“We had a safe house ready for you. People who were ready to see to your well-being. We talked about taking the rider from you, but we were afraid that it might leave you open to the Graveyard Child. So instead we erased you.”
“My tattoo,” I said. “It’s why I’m hard to see magically. That was you guys.”
Rhodes spread his arms, displaying them. His smile was rueful. “Skin sigils are pretty much what we do,” he said. “We couldn’t use any of the standard Marks. The Graveyard Child knew them all. We fashioned one specific to you and tied it to your own qi for its power. So long as you lived, magic would not see you. Only, then you vanished.”
“Eric swooping down and doing whatever he was doing to mess with my head,” I said.
“Apparently,” Rhodes said. A gust of freezing wind blew the door open. He pushed it closed and moved a standing lamp to block it. “We didn’t know that at the time, though. We thought you might have been in league with Eric the whole time, playing along with us in a way that gave him information about us and gave you the Mark that would make it even harder to track when the rider had moved to you.
“We kept track of you, but the Graveyard Child defended you like his own. When you left for Arizona, we thought that you were trying to escape him, and we tried to reach you, but he laid a trap for us. We almost succeeded in taking away his heir. I believe that was what moved Abraxiel to take action. He planned for the next induction, when he knew where we would be.”
“And so he got Midian Clark to be the focus for him. The idea was to kill Coin and take his place.”
“Only, Master Coin reached him first.”
For a moment I was with Midian Clark. The rueful smile on his ruined lips. The yeah, you-got-me shrug when Aubrey and I had realized he wasn’t a cursed human but a rider trapped in a corpse. I wasn’t about to tell Rhodes that I still thought of the old vampire as a friend. But even if I liked him, Midian’s agenda had always been his own. I wondered how much he’d known about Eric, and about the Graveyard Child, that he’d never bothered to mention because it suited him to leave me in the dark.
“And I took out Coin, thinking he was a demon-possessed monster who’d killed my loving uncle,” I said. “And everyone assumed that the Graveyard Child had shucked out whatever was living in me and taken up residence. So the whole thing started over. Jay got Carla pregnant, and it looked like the cycle might be beginning again. So you grabbed her, lured me into a trap; except, instead of the Graveyard Child, you got the Black Sun.”
“The Black Sun?” Rhodes said, his jaw actually dropping a centimeter.
“Well, the Black Sun’s daughter,” I said. “But yeah.”
“And here we are,” Chogyi Jake said, “and we don’t know what happens next.”
“That is the question, isn’t it?” I said. “Is this something where we can shake hands and chalk it up to experience, or do we still have a problem?”
Rhodes sat on the bed again, his hands on his knees. He seemed so thin, almost too fragile for the power that was in his flesh. I wondered whether I should have felt the same about myself. I wasn’t as twiggy as he was, but the Black Sun was orders of magnitude more powerful than I was. Maybe I should have felt too small for what was in me, but I didn’t. I felt at home with her.
“You and I are fine,” he said slowly, “but I am not the Invisible College. Eduardo and Idéa have as much status in the body as I do. I can take everything you’ve said to them, and they might believe it too. But you are the one who killed Master Coin. Not Eric Heller. Not even the Graveyard Child. You. And that may not be something all of us can overlook.”
“What about a pact?” I asked. “When . . . God, I feel like a terrible human being. Okay, when I was fighting Coin, he offered to make a pact. A binding. If I didn’t act against him, he’d let me go. At the time that sounded like a kind of spiritual slavery, and I was still pretty bent about Eric, so I turned him down. Any chance the offer is still open?”
“Maa—aaybe,” Rhodes said, pulling the word out to three syllables. “If you’re serious, it might be something we can do. But if you have the Black Sun in you as well—”
“I will consent to this,” my mouth said without me. “The sabiendos are no enemy to me.”
Rhodes’s eyes went round and wide enough that I could see the whites all around the irises. It was hard not to smirk a little.
“Was that . . . ?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That was her. So what do you think. We have a deal?”
Rhodes seemed lost in thought, but his voice was as sharp as ever. “It would need to be binding on your allies as well. No offense.”
“None taken,” Chogyi Jake said. “I am willing, but our friend Ex may be more difficult to convince.”
“I’ll talk him into it,” I said. “We can make this work. But it needs to cover all of you guys. And that freaky bloodhound thing too. I don’t know what that was, but seriously, if we do this, I want it kept on a leash.”
Rhodes shifted his focus to me. The wind blew the door against the standing lamp with a clunk, and then another one.
“Bloodhound?” he said. “What bloodhound?”
A chill crawled up my spine and I felt a fear that was deeper and colder than anything I’d felt on the drive out here.
“The thing that tracked us to the hotel,” I said. “About a head and a half smaller than you? Black poncho. Creepy as hell. The one that was using Chogyi Jake’s blood from the big battle of the kitchen table?”
Rhodes shook his head. “We didn’t track you. We’d convinced Carla you were dangerous. There was nothing else we needed to do.”
“All right,” I said. “Then what the fuck was that thing?”
The silence lay over the room for a long moment, each of us thinking the same thing, but none of us willing to say it. To make it real.
“It’s not dead,” I said, and the words were stark. “The Graveyard Child. You killed Eric, but it didn’t die. It’s here. It’s here, and it knows I’m here too.”
Rhodes went pale under his ink. “That’s not good news. It has to have found a host. Someone else who’d been prepared besides you.”
I rose from the chair, clutching the shotgun. Chogyi Jake wasn’t leaning against the dresser anymore. I saw my own alarm mirrored in his face.
“It knows where we’re staying,” I said. “Ex is alone.”
“I think we should leave,” Chogyi Jake said. “I think we should leave now.”
“Be in touch, okay?” I said to Rhodes over my shoulder as I walked out. “Your people call mine. Like that.”
“Yes. Of course. But be careful. If it is Abraxiel and he manages to empty you after all, you won’t be able to keep him out of you.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Spiffy.”
chapter nineteen
I bent over the wheel, trying to will the SUV faster. The engine groaned and roared. The snow made a tunnel that was almost but not quite aligned with the road. I could feel the surface of the highway in the small movement of the steering wheel, the slickness and the growing ice. Two hours out to Rhodes’s hideout; forty-five minutes, more or less, talking to him; and now two more hours back. I plucked my phone out of my pocket, keeping one eye on the red glow of the brake lights on the trailer in front of me. It was hardly doing fifty, and there was just slightly too much oncoming traffic to pass.
“Let me dial,” Chogyi Jake said. “It won’t help anyone if we wreck on the way back.”
“Okay,” I said. A pickup truck blew by, heading the other direction, and I pulled out to pass the trailer just as a new set of headlights appeared, coming toward me. I said something obscene and pulled back. Chogyi Jake put the phone on speaker, each ring tightening the knot in my stomach. The call dropped to voice mail.