Daniel Abraham - Unclean Spirits

I wondered if it was possible to track an instant message back to where it had physically originated. Maybe it was all relayed through a server over at AOL, but I had the sense it was peer-to-peer, in which case they’d have the IP address of the network here. They wouldn’t be able to translate that into a street address without hacking the living snot out of Eric’s service provider. They were evil wizards. Getting into a router configuration might not be beyond them, but then again, Eric had done a pretty thorough job of keeping the house off their radar. Chances were good that the service record would keep the address obscured. I wished that Eric had left me some record of what exactly my defenses were.

I’d known that they were out there. I’d known they were looking for us. Actually catching sight of one of the hunters shook me more than I’d expected it to. I started to wonder how big a risk I’d been taking when I went to see the lawyer. How were Coin and his people going to come after us now? Would he go after my family? I tried to imagine my mother at the mercy of tattooed wizards possessed by evil parasites. It would pretty much confirm everything my parents thought about me, and that was the lowest reason on the list for keeping it from happening.

In the kitchen, Midian and Chogyi Jake were talking about different mythological loci and the relationship between choice and will. A couple hours ago, I’d have cared. Instead, I sat down at the table with my head in my hands until they both went silent.

“You okay, kid?” the vampire asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

I slept badly, every passing car or creaking wall startling me awake. At three in the morning, I came within two digits of calling home and telling my parents to take my brothers and get out of the house. The only thing that stopped me was knowing that they wouldn’t do it. I lay on the bed, drifting in and out of unpleasant dreams, and watched the curtains turn light again with the approaching dawn. At no point in the night did I even move toward turning on my laptop.

Midian and Chogyi Jake had been pretty quiet after I told them about the fake Ex, but neither had given me any grief for being taken in, even briefly. We agreed that the three of us would use the word elephant someplace in the first sentence or two if we were ever communicating across the net, and Midian made a joke about policy being the surest evidence that something had already been fucked up.

The doorbell rang at eleven in the morning, and the sound knotted my guts. Midian, watching television with the captioning on and the sound off, rose from the couch. Chogyi Jake came in from the kitchen. The doorbell rang again.

“You want me to get my Luger?” Midian asked.

“You two get back out of sight,” I said. Chogyi handed Midian a knife, nodded to me, and faded back into the kitchen. Midian stepped into the hallway where he couldn’t be seen from the door. I put my hand on the knob, took a breath, let it out, and pulled the door open.

The courier had already given up, the little red station wagon pulling away from the curb. A gray cardboard box squatted on the red bricks. I picked it up, still half expecting it to be a trap. The report inside was eighty pages long, professionally bound, with nothing on it to indicate that it was meant for me or produced by my lawyer. Everything about it was plausibly deniable. I went to the dining room table and sat down. After a couple minutes, I told Midian I’d read him the good parts if he’d stop hovering over my shoulder.

Randolph Eustace Coin was born in Vienna in 1954, son of a grocer. His family moved to America in 1962, taking up residence in an ethnically homogenous enclave in New York City. He attended public school without any particular sign of excellence, though he was supposed to have been a pretty good clarinet player.

I looked up.

“How does Coin put a curse on you in seventeen eighty whatever it was if he’s not born until the nineteen fifties?” I asked.

“He was in a different body at the time,” Midian replied with a shrug. “It’s not like your lawyer can track which flesh has who inside it.”

“Ah,” I said. “Right.”

In late summer of 1972, Coin disappeared.

The Randolph Coin who emerged six years later was a different man. While seen socially with members of something called the Zen Theosophy, he’d never espoused any particular beliefs in public apart from a general support for public education and a concern about overpopulation. A footnote pointed out that while they come from similar teachings, the Zen Theosophists weren’t directly associated with the Theosophical Society and accepted the teachings of Alice Bailey, which seemed to mean something to Midian, because he nodded when I said it.

Over the next two decades, Coin had appeared in the company of religious leaders, poets, cranks, and captains of industry and finance. A list of names was included, and I recognized about half. It was never clear how he made his money, though he was on the board of two political consultancies, an international aid foundation, and a scientific equipment supply company. As far as the world was concerned, Coin was one of those entrepreneurs whose lofty status made it hard to say what they really did. While he might have had some kooky friends, he himself was a man of no particular beliefs.

The report skipped a page.

The Invisible College was a fraternal society with its roots in the sixteenth century, when it was most closely associated with John Dee and the Rosicrucians. There had been some kind of violent schism within the College associated with World War II, but details were few and far between.

The membership role wasn’t ever made public, but rumor put the group’s size at between one hundred and six hundred people at any given time. It wasn’t clear from the references to it whether it was a religious order, a scientific lobbying group, or an internationalist think tank. Other members had apparently included Aleister Crowley, Harry S. Truman, and Alan Turing.

“Turing?” Midian asked. “Go back. When was Coin born?”

“Nineteen fifty-four,” I said.

“Yeah, but what day?”

I flipped back through the pages.

“June seventh,” I said.

Midian chuckled. It was a low, wet sound.

“What?” I asked.

“Turing offed himself the same day,” Midian said. “Probably just a coincidence. Keep going.”

“There isn’t much more in this section,” I said.

“What’s next?” Chogyi Jake asked.

I turned the page. The remainder of the report might as well have been printed on gold plate. It was perfect. Copies of Coin’s movements for the last week, including his visits to the warehouse where we’d tried to kill him, his home address (which to judge from the footnotes was a very big secret), descriptions of his cars, photographs of his bodyguard. He was the big guy I’d seen with Coin at the warehouse that first time with Ex. The report ended with an estimated itinerary of his movements for the next week and a half and a footnote explaining that all predictions in the report needed to be considered approximate. The apologetic tone of the note made me wonder if they were used to an expectation of clairvoyance.

An appendix had copies of original documents, including notes from a doctor’s visit last year. Coin had gastric reflux. Somehow that detail, with its sense of intimacy and vulnerability, reassured me the most. I felt like I was getting somewhere.

“Okay,” I said. “So we know where he is. We have an idea where he’s going to be. That’s a start, right?”

“Would have been nice to have someone who knew a little more about riders digging into these assholes, but on the whole…” Midian said. “So, kid. What’s your next move?”