Daniel Abraham - Unclean Spirits

“I’m working on that,” Ex said. “I think there are some ways I might be able to break the curse Coin put on him. Midian’s right. If he hadn’t already been weak, he probably wouldn’t have suffered any worse than I did. And since I got hit at the same time, there may be a connection that I can work with-”

“Or maybe the bluebird of happiness will come down and shit on your head,” Midian growled. “I’ve been trying to break one of Coin’s pulls since your great-grandfather was a dirty thought.”

“I didn’t say it’d be easy,” Ex said, “but I’ve got some ideas-”

“I know how,” I said. “I mean, we all know how to do it, don’t we?”

Ex looked back at me now. The shotgun tracked down to the floor. Chogyi turned to me, his expression questioning. I shrugged.

“We kill Coin,” I said. “That’ll break all his enchantments, right? Midian’s and Aubrey’s both. Plus whatever got Eric after him in the first place.”

Midian coughed out a derisive laugh.

“Hey, kid. We went after him today when he was at his weakest, and maybe you didn’t notice, but we got our asses handed to us. He’s about a hundred times stronger now than he was at six this morning, and he doesn’t have anything else to distract him.”

“Okay,” I said. “So it’ll be hard. But we still have decades of research that Eric did. We still have Midian and that Cainite resonance whatever it is. We’ve got the three of us, and-”

“No,” Ex said. “We tried, and we failed. We’re going to hide out now. Maybe later, when it’s not so dangerous, we can think about going back on the offensive, but right now, we can’t. It would be suicide.”

“Then you don’t have to do it,” I said.

Three pairs of eyes were on me. Ex, shocked. Chogyi Jake, considering. Midian, amused. I felt my chin lift.

“Jayne,” Ex said. “You don’t have to prove anything here. What happened wasn’t your fault. It was mine.”

“It’s not about fault,” I said, willing myself to believe the words as I spoke them. “It’s just about what we do next, right?”

“Let’s sleep on it,” Ex said. “I’m pretty comfortable that the wards will hold for tonight at least. Let’s not make any decisions until we can calmly, rationally look at what happened.”

Chogyi Jake nodded in my peripheral vision. I felt my mouth harden. I was being a brat. Midian’s words had hit me deeper than I wanted to admit, as did the guilt at Aubrey’s half-death and my own failure at the warehouse. I was trying to show them all that I was just as hard-core as Uncle Eric even though they knew I wasn’t. And I knew too.

And underneath that, I knew I had to try.

“Okay, we’ll wait until tomorrow,” I said. “But after that, I’m killing him.”

I called the hospital from my bedroom. The intake nurse had put my name and cell number in Aubrey’s chart along with the lie that I was family and his contact person. The person on the other end couldn’t tell me much except that Aubrey had been admitted and they were keeping him under observation. When they offered to have the doctor call me back when he had a minute, I said yes and let the call drop.

All around me, Eric’s things loomed like ghosts. His shirts, his furniture, his magazines. I turned on my laptop, checked my e-mail, Googled unsuccessfully for anything that talked about gunshots being fired in the Commerce City suburb of Denver, and tried to think of something else I should look for, some piece of data that would turn the whole world right again. I wound up staring at the screen with a feeling that there wasn’t enough air in the room.

I wanted to cry, but I was also tired of crying. I wanted to scream and throw things and make the world be fair, but I didn’t know what I meant by the world anymore. The fact was I’d let myself look forward to this day, to after-Coin. I’d let myself imagine a future where maybe I’d have friends, even a lover, and money and safety and options. Instead of that, I was locked down, hiding under Eric’s undetectable protections while the people who’d killed him walked free.

The disappointment and despair were as familiar as coming home.

I wasn’t sure until the second time that I’d actually heard the knock at the door. I said to come in. Ex walked in slowly, his hands in his pockets, his eyes shifting onto anything besides me sitting cross-legged on the bed. He leaned against the wall beside the dresser. From where I was, his face was both toward me and echoed in profile in the mirror. He looked like a magazine cover.

“How serious are you about going after Coin?” he asked.

I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. After a few seconds, he seemed to find an answer in the silence. He drew a long breath and let it out slowly.

“I think that you shouldn’t,” he said.

“I kind of have to,” I said.

“Aubrey.”

“That’s part of it, yeah. I got him into this. If it wasn’t for me, he wouldn’t have been so vulnerable. He wouldn’t be where he is now.”

“And you’re in love with him.”

I looked down at my laptop screen.

“Things with him really aren’t as straightforward as all that,” I said, trying to lighten the tone. “Aubrey and me…I don’t know. I have a problem dating someone with a wife. Maybe it’ll work out. Maybe it won’t. But I won’t know as long as he’s in a coma, right?”

“You do what you have to do to protect the people you care about,” Ex said.

I smiled and nodded because I thought he was talking about me and Aubrey. I thought the gray, sorrowful tone in his voice was him giving up on talking me out of trying again. I didn’t understand that he was actually apologizing until morning came and I found out Ex had gone and taken the guns and all of Eric’s books with him.

The rage felt good. I broke every plate in the kitchen, china shattering against the tile floor. I screamed every obscene word and phrase I knew and then started inventing. I tipped the chairs over and threw a full coffee cup against the living room wall, leaving a dark stain on the paint and a gouge in the plaster. My muscles felt warm and loose and I was about three inches taller than normal, the righteous anger puffing my body larger and stronger and making me sure of myself. I nursed it because I knew that when it was gone, there wouldn’t be anything left.

Midian and Chogyi Jake didn’t try to stop me or restrain me or talk sense. Midian just sat on the couch, his wrists still bound, his belly still bandaged. Chogyi Jake followed me in silence, standing witness to my violence with the same impartiality he’d had during my meltdown at the shopping mall. I shouted at him a few times too, but he didn’t react at all, and it started to take the momentum out of my tantrum.

When I lost that too, I sat on the stone hearth in front of the empty fireplace-my elbows on my knees, my head in my hands-and cried. The house was trashed. It was going to take hours just to clean it up. Part of me wanted to go get the broom and dustpan and start putting it all back together, if only to prove that I had a little control over something. Most of me just wanted to sit there and give up.

“He meant well,” Chogyi Jake said. His voice was soft.

“He’s a fucking asshole,” I managed between sobs.

“He’s a fucking asshole who meant well.”

I glanced up. Coming from anyone else, the amusement would have been an insult. Coming from Chogyi Jake, it seemed like compassion. Midian coughed, then winced. His bound hands went to his side. Shirtless, he looked like something from Jim Henson’s worst nightmare, his flesh ropy and dark and implausible. The bleeding had slowed, but whatever Coin had done to him was a long way from being healed. The same could be said of all of us.