“Yeah,” I said. “That happened.”
“And you fought them off.”
“I did.”
“A normal person couldn’t have done that.”
I sat on the bed, the letter soft in my fingers. Jay’s eyes were an accusation and a plea.
“No,” I said. “A normal person couldn’t have. But . . . I’m not exactly a normal person.”
“Are you a witch?” he breathed.
“No. I’m not a witch and I’m not a demon and I don’t eat babies. But she’s right that there’s something wrong with this family. I mean seriously messed up. And I think maybe there always has been.”
We were silent for a moment. A few doors down, Chogyi Jake and Ex were packing. Or maybe Ex was taking Ozzie for one last walk before the road trip. Out beyond that, Mom and Dad and Curt were probably at the house, turning the place into chaos over this new problem. Probably blaming me for it. I handed him back the letter.
“Swear to me,” he said. “Swear to me that it isn’t true.”
“What isn’t true? That I really don’t eat babies?”
He grabbed my hand, squeezing it so tightly in his own that it almost ached.
“Swear to me that you don’t mean me or my baby any harm. Swear to God, Jayné.”
I shook my head. “I don’t believe in God anymore, Jay.”
“He believes in you. Swear it.”
“Okay,” I said. “If you need me to. I swear to God, Jay, I never meant anything bad to happen to you or to Carla or your baby. Or anyone. I never meant to hurt anybody.”
His eyes looked deeply into mine, like he was searching for something. It was the same look I’d seen on Dad when I went into the garage. That sense of trying to read something deep inside of me. I wondered if he could see the Black Sun in there. If he could tell that she was looking out through my eyes. He let my hand drop.
“Who are they?” he said. “You know, don’t you? Who took my wife and baby?”
“They are . . . they call themselves the Invisible College. They’re somewhere right in between a society of warlocks and a hive of . . . I don’t know. Demons. Or spirits. We call them riders.”
“Riders?”
“Things from outside the world that come in and take over people’s bodies. Like spiritual parasites. Vampires, werewolves, filth-lickers. They’re all different kinds of riders.”
His face went still. I couldn’t tell if it was anger or courage or something related to both of them.
“Demons,” he said.
“Sure,” I said. “It’s more complicated than that, but the term’s as good as any.”
“How do I find them?”
Outside, a semi pulled into the parking lot, its engine screaming like something clawing its way out of hell. The noise set my teeth on edge, and I was grateful when it stopped. I looked out the window at the place where the evil little thing had been. It wasn’t there now, but it was somewhere. And it had my brother’s unborn child.
“Jayné,” he said, “tell me how to find them.”
“You can’t,” I said. “And even if you could, there’s nothing you can do to them. You saw what they could do. What I can do. I love you, Jay, but you’re outclassed here. You’re in the shit so far over your head, it looks like sky. That’s just truth.”
“I don’t care.”
And of course he didn’t. I thought of Dad keeping me and Mom even after he knew I wasn’t his. Jay was cut from the same cloth. Dad had spent his life ignoring the humiliation of being a cuckold and treating me as his own. That he treated his own like they were subject-serfs who should obey him just because he was the patriarch of the house didn’t seem to matter as much as it had once upon a time. He was a broken, weird, screwed-up man, and that demand for obedience and controlling anger had been a kind of love. Jay wouldn’t do less for his own actual flesh and blood. For the woman he was going to marry.
This is my house, and my family. Any business you have, you can take up with me. And you haven’t got any business with me.
If only it were true.
I’d told myself that they would chase me. That the danger that came to them sprang from me and that it would leave when I left. And even if I could convince myself that Carla was lost—and I really didn’t want to think she was—Jay would get himself killed trying to either get her back or avenge her. And Curt, or if Curt ever got a girlfriend. A wife. If anything happened to Mom or Dad. Anything from this moment on that happened to my family because I’d stepped away was going to be my fault.
If Jay had just come an hour later . . .
“Okay, fine,” I said, and pulled my telephone out of my pocket. Ex answered on the second ring.
“What’s up?” he said.
“New plan,” I said.
“Something happened?”
“Something happened.”
“So we’re staying and hunting down the Invisible College?”
I looked at Jay sitting at the edge of the bed. He looked old and desperate and tired. I wasn’t feeling much better.
“We are.”
chapter ten
Jay was a constant in my life. Like Mom, like Dad, he’d always been there. I went into kindergarten when he was a big, sophisticated third grader. I was a freshman in high school when he was in his senior year. We loved each other, and we took care of each other. We were never friends, and that was okay. We didn’t need to be.
The years had made him physically more like Dad. Broader across the shoulders and belly, thicker at the neck. They had the same brown hair, the same curve at their jaw. I would never have mistaken the two of them for each other, but I’d never have doubted they were father and son. I couldn’t help but wonder if people who didn’t know us would identify us as brother and sister, or if the fact that we had different fathers showed in our bones and the way that we moved. He was my half brother, but more than that because our fathers had been brothers. There probably wasn’t a name for exactly what he and I were to each other.
The last time I’d seen him, he’d been in college, a year from finishing his business degree and talking about whether he should go into the ministry. I had to assume he’d decided not to, because since then, he’d graduated, moved to Florida, fallen in bed with Carla, and come back. I’d been spending my time fighting ghosts and monsters and things from outside the world. It was hard to tell just at first glance which of us had been the most changed. I wondered what he thought of me, his prodigal sister. After all, what he knew about me was that I’d vanished under a cloud and reappeared with two men in tow, a lot of money, and heavily tattooed fiancée-abducting cultists coming after me. And he hadn’t even seen the scars on my side or my arm.
I didn’t know, as we followed his little gray Toyota through the residential streets, what it had taken him to come to me of all people for help. I wanted it to be because he trusted me. I wanted there to be some connection between brother and sister that had been forged without the need for speech and that had survived all our time apart, the differences in our lives and experiences. He knew he could count on me to stand by him and do whatever needed to be done.
I was afraid the logic was more like When things get freaky, talk to a freak.
I couldn’t even argue against it. Mom and Dad. Carla’s family. The pastors at church. None of them were better equipped to deal with the Invisible College. They’d come into it swinging wild, and they’d screw it up.
Which is to say, they’d be just like I’d been back in Denver when this all started. When the Invisible College had killed Eric Heller and I’d come in to avenge him.