Jay turned right, down a narrow, gray road, and pulled up at the curb of a small masonry-block house. I drew the SUV up behind him and killed the engine. Ex and Chogyi Jake slid down to the street before I did. My huge sunglasses weren’t really hiding my black eyes. For a moment I wondered what I was going to do if I did find the Invisible College. After all, they’d bunged me up pretty good last time. That was a problem for later.
Jay fumbled with the side-door lock while Chogyi Jake and Ex walked a circuit around the outside of the house, heading in opposite directions.
“What are they looking for?”
“Whatever there is to be found,” I said.
“Demon signs?”
I shrugged. “Sure. Or if someone dropped their wallet. We’ll take what we can get.”
The lock finally complied, the thin wooden door opening into a sparse kitchen. The round table in the center of the room looked lonely. I stepped in after Jay. Inside, the house was worn and scraped at the corners, but clean. The living room floor had pale carpet that remembered where the last owner had put their couch. The refrigerator was white, with an inexplicable drip of pale pink paint along the side. I pushed my hands deeper into the pockets of my overcoat and walked through the little rooms. This was my brother’s house. And his life. These dim blinds, that secondhand television. I looked in at a nursery that was smaller than some closets I had. The mobile over the crib hung limply over the bare mattress. A sense of dread and depression seemed to outgas from the walls.
When I’d inherited Eric’s fortune, it had come with a list of properties as long as my arm, and almost all of them were nicer than this. And even the ones that weren’t could be forgiven as crash pads and hidey-holes to retreat to. I imagined the years stretching out before Carla and Jay. The late nights with the crying baby and nowhere to get away from the noise. The winters with the cold pressing in through the masonry walls. Everything about the place felt sad and oppressive. I opened the closet in the master bedroom and noticed almost automatically that it could be locked from the outside. I tried to imagine myself as Carla—newly pregnant, still unmarried, and transplanted from the people and places I’d always known.
It might not have taken strange magic to convince me to run away.
Ex came in the side door, and a few seconds later Chogyi Jake.
“What have we got?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Ex said. “No wards. No sigils. No trace that I can see of any major pulls. If someone came in with a glamour on, I wouldn’t have a clue, but I’d expect to see some sign if there’d been anything violent and recent done. And no one seems to be watching the place either.”
“There is something, though,” Chogyi Jake said. “Not specific, but . . .”
“Yeah, I feel it too,” I said.
“Something like our unwelcome visitor?” Ex asked.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if it had been here. Has the same ick factor.”
Jay looked from one to the other of us, his brows crinkled into a mask of concern and confusion.
“Something came by the hotel last night,” I said. “Something nasty. It feels like it’s been around here too.”
“ ‘Feels like’?” Jay said. “What does that even mean?”
“Feels like means feels like,” I said. “It’s not one particular thing I can point to. It just . . . smells right.”
“Did she take everything with her?” Ex asked. “Clothes? Things that had some sort of emotional importance?”
“It’s all gone,” Jay said, slumping down to the couch. “Everything’s gone.”
“If there was something with her blood,” Ex said, “that would be best.”
“You’re thinking of tracking her down the same way they tracked Chogyi Jake?”
“What’s good for the goose,” Ex said. “They’re warded by nature and practice. Whatever kinds of covers they put on her . . . well, just the three of us probably couldn’t break them, but if you’re other half will chip in . . .”
He said it casually, but I knew how much it was costing him. For Ex, the Black Sun was a demon, untrustworthy to the core, and a constant threat to my soul. To even bring up the possibility of asking her help was a betrayal of his principles. I met his eyes for a moment, and he was the first to look away.
“Did she leave a hairbrush?” Chogyi Jake asked.
“Did . . . No, I don’t think so. There’s a comb in the bathroom,” Jay said. “What are you going to do?”
“Find her. That’s what you wanted, right?” I could hear the defensiveness in my own voice. I knew what this looked like from his point of view. Magic, spirits, spiritual presences that weren’t anything like what you’d expect in church. There was a revulsion in his eyes. And with it, fear of me and of what I’d become.
Chogyi Jake turned back toward the bathroom. Outside, someone honked twice. A door slammed open and closed. Ex stepped to the window to see what it was and then stepped back without raising the alarm. Just neighbors. Just people living normal lives while we did our work unremarked beside them. Chogyi Jake turned on the faucet in the bathroom, and the pipes in the kitchen sang.
“I . . .” Jay said.
“We’re not going to hurt her,” I said. “We don’t eat babies, and we don’t want souls.”
“So you’re working with angels?” Jay asked. He sounded confused and more than half disbelieving.
“We’re working with whatever comes to hand,” I said, and as if on cue Chogyi Jake came back in, his hand lifted high in triumph. A clump of something wet, dark, and slimy hung between his fingers.
“Shower hair?” I asked.
“They cleaned the top of the drain, but they didn’t get everything from within the drain itself,” Chogyi Jake said. “I unscrewed the cover and fished out a few hairs. These are the length I’d expect.”
“No point in tracking Jay here,” I agreed. “So you know how to do this?”
“I do,” Ex said, pulling a folded map out of his pocket. He spread the paper on the little kitchen table, then drew a clear plastic box from his back pocket. A bit of red chalk rattled in it.
“What are you doing?” Jay asked.
Chogyi Jake put a hand on Jay’s shoulder. “We’re using the affinity of Carla’s hair for the whole person it came from as a focus by which we can find her location. There’s technically a second affinity between the map and the world that the map represents, but that rarely requires a great deal of concern.”
“No,” he said. “You can’t do magic in my house. Magic is of the devil.”
“Think of it as a really specific kind of praying,” Ex said, drawing a circle around the table wide enough for the three of us to stand in. Chalk scraped tile.
“You don’t have to be here for this,” I said. “You can wait in the car.”
Jay looked from the map to me and then back again. His face was pale, but there was a firmness to his jaw that gave me some hope that he wasn’t about to call the cops on us. Or worse, Dad. “If this will help Carla, I’ll do it.”
“You don’t have to do anything,” I said. “Just don’t stop me.”
“Okay,” Ex said. “We’re ready.”
Chogyi Jake had a length of braided twine with a silver plumb bob at the end. Carla’s hair was tied in a loose knot just above the silver, wrapping around the string. Chogyi Jake stepped into the circle, stood across the table from Ex, and reached out his hand, letting the string hang above the map. The streets and rivers of Wichita stirred uneasily, the paper catching some invisible draft.
When I crossed the chalk circle, it was like stepping into a vault. At first I thought sound had been dampened, that I couldn’t hear, but that wasn’t true. The traffic on the street, the whir and hum of the furnace desperately trying to warm the air—even Jay’s ragged breathing—were all just as clear as they had been before. Maybe more so. It was only the weird oppression of the house that hadn’t crossed into the circle with me, and I was quietly grateful for that.