“Something went wrong?”
“It did,” Rhodes said. “You don’t remember us telling you any of this?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Because I was there when Master Coin told this to you. I was sitting as close to you then as I am now.”
“I remember I was going to a sleepover at Monica Smith’s house and I came to in a hotel room with a tattoo and Uncle Eric. He said I’d called him from a bar, and that I’d been crying about someone named Sidney. I didn’t even know I had a tattoo until he told me about it.”
Rhodes’s face was pale under the ink.
“Yeah. That wasn’t true.”
“Picking up on that,” I said. “But the Graveyard Child?”
“Right. Sorry. It was a rider like the one I’ve got, but it went mad. One of the people it was riding was a man named Willis Ford. No one’s sure whether he drove the rider mad or if it broke him. He split from the College and started his own research. Gathering power to himself. Without the sigil work to keep him in control or the induction to help him move from generation to generation, he had to prepare bodies that would be easier to move into.”
“Qliphoth,” I said.
“He made shells. At first he’d do it by torturing someone. Traumatizing them until they were spiritually vulnerable and then keeping them in captivity until his last body grew old or infirm. Then he would move into the new skin.”
“The rider, you mean.”
“The rider and the man. Ford was a part of the new person’s consciousness just the way all my old hosts are part of mine. But each time it happened, it moved into a new mind that was broken. Every new life it stepped into was miserable and shell-shocked and angry. The illness of generations built up in it, along with the cruelty and the distance from whatever humanity Ford had possessed in the first place. Eventually it learned how to force other riders into bodies and then pull them back out. It began with small ones. Geisten and kobold. And then, over time, it moved to more and more powerful riders. Sometimes it would force several riders into the same body. Or induce possession and then exorcise the spirit, and then induce possession again so that whoever the host was to be might have gone through a dozen rounds of being ridden and having the rider ripped away.”
“Sounds like the kind of kid who tortured animals for fun.”
“No. Not fun. For knowledge. It was a vivisectionist of souls, and it learned things on its own that would have taken those of us who weren’t as bloody-minded ten times as long to discover. If we ever would have. Its plan was to eventually return to the College when it was strong and knowledgeable enough to put itself in the central position. That may not make sense, but the College centered on a single individual. Master Coin, until—”
“Yeah, really, really sorry about that.”
A shadow seemed to pass over Rhodes’s face, but he didn’t stop.
“Master Coin kept track of where it was and what it was doing. Three times he reached out to it. Tried to bring it back where we could help it. By then it had taken on the Graveyard Child’s name and started investing that with power. And then, eventually, the threat grew too great. We all agreed that it had to be stopped. And so we came to you.”
“Because I could stop it?”
“Because we saw that you were being made its heir. We thought we could help you escape. He’d already placed a rider in you. Something young but, we thought, powerful. We . . . well, we abducted you. Sorry about that.”
“In the big picture, I kind of see why. It’s weird how much all of this looks like crime, isn’t it?”
Rhodes leaned back on the bed, the spring groaning and complaining. “I hadn’t really thought about it that way, but now that you say it, yeah. It does.”
“Anyway, you drove by in the creepy windowless van and forced me in or whatever,” I said.
He looked uncomfortable at the phrasing. “We took you to the gathering, and we explained what we were. What he was. The danger you were in.”
“Must have been a hard sell,” I said. “I idolized Eric. He was the good guy through my whole childhood. The only sane-looking one in the family. I mean, put it in a different frame and it’s a very different picture. But—”
“No. You believed us at once. You told us that he’d always struck you as . . . off. That there was something wrong with him.”
I couldn’t say why that piece of information—that, among all the horror and violations that my history had become once I started looking—should be the one that made my flesh crawl. It was crawling, though. My lost weekend at sixteen was a story. Before it had been about acting out and getting too drunk to think straight. Now it was about a power struggle between generation-spanning spiritual parasites. Okay, big change. My mother had always seemed meek and broken in a way that I put down to my father and the excesses of faith. Turned out it was about shame and ritual abuse. It changed the story about who she was and what her relationship was to me. Dad, it turned out, wasn’t my bio-dad but my real uncle, and my uncle was my actual dad. Even that hadn’t changed my sense of who I was. Of the life I’d lived.
There had been some version of me that had known or guessed that something was wrong with my uncle. I didn’t remember that. Whoever that Jayné had been, she’d been wiped out of existence, and even knowing that she’d been there couldn’t bring her back. All the way back, I had loved and admired Uncle Eric. I’d trusted him, looked to him as an example of how things could be better than they were at home. Only, maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe, along with the memories of the Invisible College, Eric had done something more to my mind and memory. It left me feeling uneasy and unclean.
The door burst in with a bang like a gun firing. Rhodes leaped to his feet, the sudden squall of his will filling the room. His hands took on a wild, unearthly glow. Chogyi Jake stepped into the doorway, the shotgun in his hands and a snarl on his face that belonged on a wolf.
“Wait!” I shouted, leaping up from my chair. “Stop! Don’t shoot anyone!”
Chogyi’s eyes didn’t shift from Rhodes. The shotgun was aimed squarely at the young man’s head. Chogyi Jake’s chest worked like a bellows, and the stink of overheated iron filled the air.
“More than five minutes,” Chogyi Jake said.
“Yeah. Sorry about that. I got distracted.”
Chogyi Jake’s gaze flickered over to me for a second. It was enough to carry annoyance and amusement and chagrin. He looked back at Rhodes.
“Well. This is awkward, then,” Chogyi Jake said between clenched teeth.
“We’ve all been kind of tense recently,” Rhodes replied gruffly, the glow in his hands pulsing like a heartbeat.
“We should probably both put our weapons down.”
“I think we should.”
The two men didn’t move for a long moment, their eyes locked and ready for violence.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said, and stepped between them. Chogyi Jake didn’t resist when I took the shotgun from him. I turned back to Rhodes and lifted my eyebrows reprovingly. The glow faded to nothing. “All right. My mistake. Sorry, but let’s all just take a couple breaths and calm down, okay?”
A few seconds later Chogyi Jake shifted back, looking at the door. “I think I broke the frame.”
“We’ll buy a new one,” I said. “Not the worst thing that could have happened tonight. Jonathan. We were back at my shitty sweet sixteen.”
Chogyi Jake looked astonished. I nodded toward the dresser. He propped the broken door closed as best he could, then went and leaned against it, his expression back to the almost unreadable calm it usually was. I took my seat again, the gun across my lap. Rhodes shifted between the two of us, then sighed.