Unclean Spirits

Twelve

I waited until I'd eaten dinner. Midian had cooked steaks in red wine and black pepper. The onions were sweet and tart, and he'd done something with butter and garlic that made broccoli taste good. We sat on the back porch, drinking wine and watching the stars come out. Aubrey sat a little apart, his smile tight and restrained. Chogyi Jake and Midian were both taking up the slack in the conversation by trading jokes and stories, cajoling Aubrey out of his funk and me out of my rage. I was almost feeling human by the end. Ex kept looking over at me, prompting me to make a move. I'd promised to make peace, but I still resented it.

It wouldn't have killed Aubrey to open the discussion. He could start by apologizing again.

I knew I wasn't being fair or even particularly rational. I tried to suck it up.

"Aubrey," I said, and his head came up like he'd heard a gunshot. "You got a minute?"

"Sure," he said. I led the way back into the house. I was pretty sure the others weren't going to come anywhere near us until this was over. I sat on the couch, legs folded up beneath me, arms crossed. Aubrey took the hearth, watching me with his best poker face. We sat there in silence for a few seconds.

"Why don't you tell me about your wife," I said.

"Okay, fine," he said, then took a breath, gathering himself. "Kim and I met when I'd just been accepted into the doctoral program. We were looking into some of the same questions, so we had a lot to talk about. It worked. For a while."

Something changed in his expression, softening it. Nostalgia, I thought. He looked down at his hands as if the story was written on his skin.

"We'd been married for about two years when Eric showed up," Aubrey said. "She was still here back then. We were both at the university, and she was doing some work on a study at the medical center. The money wasn't great, but we were doing all right. Eric sent us both e-mail at first. He said he'd read our work and had some questions about the logical structures of parasitism. How parasite-host systems worked, what kinds of patterns you'd see in host behavior modification. He was really interested in reverse-engineering things."

"But Kim wasn't interested," I said.

"She was. At first. Eric took us both out to dinner to talk things over, and it was great. Kim and I had both been swimming in the problems for so long, it was like we talked in code. Just having Eric there to explain things to made us look at everything with fresh eyes. I think both of us were pretty excited afterward. It turned into a weekly thing. There were probably five or six months that everything was great. And then the riders came up."

He smiled, still not looking at me. He was seeing Eric and Kim, hearing conversations from years before. I might almost not have been there.

"I was amazed," he said, as if confessing something. "I was delighted. Riders and hosts and the idea of a universe next door that worked in a totally different way from ours, but with common strategies...it felt like revelation. Kim didn't believe it at first. I think it was just too weird for her. That it offended the scientist in her.

"Eric trained us both. It took a while to believe what we were seeing. I think I bought in before she did. And then Kim just sort of turned off. She didn't want anything to do with it. We started fighting. I said some things that I shouldn't have."

"Indulge me," I said. My voice was harsher than I'd meant it to be, but I was still pissed off. He looked up at me and the calm and nostalgia vanished.

"I told her it was wrong to ignore evidence," he said. "I told her that she was being narrow-minded and parochial because she'd come across something that didn't fit in her worldview. Instead of rethinking how the world is, she was shutting her eyes and pretending it wasn't true."

"You told her she was being religious," I said.

He chuckled, but there wasn't any mirth in the sound.

"I guess so," he said. "She didn't see it that way. She said I was being stupid. Arrogant. Either riders were a fraud and Eric was a con man with his own agenda or they were real and Eric was dangerously irresponsible for having anything to do with them without more information. The last fight we had, she told me that the work with riders had made me either a dupe or an idiot, and she wasn't going to live with either one."

"You had to choose between Eric and her," I said.

"Sort of," he said. "Anyway. She moved out, got a job in Chicago. It was one of those situations where you had to still work together, because so many of our studies were interlinked. Things cooled off, and we stayed on decent terms. About a year and a half ago, she told me she was seeing someone else. I agreed that it was over, and we had a kind of agreement in principle to finalize the divorce. File the paperwork, all that. But she's insanely busy, and I was spending half my time working on my research and the other half helping Eric."

"And seeing other people?"

"In principle," Aubrey said. "It never actually happened, but I got used to thinking of myself as unattached. If I'd thought there was any chance of Kim and me patching things up, I would never have..."

Aubrey took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He looked up at me. He was tired.

"Look, Jayn¨¦," he said. "The truth is that Kim and I have both moved on from who we were together. I didn't expect things to happen so quickly with you, and Kim honestly didn't enter my mind. It's something I've been resigned to for so long, it just felt like history."

"You could have told me all this over dinner," I said.

"Actually, I'm not sure I could have," he said. "I think talking about your ex on a first date is sort of a party foul."

"Finding out about the wife online isn't better," I said.

"How about finding out by snooping through my e-mail?" Aubrey said. "That's all fine and dandy?"

"What?"

"I said how about going through my e-mail? While I was asleep. My taxes. Or, if you'd like, how about cruising the Internet looking for scraps of my life to pass judgment on? Or, when you get upset, running off without even bothering to leave me-any of us-so much as a note to say you're okay? All of those are perfectly fine, adult behaviors?"

"That's not what I'm here to talk about," I said, feeling the moral high ground shifting under my feet.

"Well, I've brought it up," Aubrey said.

I opened my mouth, a thousand practiced zingers suddenly falling apart before I could deliver them. Aubrey shook his head, something between sorrow and disgust in his eyes.

"I don't deserve this, Jayn¨¦," he said. "Kim and I aren't together. We haven't been for a long time. And as far as I can tell, you're treating me like I've somehow betrayed you personally because I haven't filed all the paperwork in a timely fashion."

"I think being married is more than that," I said.

"Have you ever been married?"

"No," I said, "but..."

I knew the next words. I could feel the syllables against my tongue. Marriage is sacred. And I could hear the voice that was saying them. It was my mother's. It all fit together with a click that was nearly physical.

I had rejected my parents and their parochial, small, restrictive ideas. I had broken off with my family and allowed myself the kind of experiences they were always tacitly afraid I'd have-sex, beer, R-rated movies-and I'd pretended that I had remade myself. But Aubrey's history took me by surprise, and I'd reacted like I was still sitting in the fourth pew. My liberal, broad-minded tolerance could still be scratched off with a fingernail.

"Fuck," I said, anger and embarrassment giving the word weight. Aubrey waited. The silence went on. I had to say something else.

"You're right. I shouldn't have dug through your computer," I said. "I shouldn't have freaked out and bolted. But here's the thing. I don't have a great track record with...trusting people. Especially when it comes to sex. You're still married to this woman I've never met, and okay, maybe it's all just paperwork. But you are, and I found out right after we'd slept together. I'd love to pretend it was all okay with me, but it's not. I'm sorry it's not. I really, really want it to be. But it's just..."

Outside, Midian laughed. Ex said something I couldn't make out. Aubrey sucked in his breath. I felt like we were breaking up. There was a knot in my throat. I wanted to cry. Because that one last level of humiliation would have just put the cap on the whole conversation.

"I understand," he said.

"We need to be able to work together," I said, leaning forward on the couch. "Coin's a badass. He killed my uncle. He's kept Midian under a curse for two hundred some years. And I'm taking him on. We're taking him on. Knowing someone close to me, someone important, is holding back information is hard. I know I shouldn't pass that kind of judgment, but when I...um. Aubrey? What is it?"

His body had gone tense, the color drained from his face. When he spoke, his voice was very steady and controlled.

"How long has Midian been under a curse?"

"Two hundred something years," I said. "He said he was born at the end of the French Revolution. Why?"

"He's two hundred years old?"

"A little more than that, but yeah."

Aubrey stood up carefully and walked to the kitchen. I looked at the empty doorway, then unfolded myself from the couch and followed. The duffel bag of guns we'd found in the storage facility was still there on the floor. Aubrey knelt beside it.

"Aubrey?"

"Curses don't make people live indefinitely, Jayn¨¦. Outliving your life span is something people try for. Living two hundred years isn't a curse. It's something else."

He took out one of the shotguns, checked to be sure it was loaded, and handed it to me. I took the wood stock and cold steel barrel in my hands, my mind still back on Kim and sex and Ray Charles singing over coffee. The gun seemed out of place.

"Midian?" I said. "This is about Midian?"

Aubrey took out another shotgun, chambered a round, and looked up at me.

"If he's lying about the curse, we need to know why," Aubrey said. "If he's not lying about the curse, he's not a human."

"Oh," I said. The air seemed to have gone out of the room. I was having a hard time catching my breath.

"Are you ready?" he asked.

I looked down at the shotgun in my hands. Salt, silver, and iron. Defense against a wide variety of riders. I felt like I'd woken up and found a rat crawling on my leg. I nodded.

"Follow me," Aubrey said.

We stepped onto the back porch with the guns already drawn. Chogyi Jake, the first to notice us, cocked his head in something that seemed no more than mild curiosity. Ex leapt up, his chair tipping backward and onto the grass. Midian's ruined head was toward us, wisps of hair clinging to it like trails of fungus. When he turned to look over his shoulder at us, his yellowed eyes were expressionless. He picked up his cigarette, took a deep breath, and let the smoke seep out his nostrils.

"Aubrey. Jayn¨¦," Ex said. "Put down the guns."

Midian lifted a hand and waved Ex's words away. He shifted his chair to face us, two shotgun barrels pointing at his head. The ruined man sighed.

"It was the Bastille Day crack, wasn't it?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said.

"I was kind of hoping you wouldn't remember that," he said, and wheezed out a laugh. "I always talk before I think. It's a vice."

"What the fuck is going on?" Ex demanded, his face flushing red. Midian gestured toward me and Aubrey with his cigarette, the smoke leaving a trail behind it.

"The kids here just figured out I'm a vampire," he said.

"BUT I'VE seen you in daylight," I said.

"That's nosferatu," Midian said. "I'm vârkolak. Don't let it bug you. Taxonomy's always a bitch."

We'd moved into the living room, each of us keeping Midian covered as we'd left the backyard behind. Midian sat in the overstuffed chair, a cigarette still between his thin, fleshless fingers. Ex and Chogyi Jake had grabbed guns too, but Midian's casual air-legs crossed, black-toothed smile more amusement than chagrin-made me feel like we were being silly somehow. After all, he'd been with us for days. He'd been cooking our food, taking his turn at guard duty. If he'd wanted to kill us, we'd all be dead by now.

"I don't believe it," Ex said. His face was blank as a mask, but I could guess at the rage behind it. "Eric fought against riders, not next to them."

"Eric did whatever he needed to do," Midian said. "If he needed to get his hands dirty along the way, he wasn't the guy to hesitate."

"What else were you lying about?" I asked.

Midian looked at me with disappointment in his eyes. It was like seeing a teacher's reaction when a student asked a particularly stupid question. The ruined man sighed.

"Well," he said, "first off, I sort of let you think Eric was doing me a favor with this whole Invisible College thing. Not quite true. Eric came to me."

"Why would he think you'd fight against one of your own kind?" Ex asked.

"Jesus Christ, padre," Midian said. "My own kind. Shit. Would you say that to a black guy? Or a Jew? I'm a rider, Coin's a rider, that doesn't make us buddies. Look around the room here. You've got the girl here who can't figure out if she's a kick-ass superhero or a college dropout loser. The biologist guy who can't stop feeling guilty for getting in her pants. Which, I'll point out, was not exactly just his idea, but they don't remember that. Tofu boy over there, who's showing his dedication to nonviolence by helping to shoot Coin in the head, but it's okay because he's not the one pulling the trigger and anyway Coin's not human. Shakyamuni'd be real proud of him for that doublethink. And you caught between a bunch of promises you've made to some great big Nobodaddy in the sky, a lifelong apology for fucking up when you were a kid, and a perfectly natural jealousy-"

"Drop it," Ex said. "You can't split us apart."

"That's the point, dumbfuck. You are split apart," Midian said, sitting forward. His contempt ignored the shotgun Ex pointed at his chest. "You've got four people here, and six different sides. It's no different Next Door. The loupine fight the ifrit, who ally with the zombii, unless they're at war with them. The orisha undermine everything the noppera-b¨­ try to do. The Graveyard Child works against Father Ba'al, and they both hate the Black Sun. It's a fucking mess over there."

"So Eric was set against the Invisible College and felt he could use you because you hated Coin too," Chogyi Jake said. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."

I shifted my shotgun to rest on my leg. My arms were getting tired.

"Coin fucked me," Midian said philosophically. "That part was always true. I was in Rome back then, and Coin and his buddies were just getting a foothold in the south. They'd been bopping around Finland eating lutefisk and making candles or something. Anyway, I took over this body. It used to belong to a fella named Porfirio de la Vega. Well, it turns out the Invisible College had been going after the poor bastard too, but I got him first. Coin got a hair crosswise over it and broke me. I can't feed. For two hundred years, I can't feed and I can't get out of the body. I just sit in here. But the curse connects us, me, and Coin. So when Eric decided it was time to take the bastard out, he came looking for me."

"I don't believe you," Aubrey said. "Eric would never make an alliance with something like you."

Midian dug in his pocket and extracted a fresh cigarette, lighting it off the butt of the old one. The cherry glowed red, the smoke came off gray. His yellowed eyes were fixed on Aubrey.

"You never heard of the lesser evil?" he asked. "Well, that's me. Didn't you ever wonder why he didn't pull any of you boys into this? It's a dirty operation. Messy. Morally impure. But he thought it needed doing, so he was going to do it. He left you poor fuckers out to protect you from it."

We were silent for a moment. I could see the other three-Aubrey, Ex, Chogyi Jake-weighing the idea. They all seemed to think it was plausible.

"He didn't need to do that," Ex said, but his voice sounded less sure now.

"Yeah, well," Midian said with a shrug. "Take it up with him."

"This changes things," Aubrey said.

"Does it?" Midian asked. "You can't pull Coin out without me as the focus. I mean, maybe if you find someone else he's cursed between now and sunup, but even if you do, so what? It's not going to make any difference."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Look. You get some random Suzie Sunshine who Coin put some ugly mojo on, haul her ass out there, and use her to break him, it's still going to lift my curse. What we're doing isn't just for me. Everyone Coin's acted against gets helped out, whether you like us or not."

"It's just that on balance, that's more good than bad," Ex said.

"Don't trust me on it," Midian said. "Trust Eric."

"I have to think about this," Ex said. "We need to set guard on him."

Midian made an impatient sound, but Aubrey was already shifting position. Chogyi Jake walked into the kitchen and came back with a length of rope. I pressed back against the wall to let him pass. Midian rolled his eyes but held out his wrists like a man waiting for the police to cuff him. As Chogyi Jake bound the thin, frail-looking wrists, Aubrey looked over to me. This time last night, I'd been dancing with my hands around him. It seemed like longer ago.

He nodded to me and then toward the kitchen, where Ex had gone. I hesitated for a moment, then pointed my own shotgun toward the ground and walked away.

The remains of the meal preparation hadn't been cleared away yet. The cutting board was still bloody from the steak, and knives lay in the sink, their edges catching the light. The air was rich with wine and garlic. Ex was sitting at the table, his head in his hands. I leaned the gun against the side of the refrigerator and pulled out the chair across from him. The clock on the wall above him showed we were coming in on midnight.

"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.