“It had a plan,” I said. “It was going to hollow me out and take over my life, and when that didn’t work out, it had something else it could fall back to.”
“You sound jealous,” he said.
“I am. I can’t remember the last time I had a clear idea of what I’d be doing next week. This thing plays with decades. With lifetimes. Can you imagine what it would be like to have that kind of time to plan through?”
“I’m supposed to be planning for my immoral soul,” Ex said. “But honestly, no. I can’t imagine living on that kind of time scale.”
“It’s got to be pissed off that I got its stuff, though,” I said. “Maybe we should go out and spend everything quick before it . . .”
Ex turned me around slowly, the hand on my shoulder drawing me back until I faced him. Then he took his hand away. In the light from the desk lamp and the backsplash of city lights from the snow, he looked younger. His black eye was already fading toward a weird green. I wondered what mine looked like. Whether my nose was going to be the same shape it had been before Rhodes broke it. I wondered if anything was ever really the same after it broke. Even things that healed were different. I felt a rush of exhausted tears come to my eyes.
“I wish I had a plan,” I said. “I wish I knew what I was doing next.”
“We’ll decide in the morning.”
“I don’t mean just that. I mean . . . I mean where do you see yourself five years from now? Or ten? Or twenty? I’m pretty sure I’m not going to spend the rest of my life bouncing from crisis to crisis and emergency room to emergency room. But I don’t know what that looks like. And it does.”
Ex stretched his neck, the vertebrae popping like a wet stick.
“It’s also apparently mind-warpingly crazy and evil besides,” he said.
“But with a solid investment portfolio,” I said. “Did you ever see it? I mean, you worked with him. I’m sure you didn’t think, Hey, this guy’s clearly possessed. Would you look at that? But from here, looking back, were there signs?”
Someone in a nearby room turned on the shower. The pipes sang.
“No. I didn’t suspect anything at the time, and I can’t think of anything that in retrospect should have looked suspicious. He seemed like exactly what he claimed to be. Whatever this thing is, it can pass for human. It may take years to track this thing down. It may take our whole lives. But we can do it.”
“Do we have to?”
“Yes,” he said, and he was right. I had come into this thinking that Eric had been some kind of spiritual fixer, the guy who came in when there was trouble and faced down the demons. He’d been just the opposite, but that didn’t change things for me. If anything, it confirmed it. The Graveyard Child. The haugsvarmr. The body-hopping serial killer that had ruined Karen Black. They were madness, and I was in a position to do something about them. And so yes, I had to.
“And the Black Sun?” I asked. “Are you going to have to fight her too?”
“She’s a demon,” Ex said. “Sooner or later, yes. That’s going to be a problem. But she’s not at the top of my to-do list.”
I chuckled.
“Suppose that’ll have to do.”
I rose and walked to the window, put my fingertips to the glass. The cold pressed through, but not as badly as I’d expected. The world was the soft orange-gray of city lights captured by the snow. I let the future fade away for a second. The need for a plan, for certainty. I just took in the moment and let it be beautiful. My hometown, in snow.
“Can I ask you something?” Ex said.
“You can ask me anything.”
“You don’t seem freaked out. Why not?”
“I don’t seem freaked out?” I said, laughing a little through the words. “Seriously?”
“Well, maybe a little. But compared to what I expected . . . I mean, in the last few days you found out that your father wasn’t your real father, that your mom was ritually abused by your uncle, and you’re the product of that abuse. That your mother is probably insane because of what happened to her. That you had your mind altered by this Graveyard Child thing; that you almost escaped the whole thing once, only you don’t remember; and that the thing that’s responsible for it all is not only still alive but it seems like it may be tracking you. By just about any scale, that’s a pretty bad week.”
“True,” I said. And then a moment later: “I’ve had worse.”
Ex sighed and Ozzie sighed with him. “You have, haven’t you? You know, I think back to the girl I met in Denver.”
“You mean when you were helping hide the corpses of the Invisible College people I’d helped Midian kill?”
“That was the night.”
“And what do you think about when you think about that girl?”
Ex’s expression went sober. “That she was fragile. And she was lost. When you found out reality wasn’t what you thought it was, it shook your world. All of it. Now it’s happened three or four times in as many days, and you’re wondering what your long-term plan should be. You’re not the same person you used to be.”
“I am, though.”
“All right,” Ex said. “Then maybe I’m just seeing how much better you are at being her. Now, lay down and close your eyes. You don’t have to sleep, but you do have to rest.”
The pillow felt better than it had any right to. I kept looking outside for the first light of dawn, but it would be hours yet. There was traffic, though. Men and women going to their work, the city pulling itself awake after another long night’s rest. I felt my mind beginning to wander. I wondered what Jonathan Rhodes had done about his broken door and whether Jay would ever find a way to be happy married to Carla. If Curtis would have the courage to go to a secular university, and whether it would be easier for him because he was a guy and the youngest.
My closed eyes felt perfectly comfortable and my body still and calm. Somewhere inside me, the young Black Sun might be resting or thinking or waiting for some event or opportunity. The more I’d learned about her, the more I trusted her. Not a perfectly rational response, I thought, but at least it’s mine.
Ex was right. I had changed. I thought of the things that had uneased and unsettled me, not just when I got to Denver. When, in Arizona, my boyfriend’s circle decided to eject me from their clique, it had been devastating. I’d dropped out of college because I’d been distracted by something that didn’t matter to me now at all. When I’d found out, after falling into bed with Aubrey, that he was technically still married, I’d thrown a fit. When I’d met Karen Black, just standing next to her had left me feeling inadequate.
I could remember all those events, all those feelings. But I couldn’t imagine having them now. Even coming home, seeing my parents again, seeing Jay. It hadn’t been easy, but four years ago it wouldn’t have been possible. The thought was comforting. I liked the younger Jayné who’d made her decision and stuck by it. I liked the one who’d decided to let herself be seduced by a man she basically didn’t care about as a rite of passage into the new life she’d chosen. I’d made some stupid decisions, but they were mine, and there was as much to love about where they had brought me. Except for the hiding behind wards in a hotel room. That part wasn’t an emblem of success.
I heard Ozzie jump off the other bed and pad stolidly across to the bathroom. She drank out of the toilet. Voices came in the corridor and went. I drifted by degrees down toward sleep.
And then I sat up, my heart pounding and my blood electric. Ex turned to me, alarmed.
“What’s the matter, Jayné?” Chogyi Jake asked from the other bed.