My dad? Yeah, he detonated. Shouting, slapping his open hand against the table so hard the centerpiece jumped.
I’d heard the phrase twisted in rage before, one place or another, but this was when I really understood it. And my mother stood in the doorway, her hands fluttering in front of her like birds in a cage. He called me things he’d never called me before: stupid, naive, a selfish bitch, and I’m pretty sure wannabe whore figured in there someplace. I called him a monster and a mind-fucking control freak. Our mutual hatred and anger peeled the paint.
He told me to get my cheap ass up to my room and not to come back down until I’d seen sense. I remember that part very well.
I stomped up the stairs, slammed my bedroom door closed, and left by the window. Two days later, I was in Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, weeping over my one suitcase. And a week after that, I was a Sun Devil. We hadn’t spoken since. The only one I’d ever touched base with at all before last week was my little brother, Curt, and then I hadn’t gone into great detail. Dropped out of college, got a huge fortune when Uncle Eric died. Oh, and did you know he was an international demon hunter? Or that he was an even bigger asshole than Dad? Or that I have a spirit living inside me called the Black Sun, and it gives me superpowers sometimes? How’s high school been for you? Didn’t see going there.
And yet, there was exactly where I was going. Back home to where it all began, or if it hadn’t begun there, at least someone might know some of what had happened. Might be able to explain some of the confusion that my life had become since Uncle Eric died.
The snow had been coming down since we crossed the New Mexico border into Oklahoma. It was all hard round balls like bits of Styrofoam that tapped against the windshield and flew away again before they had the chance to melt. China Forbes crooned from the speakers about falling stars falling forever, and Chogyi Jake snored gently in the passenger’s seat. I imagined Ex behind me, staring moodily out the window, and Ozzie curled up with her nose tucked under her tail; but since I couldn’t see them, that said more about my state of mind than theirs. Gray clouds pressed the sky low enough it felt like a ceiling. I could feel the highway getting slick under the tires just by the way the steering wheel vibrated.
“I think the dog needs to go out,” Ex said.
Chogyi Jake grunted, yawned, and leaned forward, blinking into the gray.
“Seriously?” I said.
“Well, I’m not positive,” Ex said. “She’s just got that look on her face.”
“What look?
“That the-backseat’s-fine-with-me-if-it’s-fine-with-you look?”
“Okay, message received,” I said.
“We could use some lunch too,” Ex said.
“Next stop coming up,” I said, willing my voice to be cheerful.
Ten miles on, a service station huddled at a highway exit like a luckless hitchhiker. Along with gas pumps and the kind of bathrooms you have to go outside to get to, it boasted a little sandwich shop. Ozzie got to her feet as I pulled in, her wagging tail making a rhythmic thumping against the seat. Ex had apparently been right. It was kind of cute. I hadn’t pegged him for a dog person.
“I’ll take her for a walk,” Ex said as I killed the engine. “You can order for me.”
“Meatball sandwich, no cheese?” Chogyi Jake asked, though he didn’t have to. We’d all been working together for years now, tracking down riders. They were the spiritual parasites—riders was the generic term—that snuck in from the Pleroma or Next Door or whatever we called it and took up residence in the bodies of men and women. Bodies like mine. They were responsible for vampires and werewolves and lamias and a whole taxonomy of things that made the world weirder and more dangerous. Once upon a time, I’d thought we fought against them, but that had turned out to be a little simplistic.
We’d traveled across the world together, the three of us, and—once upon a time—Aubrey. Only Aubrey was back together with his once and future wife, Kim, in Chicago, rebuilding the life that my uncle Eric had destroyed for them. And so it was just the three of us heading back to my family to try to figure out what Eric had done to mine.
Well, the three of us and my dog.
“Large iced tea,” Ex said, opening the SUV’s rear door. The blast of cold air pressed against the back of my neck for a second before the door closed again with a crash. I reached around for the leather backpack that I still used instead of a purse. Chogyi Jake stretched, squinting out into the snow. I felt another passing urge to apologize to him for ditching him back in New Mexico, but it would have been about the millionth time I’d done it, and I figured after about six hundred thousand it might start getting annoying.
“You good?” I asked.
“I try,” he said, smiling gently.
I smiled back. “Smart ass.”
The service station was small and tacky. Christmas tinsel still hung on the edges of the counter, and a bin of clip-on reindeer horns squatted by the bathrooms with a hand-drawn sign saying 50% Off. We ordered at the counter along the eastern wall, then sat at a chipped Formica table and watched the semis roll by on the highway. The horizon was lost, sky and earth fading into a uniform nothingness. I ate two bites of my sandwich and pushed the rest away.
“Do you know what you want to ask them?” Chogyi Jake asked. He had a way of stepping gently into the middle of deep conversations we hadn’t had yet. Since I’d called my mother a week before and arranged for this sudden, probably unpleasant reunion, he hadn’t asked me why or what I hoped to gain by it. We could skip all that. I leaned forward and shook my head.
“I keep thinking I should start with the riders. I mean, if they don’t even know that riders exist, everything else I want to know starts sounding pretty sketchy. Or with Eric. Or with whether Mom really had an affair.”
“Why do you want to know about that?”
I plucked a potato chip out of his bag.
“You don’t think it’s important?”
“It might be,” Chogyi Jake said. “Or it might not. But I wondered why you would begin with that.”
“It’s not her,” I said. “It’s not like her. I mean, I can’t imagine that she’d ever do that.”
“Are you thinking then that it must have been the product of magic,” he asked, “or that you might not understand your mother as well as you believed?”
Outside, Ex and Ozzie trotted back toward the SUV. I’d seen dogs smile before, and she trotted along at his side, looking up at him, a black Lab with a graying muzzle and fewer problems than anyone else in the car.
“I was thinking magic,” I said. “You’re telling me it’s not?”
“I have no way of knowing. But I see how it would be difficult . . . maybe impossible . . . to look into one part of this without looking into all of it.”
“I love you. I do. But I don’t even know what the hell that means.”
He laughed and I grinned. Ex opened the SUV door and Ozzie hunkered down, thought about it, and then jumped, clambering up to the seat. The lousy little radio at the back of the station went from commercials to an old Lady Gaga tune without changing tempo.
“I mean,” he said, choosing each word as he said it, “that we’re going in hopes of understanding what Eric’s plan was. How you came to have a rider in you, why he left you his accumulated wealth, what his greater purpose was. All that.”
“Right,” I said.
“It may not be possible to address that without addressing other issues. Who you are to your family. Who you have become. What your relationship is to them.”
“Boy, am I not seeing that,” I said.
Chogyi held up a finger. In someone else, it would have been condescending. In him, it just meant he needed a second to think.