I dropped the call as Ex and Ozzie came back in. He had a duffel bag over his shoulder that had been empty when it was in the car. It was loaded down now, probably with shotguns. The dog’s tail was still wagging, and I had the impression that it hadn’t stopped at any point in between. She scrambled up onto the bed and curled up with a look that said What? I’m small.
“Anything?” I asked.
“Nothing I could see,” Ex said. “Nothing out there’s under a glamour. No surveillance that I can see either. It would have been difficult if the city were denser, but there’s hardly anything out here to hide behind.”
“There’s a small blessing.”
Ex smiled.
“More like faint praise,” he said, sitting on the cheap black desk chair that seemed to come in all hotel rooms and propping his feet on the other bed. “So what’s plan B?”
“Don’t know. Things didn’t go too well with my dad.”
“I know,” Ex said.
“I mean before that. We were in the garage, and—”
“Yeah, the sound carried pretty well,” Ex said. “We didn’t hear all the words, but the tone of voice was clear.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s embarrassing.”
“The big question is what the Invisible College was doing there,” Ex said, unzipping the duffel bag and taking out one of the guns. “If they came because they knew we were coming. If they’ve been staking out your home turf since Denver.”
He racked the gun, ejecting a brass-and-blue-plastic shell. Chogyi Jake picked it up, frowning, and pulled a tiny Leatherman out of his pocket.
“Yeah,” I said. “I was under the impression that we’d broken them back in Denver. Didn’t killing their grand pooh-bah break all their spells?”
“All the ones that were tied to the rider that had taken Coin’s body,” Ex said. “And we kicked the anthill. But enough time may have passed that they got their boy band back together.”
“A new Randolph Coin,” I said. Then I shook my head. “That wasn’t what this guy seemed like to me. He was young.”
“The body was young,” Chogyi Jake said, stepping into the bathroom. “The thing inside it may have been quite old. And possibly quite powerful.”
“That’s what I mean, though,” I said. “He didn’t seem . . . powerful. Or maybe powerful but not sophisticated. I mean, he used the frigging Oath of the Abyss.”
“Maybe he’s got a thing for shotguns,” Ex said, racking and ejecting another round and another until the gun was empty and half a dozen blue shells rolled on the spare bed. “All power, no subtlety.”
My phone buzzed. A text message from Curtis: ru OK? What the f was that?
“I suspect he was one of the younger leaders within the College,” Chogyi Jake said. “Someone with ties and experience, but still subordinate to Coin.”
I thumbed a message back to Curt: I’m fine. Don’t worry. I’ll be in touch.
It was weak, but I didn’t know what else to tell him. This didn’t seem like the moment to go into the whole issue of spiritual parasites and secret societies. Partly because he might think the whole thing was exciting, and the last thing I wanted was my little brother poking his hands into the hornet’s nest. The less involved he was—the less involved all of them were—the better it would be for everybody.
“We knew that Coin was involved in holding the haugsvarmr under Grace Memorial,” Ex said, “because killing Coin was what let that damned thing call for help.”
“Which is why Eric was in Denver in the first place,” I said. “To get rid of Coin and find the thing under Grace and . . .”
“Yeah,” Ex said, switching to the second weapon. “That’s the question, isn’t it? And what? Make some kind of deal with it. It got its freedom and Eric got fill-in-the-blank.”
“We’ve already figured that Eric wasn’t exactly one of the good guys,” I said. “The Invisible College was working against him. They might be on the side of the angels, right?”
“I think there’s room in all this for more than two sides,” Ex said. “Eric was a sociopath and a rapist, but that doesn’t mean Coin wasn’t at least as bad or worse. The Pleroma is full of these things, and that they all fight among each other doesn’t mean that half of them are angels and half are demons. They’re—”
He broke off, looked away, and started ejecting shells from the second gun. I knew what he was going to say and why he’d stopped. They’re all demons. The words were as clear as if he’d spoken them. To Ex, all riders were demonic, and all of them needed to be stopped. Even the one in me. That it had saved my life and his a dozen times over didn’t matter to him. In his world, I was still someone to be saved, and she—it—was what I needed saving from. I folded my hands across my knees and looked away. I’d made my deal with the Black Sun, and it hadn’t done anything yet that made me think it wasn’t my ally. And still, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure Ex was wrong.
“Well, we can’t leave,” I said. “Not the way things stand now. And we can’t go to my folks and start asking questions.”
“So what does that leave us?” Ex asked as he started to break down the shotguns.
Ozzie yawned, stretched, and started to snore wetly. I poked her with my toe, but she ignored me. Outside the window, the traffic from the highway made a low, constant hum. Tires against asphalt. The moon was just shy of full, spilling cold, blue light across the parking lot.
“I think we should try to make contact with my mother outside of the house. No one’s going to go against Dad in his own home. Not if he’s laying down the law like this. But if we can get her when she’s out shopping or coming home from church or something, maybe I can talk to her.”
“What about your brothers?” Chogyi called. “They seemed quite approachable.”
“Probably are, but they’re also the least likely to know anything. Jay’s not that much older than me, and he’s got his fiancée and her family and the wedding thing to worry about. Curt’s younger and probably knows even less than I did.”
“Does your mother attend church by herself?” Chogyi Jake asked.
“Sometimes,” I said. “But even if her schedule’s the same as it was when I was living there, this wedding thing’s going to throw it off. Plus which, my dad’s going to be on high alert. Plus which, Carla and all her family are going to be around.”
“So follow her around,” Ex said, “and hope for a chance.”
“And hope no one else is following her around in order to take a crack at us when we start doing it.”
“Sounds like our usual kind of plan,” Ex said, smiling grimly.
My phone buzzed again. Curtis. Who were those guys? Were they in a gang or something?
“Hmm,” Ex said, frowning down at the disassembled steel.
“Anything interesting?”
“Nope. The serial numbers are still on them, though.”
“Can we trace them? See who they were sold to or something?”
Ex smiled like I’d made a joke.
“This is America,” he said. “There’s no Carfax for guns. About the best we can hope for is that they were stolen. And then all we’ll really know is who they were stolen from.”
“Is there any juju on them?”
“Not that I can see,” Ex said. “Maybe on the shells, though.”
“No,” Chogyi Jake said, stepping back into the room. His hand was out flat, carrying something gently. “No magic. But look at this.”
It wasn’t quite a powder. More like tiny pale stones flecked with bits of red and black color. I frowned and put my fingers out to touch it. It didn’t burn or feel cold. I didn’t get the weird flesh-crawling feel I sometimes did around magically charged items. It just felt like it looked. Innocuous.
“Rock salt?” Ex said.
“I think so,” Chogyi Jake said. “It dissolves the way I’d expect it to. I haven’t quite brought myself to taste it, but—”
“We should check the other shells,” Ex said. It
took us about half an hour to slit the plastic open on all of them. Before we were done, Ozzie had woken enough to become interested in what we were doing and then get bored by it again. All of the shells were the same. Black powder and mundane salt. Ex went back to the disassembled guns, lifting each piece to his eyes and shifting it so that the light played across the surfaces.
“There’s no rust,” he said. “I can’t believe they’ve used salt rounds in these guns. At least, not on a regular basis.”
“Why use them at all?” I asked.
“Because you didn’t want to hurt anybody,” Chogyi Jake said.
“That’s what I was thinking,” I said. “So if they weren’t looking to hurt anybody, what were they doing?”
For what seemed like forever, none of us spoke. When Ex broke the silence, his voice was soft.
“Curiouser and curiouser.”
chapter five
I was at a coffee shop in Phoenix a few years back when I heard that my uncle was dead. The man on the other end of the line was very gentle, very solicitous. All I knew then was that Uncle Eric—the one relative who’d always been on my side, swooping in whenever I was in trouble—had been killed. After we hung up, I sat still for half an hour, trying to figure out how I felt. Stunned, horrified, sad. I had the impulse to call home and talk to my parents, but even then I knew it wouldn’t be welcome. Dad had forbidden us all to speak to Eric with more or less the same fervor he’d used to forbid me to go to ASU.
I didn’t call. Instead, I’d packed up the thin membrane of my own failed life and flown out to Denver, expecting to execute his will and hide out from my collegiate failures for a couple weeks.
Back then, I printed up all the directions to things off MapQuest. When Ex tracked me, he had to sneak a GPS tracker into my backpack. Now, planning out our next approach to my mother, it was all Google Maps and Street View, and I’d had the GPS trackers pulled out of my phone and car. Actually, so that Ex couldn’t find me when I didn’t want to get found. Some things time changes quickly.
Some things stay the same.
The morning after I talked to my lawyer, the report was delivered by special courier. The carefully anonymous pages had become familiar over the years. I lay on the bed in my sweats and a T-shirt, scratching Ozzie with the heel of my right foot, and went over the pages. The Invisible College had fallen apart after their leader died, but in recent months about half a dozen much smaller, much less organized groups had started to re-form from the ruins of the old one, usually with some central figure taking the role that Randolph Coin had occupied. In Montreal, it was a woman named Idéa Smith who might or might not have been the blue-eyed woman with the shotgun. In Mexico City, Eduardo Martinez, who was apparently immune to having a decent picture taken. In Los Angeles . . .
“Bingo,” I said. Ozzie shifted her ears forward.
Jonathan Rhodes had turned twenty-eight in May, putting him about one presidential election ahead of me. He’d been inducted into the Invisible College ten years before. Before that, he’d been a musician. He’d studied economics and literature at Tulane for three semesters before he fell in with members of the College. The pictures of him were unmistakable. He had the kind of boyish face that would still look young when he was sixty. Even with a full head of brownish hair and none of the tattoos that covered him now, I recognized the man who’d broken my nose.
The report went on to detail what the three new leaders had been doing, more or less, in the years since their own superior died. I skimmed most of it. The important thing for me was what they were doing now, apart from kicking in my family’s doors and windows. The answer wasn’t particularly satisfying. Since the end of summer, they’d been absent. Vanished. Gone underground like they were hiding from something. There wasn’t a solid date when they’d vanished, but it looked to me like it had gone down right about the same time I’d been in Chicago. I wanted there to be a connection between the two, and maybe there was one. I just didn’t see it.
I got to the last page of the report. A list of outstanding questions that the investigator was looking into now—recent whereabouts, funding sources, activity on the Internet—with the promise that more information would be provided as soon as the questions had reliable answers. Given that I’d only asked for the report the night before, I was impressed they’d managed this much.
I tossed the report on my pillow and got up. My body suffered a kind of all-over soreness that I hadn’t felt before. Each individual muscle seemed to ache just a little bit, so there wasn’t anything I could do, any motion I could make, that didn’t bug me at least a little bit. My face still throbbed if I stood up or sat down too quickly, and the girl in the mirror looked pretty rough. Blood had pooled under both my eyes, and the bridge of my nose had a little shift that it hadn’t had before. I washed my face gently. Probably I should have gone to a doctor. If it was important to me later, I could have a plastic surgeon rebreak everything and put it back together. Probably it wouldn’t be worth the trouble. I told myself the new nose added character, took a quick shower, and got some clothes on. Ozzie was standing by her food bowl and wagging her tail at me when I got out. She was almost finished with her breakfast when Ex’s soft knock came at the door.
“I think it’s your boyfriend,” I whispered into her soft ears, then opened the door. Chogyi Jake was with him, and they’d brought pancakes. Ex also had a pair of massive 1960s sunglasses with lenses that stretched down past my cheekbones and covered my shiners. My friends were the best people ever. They took turns reading the report while I ate.
“We have their guns,” I said when they were both finished. “I was thinking maybe we could use that to make some kind of connection back to them. Figure out where they are?”
“Would be better if we had something with blood on it,” Ex said.
“And even then,” Chogyi Jake said, “the Invisible College can be difficult to track.”
“That’s why I was thinking magic. I know they can cast glamours and look different. I thought if we could use my rider, maybe—”
“They’re also hard to locate that way,” Ex said.
“Kind of the way I am?”
“Like that,” he agreed.
“Well, piss. Back to the first plan, then? At least Mom won’t be that hard to find.”
PLAINS IMMANUEL Fellowship was in an A-frame building with buff-colored brick on the first story and white clapboard above that where the chapel ceiling rose up. Looking at the five low stone steps that led to its doors was like hearing a familiar voice speaking my name. Everything about the building was clear in my mind—the fluorescent-backlit stained glass in the hall outside the pastor’s office, the blond wood of the pews, the damp smell of the children’s classroom in the basement. All of it was clear. The building itself seemed like a person. Like another member of my family. Part of me wanted to go in just to be there. To breathe that air again and see if it really was all just the way I remembered, or if by changing myself I’d changed it too.
There was a new sign out by the road, also done in brick and almost the same color as the building. It had a section of white with black movable letters. Today, they spelled out FEAR THE LORD, AND YOU’LL HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR. Every time I read the words, I was torn between amusement and anger.
Ex and I sat in the SUV across the road, watching. Chogyi Jake was out in the cold wind, huddled into a flight jacket with a stocking cap pulled down over his ears, making his tour of the building’s perimeter. Looking for the enemy. When he was done, he’d get back in the rental car we’d hired so that we could have more than one option in case of an attack. I’d popped for the full insurance on the rental. I’d gotten a coffee from a Scooter’s Coffee & Yogurt. Ex had too. My mother had gone in the church about an hour ago. I’d turned off the music when we got there because I had the idea that it wasn’t the sort of thing that went with shadowing someone. Between the heater, the engine, and the wind, there could have been a George Thorogood concert going on insi
de and I wouldn’t have known it, but I didn’t turn my Pink Martini back on.
The doors opened, and I leaned forward, my hands on the steering wheel. A man in a gray suit came out and trotted to the parking lot. I sat back while he revved his engine and pulled out into traffic. I didn’t know what exactly Mom was doing at church, but I didn’t think there were services at this time in the morning. Something to do with the wedding, I guessed. Or else something to do with me.
“Are you all right?” Ex asked.
He looked good. He’d put a glamour on himself. It was one of the cantrips Eric had taught him, back when they’d worked together. Back before any of us had known what Eric was. As a result, his own wounds and bruises were invisible, as if they’d healed overnight. He looked like a perfect version of himself unless I really focused on him, and then all the damage became clear. Not a bad metaphor for the rest of him either.
“I’m . . . I don’t know. I’m fine. You guys keep asking that. Do I look like I’m about to start sprouting tentacles or something?”
“You’re quiet,” he said.
“And I’m usually loud?”
His smile was sly, and it made him look better.
“You’re not usually quiet.”
The church door opened, and this time it was my mother walking out. She wore a simple blue dress that looked too slight for the weather, a thin coat, and a wool scarf that fluttered behind her like it had someplace else it wanted to be. I scooped up my phone and called Chogyi Jake.
“I see her,” he said instead of hello. “Going back to the car.”
“All right,” I said. “Any sign of the bad guys?”
“Nothing.”
“Okay. I’ll follow her. You follow me.”
I had essentially no experience tailing someone. It was the kind of skill set I’d heard about on TV and movies, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it. We had two cars, so I had a vague idea that I should stay behind Mom for a while, then turn off and let Chogyi Jake take my place, then switch off again a few blocks later. Either it was a good plan, or my mother had other things on her mind. Even though I was in a lumbering black apartment of a car, she didn’t seem to notice me, or it, or much of anything. She went to the dry cleaner’s and the bank. I drove with one eye on her, and one on the rearview. I expected to see a buzzing fleet of rider-infested wizards bearing down on me and howling for blood at any minute. That it kept not happening only made it seem more likely that it would.
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