Daniel Abraham - Unclean Spirits

“Are you ready?” he asked.

I looked down at the shotgun in my hands. Salt, silver, and iron. Defense against a wide variety of riders. I felt like I’d woken up and found a rat crawling on my leg. I nodded.

“Follow me,” Aubrey said.

We stepped onto the back porch with the guns already drawn. Chogyi Jake, the first to notice us, cocked his head in something that seemed no more than mild curiosity. Ex leapt up, his chair tipping backward and onto the grass. Midian’s ruined head was toward us, wisps of hair clinging to it like trails of fungus. When he turned to look over his shoulder at us, his yellowed eyes were expressionless. He picked up his cigarette, took a deep breath, and let the smoke seep out his nostrils.

“Aubrey. Jayne,” Ex said. “Put down the guns.”

Midian lifted a hand and waved Ex’s words away. He shifted his chair to face us, two shotgun barrels pointing at his head. The ruined man sighed.

“It was the Bastille Day crack, wasn’t it?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I was kind of hoping you wouldn’t remember that,” he said, and wheezed out a laugh. “I always talk before I think. It’s a vice.”

“What the fuck is going on?” Ex demanded, his face flushing red. Midian gestured toward me and Aubrey with his cigarette, the smoke leaving a trail behind it.

“The kids here just figured out I’m a vampire,” he said.

“But I’ve seen you in daylight,” I said.

“That’s nosferatu,” Midian said. “I’m varkolak. Don’t let it bug you. Taxonomy’s always a bitch.”

We’d moved into the living room, each of us keeping Midian covered as we’d left the backyard behind. Midian sat in the overstuffed chair, a cigarette still between his thin, fleshless fingers. Ex and Chogyi Jake had grabbed guns too, but Midian’s casual air-legs crossed, black-toothed smile more amusement than chagrin-made me feel like we were being silly somehow. After all, he’d been with us for days. He’d been cooking our food, taking his turn at guard duty. If he’d wanted to kill us, we’d all be dead by now.

“I don’t believe it,” Ex said. His face was blank as a mask, but I could guess at the rage behind it. “Eric fought against riders, not next to them.”

“Eric did whatever he needed to do,” Midian said. “If he needed to get his hands dirty along the way, he wasn’t the guy to hesitate.”

“What else were you lying about?” I asked.

Midian looked at me with disappointment in his eyes. It was like seeing a teacher’s reaction when a student asked a particularly stupid question. The ruined man sighed.

“Well,” he said, “first off, I sort of let you think Eric was doing me a favor with this whole Invisible College thing. Not quite true. Eric came to me.”

“Why would he think you’d fight against one of your own kind?” Ex asked.

“Jesus Christ, padre,” Midian said. “My own kind. Shit. Would you say that to a black guy? Or a Jew? I’m a rider, Coin’s a rider, that doesn’t make us buddies. Look around the room here. You’ve got the girl here who can’t figure out if she’s a kick-ass superhero or a college dropout loser. The biologist guy who can’t stop feeling guilty for getting in her pants. Which, I’ll point out, was not exactly just his idea, but they don’t remember that. Tofu boy over there, who’s showing his dedication to nonviolence by helping to shoot Coin in the head, but it’s okay because he’s not the one pulling the trigger and anyway Coin’s not human. Shakyamuni’d be real proud of him for that doublethink. And you caught between a bunch of promises you’ve made to some great big Nobodaddy in the sky, a lifelong apology for fucking up when you were a kid, and a perfectly natural jealousy-”

“Drop it,” Ex said. “You can’t split us apart.”

“That’s the point, dumbfuck. You are split apart,” Midian said, sitting forward. His contempt ignored the shotgun Ex pointed at his chest. “You’ve got four people here, and six different sides. It’s no different Next Door. The loupine fight the ifrit, who ally with the zombii, unless they’re at war with them. The orisha undermine everything the noppera-bo try to do. The Graveyard Child works against Father Ba’al, and they both hate the Black Sun. It’s a fucking mess over there.”

“So Eric was set against the Invisible College and felt he could use you because you hated Coin too,” Chogyi Jake said. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

I shifted my shotgun to rest on my leg. My arms were getting tired.

“Coin fucked me,” Midian said philosophically. “That part was always true. I was in Rome back then, and Coin and his buddies were just getting a foothold in the south. They’d been bopping around Finland eating lutefisk and making candles or something. Anyway, I took over this body. It used to belong to a fella named Porfirio de la Vega. Well, it turns out the Invisible College had been going after the poor bastard too, but I got him first. Coin got a hair crosswise over it and broke me. I can’t feed. For two hundred years, I can’t feed and I can’t get out of the body. I just sit in here. But the curse connects us, me, and Coin. So when Eric decided it was time to take the bastard out, he came looking for me.”

“I don’t believe you,” Aubrey said. “Eric would never make an alliance with something like you.”

Midian dug in his pocket and extracted a fresh cigarette, lighting it off the butt of the old one. The cherry glowed red, the smoke came off gray. His yellowed eyes were fixed on Aubrey.

“You never heard of the lesser evil?” he asked. “Well, that’s me. Didn’t you ever wonder why he didn’t pull any of you boys into this? It’s a dirty operation. Messy. Morally impure. But he thought it needed doing, so he was going to do it. He left you poor fuckers out to protect you from it.”

We were silent for a moment. I could see the other three-Aubrey, Ex, Chogyi Jake-weighing the idea. They all seemed to think it was plausible.

“He didn’t need to do that,” Ex said, but his voice sounded less sure now.

“Yeah, well,” Midian said with a shrug. “Take it up with him.”

“This changes things,” Aubrey said.

“Does it?” Midian asked. “You can’t pull Coin out without me as the focus. I mean, maybe if you find someone else he’s cursed between now and sunup, but even if you do, so what? It’s not going to make any difference.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Look. You get some random Suzie Sunshine who Coin put some ugly mojo on, haul her ass out there, and use her to break him, it’s still going to lift my curse. What we’re doing isn’t just for me. Everyone Coin’s acted against gets helped out, whether you like us or not.”

“It’s just that on balance, that’s more good than bad,” Ex said.

“Don’t trust me on it,” Midian said. “Trust Eric.”

“I have to think about this,” Ex said. “We need to set guard on him.”

Midian made an impatient sound, but Aubrey was already shifting position. Chogyi Jake walked into the kitchen and came back with a length of rope. I pressed back against the wall to let him pass. Midian rolled his eyes but held out his wrists like a man waiting for the police to cuff him. As Chogyi Jake bound the thin, frail-looking wrists, Aubrey looked over to me. This time last night, I’d been dancing with my hands around him. It seemed like longer ago.

He nodded to me and then toward the kitchen, where Ex had gone. I hesitated for a moment, then pointed my own shotgun toward the ground and walked away.

The remains of the meal preparation hadn’t been cleared away yet. The cutting board was still bloody from the steak, and knives lay in the sink, their edges catching the light. The air was rich with wine and garlic. Ex was sitting at the table, his head in his hands. I leaned the gun against the side of the refrigerator and pulled out the chair across from him. The clock on the wall above him showed we were coming in on midnight.