“That’s what I’m telling you! Will you listen to me? Eric was the real deal. He’d been doing this for years. He was connected. Chogyi Jake, Aubrey, me. We were his gophers. We were the day labor he took on when he needed an extra pair of hands.”
There was real pain in his voice. It sobered me. I looked at the cot, the books, the crucifix. I tried to see beauty in it.
“Why are you following me?” I asked.
“Because someone has to keep you safe.”
“They know you’ve left me,” I said. “The Invisible College? They know you left.”
“They caught sight of me a couple times,” he said. “And now that I’m out of the house, I’m not under Eric’s wards and protections. Even if they don’t know exactly where I am, they can tell that much.”
“And yet you’re still alive,” I said.
“I am.”
“Luck?”
“Partly,” he said. “I’ve got a talent for not being found.”
“You’re going to stop following me,” I said. “You’re in or you’re out, but not this halfway crap. It’s creepy. You scared me today. I thought you were them.”
“I could have been. Coin has his people all over the city looking for you. He knows you’re up to something.”
“He doesn’t know what,” I said.
I walked to the window. A simple weeping Christ on a rough wooden cross. The floor before it was cleaner than the rest of the place. Like someone had knelt there often.
“We were idiots to think we could win where Eric failed,” Ex said. “We were blind and proud, and we’ve paid the price for it. You have to stop this before it gets worse.”
“Pride?” I said. “You think that’s what went wrong? We were too full of ourselves, and so God saw to it that we didn’t win?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But it’s what you meant.”
I gave him a few seconds to object. He didn’t. Instead, he walked toward me, his hands out to his side, unconsciously echoing the figure on the cross. I’d spent a fair part of my childhood watching my father work himself into rages, and the feel of this was different. This was desperation.
“Eric overestimated, and he got killed for it,” Ex said. “We overestimated, and Aubrey paid the price. I’m not going to see you be the third.”
“I might win,” I said.
“You won’t. You’ll plan the best that you can, and be as clever as you can be, and call on all the help you can find, and Coin will still beat you. You know it, and you’re ignoring it because you’re in love with the man in that hospital bed, and you think that maybe, maybe, you can pull off a miracle and get him back.”
He paused. I waited.
“You don’t have to prove anything,” he said. “Not to anyone.”
Ex was close to me now. The smell of his body wasn’t unpleasant. He seemed to shake with the force of his emotion, a controlled violence that was pounding through him like a deep internal storm. I didn’t feel threatened by him at all. I was oddly touched.
“I’m not taking Coin out because of some kind of sick, desperate love for Aubrey. I’m doing it because I think he’d have done it for me. And because Eric was the only one in my whole life who ever really looked out for me. And I’m doing it for myself. Because I can.”
“Don’t,” Ex said. “Don’t try. Be safe.”
I stepped into his open arms and hugged him. His body went stiff with shock, and then softened. He wrapped his arms around me. I felt him sigh deeply, his ribs expanding and falling back. I rested my head on his broad shoulder. Through the dirty window, I saw a sparrow take wing, a brown-gray blur rising into the sky.
“Thank you,” I said.
He nodded, his cheek against my forehead. I squeezed him tight, then stepped back and let him go.
“You should take me home,” I said.
“You’re dropping this,” he said. “You’re walking away.”
“Nope,” I said. “If I go down, I’m going down with my teeth around that fucker Coin’s throat.”
His eyes widened, his face went a shade paler. He looked past me to the crucifix like an actor who needs someone to feed him his next line.
“I know you’re trying to take care of me,” I said. “In your stupid, patriarchal, Neanderthal way, you think this is how you treat your friends. But I’ve already got a daddy, and I walked away from his bullshit too. Now take me home.”
“You don’t understand,” he said as I stepped past him toward the bike.
“I do,” I said. “I just disagree.”
BACK AT the house, I stood on the porch, sweat cooling on the back of my neck, and watched Ex drive away. I thought maybe he turned and looked over his shoulder at the last moment, but I might have been making that up. I went inside.
Voices came from the living room, Midian and Kim talking over each other. For a second, it sounded like a fight. Then it only sounded like excitement.
When I stepped in the room, all eyes turned to me. Kim and Chogyi Jake were sitting on the floor off to one side, a notebook open between them with designs and symbols that seemed to shift and move when I wasn’t looking straight at them. Midian was sitting on the coffee table, Candace and Aaron on the couch.
“Hey, kid,” Midian croaked. “We were wondering if you were coming back.”
“I live here,” I said.
“How’s the padre?” Midian asked.
I shook my head.
“Yeah, well,” Midian said. “Probably for the best. He got on my nerves.”
“What have we got?” I asked.
Aaron cleared his throat, leaned forward, and started talking. The initial plan to take Coin out close to the convention center had hit some snags. We’d been working under the assumption that Coin would be heading back to his place, but Midian had pointed out that that wasn’t necessarily true. So they’d been working out other strategies.
All the plans made some assumptions. First, that we could draw off the vast majority of Coin’s minions, both by Midian and Chogyi Jake picking the right moment to break cover and get themselves chased and by feeding a little clever misdirection to the fake Ex. All of that was just to get Coin and his bodyguard out where we could take a crack at them.
The best-looking option thus far involved getting two cars, one with Candace at the wheel and Kim in the back, the other with Aaron and me. We could follow Coin when he left the convention center. Once we were sure where he was going, it wouldn’t be hard to get the two cars close to him. Kim would damp out Coin’s powers, Aaron would run him off the road (he’d been trained in that sort of thing and had no lack of confidence in his ability), and then he and I would finish things off with the bullets I’d recovered from our first attempt. Candace and Kim would pick us up, and we’d vanish into the night.
“It’s cleaner than it looks,” Aaron said. “There were three guys that got killed in the last five or so years with the same MO. They were all traffickers. Coin’s a higher tax bracket than those guys were, but the chances are when the Denver cops see this, they’ll assume he was involved and not look at it too hard.”
“Hey,” Midian said, tapping Aaron on the knee with one skeletal hand. “Tell her what they call that. This is great, kid. You know what the cops call it when some mad fuck who needs to die gets aced by a civilian?”
“What do they call it?” I asked.
“Misdemeanor murder,” Aaron said. “It happens. We get someone who everyone knows has been selling crack in the school yard, but we could never prove it. Someone does the obvious thing. There’s just not much point in spending the resources on the investigation.”
“Don’t you just love that there’s a name for that?” Midian cackled. “Renews my faith in mankind.”
Actually, it creeped me out, but I put my reaction aside.
“Are you sure we can make this look like a drug hit?” I asked.
“I’m sure,” Aaron said. “I’m going to borrow some things from the evidence
store back at home. We can drop it in Coin’s car when we leave. Or in the one we’re driving. If it’s on the scene, the guys down here will put it together. They’re not dumb.”
I nodded. It occurred to me for the first time that I had put all my time and concentration into killing Randolph Coin, and none at all into getting away with it. This was going to look like murder, and I couldn’t really tell the judge about riders from the Pleroma unless I was pushing for an insanity plea. Sobering thought.
“But the car that we use to run him off the road,” I said. “That’s an issue, right?”
“Actually,” Candace said, “we can kind of kill two birds with one stone.”
“There’s a place just north of Boulder,” Aaron said. “There’s no business going on there, but we’re all pretty sure it’s a way station. A safe house the bad guys use to move drugs and girls from the West Coast out east. We’ve never had enough to get a warrant, dig into things.”
“Okay,” I said, pulling the word out to three syllables.
“So the second car,” Aaron said. “I’m going to borrow it from the guy who owns the house. If it’s involved in a homicide in Denver, I’m pretty sure we can shut down everything else the fuckhead’s up to too.”
I laughed and sat down on the hearth.
“We may be a force for good in the world after all,” I said. “What about the Calling Malkuth thing?”
“I think it will work,” Chogyi Jake said. “It isn’t a configuration I’d seen before, but everything that Kim’s showed me fits together well.”
“There is a problem,” Kim said, her head turned to Chogyi and away from me. “Jayné’s protections. I don’t know what this will do.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
“It is a consideration,” Chogyi Jake said.
“It really isn’t,” I said. “Are we thinking we’ll have two rifles?”
“One for each of us,” Aaron said, nodding.
“One per bullet,” Midian said. Then, “You know, kid, you aren’t the world’s best shot. And the last time you were looking down a barrel at Coin…”
“That was last time,” I said. “This is point-blank. I can’t miss.” And this time, I was going to pull the trigger.
“So we’re on?” Midian asked.
I hesitated, wondering what Ex would have thought if he’d come in. If he would have been swayed by it. If he would have thought I stood a chance, or been just as certain that I was fooling myself. I couldn’t answer those questions, and they didn’t matter anymore. Ex’s opinion wasn’t as important as mine.
“We’re on,” I said. And then a moment later, “Hey, can you guys ride motorcycles?”
Twenty-two
My covert Monday morning coffee run failed. I went out alone in Chogyi Jake’s van, picked up a few bags of food, and headed toward the nearest Starbucks, my mind on a cup of coffee and a slice of pound cake, and I almost didn’t see the trap. Two middle-aged women sitting at the entrance, smiling and talking to each other. When I pulled my will into my eyes, their glamour faded, the tattoos on their faces and hands appeared, and I turned the van back out of the parking lot, shaking almost too hard to drive.
They were closing in.
I didn’t tell anyone about it when I got back to the house. Aaron and Candace were back up in Boulder, taking care of things on that end. Midian was cooking. Chogyi was meditating and chanting, adding more spiritual sandbags to the levee. Kim was strewing ash and salt around the house until we ran out. Then she started pacing, her mouth set in a permanent frown. I sat on the couch, staring at the map of Denver and the calamity of streets that met downtown and trying not to think about how stupid it would have been to die at the coffee shop.
I hadn’t slept well, waking up at four in the morning with the unshakable certainty that I’d found a flaw in our plan. As I came more awake, the objections turned into fluff and dream logic—something about how safety cones were orange and all we had was yellow paint. By the time I’d shaken off the sense of panic, I’d also stopped being anything near sleepy. It had been Chogyi Jake’s turn to sit watch, and I’d sent him off to bed, made a cup of green tea, and watched television with the sound off until dawn came creeping through the window.
I knew Coin was there, as close as my laptop or waiting in the street. I couldn’t tell anymore whether I was feeling the pressure of his magic eating away the safety of the wards, or if it was just my own paranoia. With my spare nervous energy, I started writing a list of the crimes I was about to be party to. Murder. Theft. Discharging a weapon inside the city limits. Reckless driving. When I got to possession, I started laughing so hard I had to put the pen down.
I wanted to call the hospital, to find out if Aubrey was still okay. If he was still the cheese in their mousetrap. I wanted to go back to Ex’s garage apartment and kick his ass or talk sense to him. I wanted to be with Aaron and Candace when they stole the car from the safe-house jerk. I wanted to know how to clean a rifle so I could take mine apart and put it back together a couple thousand times in the course of the day. I wanted my uncle back. I wanted to talk to my mother.
More than anything else, I wanted Kim to stop pacing.
“Hey,” I said. “You got a minute?”
Kim looked at me like I’d asked if she was a biped. I gestured to the couch. She sat. Her eyes were bright blue and hard as marbles. I had a brief vision of the woman who’d attacked me that first day, wide blue eyes, the Slavic accent asking Who are you? I tapped Kim’s knee with the flat of my hand.
“Are you going to be okay with this?” I asked.
“I’ll be fine,” Kim said. “It’s you I’m worried about.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “If I lose whatever protections Eric put on me in order to break the Invisible College, then—”
“No,” Kim said. “I mean, how did he find you?”
I blinked. It took a couple of breaths before I understood the question.
“Ex, you mean?”
“If that’s his name. You’re supposed to be hard to locate with magic, right? So how did your priest friend evade the Invisible College, move to his own little bolt hole to keep a low profile, and still know where we were?”
“Maybe he’s good at it?” I said. “He does know where the house is.”
“Then he’s been out there, sticking himself out like a flag?” Kim said, her voice fast and hard. “Because if they can see him, and he’s close by, then it’s just as good as them knowing where you and Jake and that whatever-it-is that does all the cooking are.”
“Vârkolak,” I said. “Midian’s a vârkolak.”
Kim shooed the word away. I started to marshal my thoughts. If the Invisible College could use Ex to find me, they would have done it already. The fact that there weren’t ninja wizards breaking down the door was plenty of evidence that we were okay. Plus which, one more day wasn’t going to matter. Either we’d have succeeded in breaking the College, or we’d be so deep in trouble nothing was going to help.
Except that Kim knew Ex wasn’t a bad guy. Self-important, overbearing, and burdened by an unrealistic idea of his own responsibility, yes. Dangerous to us, no. This, I thought, was her version of waking up at four in the morning worrying about orange safety cones.
“Freaked about tomorrow?” I asked.
She shook her head, then a moment later she nodded.
“This is why I left in the first place,” she said. “Eric and his covert world. The things he would do. That he would have us do. And now here I am, back in the middle of it. And he’s not even here.”
There was a deepness in the way she said the last phrase. He’s not even here. Longing. Sorrow. Emptiness. She wasn’t talking about Eric anymore. She meant Aubrey.
“What are you going to do if we win?” I asked. “What are you going to do afterward?”
“Go back to work,” she said. “They think I’m still in Chicago. I’ve been calling the front office on my cell phone every morning, holding m
y nose and telling them I still don’t feel well. They think I’ve got the cold from hell. But there’s a budget meeting on Thursday, and I have to…I have to be there for it.”
Kim seemed to deflate. She stared at the television. It was an advertisement for something, but I couldn’t guess what the product was. Abstract happiness, maybe. I cleared my throat.
“I’m not in love with Aubrey,” I said. “I have a crush on him. He’s really cute, and really nice. And he can dance.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “The thing is, I’m not really in the best place to be making that kind of decision right now. A couple weeks ago, I was a college dropout hoping I could land a job waiting tables at Applebee’s. And now I’m—”
I gestured at the house, the walls. Kim looked at the place as if it was a real indication of who I had become. She nodded.
“That isn’t the only question, though,” she said. “You can’t be sure what he feels for you.”
I wanted to object, to tell Kim that Aubrey clearly didn’t love me or want me or whatever it was she was afraid of, but we both knew I’d be making it up. This wasn’t the time to close my eyes and pretend the world was what I wanted it to be.
“I don’t know what he feels,” I said. “We were on kind of iffy footing when it happened.”
A tight smile flickered over Kim’s lips.
“With any luck, we’ll be able to worry about all this next week,” she said.
My cell phone rang. Kim jumped a little as I dug it out of my pack. I thought of the fear in her face the first time my cell phone rang. When she heard Eric’s voice. It was one of the functionaries at my lawyer’s office returning my call. He’d gotten my message that morning and had a couple of questions about how I wanted him to proceed. I stuck my hand flat over the other ear and walked out back, talking it over with him.
The plan this time was a lot more complex than our last one had been. We had the cars we needed for the actual assault, or would after Aaron had completed his work stealing the one he’d be driving. I had one rifle, and the second was coming with the stolen car. I’d picked out a place near the convention center that had free wireless access. Midian and Chogyi Jake were ready to act as decoys, drawing off as many parasitized victims of the Invisible College as they could.
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