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Chapter Sixteen

I wrote my questions on the back of a receipt from a gas station in Medina with a pen I'd stolen from the laundromat counter, and I want it stated plainly that this was the most preparation I had ever done for anything in my life.

It took forty minutes and most of the drive north. I filled both sides of the receipt, moved on to a napkin, and by the time we hit the lake road I had nine versions of essentially the same question and hated every one of them.

The problem with Charon was that he told the truth the way a lawyer did. Every word was accurate, but accuracy and usefulness were apparently distant cousins who didn't speak to each other. Last time I saw him I'd asked whether he'd guided my mother across the River of Souls the night I was born. He'd told me nobody crossed without him knowing, and that if she had paid the price, he had granted passage.

I had walked away believing my mother was dead and at rest. It had taken all this time and a letter hidden inside a wall to realize he'd described the rules of his job and let me supply the answer I wanted to hear.

If she had paid the price.

I crossed out question nine hard enough to nearly tear the receipt.

"You're muttering," River said.

I dragged another line through what remained of number nine and ignored the comment. "Say I ask him where my mother is. What would he say?"

River kept his attention on the road, but I caught the slight pull at one corner of his mouth. "That he isn't Google Maps to give you directions."

"Right. How about, Is my mother dead? Instead."

"Death is considerably more complicated than you understand. Would you like him to explain it? There will, of course, be a price tag attached."

I lowered the receipt. "You're enjoying this."

"I'm being useful."

There was enough satisfaction in his voice to make me look at him again. The shadows hadn't gone from under his eyes and whatever had happened over the last four days hadn't magically disappeared, but the dry tilt of his mouth was the first thing about him that had looked like the old River was back.

My fingers loosened around the receipt. I hadn't realized how tightly I'd been scrunching it.

"Useful is a generous description for what you are doing."

"And she's back," he murmured with a slight smile, and I turned toward the window before he could see what that did to me.

Lake Erie appeared on our right twenty minutes later, flat and gray beneath a sky that looked undecided about whether rain was worth the effort. November had stripped away whatever charm the lake possessed during summer and left behind several thousand square miles of freezing water with murderous tendencies.

I directed River toward the turnout we'd used last time. Beyond the shallows, half a mile from shore, the glass pyramid stood in roughly nine feet of water, catching what little light managed to get through the clouds.

Humans couldn't see it, and that still bothered me. Joggers passed it every morning. Fishermen stood on the break wall every weekend drinking terrible coffee and complaining about things with fins, and boats went around the structure without their captains ever realizing they'd changed course. It sat there like something dropped out of another world while human eyes slid across it and found nothing worth remembering.

I stared at the water long enough for my skin to start objecting on principle alone.

"How are we getting out there?" my question sounded almost rhetorical. River didn't answer. His hands stayed on the wheel and his jaw was set. "River?"

"I can carry you. I would rather you didn't ask me to."

Every sarcastic response waiting on my tongue disappeared.

Four days ago I might have let him carry me without thinking to ask what it cost him, which was the part that rubbed me wrong. Two years of assuming his power came free, and I'd never once made him tell me otherwise.

"How much does it cost you?"

"That isn't the relevant question."

"It is to me."

He finally looked over, and I braced for the deflection. The slow blink. The change of subject. That maddening expression he wore when he'd decided to let me finish being wrong in my own time.