“Thank you, Dad,” I said. “For this, and really for all of it. I didn’t understand what you were doing, and if I had, I probably still would have taken off. But I know it was what you could do, and I appreciate it.”
“You’re like he was,” Dad said. “You’re lost to Satan.”
I almost laughed.
“All right, guys,” I said. “Let’s go.”
chapter thirteen
Darkness had taken the streets. I didn’t have the luxury of my sunglasses to hide behind. All the wounds were going to be clear on my face, and I was just going to have to be okay with that. I sat forward in the driver’s seat with Jay’s headlights behind me. My mind felt like the thinnest part of a whirlpool, spinning too fast and drawn too far down.
“What’s the plan, then?” Ex asked. It was a good question. I ignored it.
“You know what doesn’t make sense?” I said. “Having a massive international empire and then leaving it to someone lock, stock, and barrel without bothering to tell them about it.”
Ahead of us, a police car flew through an intersection, lights flaring on its roof, but without a siren to announce it. My knuckles ached on the wheel. I was hungry, and I needed to pee. Not the kinds of things that were supposed to bother an international demon hunter. I wished that I’d thought to hit the bathroom before we left the house, though.
“Eric’s story is much like your own,” Chogyi Jake said. “Taken under the wing of an older relative. And I have to think the miracles your father talked about were the work of a rider.”
“So there’s two points,” I said. “Inherits fortune from uncle and has a rider on board either pretty young or since, you know, conception. Think that’s enough to define a line for us?”
“Let’s look at the differences too,” Ex said. “He didn’t keep his. Michael spirited him away and brought him back empty. No more miracles.”
“But depression. A sense of loss,” Chogyi Jake said. “Qliphothic.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ve heard the term before. Remind me.”
“Shells,” Ex said. “Some riders, once they’ve been in a body, the person’s not there anymore. Or they’re there in some diminished way. There was one guy in San Diego, the rider was a jé-rouge, and when we got it out of him, he wasn’t there. His soul was eaten or transferred to some animal we never found. Lost, anyway. That was an extreme case.”
“It’s always like that to some extent, though,” Chogyi Jake said. I got to West Kellogg and turned right. The streetlights glowed around us, drowning out the stars. “Anyone who has had a rider becomes more vulnerable to other possession later.”
“The filth-lickers hanging out around exorcists and going for the easy prey,” I said.
“Exactly,” Ex said. “So when Michael got the rider out of young Eric, it left him pretty bad off. And then he toddled off to wherever and left Eric hanging open.”
For a moment I saw my mother’s expression again and shuddered. An emptied shell, left on the beach for any crab in need of a place to pick up and use. I wondered what it would feel like, being alone in my own body. It had never been that way for me. I had nothing to compare it to. Only the people I’d known who’d been through it. In New Orleans, Karen Black had collapsed when her rider was cast out, but Joseph Mfume had carried the same beast, and he’d been able to make himself whole. Mostly. Except that he loved the killer after it left him. Longed for it and the sense of peace that it brought him.
No one touched by riders was whole afterward. Even the people who found a way to live with them—a balance that brought rider and horse into a kind of partnership—paid a price for it. You will outgrow me, so we should be ready. The phrase had come up in conversation recently, but I couldn’t remember where. It seemed important at the time—
“You’re speeding,” Chogyi Jake said.
“Thanks,” I said, and let up on the gas. We were almost at the Walmart. The lights in the parking lot rose up higher than the street lamps. Fake holly hung and bright red bells hung from them. I was surprised to see so many people there so long after dark, and then I checked the time. Five thirty. Most folks weren’t even home for dinner yet.
“So Eric had some kind of use for someone who’d been emptied.”
“No,” Ex said. “Just the opposite. Michael had some reason for casting the rider out of Eric, but we don’t know what that was. And Eric didn’t do that to you.”
I hit the signal and slowed, preparing to turn into the parking lot. Behind me, Jay’s blinker started going too. I turned.
“He could have been aiming for it, though,” I said. “The haugsvarmr under Grace Memorial? It could have kicked the Black Sun out of me. It would have, if it had had little more of a chance. Only it couldn’t see me, because . . .”
Because whatever weird thing made me hard to see with magic had left the massive rider blind to me.
“And what would the point be of making qliphoth?” Ex asked. “Why’d Michael do it? Why would Eric do it? What is there to gain from it?”
It didn’t hang together. Not yet. But I was closer than I had been. I was sure of that. There were still pieces missing. Like why the people who’d killed Eric were spiriting away my brother’s pregnant fiancée.
One thing at a time, I told myself. We’ll get there if we just take one thing at a time.
It took me a couple passes to find two parking spaces next to each other, but I managed it. Jay pulled in beside us and killed his engine. He was out of his car before my feet hit the pavement.
“What is this?” he demanded, waving a hand toward the store. “I thought we were going to find Carla!”
“We are,” I said. “We just need some things first.”
Ex and Chogyi Jake both closed their doors. The sound was deep and metallic. Like a jail cell closing.
“Things? Like what things?” Jay said.
“Shotguns,” I said. “And a bathroom.”
SOUTH WATER Street was exactly the worst kind of place to do reconnaissance on an enemy. It was in the middle of a wide residential area, no fences to lurk behind, and not many hedges. Two-lane streets of gray pavement, the cracks filled with black tar. Winter-bare trees lined the street on both sides, bare branches reaching across toward each other like fantastic fingers. There weren’t many cars on the street, so if I parked the SUV close enough for us to see the house from the vision, we’d also catch the local attention like a fire at a preschool. If we parked far enough away that we couldn’t be seen, we also couldn’t see anything. Jay’s car was more nondescript than my massive black apartment on wheels, but it was also the car that Carla would recognize on sight. Given what she’d said in her note, I wasn’t assuming she was going to be on our side. At least not at the start. I might be wrong. The Invisible College might have forced her to write it, and she could be desperately waiting for us to break down the door and pull her away.
I was open for a pleasant surprise, but I wasn’t counting on it.
We wound up parking one street over, near the corner where we were most obscured by the houses. Chogyi Jake and Ex got out to walk around the block, not using any glamours, but trusting to the darkness of the night to obscure their faces. The guns we kept in the backseat. I thought about leaving the engine running so we’d be able to use the heater, but I couldn’t find a way to do that without keeping the running lights on. So we sat in the darkness, Jay and I, while Chogyi Jake and Ex headed out. The cold seemed to press in from the windows, and I folded my hands in under my jacket and watched the traffic pass. Jay shifted nervously in his seat, his hand tapping at his knees, at the door. He sighed often and without seeming to know he was doing it. Eventually I had to talk to him. It was that or let him annoy me to death.