M.L.N. HANOVER - Unclean Spirits

I told myself that it made more sense to wait. Until it was easier. Until he was ready or I was ready or some cosmic alignment made everything easy. Until the mythical perfect time that never quite seemed to be today.

I looked into the coffee cup, as if it might have an opinion. The French press left a bright layer of oil on top of the darkness that seemed lush and decadent, but not particularly eloquent.

“Just go,” I said. “Put it in your pack, and go to his room. If he’s too blasted, you can chicken out then.”

I still didn’t move.

And then I did.

Aubrey’s room was a floor down from mine, and I took the stairs rather than waiting on the elevator. My knock seemed intrusive and loud. I was already regretting having come. He was probably asleep. I was probably waking him up. I sucked. No sound came from the other side of the door, and I shifted from side to side wanting to knock again and also not wanting to.

The door opened an inch, Aubrey’s bloodshot eye made an appearance, then the door closed again and I heard the security bar they use in place of a chain being fumbled aside. When the door opened again, it opened wide.

Aubrey leaned against the doorframe. His bathrobe was the white hotel terry-cloth from his shoulders to his knees, then more familiar soft gray

sweatpants under that. His sandy hair stood at a hundred different angles, and the whites of his eyes were full-on pink.

“Hey,” he said. His voice was hoarse and careful. “Hell of a night, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. Not strictly according to plan,” I said. “Look, if you’re crashed out . . .”

“No, no. Come in. I was just staring at the ceiling waiting for my brain to start working again.”

I walked in slowly, my heart in my mouth.

His room was a little smaller than mine, the view out the window a little worse. It was still pretty nice, though. His laptop was on the desk, the screensaver scrolling a quote from Voltaire about not believing in absurdities. I tried not to take it as an omen.

Aubrey sat at the head of the bed, stuffing a pillow behind the small of his back and groaning. I perched at the foot, my leather pack stowed discreetly on the floor. We were silent for a few awkward seconds.

“So,” I said. “How are you doing?”

“Honestly?” Aubrey said. “I don’t know. I feel . . . I don’t know how I feel. I keep surprising myself. One minute, I’m thinking, Ah hell, that wasn’t too bad, and the next my heart’s racing and I’m sweating like a pig. Ex said it’d be like this for a while. Didn’t say how long, though. Seems kind of stupid, really. I mean, it’s over. It feels like it should be over when it’s over. You know?”

“Intellectually,” I said. “But I think Ex is right. It was a bad night. You have to respect that.”

He shook his head and leaned forward, the bed creaking under him.

“I’ve never had one of them inside me,” he said. “All the time I worked with Eric, I saw maybe a dozen people all told. Some of them had things in them. Some of them had been kicked out of their bodies.”

“Aaron,” I said. He was a cop in Denver who’d been living in his girlfriend’s German shepherd while a haugtrold ran his original body. Nice guy.

“Aaron,” Aubrey agreed. “I never really thought about what it’s like for them. Having something else in their body with them.”

“Only now you’ve been there,” I said.

He started to speak, then only nodded. His robe gaped open at the neck. Raw red gouges started at his collarbone and ran down and to his left. Claw marks.

“It was . . . intense,” he said. “I was still in there. The whole time, I was aware of everything. Well, until you knocked me out, at least.”

“Yeah, well,” I said. “Sorry about that.”

“No. Don’t be. I knew you might have to kill me. When we were in the hallway, in the dark, I knew that the only way to really stop the rider was going to mean breaking my body bad enough that . . . I was rooting for you. I wanted you to.”

“I wouldn’t hurt you,” I said. “If there was any way not to, I would never hurt you.”

“It didn’t give you a lot of choice,” he said. “I could feel it too. The thing. Marinette. It was like my mind and its mind were hooked up at the back.”

“You knew what it was thinking?”

“What it was feeling, more like. It had this energy. Wild and angry and . . . I don’t know how to say this. Confident? I was standing there, peeking in at the ritual with you two, and then it was like someone had thrown me in a prison cell about five inches behind my eyes. But I could feel the anger. It hates Amelie Glapion—I mean hates her—but it hates Karen worse.”

“I guess it would,” I said. “Karen’s like the kick-ass rider hunter, right? The thing in Glapion’s a rival and an exile and all, but at least it’s one of their kind.”

“Yeah, I suppose,” Aubrey said. He swallowed, the delicate mechanism of his throat shifting under the skin. “I think I tried to kill Ex. After the exorcism part started up, I get a little fuzzy. But I think I hurt him.”

“Nothing he can’t come back from,” I said. “Chogyi promised that a little rest, and the padre will be right as rain, whatever that means.”

Aubrey smiled. It was the first time that morning I’d seen him smile, and it looked like it hurt.

“I see why they do it,” Aubrey said. “The rider

cults? The ones like Glapion’s where people actually invite things into them? I get it now.”

“I don’t.”

“There’s this amazing sense of power. Marinette could have done . . . well, not anything, but almost. More than I could ever dream of. She was invulnerable and wild. Feral. I could feel it. I participated in it in a way I can’t exactly explain. The only thing I didn’t do was control it.”

“Power without responsibility,” I said. “Every girl’s dream.”

“If I had been there as part of the cult. If it had been something I wanted,” Aubrey said, then took a long, slow, shaking breath. “I don’t think I know how to talk about this.”

“You’re doing fine,” I said.

“No, I’m not,” he said. “The words don’t fit around it.”

“Of course they don’t,” I said. “That’s all right.”

“I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t stop it from killing you,” he said. “And it was inside of me. My body . . . I just couldn’t . . .”

There had been a time, no doubt months or years before, when I’d thought that Kim and the divorce papers were the most important issue between me and Aubrey. It couldn’t have only been minutes. I would never be that shallow. Just then, watching Aubrey start to weep, the wife and legal proceedings didn’t matter at all. I leaned forward and took

his hand in mine. His knuckles were skinned. Eyes closed, he wrapped his fingers with mine. He looked up at me.

I had seen Aubrey naked. I had seen him in the throes of orgasm. I had seen him unconscious and helpless as a baby. I had never seen him as vulnerable as he was at that moment. I moved up the bed, pulling his arm around my shoulder, and held him as he rocked gently forward and back. There was blood on his robe. His body smelled like musk and clean sweat and the peculiar almost-pepper that was just him. He cried like he’d lost something precious, his arms tight around me.

I wept too. And I rocked him.

And I kissed him.

Here’s the thing about sex. It’s like music or language or anything really human and complicated. It can express anything; love or lust or anger, loss or sorrow. I kissed Aubrey, and he kissed me back. He was gentle at first, and then it was hard and rough and desperate. And I met him, pressure for pressure and power for power. Grief for grief. I pulled open his robe, my fingertips tracing wounds that hadn’t fully stopped bleeding. He pulled off my shirt, his hand resting on my side where my old scars had almost turned white.