Page 2 of The Jackal

"You're not going to be the crazy dog lady."

"I have so much dog hair in my house that I've started thinking of it as a finish. Like a coat of paint. There's a tumbleweed of it under my sofa that I've named."

Dad didn't laugh that time, which is how I knew he was about to say something I'd actually have to sit with. He turned the beer bottle in his hands, looking out at the dogs, and the lines around his eyes did the thing they did when he was choosing his words like he was clearing a room.

"You moved to a city where you didn't know a soul," he said, "for a job most people don't even know exists, taking care of animals that gave everything and got handed back broken. You did that alone. At thirty." He took a sip. "I've commanded men who couldn't do half of that. You've got more to offer than you let yourself believe, Magnolia. The right person is going to look at all of this—" he tipped the bottle toward the yard, the dogs, the absurd turtle pool, the small, crooked house "—and understand exactly what kind of luck they walked into."

I didn't say anything for a second. The cicadas filled it in for me.

It would have been easy to make a joke. I'm good at that, the deflection, the quick pivot before anything lands too hard. But my dad didn't hand out reassurance the way other people did, automatic and weightless. When Gary Bennett told you something, it was because he'd done the math and the math came out that way. He'd spent my whole childhood doing math—the math of deployments, of moves, of which base, which school, which Christmas he'd actually be home for. The math that had eventually added up to my parents sitting me down when I was sixteen and explaining, kindly and without raising their voices once, that they loved each other and couldn't stay married to each other, and that none of it was the Army's fault and all of it was.

My mom was a physician. She'd spent fifteen years restarting her practice in fifteen places, building something and leaving it, building it again, until one day, she simply didn't want to anymore. I understood it. I understood both of them. That was the cruel part—there was no villain in my parents' divorce, just two good people and a career that asked for everything and got it.

Which was maybe why I'd ended up where I had. First with the nonprofit in Virginia Beach, working with the families—the spouses holding it together through the deployments, the kids counting months on calendars. And now here, with the dogs. The ones who'd done the work and come home changed, who needed someone to learn their fears and sit with them in the dark. I knew how to do that. I'd been training for it my whole life, even when I thought I was just surviving it.

"You're getting that look," my dad said.

"What look?"

"The one where you're three states away."

"I'm right here." I bumped my shoulder against his. "I'm just thinking I got lucky in the dad department, even if you did buy me a grill the size of a chest freezer without asking."

"It's got a side burner."

"You said."

In the pool, Beans had discovered the hose and was now biting the stream of water with single-minded fury, getting absolutely nowhere and refusing to learn. Tiny had given up and lay half-submerged like a capsized boat. Duke still sat in the center of it all, monarch of his small, wet kingdom, watching the squirrel watch him.

My phone buzzed against the step, and I already knew without looking that it was my mother, because she had a sense for these moments the way some people could feel a storm coming in their knees.

How's the colonel behaving? the text read, and then, before I could answer, a second one: Send me a picture of the dogs in the pool.

My parents hadn't been in the same room in years and probably never would be again, but they'd somehow worked out a custody arrangement over me that required no lawyers and no calendar—he got the grills and the down payments, she got the late-night phone calls and the photos of the dogs. Between the two of them, I had never once felt like a child of divorce so much as a child who'd been loved by two people from slightly different zip codes. I took the picture. Duke looked regal. I sent it, and watched the three dots appear right away, the way they always did.

My dad got up to put the burgers on, and the smell of them hit the air a minute later. For a while, there was nothing to do but sit on my own back steps, in my own crooked house, in a city that was slowly becoming mine, with a cold beer and three ridiculous dogs and a father who'd built his whole hard life around showing up when it counted.

I told myself I had everything I needed.

I almost believed it.

2

CASH

Anubis was the god of the dead.

Not the one who made them. People always got that part backward. The killing belonged to louder gods—gods of war and storm and fever, who took what they wanted and left the rest where it fell. Anubis came after. He was the one who knelt in the aftermath. Who washed the body and bound it and weighed the heart against a feather to learn what kind of man had carried it. Who walked the dead down the long dark to whatever waited, so they wouldn't have to go alone.

The Egyptians gave him the head of a jackal, and people think that was about fear. It wasn't. Jackals were the animals you saw at the edge of the burial ground, out past the firelight, working the dirt nobody else would put their hands in. The Egyptians watched them out there night after night, doing that work with the dead, and decided that whatever could do it—without flinching, without needing to be thanked—was holy.

They were closer to right than they knew.

I've thought about that more than a man probably should. But I do this for a living. You tend to think about the work.

Which is how I came to be standing in the rain in Aleppo at two in the morning, watching a man I was about to kill cup his hands around a lighter.

The rain had been coming down for three hours, the kind that doesn't fall so much as collapse. I'd been in it for two of them, folded into the black gap between a generator housing and a dead car, not moving. I'm good at not moving. It's most of the job, if you want the truth. People picture the other parts. The not-moving is what gets you in the door.