“The bad guys? Did you . . . are they still around?”
“I didn’t kill them,” I said. “Got away, though. And I have some things I want to look into. They were doing something, and they did it wrong. If I can figure what they were trying for, I’m hoping it’ll aim me in the right direction.”
“I want to be in on it,” Jay said. “Whatever you wind up doing, I want you to let me know.”
“You’re feeling guilty about shooting Ex, aren’t you?” I said, teasing him.
“I am,” he said. “And I also just got my sister back. I’d rather not have her just vanish again.”
My tears weren’t a surprise, really. I should have expected them.
“I love you too,” I said. “You know that when I said these guys were my family now, I didn’t mean that you weren’t, right?”
“Of course I knew that,” he said. “Dummy.”
I laughed a little. “We’ll get through this.”
“We will. We’ll track those bastards down wherever they go.”
“Yeah. First, get some rest. Can I reach you here when we’re up?”
“Absolutely. I’m going to try to get a little sleep myself.”
“Take care of yourself,” I said.
When I crawled back into bed, my brain felt less like an accident in a fireworks factory. Talking to Jay, knowing he was safe, even for very narrow definitions of safe, calmed me down. I pulled the blankets up to my chin and snuggled down into the pillows. Ozzie stood up, walked around in a circle, and lay down again with a contented sigh. I knew what she meant.
In the darkness, I listened to Ex’s soft snoring and Chogyi Jake’s slow, deep breath. I felt every time Ozzie shifted, chasing dream rabbits. My mind started to drift. I was glad, I decided, that Ozzie had wrecked the other room. If it had just been me and her in the place, it wouldn’t have felt right. Part of that came from spending the last day fighting and afraid, but part was just that these were my people. This was my pack, and having us all together in the same room was right. This was the way it was supposed to be.
I reached my mind down, deep into my body. Thank you, I thought. The Black Sun didn’t respond. Maybe she was asleep too. I didn’t know if riders did things like that, but I couldn’t see why they wouldn’t. She was part of my pack as well. Part of my self.
Back in college, a deeply unethical teaching assistant had told me that there were two kinds of family: the one that you’re born into, and then the one that you make for yourself. He’d been trying to seduce me at the time, but that didn’t make the sentiment wrong. I had made myself a family, and it was one that I liked a lot. I would always be my parents’ daughter. That was just history, and there was nothing that could change that. But what that meant was up to me and the people—and the dog—I kept with me.
I closed my eyes and listened to the cars on the highway, the voices in the hall, the breath of my family. I slept.
And when I slept, I dreamed.
chapter sixteen
I stood in the desert at night. Wind whipped the bare earth, but I wasn’t cold. The sky was black and starless. A dark scorch mark ran alongside me as I walked or ran or floated through the emptiness. I knew both that it wasn’t real and that it was the result of my abortive efforts to exorcise the thing living inside me. I looked at the damage with a real curiosity. If they could put me in one of Oonishi’s fMRI machines back in Chicago, would they be able to find what part of me had died in order to make this scar? Or maybe this wasn’t a sign of death. Only change.
And then she was there with me. Or we were there together. Or I was doubled. There wasn’t a good word for it. I cast two shadows in the light from an invisible moon.
Her face was cracked. The Jayné mask that had been so perfect for so long had black marks running through its cheeks. I lifted my hand to her, and I also pulled my head back so that she couldn’t touch my damaged self.
It’s okay, one of us thought. I won’t hurt you.
Fingertips brushed against the broken mask, and more of the pale ceramic fell away. There was flesh under it, dark as the midnight sky. I kept peeling away the mask, uncovering her and being uncovered. The air touched my dark cheeks for the first time. The Black Sun looked at me with eyes like my own set in an inhuman face. Inhuman, but beautiful.
I will outgrow you, she said. Not yet, but not long from now. The change has begun, and we can’t escape it. We can’t even slow it down.
The elation I felt was human. I took her hand, and her false skin shattered, letting our fingers entwine for the first time ever.
It’s all right, I said. We’re ready. We will be ready.
I’m frightened, the rider said in a voice that was soft as a whisper and vast as mountains.
“I’m not,” I said with my real voice, and, by saying it, woke myself up.
“You’re not what?” Ex asked.
The hotel room was still dim, but someone had shifted the curtains so that a little bit of sunlight came through. It wasn’t the full-on cave darkness that it had been. More a kind of winter twilight. The water was running in the bathroom, the shower splashing. I put my hand to my hair, suddenly aware of how much I smelled like sweat and unwashed me, and wondered if hotels ever ran out of hot water. At my feet, Ozzie raised her head. Her tail thumped against the mattress twice. I leaned forward and put my hand on her side, scratching her ribs. She put her head back down with a contented canine smile.
“I’m not awake,” I said.
“You can keep sleeping,” Ex said. “We’ve only been down for a few hours.”
“No, I’m fine,” I said, and yawned so wide my jaw cracked. “I heard from Jay while you guys were asleep. He’s fine. Carla’s safely out of town.”
“And your family?” Ex said.
They’re mostly in the room with me, I thought. “Dad’s warned. I don’t know what more we’d do, even if we could.”
“I don’t like it,” Ex said.
“I’m not thrilled either,” I said, yawning again, but less prodigiously. “But it’s what I’ve got. How’s your foot?”
“Swollen. Has a bunch of holes in it. So what’s our next step here? Is it time to head for Denver and hit the archives?”
I pulled the blankets back and sat up. My body felt sore and achy and the ghost of a headache was floating somewhere at the back of my neck. Given how bad last night could have gone, I felt pretty good about it.
“Not yet,” I said. “Do you remember much of the binding spell Rhodes and his buddies tried on me?”
“Some of it, yes,” Ex said.
“The names they tried to bind me with, Puer Mórtuus. Graveyard Child. And the other one.”
“Doc,” Ex said. “The last one you can never remember is always Doc.”
“Doc sounded more like Abraxis something.”
“Abraxiel Unas. I remember that much.”
The shower water stopped and I heard the metallic hiss of the curtain opening. I pushed my hair back. I really wanted that shower next.
“Ring any bells?” I asked.
“No,” Ex said. “But I’ve been looking around on the online resources. I’m seeing some footnotes in the London resources. Nothing solid, though.”
I laced my fingers together. What had been a half-formed suspicion slid into my consciousness like the back of my head was serving it up on a platter. If Ex couldn’t find information on a rider, either it was the most obscure entity in the catalog or something else was going on.
“Go outside our resources,” I said.
Ex frowned. “To where?” he asked. “Eric put together the most comprehensive collection of occult literature and theory maybe in the world. Seriously, any one of the places we’ve visited had caches as good as the best museums and universities.”