He came onto the porch. Jonathan Rhodes in blue jeans and a thick knit sweater. If it hadn’t been for the intricate tattoos, he could have been anyone. Instead, he looked like a refugee from some deeply disturbing carnival. When I had killed Randolph Coin, it had been with an enchanted bullet. I hadn’t shot him with it, even. Just pressed the ensorcelled metal to a wound and kicked the rider in him loose. He hadn’t stopped breathing all at once. For the first time I wondered if that meant the man—the shell—had been alive at the end, empty of its rider and wounded past all hope of survival. I wondered whether Jonathan Rhodes had any bullets like that one, and if there might be a rifle trained on me right now.
“You’re Rhodes,” I said, lifting my voice. I didn’t put any magic in it. It was just me talking loud enough to carry across a narrow street.
“Jayné Heller,” he said. I thought he sounded nervous, but I was probably flattering myself.
“You wanted me here,” I said. “So I’m here now.”
He nodded. He had his hands in his pockets, and I had the sense he was holding something as tightly and with the same faux-casual attitude that I held the Remington. A pistol. A charm. Whatever it was, he hadn’t used it against me yet. We were two dogs circling each other, not sure yet how the fight was going to start. Who was going to take the first bite.
“We know what you’ve been doing, Ms. Heller. It stops tonight.”
“We can talk about that,” I said. “But I think you may not be up on everything. Or maybe I’m not. But you have to let the girl go.”
“She’s under our protection,” Rhodes said. “Her and the child she’s carrying. You can’t have them.”
“Not a negotiating point,” I said. “But maybe if you—”
The shots came from the back of the house. Two shotgun blasts with maybe half a second between them. Someone screamed, but I couldn’t tell if it was a man’s voice or a woman’s. I brought up my shotgun, still in its bag, and started running across the street.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Ex was supposed to use the spell called Calling Malkuth; he was supposed to damp down their magic before anything else happened. The fact that he hadn’t meant the firefight was starting with the bad guys at full strength. It was happening too early.
On the porch, Jonathan Rhodes pulled his hand out of his pocket and gestured at me. A fine arc of gray dust puffed out, thin as ashes. It felt like a sledgehammer to my chest. I staggered back, gagging, and then I wasn’t driving anymore. The Black Sun dropped to one knee on the dead brown lawn and lifted a hand palm out toward Rhodes. His snarl was made of anger and fear. His teeth were deformed, carved into strange, inhuman shapes.
He came off the porch, launching himself straight at me and blocking the path to the doorway. Chogyi Jake appeared from my right. He’d taken his gun out of the duffel bag, and its barrel was trained on Rhodes’s head. He might just as well not have been there at all from the attention the tattooed man paid him. I raised my own weapon.
Time seemed to slow down. I saw his eyes grow wide, not with fear or surprise but a kind of joy. Like this was the battle he’d been waiting for, and now, at last, he had it. The marks on his face shifted, remaking themselves under his skin. I pulled the trigger. The shotgun kicked like a car wreck, and the end of the duffel bag blew open. Rhodes was five, maybe six feet from the end of the barrel. It was as good as a mile. Hundreds of tiny sparks flashed around him, the bright metal of the buckshot vanishing. He grinned, stepped forward, and kicked at me. My body dropped back, letting the gun fall to earth, and caught his ankle against my crossed forearms. Chogyi Jake fired, and the flash came again. If Ex had managed his cantrip—if the powers of the riders had been pushed back—it would have shredded Rhodes’s skin. Or at least drawn blood.
He pushed down with a shout, landing on the foot he’d kicked with and twisting forward, driving his elbow toward my temple. Even with the unnatural reflexes of my rider, the blow glanced off my skull. I staggered back. Chogyi Jake racked a fresh shell and fired again. He was at point-blank range now. I saw the hot gasses from the muzzle flash make ripples in Rhodes’s shirt, but he still ignored it. I jumped back from a kick that sank his heel inches into the dead brown sod. Another scream came from the back of the house. Unmistakably a man this time.
Ex.
I broke away, racing for the back of the house, legs pumping with so much force I felt the grass under me sliding. I ripped out divots.
A single exterior bulb cast a harsh pool of light in the space between the house itself and the shed in the back. It was like a lit theater stage in the dim night. Ex knelt in the middle of the circle, steadying himself with one hand. His shotgun lay on the ground in front of him. His head hung forward, the cascade of loose hair hiding his face. His left leg from the knee down was soaked with blood. I was at his side in seconds, and it was still too long.
He looked up, his face pale and stony with pain. I tried to speak, but my body wasn’t my own. Instead, I put my arm around him, staring into his eyes in mute fear. For a moment he seemed not to find me, his attention swimming. He found me, his eyes focusing. His smile was tight.
“Well, that could have gone better.”
I tried to ask about Jay, about Carla, about what had happened, but the Black Sun wouldn’t give me control. Instead, she looked back. Jonathan Rhodes was walking down the side of the house toward us. I was aware distantly of lights in the neighboring houses, of voices raised in fear. Somewhere nearby, a car engine roared and tires shrieked against pavement. I hoped it was Jay, and I hoped he had Carla with him. It would suck to die like this for nothing. Ex shifted, tried to stand, and yelped in pain. Rhodes came to the edge of the light. His eyes seemed to glow.
Something moved on my left. The other man, Eduardo Martinez, stepped out of the darkness. I turned around. The woman, Idéa Smith. I’d made the classic mistake. I’d come too far forward and ignored my flanks, and now they were all around me. I felt a growl low in my throat. Ex shot out a hand, reaching for the shotgun, and the woman gestured. Her will was like a whip, and the shotgun ripped itself out of Ex’s hands and stuck hard to the icy earth. My body went still, waiting for an opportunity I wasn’t sure would come. These were the people who had killed Eric. They knew what they were doing.
They opened their arms, and I felt the web of energy sparking between them, pressing against me like a cage. The Black Sun turned, shuddering, but the circle was complete. There was no way out. The three began chanting, and the invisible net grew stronger with each syllable that locked into the ones behind and before. Rhodes lifted his arms. The black ink shifted in his skin, words in arcane languages forming, growing sharp, and then breaking apart. The vast flow of meaning burned off him, pushing me back to the center of the circle. Ex took my hand. His fingers were cold.
“By your name I bind you,” Rhodes said, and his voice was dry and vast and older than the flesh it rode in. “Puer Mórtuus, I bind you.”
The cage grew closer, pressing in against me. His tongue was black now, his eyes bright and nacreous, like mother-of-pearl. He took a step in, and the other two stepped in with him. The air thickened, and I struggled to breathe. The stink of overheated metal overwhelmed me.