only, instead of a goat, he was using a woman.”
“That’s possible. Having a host that had been ridden several times would make subsequent possessions easier,” Chogyi Jake said. He handed me a coffee cup with the thin white string of the tea bag looped around the handle. “But that she was naked left me wondering about rites of Inanna.”
“I just figured it was Eric getting his rocks off,” Ex said with a shrug.
“Okay. Talking about my mother here,” I said. “I’m feeling pretty freaked out already. It’s not helping to imagine her as Eric’s . . .” I waved my hand.
“Mind-controlled, sexually exploited lab hamster?” Ex offered.
“Yes, that. Not helping.”
“But it’s what she was,” Ex said. “We knew that Eric was capable of atrocities. Looking away from it now doesn’t win us anything. You aren’t responsible for any of this. None of this is your fault. But you exist because Eric was willing to go to great lengths to make a child that would be possessed by the Black Sun from the moment of conception. He put a lot of effort into making that happen, and when he’d managed it, he moved on to whatever was next on his to-do list. There has to be a reason.”
“That isn’t what he’s done, though,” Chogyi Jake said. “Jayné isn’t simply ridden by the Black Sun. Eric engineered the creation of a new rider. A daughter not only for the woman but for the mature Black Sun as well.”
“Good point,” Ex said.
I stood up and scooped the leather leash and my oversize sunglasses off the dresser. Ozzie’s ears turned toward me, and she hopped on her front legs.
“I just took her out,” Ex said.
“Yeah,” I said. “This time she’s taking me.”
“Be careful. We didn’t see the Invisible College following you today, but that doesn’t mean they’re not out there.”
Ozzie and I walked down the corridor to the lobby. I had the leash in one hand and my coffee cup in the other. A television was set to FOX, where a woman in a pale blue dress was looking earnestly into the camera and talking about preparations being made for the New Year’s Eve celebrations and wondering aloud whether three days would be enough time to get ready. Red and silver tinsel and fake holly clung to the front desk, and the man behind it nodded to me as I passed. I smiled back reflexively.
Outside, the world was getting colder. High, thin clouds scudded across the vast blue like they were in a hurry to get someplace. Or at least away from here. From the smell, I guessed there was snow coming. I led Ozzie out to the edge of the parking lot, and she trotted amiably along beside me. The traffic on the highway buzzed, the individual cars and trucks and semis all blending together in a single constant sound. I sat on the concrete curb, my elbows resting on my knees. Ozzie looked at me, chuffed once, and sat at my side. I counted windows, found where my room was, and then the one Chogyi Jake and Ex were sharing. I wondered what would have happened if I’d checked in with one of them. I’d heard more than one story of an unmarried man and woman being required to get separate rooms. Not corporate policy, just my little town.