Daniel Abraham - Unclean Spirits

“I thought we couldn’t leave the house,” I said. “I thought it wasn’t safe.”

“It isn’t,” Chogyi Jake said. “Ex is risking himself to keep you from harm.”

“Or to keep me under his fucking control.”

“Yeah, well,” Midian croaked. He always sounded like something in his throat was about to come loose. “Who’d have guessed a Jesuit priest would be paternalistic.”

“Ex-priest,” I said.

“Whatever.”

“Rest,” Chogyi Jake said. “This will all be much better if we can regain some sense of our center.” His eyes were bloodshot. I should have been taking care of him, not the other way around.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m tired,” he said. From him, it was like an admission that he was near collapse. I realized that I didn’t know how deeply our failure with Coin had hurt him. I felt bad that I hadn’t thought to ask.

The house had become a submarine, dead on the ocean floor. Everything looked the same, apart from the damage I’d done. But the air was different. The light that pressed in at the windows trapped us. Whatever magic Eric had put on the building to keep us safe, I could feel it weakening, and I didn’t know how much of that was true and how much was just my own growing fear and hopelessness.

I sat in the kitchen, my stomach too knotted for food or coffee. Chogyi Jake went to each of the windows and doors, chanting and pouring out lines of rice and salt. Propping up the wards. Buying us time.

I pictured Aubrey sitting across from me. His honey-colored hair. His bright eyes. His fingers closed around mine. In my imagination, all the anger and weirdness from our failed date was gone. I wanted badly for it to be true. Tears ran down my cheeks. I let them.

“I blew it,” I said to my imaginary Aubrey. “I don’t know how I managed to fuck everything up again, just like always.”

My hands were rubbing my thighs, the palms pressing into the denim hard enough for the friction to warm them. To hurt a little.

“I think I have to run away now,” I said. “I’ve lost you and Ex. And Midian, kind of. I mean since he turns out to be one of the bad guys, that kind of takes him off my assets column. So…”

My hand was tapping on my thigh, just a light movement, like a kid tugging at her mother’s dress. I watched my own fingers, my mind mostly empty, but aware of something happening in the background. Some thought that was struggling to bubble up from my subconscious.

“I’m down to nothing,” I said. “Taking on Coin now is a hundred times dumber than when we did it before. I don’t have the books. I don’t have the rifles. I don’t have the magic bullets. I’ve lost…”

I put my hand into the pocket of my jeans, looking for something without knowing quite what it was. It came back out with six hundred-dollar bills. Some of the change from my shopping spree. I looked down at the money. Benjamin Franklin looked back up at me.

“I’ve lost everything,” I said, but the conviction was gone from my voice. I shuffled the bills one after another. The thought wasn’t quite formed yet, but I was starting to sense a vague shape. Midian coughed.

I stood up with the weird feeling that I was floating. My backpack was sitting by the front door. I unfastened the straps. Aubrey’s keys rested on top of the undifferentiated mess of my life.

“Chogyi!” I shouted.

I held the keys as he came down the hall. Midian was silent. I could feel him listening to us.

“I need to go out,” I said. “How dangerous is that going to be?”

“Very,” he said.

“What about that thing where I didn’t set off the alarms in Midian’s apartment? Do you think that’ll make it harder for Coin to find me too?”

Chogyi paused, considering. “If it’s difficult for one magic to see you, it may be a general effect. And you didn’t fire the rifle, so Coin’s wards haven’t interacted with you directly.”

“You’re not sure, though.”

“No.”

I took a deep breath.

“I’m going to risk it,” I said. “If I’m not back by nightfall, plan without me.”

I almost expected him to stop me. I don’t know why. I trotted out to the minivan and headed north quickly, before I lost my nerve. Half an hour and a certain amount of dithering later, I parked on Brighton Boulevard where it bellied up next to the railroad tracks. I sat in the minivan, looking to the east, past the boxcars and toward the warehouses. I got out with a sense of unreality, locked the door behind me, and set out across the tracks. A homeless guy leaned against a huge black trash bag half a block down. I paused, remembering what Ex and Chogyi Jake had taught me. I drew up my qi, placing it just behind my eyes. The homeless guy was still just a homeless guy.

Ten minutes later, I was crouching where I’d been before, the flaking wall against my back, my heart tripping over itself. My throat was dry. I leaned over to peer at the warehouse. The buses were gone. Only half a dozen cars remained. I looked for people, but didn’t see anyone. I made myself stay still as I scanned the ground. It had only been one day, and in a part of the city that stayed pretty much dead as a cod all weekend. The chances were that it would still be where I’d dropped it.

I saw it. The rifle lay flat, its barrel still pointing roughly toward the warehouse. I inched forward, one eye on the warehouse, one on the rifle. The sun left it almost too hot to touch, but I got my hand around it and trotted back to the cover. I tried to remember how many times I’d fired while Coin walked back from the carnage. Three, I thought.

One round still waited in the chamber, one in the magazine. Carefully, I lifted the cartridges out, feeling the carved designs squirm against my fingertips. I dropped the nasty little things into my backpack, tucked the rifle under my arm, and jogged back to the minivan.

Despite Ex’s best efforts, I had two bullets made for killing riders. It was a thin victory, but I took pride in it. I drove back to the house with a growing sense of possibility.

When I got there, I swept up the ruined dishes. I cleaned the coffee stain off with a rag and warm water while Midian sat on the couch, watching me with silent, dead eyes. I stood back, considering the wall. After a little scrubbing, the biggest problem was that the cleaned bit now looked brighter than the rest of the wall. I looked around, suddenly aware of all the little ways that the house had fallen into disrepair during the time I’d been in it.

“Well,” I said. “Okay.”

“Okay?” Midian asked.

I looked at him, then went to the kitchen and came back with a carving knife in hand. The yellow eyes tracked me uncertainly.

“If I let you go, are we going to be cool?” I asked.

“You’re serious?” he asked. “I’m a fucking vampire, you know.”

“Eric was willing to work with you,” I said. “And besides, I kind of like you. So are we going to be cool or not?”

“As long as we want the same thing. After that, we’ll have to see how it plays out,” he said. And then, “Hey, kid. At least I’m not bullshitting you, right?”

I answered by cutting the rope around his wrists. He rubbed the desiccated, time-dark flesh and looked up at me.

“For someone who’s totally fucked, you’re looking pretty chipper,” he said.

“Yeah, well,” I said. “I’m going to clean the place. You want to whip us up some dinner?”

The vampire shrugged, then stood up.

“I’m on it,” he said.

I dug a vacuum cleaner out of a closet and set to getting all the coffee cup fragments out of the carpet. I threw out the tray Midian had been using for his dead cigarettes, gathered up all the dirty glasses and dishes that had found their way to the flat surfaces of the house, and brought them home to the dishwasher. The bright spot on the wall kept bothering me. There was only one thing, I decided, to be done about it. I got my laptop out from the bedroom, hooked it up to Eric’s modest stereo speakers, and cranked up some music. China Forbes sang an old Carmen Miranda tune, and I started washing down all the walls in the living room while I danced to it. About twenty minutes and two walls later, Chogyi Jake came out from the back, surprised to see something happening that wasn’t about ruining the flatware.