He frowned. The light from the window caught the plane of his cheek, illuminating the spray of faint stubble there. A few whiskers down near his chin were coming in white.
“It may be difficult to find them,” he said. “They are like you that way.”
“Difficult for magic to track down,” I said. “Well, we’re clever.”
“And pure of heart,” he said. It was so deadpan, no one who didn’t know him would have recognized it as a joke. I laughed, though.
“So we should ace it, right?” I said. “Let’s go tell Ex what’s up. And maybe order a pizza. I know a really good pizza joint.”
“Thank God for the native guide.”
ELIAS BARKER. Toomey Conaville. Sarah Conaville. Elmer Bowes. Anderson Skinner-Bowes. Nellie Skinner-Bowes. Amelia Norwich. Michael Bishop Heller. Eric Heller. Jayné Heller. From 1866 to tonight. Turned out, I was part of a tradition. There was a line of people pressing back into history, and I had something to do with them. Some commonality. Literally, some business. I didn’t have any idea what it was, but I would. All I had right now was the moments that the baton had been passed. I wondered if they’d all been as lost and confused as I was, or if there was some manual that was supposed to come with the fortune. Something that explained the riders and my relationship to them.
Nothing was going to excuse what Eric had done, but context might haul it up into explicable territory. That would be a start. It might even be enough.
I lay in bed that night, unable to sleep. Ozzie snuck onto the foot of my bed and I didn’t have the heart to kick her off. She was snoring now, her legs twitching occasionally as she chased some dream-world squirrel. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to sleep. In the hours since dawn, I’d found out I was actually Eric’s daughter, that my mother had been possessed by the Black Sun and was still half-crazy from the experience. That Eric’s money hadn’t just been Eric’s but had belonged to a long list of mysterious people leading back into the fog of history. I’d had whole years that were less eventful than today, and it left me feeling a little stunned.
Dad was not my father. I kept poking at the idea, waiting for it to explode on me. This was supposed to be where my whole sense of myself shifted, and it didn’t seem trivial. But it also didn’t change who I was. I’d been conceived in ritual sex magic orchestrated by my evil uncle while my mother was possessed by a rider who was also quite possibly bound against her will. That was way creepier than the joyless missionary-position indignity that I would have put my money on before, but it didn’t seem to have anything to do with me. I’d had a movie-set childhood where all the things I trusted in were lies and deceptions, but I kind of knew that already. What exactly was behind the curtain didn’t change much.
When I’d climbed out my window and headed out for Arizona, I’d broken with the past. That it hadn’t gone spectacularly seemed less important now than the bare fact that I’d done it. If everything back then seemed different now, well, so what? Maybe it didn’t really matter what past I’d broken from.
I shifted, pulling the pillows up over my head. In the corridor, someone tromped past, the squeaking of a suitcase’s wheel as identifiable as a finch’s song.
“Did you know?” I asked the darkness. “About Eric and putting all those different riders into Mom?”
For a long moment nothing happened. The footsteps outside my room stopped. The muffled sound of a door lock, a hotel door opening, then closing. Some random stranger whose life story intersected with mine just this much and no more.
“No,” my mouth said without me. “I did not know what he did to our mothers.”
Our mothers. Well, that was true. There were two of us and there were two of them. We’d been made together. Her mother and mine had both been bound, and we were both the products of that profoundly unclean ritual. I wondered if the rider was more upset than I was. I wondered if there was any way to comfort her. I turned the pillow over, putting the cool side against my cheek, closed my eyes, and willed myself to sleep.
I’d heard descriptions of people having strokes whose first symptoms weren’t weakness or confusion, but an overwhelming sense of wrongness. Between one breath and the next, something like that washed over me. The pillow was the same, but the crisp, ghost-white cloth was suddenly nauseating. The walls of darkened room seemed to be at subtly wrong angles. I turned on the light, thinking the brightness would push sanity back into the room, but the bulb seemed sickly too. Morgue light.
Ozzie lifted her head, growling deep in her throat. I sat up slowly, using both hands. I couldn’t tell if I was dizzy or not, only that something felt wrong. That I felt wrong.
“It’s okay, girl,” I said, but Ozzie wasn’t buying it. She jumped off the bed and started pacing the room, the growling getting louder. The hair on her back was raised, her lips pulled back to expose yellow, blunted teeth. She stopped at the window, her nose to the thick blackout curtains, and barked once.
“Shh,” I said, rising uncertainly to my feet. “It’s okay, girl. Keep it down or we’ll wake the neighbors.”
A sickening chill came over me, like the touch of a dead fish that had gone to rot. For a moment I thought I heard someone crying. Or maybe laughing. It was hard to breathe.
“Okay,” I said. “This isn’t just me, right?”
The rider didn’t answer, but I imagined her perched behind my eyes, waiting and alert and ready.
Ozzie barked again, the angry sound of an animal defending its territory, and I walked to the window. The dog’s barking was constant now, angry and wild and threatening. She didn’t turn to look at me when I got to her side. Her full attention was on the window. I didn’t want to pull back the curtains.
I pulled back the curtains.
Outside, the world looked the same and debased at the same time. The scattering of cars was just like it had been, but it meant something different. Decay, emptiness, the aftermath of disaster. The tires on the highway were a threat until they passed, and then they were hope retreating. I put my palms against the glass, and the cold bit my fingers. Dreams were like this. The way the meanings of things came unglued, and anything—an apple, a desert, the flicker of a match—could be a reason for bone-crushing fear. Madness was leaking into the world from the cracks, and I didn’t know where the flood was coming from.
And then I did.
It stood at the edge of the parking lot, not far from where I’d been sitting when Curtis called me. It was small. Maybe three, three and a half feet tall. No bigger. It had the frame of a kid, a black rain poncho with the hood up, so that all I could see was the pale face. It was too far away to make out the details, but I had the sense of profound deformity. Of wrongness distilled into something so pure, the fumes from it burned.
It saw me, and a wide, toothless smile split its face. I was afraid it would wave at me or clap its hands, but it was still. A pair of headlights from a passing car played over the thing, making it bright for a moment. Ozzie’s barking was a frenzy now, flecks of foam sticking to the glass. An unfamiliar voice was shouting at me to shut her up. It was like something from another world.
We stood there, the evil little thing and me, staring at each other through the glass, and then I was running across the room, out the door, sprinting for the stairs faster than a human body should have been able to. I vaulted the handrail, dropping to the flight below and out the door into the darkness of the night, charging the spot where it had been with a shout boiling up out of me, carrying the will of the rider along with my own. The pavement nipped at my bare feet, the cold slapped me, but I didn’t care. In all my life I had never been so pure—or so ready for murder. It was instinct, and I didn’t even want to restrain it.