Daniel Abraham - Unclean Spirits

“Thought you’d never ask,” Ex said, his tone more angry than welcoming. I forgave him. I knew where it was coming from. I was more than a little pissed off at me too.

“That’s him,”

Ex said.

I wanted to sink down into the car seat or else strain forward to see better. The binoculars pressed against my eyes shortened the space and blurred the chain-link fencing. It was as if there was no barrier between us and the two men far away down the street who were getting out of a car just humble enough to not call itself a limousine. They weren’t what I’d expected. The larger was broad as a linebacker and easily a head taller than his companion. His Hawaiian shirt blared red and blue and green, and his tree-trunk arms swirled with complex designs and patterns that made my eyes ache. Ex didn’t have to tell me that he wasn’t the one.

The smaller man-Randolph Coin-closed the passenger door and said something, nodding toward the warehouse and then to the train tracks beyond it. His face was wide and round, heavy at the jowls, and sparkling with a bright animation. When the big man answered, Coin laughed. He looked like a successful businessman, only without the soul-crushing grayness. Even with the pounding heat of the afternoon, he wore a dark jacket. The big one wiped an arm across his inscribed forehead, and I realized that Coin wasn’t sweating.

“He isn’t marked,” I said. “I don’t see any tattoos on him.”

“It’s a glamour,” Ex said. “Changes how people perceive him.”

“Rider magic?”

“Normal people can do it too, if you train them enough. Takes a few years. Right now, you should just focus your qi in your belly and bring it up to your eyes. Don’t push past that, though. We don’t want them to notice us.”

It was Tuesday, and we were in the northern suburb called Commerce City. The train tracks angled southwest to northeast, just north of where we were parked. The warehouse was to the south, exactly where Uncle Eric’s notes and plans said it would be, and Coin and his sheriff walked toward it now with unhurried calm. I closed my eyes and tried to remember what Ex and Chogyi Jake had taught me the day before. I pictured a warm ball of smoke just a few inches south of my navel and on an inward breath took energy into it from all around my body. Then I imagined the smoke glowing blue and white with flickers in it like lightning as it traveled up my spine, through the back of my head, and into my closed eyes.

There was a physical sensation that went with it that reminded me of watching a cat slink along under a bedspread. I opened my eyes again, and Randolph Coin was transformed. Swirls of ink eddied at the corners of his eyes. Black marks darkened his lips. At the warehouse door, he paused, turning back toward the car like he’d heard something. Startled, I let the smoke dissipate. My eyes became my eyes again, and his face was only flesh-colored. I put down the binoculars.

“All right,” I said. “That’s good. Let’s get out of here.”

Ex slipped the car into gear, the purring motor lowering its voice as we slid out onto the street. The highway was south of us, but we’d have to loop around to reach it. The gray-blue industrial warehouse vanished as we made the first corner. The dog track loomed up on our left, and I let out a breath.

Randolph Coin, evil mage who had killed my uncle and tried to kill me and Midian. Who trafficked with the things that lived in the Pleroma and took over bodies like Aaron the Boulder cop’s. Who hadn’t moved the induction ceremony from its rented warehouse by the greyhound racing track.

Randolph Coin, who wasn’t afraid of us.

I watched Ex’s face as he pulled the car onto I-270, merging with the traffic like a fish with water. His pale blond hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail, his expression focused and serious, his grip on the steering wheel hard. He leaned forward as he drove, as if he was controlling the car by the direct force of his will as much as by the wheel in his hands.

“I screwed up,” I said.

He glanced over at me, no more than a flicker, then his ice-blue eyes were back on the road.

“If you say so,” he said.

“I shouldn’t have let Aubrey leave the shotgun in the car,” I said. “If we were going into something that we thought might require protection, it was stupid of me to leave the weapon outside. And I should have brought you and Chogyi Jake as backup. It was my fault.”

The lines around his mouth softened a little bit. Not much.

“It was an easy mistake to make. Don’t let it bother you. You’ll do better next time,” he said. And then a few moments later, “Eric should never have taught him that. It’s like giving live ammunition to a ten-year-old. It doesn’t matter how good his intentions were, it’s too much power to have control over it.”

“It worked,” I said. “The thing would have killed us if Aubrey hadn’t done what he did.”

“Yeah,” Ex said, and gunned the engine, passing a semi and cutting back into traffic in front of it.

“We’ll do better next time,” I said.

“Yeah.”

At the house, Midian was waiting on the couch, a soccer game playing on the television. His sleeves were rolled up to expose the blackened beef jerky of his forearms and he was smoking another cigarette. The house was starting to reek of them. He stood as we came in the room.

“Well?” he asked.

“Coin’s still where he was. One bodyguard. No one watching from the roof, no wards on the perimeter past what Eric was expecting. He thinks we’ve gone to ground,” Ex said.

“We’re on, then?” Midian asked. Ex hesitated for a moment. I knew what he was thinking. We’ll do better next time.

“Yeah,” Ex said. “We’re on.”

Midian grinned, smoke curling between his ruined teeth.

The plan was simple, and even easier because it was already laid out. Instead of Eric luring Coin free of his hive, Chogyi Jake would do the work. Instead of Eric’s hired muscle attacking Coin, Ex and Aubrey and I would do the honors with sniper rifles and custom ammunition designed to disrupt riders. I pulled up satellite photos of the warehouse and everything around it from Google Earth and printed out copies for everyone. Ex diagrammed where each of us would be and worked out the timetable. I kept expecting him to tell us to synchronize our watches, but since all of our cell phones pulled the data from the same satellites, that part was really covered already. I’d just been watching too many old movies.

Aubrey joined in just before sundown, looking like a man only half recovered from the flu. He moved slowly, and I tried to tell myself it was mostly just the wounds. The physical ones.

When we’d done everything there was to do, Aubrey crawled back into bed. Chogyi Jake left, going off to run some normal human errand-feed his cats, check his mail, something mundane and reassuring like that. Ex set himself on the couch like a guard, turned on the television, turned it off again, and pulled a book of essays by Bertrand Russell out of his things. He read it with a constant sneer. Midian sat in the kitchen, a cup of coffee in one hand, a cigarette in the other.

Back in the bedroom, my laptop open on the bed, it struck me that the hardest thing was going to be waiting the three days before our moment came. I got online and against my better judgment, I checked the blogs of everyone I’d known from before I’d come to Denver. My old boyfriend was still bitching about the band he was in that never quite got it together to practice. My dorm mate from last year had apparently just noticed that feminism existed and couldn’t decide whether she thought it was a good thing. The girl I’d once considered my best friend hadn’t posted anything since she’d gone off to Portland with her boyfriend in June.