Midian dug in his pocket and extracted a fresh cigarette, lighting it off the butt of the old one. The cherry glowed red, the smoke came off gray. His yellowed eyes were fixed on Aubrey.
“You never heard of the lesser evil?” he asked. “Well, that’s me. Didn’t you ever wonder why he didn’t pull any of you boys into this? It’s a dirty operation. Messy. Morally impure. But he thought it needed doing, so he was going to do it. He left you poor fuckers out to protect you from it.”
We were silent for a moment. I could see the other three—Aubrey, Ex, Chogyi Jake—weighing the idea. They all seemed to think it was plausible.
“He didn’t need to do that,” Ex said, but his voice sounded less sure now.
“Yeah, well,” Midian said with a shrug. “Take it up with him.”
“This changes things,” Aubrey said.
“Does it?” Midian asked. “You can’t pull Coin out without me as the focus. I mean, maybe if you find someone else he’s cursed between now and sunup, but even if you do, so what? It’s not going to make any difference.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Look. You get some random Suzie Sunshine who Coin put some ugly mojo on, haul her ass out there, and use her to break him, it’s still going to lift my curse. What we’re doing isn’t just for me. Everyone Coin’s acted against gets helped out, whether you like us or not.”
“It’s just that on balance, that’s more good than bad,” Ex said.
“Don’t trust me on it,” Midian said. “Trust Eric.”
“I have to think about this,” Ex said. “We need to set guard on him.”
Midian made an impatient sound, but Aubrey was already shifting position. Chogyi Jake walked into the kitchen and came back with a length of rope. I pressed back against the wall to let him pass. Midian rolled his eyes but held out his wrists like a man waiting for the police to cuff him. As Chogyi Jake bound the thin, frail-looking wrists, Aubrey looked over to me. This time last night, I’d been dancing with my hands around him. It seemed like longer ago.
He nodded to me and then toward the kitchen, where Ex had gone. I hesitated for a moment, then pointed my own shotgun toward the ground and walked away.
The remains of the meal preparation hadn’t been cleared away yet. The cutting board was still bloody from the steak, and knives lay in the sink, their edges catching the light. The air was rich with wine and garlic. Ex was sitting at the table, his head in his hands. I leaned the gun against the side of the refrigerator and pulled out the chair across from him. The clock on the wall above him showed we were coming in on midnight.
“So,” I said softly. “What do you think?”
“I should have seen it,” Ex said angrily.
“Well, you didn’t,” I said. “What else do you think?”
Ex looked up at me through his eyebrows. For a few seconds, he looked on the verge of doing something violent, but he shook his head and the impression went away. He pulled back his hair, tying it with a rubber band, then squared his shoulders.
“It makes sense,” he said. “The curse, the divisions between forms of riders, Eric’s willingness to use that to his advantage. Everything it said makes sense, but…”
“But,” I prompted.
“I don’t trust him. He’s a rider, and he has his own agenda.”
“Do you still think Coin killed Eric?” I asked.
Ex weighed the question for a moment, resting his chin against one knuckle. He nodded.
“Those people he sent to kill me and Midian? Those were part of the Invisible College?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then,” I said. “Nothing’s changed. Coin’s still going to be at his weakest in a few hours. We still have everything we need to go up against him.”
“I know,” Ex said. “I don’t think you can be safe when the Invisible College is hunting you, and killing Coin will break their power. I can’t think of a reason not to go forward. It’s just…”
“You trusted someone. And then you found out they didn’t actually deserve it,” I said. “Now you have to suck it up and work with them no matter how you feel, just to get the job done. Kind of like what you were saying to me earlier tonight.”
“Aubrey,” he said.
“I’m not saying he’s a body-stealing vampire or anything,” I said, feeling a twinge of distress left over from my interrupted talk with Aubrey. Had we broken up? Had we ever really been together? I wasn’t totally sure. I pulled myself back to Ex. “I’m just saying there’s kind of a parallel. But we can’t be divided or distracted. That was you talking.”
“And after?”
I tilted my head.
“After we kill Coin. What do we do about Midian,” Ex said, his voice almost a whisper. “If we’re allies now, that’s going to be over by this time tomorrow. As soon as Coin goes down, the thing inside that body will be free to do whatever it wants. He will go out into the world, and he’ll hurt people. Maybe kill them. He’s a rider, it’s what he does.”
I gazed out the window, or tried to. With the darkness outside and the light in the kitchen, the glass was more like a black mirror. I looked tired. The kitchen behind me, reversed left for right, seemed alien. My body felt heavy and weak, my mind a little dizzy from too many changes too close together. Ex waited, his silence pushing me to answer, and I thought it was deeply unfair of him. I hadn’t planned any of this. Picking up Eric’s plan had all been Midian and Ex, Aubrey and Chogyi Jake. Even the encounter with Candace Dorn’s haugtrold had been Aubrey’s insistence more than mine. Making me decide what to do now, just when things got hard, seemed vaguely monstrous.
“We give him a head start,” I said. “A day, maybe.”
“He’ll vanish,” Ex said. “We might never find him again.”
“It’s a risk,” I agreed. “But the alternative is we kill him tomorrow morning. Use him for what we need, and then stab him in the back when we’re through with him.”
“It could be the best thing,” Ex said.
“Maybe. But we can’t do it.”
Ex didn’t speak, but his expression was clear enough. Why not?
“We’re the good guys,” I said.
Thirteen
We split the night into four hour-and-a-half shifts to guard Midian. Mine was three to four thirty, which slated me for a longish nap before and a short one after. Midian, his hands still tied, ignored the situation except to sigh theatrically, stretch out on the couch, and get more sleep than the rest of us. I sat in the facing chair, Eric’s shotgun across my thighs, and listened to the small sounds of the night.
The clock in the kitchen ticked quietly to itself. Sirens rose and fell in the distance. Once, a helicopter chopped the air so far away I could barely make it out. And Midian—Midian the vampire, or vârkolak, whatever that was—breathed slowly in and out in the rhythm of deep sleep. In a few hours, I was going to be looking down a rifle at the thing that had killed Eric, but just now, the world was silent and still, and my mind was clearer than I had expected it to be.
The mystery that Midian’s revelation had left me with was this: if Eric wasn’t doing this to help Midian, who was he helping? There was, I assumed, someone out there who he’d intended to benefit. Someone like Candace Dorn. I wondered how I would find those people and let them know that the thing had been done, or if they’d just know when it happened. Ex and Aubrey and Chogyi Jake hadn’t found anything in the old notebooks that explained how this whole thing had started, but there had to be more books, more records. Somewhere there had to be something about how he’d found Midian, and what came before that, and before that. Or maybe he’d kept it all in his head.
I thought about the list of properties the lawyer had shown me. And those had been the tricky ones. There were others. More. I could have spent months going through all that. Years. And if I didn’t find some master record, I’d still wonder if it existed somewhere I just hadn’t thought to look. I was out of my depth. I’d known it from the momen
t Uncle Eric’s fortune fell out of the sky like something from an old Looney Tunes cartoon, and sitting alone in the dead of night, I felt it deeply. I was scared, I was faking it, I was probably in gut-wrenching danger that I didn’t understand. I’d spent the last few days as disoriented and dizzy as someone on her eighth time on the roller coaster.
But there was also a small, secret joy way down deep that surprised me. I was rich beyond my wildest dreams. Things hadn’t gone the way I wanted with Aubrey, but they’d still left me feeling wanted in a way that was almost more reassuring than actually having a boyfriend would have been. And regardless of why Eric had gone after the Invisible College in the first place, I knew why I was doing it.
I was doing it for Eric.
I heard the low beeping of Aubrey’s cell phone alarm and checked the time. Four thirty. My turn at guard duty was over. I listened to the soft, shoeless footsteps as he walked down the hall toward me, and I nodded to him as he stepped into the living room.
“Everything okay?” he asked, his voice hushed.
I handed him the shotgun.
“It’ll do,” I said, and then, “Hey. About…what happened at your apartment? Midian wasn’t wrong. It was my idea too, and it’s not like I told you all about everything in my history either. So. The Kim thing was a shock, and I’m a little easier to spin right now than usual. But…”
I shrugged.
“So we’re good?” Aubrey asked.
“We’re working on it,” I said. “I mean, you’re still married.”
Halfway down to my bedroom, I stopped, considered, and then turned back. I was too wound up to sleep. I headed to the kitchen, turned on the light over the sink, and brewed up a pot of coffee that wasn’t as good as Midian’s. A little before six, the windows were bright with the coming dawn. Ex and Chogyi Jake walked in quietly. Ex looked tired but focused. Chogyi Jake might have just woken up from eight solid hours, except that his smile didn’t reach his eyes as much as usual. Without a word, Ex put the rifles on the kitchen table. The black ammunition seemed to writhe in my peripheral vision.
“Well, hey,” Midian said from the living room. “Nice day to kill someone. Is that coffee? Because if it is, you over-brewed it.”
“Good to know,” I said, and heard his wheezing chuckle.
“Okay,” Ex said, his voice cutting through the morning like a drill sergeant’s. “We’ve got one more run-through on this, and then we go.”
Midian and Aubrey came into the kitchen. Midian’s hands were free, and he was rubbing his wrists. I noticed that he kept his distance from the bullets. We went through everything again for the last time, then Ex loaded the rifles and handed one to me and one to Aubrey. Ex offered the shotgun to Chogyi Jake, but he refused it.
“When we get this done, who’s gonna want pancakes?” Midian asked, his ruined lips in a leer. I wondered how I could have imagined he was really alive.
“Let’s go,” Ex said.
We went.
THE FIRST difference I noticed was the air.
We drove north toward Commerce City, Ex in the windowless van, Chogyi and Midian in Ex’s sports car, Aubrey and I sitting silently in his minivan. The warehouses along the railroad tracks came slowly nearer, the rising sun flooded the still relatively empty highway and turned the asphalt to gold, and the air around us seemed to grow less substantial. The light moved through it differently. I put it down to my own nerves until I felt something bump against me, tapping at the base of my spine. I had the sudden physical memory of being eight years old and swimming in a lake where fish would sometimes blunder into me.
Aubrey saw me shudder.
“Yeah,” he said. “I can feel it too.”
“This is them?” I said, gesturing at the world in general. “This is the Invisible College doing whatever they’re doing?”
“It’s Next Door getting close,” Aubrey said. “I’ve felt something like this before. The riders are about to move into their new bodies.”
Something unreal moved past my legs. I felt its wake.
“I really want this over with,” I said.
By the time we got to the warehouse, I felt like the old high school science class movie of an ovum surrounded by a million flailing sperm. The air was full of unseen creatures bumping and pressing and shifting against me. There were so many, I stopped being able to tell one from another, my body just registering them as a constant, repulsive crawling. There was nothing in the early morning light to show that any of it was happening. If anything, the strangeness of the light made the world seem static, like we’d driven into a still frame from a movie. Aubrey dropped me by the train tracks. We didn’t speak, but as I lifted the rifle out of the back, his hand touched mine. The double sensation of real, human contact and the press of riders just outside reality moved me, and I was tempted to kiss him. He pulled back and I hefted the weapon, already loaded with its unpleasant black bullets. I made my way to the corner of the little building we’d picked, looking down on Google maps like God and angels. I leaned against the masonry block, the blue paint flaking away. The boxcars loomed to my left like great, blind, industrial cows. Nothing moved.
Fifty or sixty cars filled the parking lot, and three huge silver buses were parked against the side of the building. A chain-link fence surrounded the whole place. Two gates opened to the street—one wide enough for semis to negotiate with ease, one no wider than a door. The second was closer to me, chained shut. When I lifted the scope to my eye, I could read the numbers on the combination lock.
Aubrey’s minivan appeared on the street, coming down from the north, then passed out of sight, making its way toward his assassination post. I wouldn’t be able to see Aubrey or Ex and the windowless van from where I was. I sat crouched in the long, blue shadows of morning, my back against the wall, invisible creatures pressing against me.
“Hey,” Uncle Eric said. “You’ve got a call.”
I plucked the cell phone out of my pocket, cursing myself quietly for not putting the phone on vibrate, and let the barrel of the rifle lower toward the ground. The display only told me that it was a conference call. I picked up before Eric spoke again.
“Hey,” I said.
“Are you in place?” Ex asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Okay,” Aubrey said with a small, coughing sigh. There was a rustling on the line and something clanked. “I’m set.”
“Midian and I are heading in,” Chogyi said. “You’ll see us in just a moment.”
His voice was calm. Just hearing him sound like that loosened the knot in my belly a little bit. I almost smiled.
“Okay,” Ex said. “Focus on drawing Coin out. Don’t worry about us. We’ll be watching for the signal.”
“Good luck, everyone,” I said, then I dropped the call, put the cell phone back in my pocket, and knelt down, the rifle held between me and the wall. A flock of pigeons rose from the far side of the tracks, swinging wide around the green-gray warehouse and then away, as if they wanted nothing to do with any of us.
Ex’s car pulled up on the street, its engine unnaturally loud in the comparative silence. Chogyi Jake got out of the driver’s side. Midian emerged from the passenger’s, moving with the same awkwardness he always did. Chogyi Jake lifted a black nylon duffel bag out of the car’s diminutive trunk and unzipped it. Midian slouched to the smaller gate in the chain-link fence, then slowly, painfully knelt. I shifted my weight, the gravel crunching under me. Chogyi Jake pulled a blue silk robe from the bag, pulled it on over his clothes, then leaned down by Midian. I picked up the rifle. Through the scope, I could see the chalk in Chogyi Jake’s hand, the symbols taking shape all around Midian. The vampire’s eyes were closed, his hands open on his bent knees, his smile showing teeth black as fresh tar. Seeing them both in the crosshairs felt ominous, but I didn’t look away.
Chogyi took his place behind Midian, one hand on the ruined scalp, the other palm raised toward the new-risen sun. When the slow, strange call of his voice
reached me, I caught my breath.
The song that rose from them was one of the strangest sounds I’d ever heard. Sorrowful and accusing, it most reminded me of an Islamic call to prayer. The invisible things pressing against me shivered, paused, and then went wild. Their frenzy made me grit my teeth. I could feel them over every inch of my skin, writhing and beating against me. Chogyi Jake’s call rose again, seeming to echo against itself, like someone singing a round, even though there was only one voice. Midian wasn’t smiling anymore. His ruined lips were moving, his head shaking back and forth, his eyes shut. Sweat was pouring down Chogyi Jake’s face and neck. I could see the rivulets glitter in the light.
The warehouse door opened with a scream of old hinges. I looked up. At this distance, the man who came out could have been anyone. I had expected him to walk unnaturally, pulled out to us like an unwilling marionette, but his steps were perfectly regular. Through the scope, I could see the dark slacks and simple white shirt below the inscribed face I had glimpsed when Ex brought me here before. Randolph Coin, or whatever had taken up residence under the dead man’s skin. I placed the rifle against my shoulder the way Ex had shown me and kept my eye on Coin as he crossed the wide parking lot, reached the chain-link fence, twirled the combination lock, and opened the small gate. Something shimmered as the gate opened. For a moment, I saw inhuman faces in the air.
Coin stepped out to the street. My heart was tripping over, wild as the riders that whirled in the still air. Coin’s face, caught in my crosshairs, filled me with a sense of dread and terrible, inhuman power. I heard the sound of gigantic wings again, and I didn’t know if it was my imagination or something more. My breath was fast and shallow.
This was it. This was the moment Eric had envisioned. This was why he’d been killed. I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and lay my finger on the trigger. I centered the crosshairs on Coin’s chest. Chogyi Jake’s song faded to silence.
Coin’s lips were moving. I thought he said the words Midian and Heller. I waited for the signal, but Midian’s arms remained down, Chogyi Jake still standing. Coin paused, as if listening to some reply. The tattooed mouth twisted in derision. I saw Midian’s arms rise. I pulled the trigger.
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