My fingers stopped tapping.
“What is it?” Chogyi Jake asked.
“Eric’s money,” I said. “How do you think he got it?”
chapter eight
“He inherited it, dear,” my lawyer said. “Much the way you did.”
“Inherited it?” I said, shifting my phone to the other ear. Chogyi Jake’s eyebrows rose a degree and he leaned forward in his chair.
“Yes,” she said. “The structures were a bit different, of course. Regulations on these things do change over the course of a few decades. But he came into possession in 1984, on the death of Michael Bishop Heller. He would have been your great-uncle. He was a charming man. I actually met him once, but that was when I’d just started with the firm. He still wore hats, and really men stopped doing that after John Kennedy.”
“Old-school.”
“Very much.”
“And—I’m sorry, but I have to ask. Where did, um, hat guy . . . ?”
“Michael Bishop Heller came into possession on the death of Amelia Norwich in 1966. She, I believe, had it from Nellie Skinner-Bowes in 1944, who had it from her father, Anderson Skinner-Bowes in 1927. The original principal was put in trust in 1866, and it was fairly large then, and primarily in gold. Of course, the Civil War had just ended, so the assumption is that Elias Barker, who actually made the investments, was relocating from someplace in the Confederacy.”
“And you just know all this stuff off the top of your head?”
I could hear the smile in her voice when she answered. “You are our most important client, dear. You must know that?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it. So no one ever, I don’t know, got a gambling habit or lost a bunch of money in a divorce or anything?”
“No,” she said. “The investment strategy has been very consistent. Long-term, medium-risk investments with occasional more speculative short-term adventures at the client’s direct instruction. There isn’t a five-year period when the overall capital has gone down. Your uncle, God rest him, was a bit more profligate than you are, but even his habits never threatened to cut into the capital.”
“You mean he spent more than I do?”
“Considerably.”
“Okay, in the last three years, I’ve bought a house, a car, a bunch of motorcycles, God knows how many plane tickets, and started an ongoing research grant. Like on whims. I just called and had you do it.”
“The research grant was new,” she said, her voice a little wistful. “That’s mostly because it’s an ongoing expense. But we put some language in the paperwork that gets us a share in any patents that come from it, so there may still be a return. But all in all, no, dear. You fly on commercial airlines, for heaven’s sake.”
“First-class, though,” I said.
“Jayné, dear, I wouldn’t let you fly coach. I believe in frugality, but there are limits.”
I licked my lips. “How much of his expenditures do you have records of?”
“Well, I can’t say what he paid for in cash unless he forwarded on a receipt. But for any large-scale purchases, of course I’ll have full records.”
“Going back how far?”
“I already said, dear. Eighteen sixty-six.”
“You’ve still got the original records?”
“Yes.”
“Can I . . . how can I review those? I mean, Eric’s first, but if I can see all of them, that would be amazing.”
“Come to Denver. I’ll have the archives opened. Are you thinking of an audit?”
“Less of an audit,” I said. “More of an overview. Orientation. Something like that.”
“I would love to see you again, and I’d be delighted to go over any of our records with you. When would you like to come out?”
I looked at Chogyi Jake. His expression was the same calm smile as always. I wished sometimes he’d be a little easier to read. Or . . . no. That wasn’t right. I wished sometimes he’d make a few of my decisions for me, just so I wouldn’t have to. We could get in the car now and be there by morning. Going back to Santa Fe would have taken longer.
I had the visceral memory of the three tattooed wizards in my childhood home.
“There’s something I need to clear up here,” I said. “It may take a few days.”
“The week after New Year’s?”
“Let’s aim for that,” I said. “I’m not sure when exactly I’ll get there, though.”
“I’ll pencil it in for now. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“No,” I said. Then: “Yes. Can I get a list of those names? The people who had the money back from whenever?”
“Will e-mail do?”
“Sure,” I said.
“It will be to you momentarily.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”
We exchanged a couple rounds of pleasantries and farewells, and I dropped the connection and tossed my phone onto the bed.
“Well, that’s interesting,” Chogyi Jake said.
“Isn’t it just? I’ve got to say, I feel kind of stupid for not thinking of this before.”
“We aren’t businessmen,” Chogyi Jake said. “We fight vampires and demons.”
“Ex kind of was living in a garage, wasn’t he?”
“With a very nice car. He does like cars,” Chogyi Jake said. “I take it we’re staying for the wedding?”
“No. I mean, maybe. We’re staying until I can find the Invisible College and make damned sure they leave my family alone.”
He frowned. The light from the window caught the plane of his cheek, illuminating the spray of faint stubble there. A few whiskers down near his chin were coming in white.
“It may be difficult to find them,” he said. “They are like you that way.”
“Difficult for magic to track down,” I said. “Well, we’re clever.”
“And pure of heart,” he said. It was so deadpan, no one who didn’t know him would have recognized it as a joke. I laughed, though.
“So we should ace it, right?” I said. “Let’s go tell Ex what’s up. And maybe order a pizza. I know a really good pizza joint.”
“Thank God for the native guide.”
ELIAS BARKER. Toomey Conaville. Sarah Conaville. Elmer Bowes. Anderson Skinner-Bowes. Nellie Skinner-Bowes. Amelia Norwich. Michael Bishop Heller. Eric Heller. Jayné Heller. From 1866 to tonight. Turned out, I was part of a tradition. There was a line of people pressing back into history, and I had something to do with them. Some commonality. Literally, some business. I didn’t have any idea what it was, but I would. All I had right now was the moments that the baton had been passed. I wondered if they’d all been as lost and confused as I was, or if there was some manual that was supposed to come with the fortune. Something that explained the riders and my relationship to them.
Nothing was going to excuse what Eric had done, but context might haul it up into explicable territory. That would be a start. It might even be enough.
I lay in bed that night, unable to sleep. Ozzie snuck onto the foot of my bed and I didn’t have the heart to kick her off. She was snoring now, her legs twitching occasionally as she chased some dream-world squirrel. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to sleep. In the hours since dawn, I’d found out I was actually Eric’s daughter, that my mother had been possessed by the Black Sun and was still half-crazy from the experience. That Eric’s money hadn’t just been Eric’s but had belonged to a long list of mysterious people leading back into the fog of history. I’d had whole years that were less eventful than today, and it left me feeling a little stunned.
Dad was not my father. I kept poking at the idea, waiting for it to explode on me. This was supposed to be where my whole sense of myself shifted, and it didn’t seem trivial. But it also didn’t change who I was. I’d been conceived in ritual sex magic orchestrated by my evil uncle while my mother was possessed by a rider who was also quite possibly bound against her will. That was way creepier than the joyless missionary-position indignity that I wo
uld have put my money on before, but it didn’t seem to have anything to do with me. I’d had a movie-set childhood where all the things I trusted in were lies and deceptions, but I kind of knew that already. What exactly was behind the curtain didn’t change much.
When I’d climbed out my window and headed out for Arizona, I’d broken with the past. That it hadn’t gone spectacularly seemed less important now than the bare fact that I’d done it. If everything back then seemed different now, well, so what? Maybe it didn’t really matter what past I’d broken from.
I shifted, pulling the pillows up over my head. In the corridor, someone tromped past, the squeaking of a suitcase’s wheel as identifiable as a finch’s song.
“Did you know?” I asked the darkness. “About Eric and putting all those different riders into Mom?”
For a long moment nothing happened. The footsteps outside my room stopped. The muffled sound of a door lock, a hotel door opening, then closing. Some random stranger whose life story intersected with mine just this much and no more.
“No,” my mouth said without me. “I did not know what he did to our mothers.”
Our mothers. Well, that was true. There were two of us and there were two of them. We’d been made together. Her mother and mine had both been bound, and we were both the products of that profoundly unclean ritual. I wondered if the rider was more upset than I was. I wondered if there was any way to comfort her. I turned the pillow over, putting the cool side against my cheek, closed my eyes, and willed myself to sleep.
I’d heard descriptions of people having strokes whose first symptoms weren’t weakness or confusion, but an overwhelming sense of wrongness. Between one breath and the next, something like that washed over me. The pillow was the same, but the crisp, ghost-white cloth was suddenly nauseating. The walls of darkened room seemed to be at subtly wrong angles. I turned on the light, thinking the brightness would push sanity back into the room, but the bulb seemed sickly too. Morgue light.
Ozzie lifted her head, growling deep in her throat. I sat up slowly, using both hands. I couldn’t tell if I was dizzy or not, only that something felt wrong. That I felt wrong.
“It’s okay, girl,” I said, but Ozzie wasn’t buying it. She jumped off the bed and started pacing the room, the growling getting louder. The hair on her back was raised, her lips pulled back to expose yellow, blunted teeth. She stopped at the window, her nose to the thick blackout curtains, and barked once.
“Shh,” I said, rising uncertainly to my feet. “It’s okay, girl. Keep it down or we’ll wake the neighbors.”
A sickening chill came over me, like the touch of a dead fish that had gone to rot. For a moment I thought I heard someone crying. Or maybe laughing. It was hard to breathe.
“Okay,” I said. “This isn’t just me, right?”
The rider didn’t answer, but I imagined her perched behind my eyes, waiting and alert and ready.
Ozzie barked again, the angry sound of an animal defending its territory, and I walked to the window. The dog’s barking was constant now, angry and wild and threatening. She didn’t turn to look at me when I got to her side. Her full attention was on the window. I didn’t want to pull back the curtains.
I pulled back the curtains.
Outside, the world looked the same and debased at the same time. The scattering of cars was just like it had been, but it meant something different. Decay, emptiness, the aftermath of disaster. The tires on the highway were a threat until they passed, and then they were hope retreating. I put my palms against the glass, and the cold bit my fingers. Dreams were like this. The way the meanings of things came unglued, and anything—an apple, a desert, the flicker of a match—could be a reason for bone-crushing fear. Madness was leaking into the world from the cracks, and I didn’t know where the flood was coming from.
And then I did.
It stood at the edge of the parking lot, not far from where I’d been sitting when Curtis called me. It was small. Maybe three, three and a half feet tall. No bigger. It had the frame of a kid, a black rain poncho with the hood up, so that all I could see was the pale face. It was too far away to make out the details, but I had the sense of profound deformity. Of wrongness distilled into something so pure, the fumes from it burned.
It saw me, and a wide, toothless smile split its face. I was afraid it would wave at me or clap its hands, but it was still. A pair of headlights from a passing car played over the thing, making it bright for a moment. Ozzie’s barking was a frenzy now, flecks of foam sticking to the glass. An unfamiliar voice was shouting at me to shut her up. It was like something from another world.
We stood there, the evil little thing and me, staring at each other through the glass, and then I was running across the room, out the door, sprinting for the stairs faster than a human body should have been able to. I vaulted the handrail, dropping to the flight below and out the door into the darkness of the night, charging the spot where it had been with a shout boiling up out of me, carrying the will of the rider along with my own. The pavement nipped at my bare feet, the cold slapped me, but I didn’t care. In all my life I had never been so pure—or so ready for murder. It was instinct, and I didn’t even want to restrain it.
The thing was gone.
“Come back here, you bastard sonofabitch!” I screamed in a voice that wasn’t only my own but also something deeper, wilder. Not more dangerous, though. I was already feeling plenty dangerous. “Come back here and I will feed you your fucking heart!”
The last word came as a detonation. Behind me, three car alarms went off, their whoops and beeps like a pack of confused dogs barking because someone else was barking. It was too late. The unclean presence was already fading. The winter air was just air again. The wide sky above me lost all its malevolence and turned back into stars and clouds, impersonal and distant. The snarl on my lips wouldn’t let go, though, and even with the cold I didn’t move.
I heard Chogyi Jake and Ex coming from the hotel. Their footsteps were as identifiable as their faces. I didn’t even turn to look at them, my gaze locked on the darkness, searching for the twisted little figure even though I knew it wasn’t there.
“Jayné,” Ex said. He had a gun in his hand. Chogyi Jake did too. They were both in pajamas. So was I for that matter. It wasn’t the first time I’d been happy that I’d never gotten the habit of sleeping naked.
“Something was here,” I said. “It was right here.”
Chogyi Jake moved forward, his pistol held low but ready.
“You saw it?” Ex asked.
“From the window. It saw me too.”
“You recognized it?”
I hesitated.
“No,” I said. “No, I don’t know what it was.”
“But you came out after it on your own?” The disapproval was actually second to the confusion. Why attack it? And why go out on my own like I was taking on an army with my hands? It was a fair question.
“It scared the hell out of me.”
Ex looked around. There were lighted windows in the hotel now. The silhouettes of people looking out into the parking lot at us. Ex put the gun’s safety on and held it under his shirt. I crossed my arms and wondered if Ozzie was still in the room. I didn’t have any idea if the door had closed after me. I counted windows until I saw mine. She was there, her paws against the window. From the slight shifting of her head, I guessed she was wagging.
“And this is how you react when something scares you?”
“Apparently so.”
“Remind me not to pop any unexpected balloons around you.”
“Don’t pop any unexpected balloons around me,” I said, because it was the right line to follow with. Something to let the tension slip. I couldn’t let it stand there. “It wasn’t like that, though. I wasn’t startled. I was afraid.”
“I have something,” Chogyi Jake called. My feet were getting numb fast. The Black Sun had retreated back into my body and the adrenaline was seeping away, but my curiosity had cooked down
to a solid need to know. I stepped into the scrub at the side of the road. There in the shadows lay a little knot of pale and black, like a crumpled sheet of ink-stained paper, only larger. I squatted down next to it, reaching out with my fingers. Something about it seemed strange and ominous and familiar all at the same time. I plucked at it, pulling it into the light.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said.
“You know what this is?”
“I do,” I said.
My mother had always been the one to buy things for the house. Curtains, place mats, napkins. All of that had been hers. The dish towel lying on the soiled ground was the same blue-and-yellow kind that I’d used for years to wipe up spills and wash down counters. There were surely others like it all through the city, all through the world, but at that moment I’d have bet everything I owned that this one had come from my family’s kitchen.
And half of it was stiff and dark with old blood.
chapter nine
“Are you sure it’s your blood?” Kim asked from my laptop. Compressed into the Skype window, she and Aubrey seemed like news announcers, each ready for their turn at the camera. The morning sun was bright and low, and I’d pulled the curtains in the guys’ room half closed, covering us all in an artificial twilight.
“Certain,” Chogyi Jake said. “We’ve tried Bonewitz’s consonance rites and the Dismas Ceremony. It’s mine. I split my lip when they attacked, and that was the cloth I used to clean myself up.”
“We figure they went back later and dug through the trash,” Ex said.
Aubrey grunted his dissatisfaction. “I wish we could run the DNA all the same.”
“You’re just saying that because you have the equipment,” Ex said.
“Well, we do,” Aubrey replied.
Kim shook her head, but there was a smile with it. On camera, she looked fuller in the cheeks, not so pinched at the mouth. Aubrey was sporting the beginnings of a mustache that absolutely didn’t suit him. Seeing them again—seeing them together—was more like coming home than coming home had been. I wished they were really there. But I understood why it was a bad idea. It hadn’t been a full six months since Aubrey had been my lover and Kim had been his ex-wife. It only felt like years ago because so much had happened in between.
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