“What do you remember about that battle? Anything that he might have said to you?”
“It was a long time ago,” I said, “and I may not have been thinking my straightest. I mean, there was the are-you-sure-you-want-to-do-this? jazz where he offered to do some kind of binding pact where we didn’t hurt each other. I figured that just meant he thought I might win.”
“Did win,” Ex said.
“Had some help,” I said.
He smiled. “You’re welcome.”
“And anyway, I didn’t go after them first. They killed Eric and, okay, maybe that was doing the world a favor. But the first time I saw any of them, they had guns in their hands. Four of them broke into that second apartment and started unloading at me.”
Chogyi Jake nodded and pressed his fingers to his lips. I could almost hear him thinking, and it was hard not to follow my own path through the problem.
“There’s a hole in that,” Ex said. “How did they know you were there?”
“I screwed up the wards,” I said. “Crossed the threshold without fixing the line behind me.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But how did they find you? You don’t show up when people are using spells, remember? It doesn’t matter what wards you broke when you came through. They wouldn’t have seen you.”
“The only other one there was . . . oh.”
“Midian Clark,” Chogyi Jake said. “Who is a vampire. And was plotting with Eric to assassinate their leader.”
“Only then there I was too,” I said. “And when they came to the house here, they were loaded with rock salt. Mundane, unaltered rock salt. So that if anyone did get shot, the chances were better that they wouldn’t get killed. Unless, you know, high blood pressure. Shit.”
I leaned forward on the couch. I didn’t want it to be true. More than that, I didn’t want it to be even plausible. Like a voice on an old tape, Randolph Coin came back to me. You are determined to walk in his footsteps.
And I even knew what I’d said back. Yeah. Really am.
“Hold on,” Ex said. “I said it before. Yes, they were Eric’s enemy. We always knew that, but that doesn’t make them good. Whatever he was doing with the Black Sun and the haugsvarmr and you, standing against it doesn’t make the Invisible College into angels and paladins. That thing they sent looking for us?”
I leaped for it. “That’s true. I don’t know what that thing was, but it wasn’t good. Rotten to the core, more like.”
“I wonder if there is a way that we could reach out to them,” Chogyi Jake said. “Speak with them without the necessity of violence—”
“No,” Jay said, stepping out from the kitchen. I realized belatedly that I hadn’t heard Dad’s voice for a couple minutes. I wondered how much of our conversation they’d listened to. I was pretty sure the whole demons, guns, and vampires bit wasn’t going to help my standing in the family. “We’re not doing anything to warn them that we know where they are. Or where Carla is. We do nothing that might put her in more danger.”
Dad came in behind him. If I’d thought Jay was growing to look like Dad before, it was twice as clear with the pair of them standing side by side. Behind them, I saw Curt’s legs pulling back up the stairs. So he’d been eavesdropping too. Well, it made sense. If I’d had the chance at his age, I’d have snooped too.
In the kitchen, Mom started putting away dishes, the familiar clatter of china and glass both commonplace and foreign. It was as if by acting like things were normal, she could force reality to be normal and regular and comprehensible. Maybe that was how she’d gotten through the last two or three decades. Once I carried angels in my flesh, but now I need to get the boys to soccer.
Someone had said to me once that the only people who called themselves crazy were sane. That anyone who’d really been down the road to madness only wanted to be normal again. I’d never thought to apply that to my own family. Or myself.
I stood up, pulling my overcoat straight.
“Jay tells me that Carla’s gone off with the people that attacked you here,” Dad said. “And that you won’t help unless I do what you want.”
“That’s an extreme reading of the text,” I said.
“Watch your mouth,” Dad said. “You watch your mouth with me.”
If he’d hit me, it wouldn’t have hurt worse. I felt it in the space just below my rib cage. The anger was so raw, so vicious, and it was my dad. After everything and all the things I’d done, it was my daddy yelling at me. The shame ballooned out from it and I tried not to weep.
This is why I didn’t want to come here, I thought. This is why I was scared to go home.
“I told you once you weren’t welcome here,” he almost-shouted, “and now you’re back. You’re already on thin ice with me, and I will not have you treat me with disrespect in my own house.”
Jay put a hand on Dad’s arm, and he sputtered into silence. His face was thick and flushed, his hands in fists. His eyes shifted over me like I was the enemy. Like he was looking for a place to strike. Fear or sorrow or even love can come out as anger. I felt the tears coming to my eyes, and I willed them away. I couldn’t show weakness. I had to speak, but I couldn’t. I had to bring him to a place where he could tell me what he knew, that he could save me. I couldn’t do it.
The bloom started just below my sternum. It was a subtle thing—warm and close and secret. It pressed down into my belly, up into my throat. The hurt didn’t fade. If anything, it came more clearly into focus. But my ability to stand it grew. I saw the sorrow in everything. In what my mother had suffered, and in what my father had suffered as a result. In the loving home they could have had, and didn’t. In the childhood I could have had. And Jay. And Curtis. I saw the sorrow in the love behind the fear and rage my father’s eyes. Love that had gone septic now. Unreachable as the moon.
“I’m sorry,” I said. We said. “I do respect you, and I wouldn’t have broken your rule if there weren’t great need. I think Carla and her baby are in danger, and I need your help to save them.”
Dad’s eyes narrowed and his head turned a degree away from me, not trusting what he’d heard. I stood solid, a single line connecting me to the center of the earth. If he’d hit me with a truck, I wouldn’t have moved.
Thank you, I thought. Her only response was a sense of wordless acknowledgment.
“What do you want from me?” Dad asked.
I took a deep breath, let it out through my nose just the way Chogyi Jake had taught me. It would have been so easy to say I want to know about my real father. The words were right there on the tip of my tongue, ready to fire. It wouldn’t cost me anything.
“I want to know about Uncle Eric,” I said. “Who he was. What he was into. How he went bad.”
Dad’s scowl deepened.
“He’s gone, and you’re in his place,” Dad said. “What does any of the past matter?”
“Maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know. And I won’t until you tell me what happened,” I said. It was the truth, and something in Dad seemed to hear it. He ran his palm over his chin. For a long, breathless moment, no one spoke.
“Come with me, then,” he said.
chapter twelve
“You should go,” Dad said as he stepped into the kitchen. Mom’s eyes went wide, and she hesitated. Dad shot a look at her that would have peeled paint, and her face went pale. “Go upstairs and see that Curtis is doing his work. This isn’t a conversation you need to hear.”