Daniel Abraham - Unclean Spirits

The voice-mail message was short, and Candace Dorn’s voice was pleasant. I waited for the beep.

“Candace. Hey, this is Jayne Heller? Look, I’m in a little trouble. I may be in pretty big trouble. I need to ask Aaron for a favor. Could you have him give me a call? Thanks.”

I dropped the connection with a sense of excitement that bordered on dread. I had money, and a few cantrips, and two magical bullets.

And a cop. I had at least one cop. Maybe more, if he had friends he trusted.

And I wasn’t finished yet.

I knew what I needed to do. The idea of calling Candace had opened up a whole new set of options, and no matter how much I hated them, I couldn’t afford to leave any unexplored. It was to keep my friends alive. When I put it that way, my feelings didn’t matter all that much.

It took me twenty minutes to find the number. I probably could have done it with two Google searches, but I still didn’t want to boot up the computer. Eventually I got through directory assistance the old way, a computer with a vague East Coast accent patching me through. I listened to the ringing, my heart beating fast. I was hoping for more voice mail. It didn’t work out.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice said.

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I swallowed down the knot in my throat.

“Hello? Is anyone there?” she said, preparing to hang up.

“Hi,” I said. “You don’t know me. My name’s Jayne. Jayne Heller. Eric Heller was my uncle. He died. Someone killed him, and…um…anyway. I need help. I need your help.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Aubrey’s in trouble,” I said. “He could die.”

There was a moment’s silence. I could hear her breathing. When she spoke again, her voice was grim.

“Where is he?”

“Denver,” I said. “He’s in the hospital.”

“I’ll be there tonight,” his wife said.

I met her at the airport just at sunset. In person, Kim looked a little less like Nicole Kidman. She wore gray slacks and a simple cream blouse that would have looked perfectly in place at a baseball game or a boardroom. Her eyes were a sharp blue, her mouth tight and a little angry. She came through baggage claim without pausing at the carousel, a generic black carry-on wheeling behind her and a tasteful black purse on her arm. She only looked around for a moment before homing in on me. When she stood before me, her head cocked to the left, her eyes clicking over me like a specimen she was trying to identify, I was surprised to see she was half a head shorter than me.

“You look like him,” she said. She spoke sharply, like she was trying to bite off the last letter of every word. “I mean, not like him like him. But the family resemblance is there.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“I didn’t like Eric. I always knew that something like this was going to happen.”

“Well, he’s dead now, so I guess it won’t happen twice,” I said, more harshly than I’d intended. “And he wasn’t the one who got Aubrey in trouble. I was.”

“Aubrey is always the one who gets Aubrey in trouble. It’s his superpower. Are we waiting on something? I don’t have any other luggage.”

I nodded and led the way back out to the minivan. Kim was silent, but her shoes tapping on the concrete behind me seemed to carry accusation and disapproval. I was probably overreacting. She didn’t say anything about my driving Aubrey’s car, so either she didn’t care or she didn’t know it was his. We’d known each other for ten minutes, and I was already certain she wasn’t the sort of person to hold back an opinion.

“We’re staying in Eric’s old house,” I said as we pulled out of the parking space. “It’s got protections on it, and the Invisible College is looking for us pretty hard, so I’m trying not to go out if I don’t have to.”

“I want to go to the hospital,” Kim said. “I need to see him.”

“Aubrey’s all right,” I said, fumbling with a parking stub and a few loose dollars to pay the charge. “I called the doctors again just before I came out here, and they said-”

“I need to see him,” she said again.

“I don’t think it’s safe.”

“I didn’t ask if it was.”

I clenched my teeth. I didn’t want to go back to the hospital. But she was here because I asked her. Because I needed her.

“Fine,” I said. “But we can’t stay long.”

The hospital was out of our way, and we didn’t talk. The few times I glanced over at her, her eyes were on the city sliding by. I wondered whether I should have told her about my night with Aubrey, whether her story about their marriage would match the one he’d given me. I parked on the street, and Kim was out of the car almost before the engine died. I had to trot to catch up with her.

Aubrey’s room hadn’t changed much since I’d left it. His heart rate was steady and slow. His mumbling roommate still mumbled. Kim stood beside him, looking down with her eyes half closed. Her expression betrayed nothing.

“How long has he been like this?” she asked.

“Since last Saturday,” I said, “so a week tomorrow.”

A nurse came into the room, a strong-looking black woman in her midfifties. I remembered her vaguely from the earlier times I’d been here. She smiled at me, kindness and sympathy in her expression, and started changing out the roommate’s saline drip.

“Excuse me,” Kim said. “Where’s his chart?”

“I’m sorry,” the nurse said, “but we can’t give out his medical information to-”

“I’m his wife. You can give it to me,” Kim said. The nurse looked surprised and glanced at me. I shrugged and nodded. The nurse’s eyebrows rose a millimeter, but she gave no other sign of surprise. Fiancee and wife visiting together was apparently not the strangest thing she’d seen that day.

“I’ll see if I can get the doctor for you,” she said, and went back to her task. I went to look out the window, feeling awkward and out of place. I didn’t see it when the nurse left. Kim didn’t speak to me. I let the silence press on me for as long as I could stand it.

“He’d been in a fight a few days before,” I said. “A rider took over this guy’s body, and we wound up in a fight. Aubrey did something that knocked the bad guy out, but it weakened the connection between him and his body. When Coin fought back, it hit Aubrey really hard. That’s why…”

That’s why he’s hurt and I’m not. That’s why you’re here. That’s why this is all my fault. Kim made a small sound of agreement so perfunctory that I didn’t know whether she was aware of it. She touched Aubrey’s cheek with the detachment of someone preparing for a dissection, then ground the knuckle of her right index finger into Aubrey’s sternum, hard enough to make the bed under him creak.

“Hey!” I said. “What are you doing?”

“Sternal rub.” She nodded to the heart monitor. Fifty-five. “He still responds to pain. That’s very good. It would have been better if he’d flinched, but this is something.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I don’t hurt him for the joy of it,” she said.

I didn’t know how to respond, and a second nurse came in the room to save me. He was a huge man, wide as a horse across the shoulders, with a shaven head and broad lips. He looked at me, his eyes barely widening. I had the sudden, overwhelming memory of the tattooed attackers breaking into Midian’s apartment and the moment of surprise that followed breaking in the door.

I’ve seen him before, I thought, my body already in motion. I scooped up the little plastic visitor’s chair and swung hard. The huge man blocked the attack but fell a step back as I remembered where. He was the one who’d been with Coin that first day when Ex took me to see the warehouse. He was part of the Invisible College.