Daniel Abraham - Unclean Spirits

“I was amazed,” he said, as if confessing something. “I was delighted. Riders and hosts and the idea of a universe next door that worked in a totally different way from ours, but with common strategies…it felt like revelation. Kim didn’t believe it at first. I think it was just too weird for her. That it offended the scientist in her.

“Eric trained us both. It took a while to believe what we were seeing. I think I bought in before she did. And then Kim just sort of turned off. She didn’t want anything to do with it. We started fighting. I said some things that I shouldn’t have.”

“Indulge me,” I said. My voice was harsher than I’d meant it to be, but I was still pissed off. He looked up at me and the calm and nostalgia vanished.

“I told her it was wrong to ignore evidence,” he said. “I told her that she was being narrow-minded and parochial because she’d come across something that didn’t fit in her worldview. Instead of rethinking how the world is, she was shutting her eyes and pretending it wasn’t true.”

“You told her she was being religious,” I said.

He chuckled, but there wasn’t any mirth in the sound.

“I guess so,” he said. “She didn’t see it that way. She said I was being stupid. Arrogant. Either riders were a fraud and Eric was a con man with his own agenda or they were real and Eric was dangerously irresponsible for having anything to do with them without more information. The last fight we had, she told me that the work with riders had made me either a dupe or an idiot, and she wasn’t going to live with either one.”

“You had to choose between Eric and her,” I said.

“Sort of,” he said. “Anyway. She moved out, got a job in Chicago. It was one of those situations where you had to still work together, because so many of our studies were interlinked. Things cooled off, and we stayed on decent terms. About a year and a half ago, she told me she was seeing someone else. I agreed that it was over, and we had a kind of agreement in principle to finalize the divorce. File the paperwork, all that. But she’s insanely busy, and I was spending half my time working on my research and the other half helping Eric.”

“And seeing other people?”

“In principle,” Aubrey said. “It never actually happened, but I got used to thinking of myself as unattached. If I’d thought there was any chance of Kim and me patching things up, I would never have…”

Aubrey took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He looked up at me. He was tired.

“Look, Jayne,” he said. “The truth is that Kim and I have both moved on from who we were together. I didn’t expect things to happen so quickly with you, and Kim honestly didn’t enter my mind. It’s something I’ve been resigned to for so long, it just felt like history.”

“You could have told me all this over dinner,” I said.

“Actually, I’m not sure I could have,” he said. “I think talking about your ex on a first date is sort of a party foul.”

“Finding out about the wife online isn’t better,” I said.

“How about finding out by snooping through my e-mail?” Aubrey said. “That’s all fine and dandy?”

“What?”

“I said how about going through my e-mail? While I was asleep. My taxes. Or, if you’d like, how about cruising the Internet looking for scraps of my life to pass judgment on? Or, when you get upset, running off without even bothering to leave me-any of us-so much as a note to say you’re okay? All of those are perfectly fine, adult behaviors?”

“That’s not what I’m here to talk about,” I said, feeling the moral high ground shifting under my feet.

“Well, I’ve brought it up,” Aubrey said.

I opened my mouth, a thousand practiced zingers suddenly falling apart before I could deliver them. Aubrey shook his head, something between sorrow and disgust in his eyes.

“I don’t deserve this, Jayne,” he said. “Kim and I aren’t together. We haven’t been for a long time. And as far as I can tell, you’re treating me like I’ve somehow betrayed you personally because I haven’t filed all the paperwork in a timely fashion.”

“I think being married is more than that,” I said.

“Have you ever been married?”

“No,” I said, “but…”

I knew the next words. I could feel the syllables against my tongue. Marriage is sacred. And I could hear the voice that was saying them. It was my mother’s. It all fit together with a click that was nearly physical.

I had rejected my parents and their parochial, small, restrictive ideas. I had broken off with my family and allowed myself the kind of experiences they were always tacitly afraid I’d have-sex, beer, R-rated movies-and I’d pretended that I had remade myself. But Aubrey’s history took me by surprise, and I’d reacted like I was still sitting in the fourth pew. My liberal, broad-minded tolerance could still be scratched off with a fingernail.

“Fuck,” I said, anger and embarrassment giving the word weight. Aubrey waited. The silence went on. I had to say something else.

“You’re right. I shouldn’t have dug through your computer,” I said. “I shouldn’t have freaked out and bolted. But here’s the thing. I don’t have a great track record with…trusting people. Especially when it comes to sex. You’re still married to this woman I’ve never met, and okay, maybe it’s all just paperwork. But you are, and I found out right after we’d slept together. I’d love to pretend it was all okay with me, but it’s not. I’m sorry it’s not. I really, really want it to be. But it’s just…”

Outside, Midian laughed. Ex said something I couldn’t make out. Aubrey sucked in his breath. I felt like we were breaking up. There was a knot in my throat. I wanted to cry. Because that one last level of humiliation would have just put the cap on the whole conversation.

“I understand,” he said.

“We need to be able to work together,” I said, leaning forward on the couch. “Coin’s a badass. He killed my uncle. He’s kept Midian under a curse for two hundred some years. And I’m taking him on. We’re taking him on. Knowing someone close to me, someone important, is holding back information is hard. I know I shouldn’t pass that kind of judgment, but when I…um. Aubrey? What is it?”

His body had gone tense, the color drained from his face. When he spoke, his voice was very steady and controlled.

“How long has Midian been under a curse?”

“Two hundred something years,” I said. “He said he was born at the end of the French Revolution. Why?”

“He’s two hundred years old?”

“A little more than that, but yeah.”

Aubrey stood up carefully and walked to the kitchen. I looked at the empty doorway, then unfolded myself from the couch and followed. The duffel bag of guns we’d found in the storage facility was still there on the floor. Aubrey knelt beside it.

“Aubrey?”

“Curses don’t make people live indefinitely, Jayne. Outliving your life span is something people try for. Living two hundred years isn’t a curse. It’s something else.”

He took out one of the shotguns, checked to be sure it was loaded, and handed it to me. I took the wood stock and cold steel barrel in my hands, my mind still back on Kim and sex and Ray Charles singing over coffee. The gun seemed out of place.

“Midian?” I said. “This is about Midian?”

Aubrey took out another shotgun, chambered a round, and looked up at me.

“If he’s lying about the curse, we need to know why,” Aubrey said. “If he’s not lying about the curse, he’s not a human.”

“Oh,” I said. The air seemed to have gone out of the room. I was having a hard time catching my breath.