“Call him again,” I said.
At the second ring of the second call, I lost patience and pulled onto the shoulder, gunning the engine and passing the trailer on the right to the music of his outraged honking. I pulled back onto the road proper on the fifth ring, and I only fishtailed a little bit.
“Here,” Ex said. “I’m here.”
“Are you okay?” I snapped.
Ex’s reply came slowly. He sounded drugged. “I’m fine. Are you all right?”
“Put up any wards you can. The Graveyard Child’s alive,” I said. “It knows where we’re staying.”
“All right,” Ex said. “Was there a reason we thought it was dead? And what’s it want with us?”
I brought him up to speed in short, telegraphic sentences. Before I was half done, I could hear the small sounds of his preparations. The hiss of a match head as he lit candles or incense, the clattering of the curtains on their rails as he closed them, the squeak of the spout on a container of salt. It took me less than two minutes to tell him the bare bones of what he needed to know.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m going to let you go and focus on getting the wards up.”
“We’ll be there as soon as we can,” I said.
“All right, but don’t push too hard. It looks nasty out there, and I don’t want to have the state patrol pulling your corpses out of a ditch because you hit a patch of ice.”
I glanced over at Chogyi Jake who was looking back at me placidly. I let the speedometer drop back down to the speed limit.
“I’ll be careful,” I said. “Just really try to be alive and whole when we get back, okay?”
“Depend on it.”
He dropped the connection and Chogyi Jake put the phone away. I went back to focusing on the road and trying not to let the speed creep too high up on me.
“We should have brought him with us,” I said. “Ozzie too.”
“And who else?” Chogyi Jake asked. “Your brother and his fiancée? Your parents? Would you have brought Curtis with us too?”
“The whole damn pack,” I said. And then: “I could rent a bus.”
The minutes clicked by, each seeming longer than the one before. The snowfall thickened and slacked off and thickened again. Through good luck and viciously focused control, I didn’t manage to slide off the road before Wichita, and it was still the deep darkness when I pulled into the motel parking lot and let the engine die. All around us, the world was silent, the snow consuming what little noise there might have been. About an inch had accumulated on the pavement, and my tire tracks were the only things to mar the whiteness. I got out of the car and swept my gaze across the edge of the lot. I more than half expected the evil little figure to be there, grinning at me like it had just crawled out of its formaldehyde jar. My shudder had nothing to do with the cold. I turned to go inside.
“Jayné,” Chogyi Jake said.
“Hmm?”
“You’re carrying a shotgun.”
I looked down at my hands. I didn’t remember scooping it out of the backseat, but clearly I had. I tried to imagine what the lady at the counter would think when the girl with the black eyes who’d come in that morning fresh from the ER with her friend who’d been shot waltzed through with a firearm in her hands. Still, I hesitated.
“If it comes to that,” Chogyi Jake said, “it won’t be enough to help.”
Reluctantly, I put it back in the car, locked the doors, and shrugged deeper into my coat. The clock behind the main desk said it was almost four a.m. My driving time hadn’t been as good as I’d hoped. At the door of my room, I knocked. There was no answer. My mind flooded with images of Ex and Ozzie gutted and bits of their bodies thrown around the room or else missing. When I opened the door, the room was empty, the beds made, and fresh towels in the bathroom. I felt myself starting to panic, but Chogyi Jake only nodded toward the corridor.
“He may have moved to our room,” he said.
When we got there, Ex let us in, and I had to restrain myself from yelling at him for switching rooms. It wasn’t that he’d actually done anything wrong, but I was stressed and tired and anything was ready to set me off.
“Anything?” Chogyi Jake asked.
“All quiet,” Ex said. “Nothing got past the wards, and as far as I can tell, nothing tried.”
Ozzie was stretched out on the bed that was still made. I noticed that the room didn’t stink and the ruined pillows had all been replaced. I gave a small prayer of thanks to whatever gods or saints watched over hotel cleaning staffs and sat at the table, my phone in front of me, uncertain what I should do next. Having come this far, I wanted nothing more than to get in the car, drive back to the house outside Santa Fe, and board it up like we were waiting for the apocalypse. Just knowing that the evil, grinning little thing was out there, that it had destroyed my family generation after generation—that it was in some repulsive sense my father—made me want to get out of the world and collapse the tunnel back. And after that, maybe shower for a year or two.
I wasn’t sure what it meant that, even with that, it felt weird calling people at four thirty in the morning. The only thing I could guess was that I was compartmentalizing the hell out of things. Yes, an arcane evil from beyond the grave that had stalked my family, broken my mother’s mind, and made the rest of our lives into a living hell—the thing that seemed to squeeze all the sanity and rightness out of the air just by breathing it—was alive and in the city. But four thirty a.m. was an inappropriate time for phone calls.
I started with Jay. His phone rolled straight to voice mail without so much as a ring.
“Hey, big brother, we’ve still got problems. I found out what the Illustrated Man Fan Club was actually doing, and turns out they aren’t the biggest threat. Call me when you get this.”
When I called home, Dad picked up, sounding groggy and pissed.
“Who is this?”
“It’s Jayné. Look, there’s a problem. The demon that was in Eric when he did all those things? It’s here. You need to get the family and—”
“Don’t call again,” he said, and hung up.
“Great,” I said to the dead connection.
“Problem?” Ex asked.
“Nothing I should be at all surprised by.”
I sent Curtis a text: Bad shit coming. Call me but don’t let Dad know. B careful.
It was woefully insufficient, and I knew it. But it was all I had to work with. I wished now that I’d told Curtis more about riders and magic and the surreal messes I’d found myself in when they were happening. He’d been my safety valve. My touchstone with some other, safer world. But that had been an illusion, and there was only one world after all. I’d thought I could shield him from the ugly truths of possession and magic, and all I’d actually managed was to make sure he wasn’t ready when trouble came. I put away my phone and took out my laptop, checked a few news sites and a couple of Web comics. Fidgeted. Put the laptop away. Chogyi Jake was on the bed next to Ozzie, and it wasn’t perfectly clear which of them the snores were coming from. Five in the morning. The snow was still falling.
Ex leaned over from his bed and put his hand on my shoulder.
“You should sleep,” he said. “It’ll be all right. I’ll keep watch.”
“That’s what you do, isn’t it?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “When it needs doing.”
He didn’t take his hand away, and I didn’t want him to. The simple warmth and weight of a human hand felt like the best security blanket in the world just then. It wasn’t the prelude to anything else, nothing about it was flirtation or foreplay. That was what made it all right.