The thing was gone.
“Come back here, you bastard sonofabitch!” I screamed in a voice that wasn’t only my own but also something deeper, wilder. Not more dangerous, though. I was already feeling plenty dangerous. “Come back here and I will feed you your fucking heart!”
The last word came as a detonation. Behind me, three car alarms went off, their whoops and beeps like a pack of confused dogs barking because someone else was barking. It was too late. The unclean presence was already fading. The winter air was just air again. The wide sky above me lost all its malevolence and turned back into stars and clouds, impersonal and distant. The snarl on my lips wouldn’t let go, though, and even with the cold I didn’t move.
I heard Chogyi Jake and Ex coming from the hotel. Their footsteps were as identifiable as their faces. I didn’t even turn to look at them, my gaze locked on the darkness, searching for the twisted little figure even though I knew it wasn’t there.
“Jayné,” Ex said. He had a gun in his hand. Chogyi Jake did too. They were both in pajamas. So was I for that matter. It wasn’t the first time I’d been happy that I’d never gotten the habit of sleeping naked.
“Something was here,” I said. “It was right here.”
Chogyi Jake moved forward, his pistol held low but ready.
“You saw it?” Ex asked.
“From the window. It saw me too.”
“You recognized it?”
I hesitated.
“No,” I said. “No, I don’t know what it was.”
“But you came out after it on your own?” The disapproval was actually second to the confusion. Why attack it? And why go out on my own like I was taking on an army with my hands? It was a fair question.
“It scared the hell out of me.”
Ex looked around. There were lighted windows in the hotel now. The silhouettes of people looking out into the parking lot at us. Ex put the gun’s safety on and held it under his shirt. I crossed my arms and wondered if Ozzie was still in the room. I didn’t have any idea if the door had closed after me. I counted windows until I saw mine. She was there, her paws against the window. From the slight shifting of her head, I guessed she was wagging.
“And this is how you react when something scares you?”
“Apparently so.”
“Remind me not to pop any unexpected balloons around you.”
“Don’t pop any unexpected balloons around me,” I said, because it was the right line to follow with. Something to let the tension slip. I couldn’t let it stand there. “It wasn’t like that, though. I wasn’t startled. I was afraid.”
“I have something,” Chogyi Jake called. My feet were getting numb fast. The Black Sun had retreated back into my body and the adrenaline was seeping away, but my curiosity had cooked down to a solid need to know. I stepped into the scrub at the side of the road. There in the shadows lay a little knot of pale and black, like a crumpled sheet of ink-stained paper, only larger. I squatted down next to it, reaching out with my fingers. Something about it seemed strange and ominous and familiar all at the same time. I plucked at it, pulling it into the light.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said.
“You know what this is?”
“I do,” I said.
My mother had always been the one to buy things for the house. Curtains, place mats, napkins. All of that had been hers. The dish towel lying on the soiled ground was the same blue-and-yellow kind that I’d used for years to wipe up spills and wash down counters. There were surely others like it all through the city, all through the world, but at that moment I’d have bet everything I owned that this one had come from my family’s kitchen.
And half of it was stiff and dark with old blood.
chapter nine
“Are you sure it’s your blood?” Kim asked from my laptop. Compressed into the Skype window, she and Aubrey seemed like news announcers, each ready for their turn at the camera. The morning sun was bright and low, and I’d pulled the curtains in the guys’ room half closed, covering us all in an artificial twilight.
“Certain,” Chogyi Jake said. “We’ve tried Bonewitz’s consonance rites and the Dismas Ceremony. It’s mine. I split my lip when they attacked, and that was the cloth I used to clean myself up.”
“We figure they went back later and dug through the trash,” Ex said.
Aubrey grunted his dissatisfaction. “I wish we could run the DNA all the same.”
“You’re just saying that because you have the equipment,” Ex said.
“Well, we do,” Aubrey replied.
Kim shook her head, but there was a smile with it. On camera, she looked fuller in the cheeks, not so pinched at the mouth. Aubrey was sporting the beginnings of a mustache that absolutely didn’t suit him. Seeing them again—seeing them together—was more like coming home than coming home had been. I wished they were really there. But I understood why it was a bad idea. It hadn’t been a full six months since Aubrey had been my lover and Kim had been his ex-wife. It only felt like years ago because so much had happened in between.
“If I had to guess,” Ex said, “I’d say they were using the blood as a tracking focus. Jayné’s damn hard to find using magic, but Chogyi Jake and I are just what we are.”
“You have wards on your room?” Kim asked.
“Just the usual. Salt and ash. The Mark of Cyprian.”
“That’s it?” she asked.
“We’re at a Best Western,” Ex said.
“They allow dogs,” I added. It seemed weak.
“Okay,” Kim said. “So you’re warded enough to keep a human being from finding you. So the hypothesis is that a rider was using the blood, yes?”
“It felt like one to me,” I said. “It felt . . . not big, exactly. It felt crazy.”
“Crazy how?” Aubrey asked.
“Like, it-made-the-whole-world-mentally-ill-just-by-being-in-it crazy,” I said.
“Let’s take it as our hypothesis, then,” Kim said. “We’ll assume that a rider was using Chogyi Jake as a handle to find Jayné. To what end?”
I shook my head. The thing had come, seen me, and then vanished. It hadn’t been an attack. It hadn’t been a message. The only thing that seemed to make sense at all was that it was doing reconnaissance for something else. Something that hadn’t happened yet.
“So let’s table that,” Kim said. “Was it the Invisible College?”
“I hate to invoke Occam’s razor,” Ex said, “but that seems like the safest bet. It was a rider. They’re all riders. We know they’re nearby. They made a weirdly half-assed attack on Jayné’s family. Now we’ve got a weirdly half-assed approach on the hotel. I don’t see what we get by assuming there’s some mysterious third party involved.”
“Could it be involved with whatever Eric was doing with me and the Black Sun?” I asked. “Whatever this all is, the Invisible College was after him from the start. I mean, they got him, right? They killed him. And they were hiding the haugsvarmr that he was trying to find. So whatever he was doing here, they were probably trying to throw a wrench in the works. If we understood what Eric was doing—”
Kim shook her head. “No.”
“No?” Ex asked.
“No. We’ve got too many variables and not enough data. We can speculate all day. Make up as many stories as we want to. The fact of the matter is, we don’t know enough yet to draw any conclusions.”
“I don’t know about that,” Aubrey said.
“I do,” I said. “She’s right. Maybe if we nail down something, the rest of it will fall in line, but right now it’s all just one damn thing after another. And the closer we look at it, the weirder it gets. There’s two ends we can reach for. Either we go after the Invisible College and try to wring some answers out of them, or we go to Denver and hit the books about Eric’s predecessors. I don’t see anything else that makes sense.”