M.L.N. HANOVER - Unclean Spirits

“Aubrey,” I said.

“Please,” he whispered.

I put my hands in his hair, holding him. I didn’t

remember moving in to straddle his lap, but I was there now, and it felt perfectly right. His breath was deep as if he’d been running. Mine was too. I leaned to the side, rolling onto the bed with him still locked between my knees.

“Yes,” I said.

There were a hundred things to say. Sane, rational, responsible things. You’re still married. You’re vulnerable. We don’t really know what we are to each other. We should be careful.

I didn’t even manage Do you have a condom?

The last time I’d had sex, it had been with Aubrey. He had been gentle and giving and funny and beautiful. Now we were different people, and our bodies were saying something else to each other. He was strong and selfish, angry and rough. Once, we had made love; now, we were fucking. And even as I pulled him into me, even when I crawled on top of him, I was there as witness to his pain.

We ended the way we began, locked in each other’s arms, crying. I had cataloged all the injuries on his flesh. The scrapes, the scratches, the bruises and cuts. I had kissed them all. He tried to thank me, but I pressed my fingers to his lips until he gave up the effort.

He fell asleep first, his skin glowing a little in the soft sunlight of early afternoon. His breathing became slower, deeper. More peaceful. I pulled the

blanket up over us both. Once again, things hadn’t gone to plan. I wondered lazily if they ever would. I appeared to really suck at planning. I let my eyes flutter closed.

In my dream, I stood alone and naked in the desert. A gentle wind was blowing across the stones and sand. I knew with the logic of dreams that this austere, lifeless landscape was my home and that it was sacred. There was something I was supposed to do there, and I didn’t remember what precisely it was. I knew I was in time, but that a moment would come—and sooner rather than later—when I would have to act. I tried to remember what exactly I had agreed to do.

Far above, a hawk that was also Chogyi Jake cried out. When I looked up, there were two suns in the sky. One was the burning disk I was used to, and the other was darker. Instead of radiating light and heat, it was radiating purification. I opened my arms to it, recalling that this was what I’d been meant to do. Something bigger than mountains whispered my name, and I woke up.

The knock came again. Hard pounding at the door. I lifted myself up. Aubrey muttered in his sleep as I fished his robe off the floor. I heard a voice I recognized. Ex.

“Aubrey!” he said, words muffled by the closed door between us. “Get up! Jayné’s missing!”

I fumbled the security bar off and opened the

door. Ex looked ill. His skin was gray, his eyes redrimmed, his pale blond hair hung to his shoulders. He opened his mouth to further announce my absence, went pale, and then blushed a deep scarlet.

“Yeah,” I said. “Could you maybe give us just a minute?”

NINE

We held the postmortem in the back of a French Quarter bar. We had the room to ourselves, and for a couple hundreds, I made sure it stayed that way. Having normal people walk in on the conversation seemed graceless. The sound system in our room was turned off, but Louis Armstrong rolled in from the front, his voice like a cheerful landslide. The chairs were all wooden and worn, three different layers of paint showing in carefully calculated decrepitude. A waitress brought us a bowl of salted peanuts and drinks. Light lagers for me and Aubrey, water for Chogyi Jake, Guinness for Ex. Karen

got something hard; a bottle of bourbon and a tall glass.

“Okay,” Karen said when the waitress had gone, “time to reassess.”

She leaned forward in her chair, one hand brushing a stray lock of hair from her eyes. She was in jeans, a white T-shirt, and a tight-fitting leather jacket that she didn’t take off when she came inside.

“I don’t think Glapion knew we were there before the loa possessed Aubrey,” Karen said. “If Daria’s Sight had tipped them off, they would have been prepared.”

“Prepared?” Aubrey said.

“Possession is bad,” Karen said. “Shot in the face is worse. It didn’t go the way we planned, but it could have been much worse.”

Aubrey bristled, and I changed the subject before things could degenerate.

“Do we know anything we didn’t know before?” I asked. “We saw Sabine. That counts for something, right?”

“Yes,” Karen said. “We didn’t get to follow her, and I don’t think there’s much chance that they’ll go back to Charity now that they know it’s compromised. But we have confirmed that Sabine is in the city.”

Ex cleared his throat. If Aubrey looked like the victim of violent crime, Ex looked like someone fighting cancer. The exorcism had left him wasted,

dark circles under red-rimmed eyes, a sense of weariness that verged on melancholy on him like an illness. He didn’t look at us, his eyes focused on the center of the table.

“What about the time frame?” he asked. “We’re here to stop a murder, and the killer knows we’re coming close.”

“What about it?” I said, specifically to Karen. “You’re the resident expert on this thing. Did we spook it? Will it move up the schedule, kill the girl sooner?”

“I don’t think it can,” Karen said. “When I was chasing it, there were . . . gaps. Normally when you see a serial killer, they start off needing a lot of time between victims, then slowly ramp up. They need more and more, faster and faster. This one didn’t do that.”

“Because it’s stuck on a timetable?” I asked.

Karen took a deep breath and let it out slowly, giving herself time to think.

“More that the thing is in a new host body,” she said. “When the murderer’s just a human being, the first kill is the hardest. There are inhibitions to overcome. The second time, it’s easier, and so on. With the rider, it’s in a new person. There are fresh inhibitions that come with the new personality. Whoever it was in before could have killed twenty people, but Amelie Glapion hasn’t killed anyone she loves. Not yet.”

“Didn’t seem to make much difference for me,” Aubrey said. There was an edge to his voice.

“It did,” Karen said. “I don’t care what kind of wards and cantrips Eric put on her, Marinette would have killed Jayné if you hadn’t been holding it back.”

Aubrey blinked, sat back in his chair, and drank his lager. I felt a rush of profound gratitude to Karen for pulling even a little of the poison back out of him. He hadn’t been able to overcome the rider, but he hadn’t been thoroughly ineffective. Fighting a losing battle isn’t the same as being powerless.

He caught my eyes and smiled. I felt a little blush rising in my cheeks and turned away. When I looked back up, he was still smiling a little. Ex coughed.

“Then the question is,” Chogyi Jake said, “when did Legba take Amelie Glapion?”

“Yes, how long ago did it take her,” Karen said. “And how strong-willed is Glapion. And how much power has it regained. There are a lot of variables, and there isn’t a way to get good information.”

“What would we do with it anyway?” I said. “It’s not like we can get the wards up on the new house any faster than we’re doing. The only thing I was thinking . . . can we skip grabbing Sabine and head straight for Amelie Glapion?”

“No,” Karen said. “If we go straight for the rider, it will spook and kill the girl, and it won’t matter

how much Grandma wants to stop it. I can promise you that.”

“That’s happened before?” Ex asked.

“Close enough,” Karen said.

A fast tapping sound came from the tabletop, almost like a phone set to vibrate. I was a little surprised to see that my fingers were making it. I considered my hand. Yeah, I thought. The smell of this ain’t quite right. But Karen’s certainty carried me. This was her show, after all. She was the expert. We were just the hired help.