Daniel Abraham - Unclean Spirits

“So,” I said softly. “What do you think?”

“I should have seen it,” Ex said angrily.

“Well, you didn’t,” I said. “What else do you think?”

Ex looked up at me through his eyebrows. For a few seconds, he looked on the verge of doing something violent, but he shook his head and the impression went away. He pulled back his hair, tying it with a rubber band, then squared his shoulders.

“It makes sense,” he said. “The curse, the divisions between forms of riders, Eric’s willingness to use that to his advantage. Everything it said makes sense, but…”

“But,” I prompted.

“I don’t trust him. He’s a rider, and he has his own agenda.”

“Do you still think Coin killed Eric?” I asked.

Ex weighed the question for a moment, resting his chin against one knuckle. He nodded.

“Those people he sent to kill me and Midian? Those were part of the Invisible College?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, then,” I said. “Nothing’s changed. Coin’s still going to be at his weakest in a few hours. We still have everything we need to go up against him.”

“I know,” Ex said. “I don’t think you can be safe when the Invisible College is hunting you, and killing Coin will break their power. I can’t think of a reason not to go forward. It’s just…”

“You trusted someone. And then you found out they didn’t actually deserve it,” I said. “Now you have to suck it up and work with them no matter how you feel, just to get the job done. Kind of like what you were saying to me earlier tonight.”

“Aubrey,” he said.

“I’m not saying he’s a body-stealing vampire or anything,” I said, feeling a twinge of distress left over from my interrupted talk with Aubrey. Had we broken up? Had we ever really been together? I wasn’t totally sure. I pulled myself back to Ex. “I’m just saying there’s kind of a parallel. But we can’t be divided or distracted. That was you talking.”

“And after?”

I tilted my head.

“After we kill Coin. What do we do about Midian,” Ex said, his voice almost a whisper. “If we’re allies now, that’s going to be over by this time tomorrow. As soon as Coin goes down, the thing inside that body will be free to do whatever it wants. He will go out into the world, and he’ll hurt people. Maybe kill them. He’s a rider, it’s what he does.”

I gazed out the window, or tried to. With the darkness outside and the light in the kitchen, the glass was more like a black mirror. I looked tired. The kitchen behind me, reversed left for right, seemed alien. My body felt heavy and weak, my mind a little dizzy from too many changes too close together. Ex waited, his silence pushing me to answer, and I thought it was deeply unfair of him. I hadn’t planned any of this. Picking up Eric’s plan had all been Midian and Ex, Aubrey and Chogyi Jake. Even the encounter with Candace Dorn’s haugtrold had been Aubrey’s insistence more than mine. Making me decide what to do now, just when things got hard, seemed vaguely monstrous.

“We give him a head start,” I said. “A day, maybe.”

“He’ll vanish,” Ex said. “We might never find him again.”

“It’s a risk,” I agreed. “But the alternative is we kill him tomorrow morning. Use him for what we need, and then stab him in the back when we’re through with him.”

“It could be the best thing,” Ex said.

“Maybe. But we can’t do it.”

Ex didn’t speak, but his expression was clear enough. Why not?

“We’re the good guys,” I said.

We split the night into four hour-and-a-half shifts to guard Midian. Mine was three to four thirty, which slated me for a longish nap before and a short one after. Midian, his hands still tied, ignored the situation except to sigh theatrically, stretch out on the couch, and get more sleep than the rest of us. I sat in the facing chair, Eric’s shotgun across my thighs, and listened to the small sounds of the night.

The clock in the kitchen ticked quietly to itself. Sirens rose and fell in the distance. Once, a helicopter chopped the air so far away I could barely make it out. And Midian-Midian the vampire, or varkolak, whatever that was-breathed slowly in and out in the rhythm of deep sleep. In a few hours, I was going to be looking down a rifle at the thing that had killed Eric, but just now, the world was silent and still, and my mind was clearer than I had expected it to be.

The mystery that Midian’s revelation had left me with was this: if Eric wasn’t doing this to help Midian, who was he helping? There was, I assumed, someone out there who he’d intended to benefit. Someone like Candace Dorn. I wondered how I would find those people and let them know that the thing had been done, or if they’d just know when it happened. Ex and Aubrey and Chogyi Jake hadn’t found anything in the old notebooks that explained how this whole thing had started, but there had to be more books, more records. Somewhere there had to be something about how he’d found Midian, and what came before that, and before that. Or maybe he’d kept it all in his head.

I thought about the list of properties the lawyer had shown me. And those had been the tricky ones. There were others. More. I could have spent months going through all that. Years. And if I didn’t find some master record, I’d still wonder if it existed somewhere I just hadn’t thought to look. I was out of my depth. I’d known it from the moment Uncle Eric’s fortune fell out of the sky like something from an old Looney Tunes cartoon, and sitting alone in the dead of night, I felt it deeply. I was scared, I was faking it, I was probably in gut-wrenching danger that I didn’t understand. I’d spent the last few days as disoriented and dizzy as someone on her eighth time on the roller coaster.

But there was also a small, secret joy way down deep that surprised me. I was rich beyond my wildest dreams. Things hadn’t gone the way I wanted with Aubrey, but they’d still left me feeling wanted in a way that was almost more reassuring than actually having a boyfriend would have been. And regardless of why Eric had gone after the Invisible College in the first place, I knew why I was doing it.

I was doing it for Eric.

I heard the low beeping of Aubrey’s cell phone alarm and checked the time. Four thirty. My turn at guard duty was over. I listened to the soft, shoeless footsteps as he walked down the hall toward me, and I nodded to him as he stepped into the living room.

“Everything okay?” he asked, his voice hushed.

I handed him the shotgun.

“It’ll do,” I said, and then, “Hey. About…what happened at your apartment? Midian wasn’t wrong. It was my idea too, and it’s not like I told you all about everything in my history either. So. The Kim thing was a shock, and I’m a little easier to spin right now than usual. But…”

I shrugged.

“So we’re good?” Aubrey asked.

“We’re working on it,” I said. “I mean, you’re still married.”

Halfway down to my bedroom, I stopped, considered, and then turned back. I was too wound up to sleep. I headed to the kitchen, turned on the light over the sink, and brewed up a pot of coffee that wasn’t as good as Midian’s. A little before six, the windows were bright with the coming dawn. Ex and Chogyi Jake walked in quietly. Ex looked tired but focused. Chogyi Jake might have just woken up from eight solid hours, except that his smile didn’t reach his eyes as much as usual. Without a word, Ex put the rifles on the kitchen table. The black ammunition seemed to writhe in my peripheral vision.

“Well, hey,” Midian said from the living room. “Nice day to kill someone. Is that coffee? Because if it is, you over-brewed it.”