Unclean Spirits

Fourteen

I sat on a low plastic chair. Aubrey's hand lay limp in mine. The sounds of the emergency room made a kind of white noise around us. Someone was coughing. A nurse was asking someone where a chart had gone. Somewhere not too far away, a child was screaming. It might as well have been silence.

Aubrey was on the bed in a cheap hospital gown, his clothes cut away. The monitor showed his heartbeat at a slow fifty beats per minute, solid and unvarying. He had enough oxygen in his blood. He wasn't dying.

He just wasn't here.

The curtain rattled and slid aside. A man in a white lab coat with a stethoscope around his neck stepped in. He was bald, wide, and he looked almost as tired as I felt.

"You're Jayn¨¦?" he asked, pronouncing it Janey. I didn't correct him.

"Yes," I said.

"And you're his fianc¨¦e?"

"Yes," I said, repeating the lie.

"Okay," the doctor said. "Could you tell me what happened?"

I went over the story. We'd been going out shooting. Aubrey had said he felt a little weak, so we'd pulled over. When he stopped talking to me, I'd brought him here. It was simple, easy to remember, and as close to the truth as I was going to get. The doctor asked me a few questions about Aubrey's medical history, whether he was on any medications, if there was anything he was allergic to. I didn't know anything. I started crying while the doctor went through all the same preliminary tests that the nurse had. He explained that they were going to take Aubrey away to do some imaging. Aubrey's heart stayed at fifty beats per minute.

I'd given up hope that they'd find anything.

I let a nurse direct me to the hospital cafeteria, where I sat looking at a cup of coffee. My knee throbbed. My stitches complained where I'd pulled at the wound sometime during my flight from the warehouse. My shoulder hurt too.

"Hey. You've got a call."

It was the fourth time my phone had rung since I'd pulled into the ambulance-only zone and screamed until a couple of paramedics helped me pull Aubrey out. As far as I knew, the minivan was still parked out there. Illegally. I tried to care.

"Hey," Eric said. "You've got a call."

I pulled the cell phone out and answered more to keep from hearing his voice again than because I wanted to talk to anyone.

"Hello?"

"Where are you?" Ex said.

"Hospital. Aubrey's in a coma or something. I don't know. He's...I don't know."

"You have to get back to the house. You have to get someplace warded."

"Okay," I said. "They took him off to get a CAT scan or an MRI or something, and as soon as-"

"Jayn¨¦!" he shouted. "You have to come here right now. You're in danger."

"Yeah," I said. "All right."

I dropped the call and made my way back to the emergency room. It turned out someone had moved the minivan to a parking space not far away, left it unlocked, and put the keys in the visor. I didn't know who'd done it, but I figured this wasn't the first time someone had blocked up the entrance. I was vaguely grateful that they hadn't just towed it away.

I pulled out, found my way onto Speer heading northeast, and tuned the radio to a country station before I realized that I had forgotten my coffee at the cafeteria and also that I didn't know how to get home from here. I just tried to keep my mind on driving until I reached Colfax, turned left, and passed the University of Colorado on my right. Then I knew more or less where I was. I did a U-turn at Eighth Street and headed home.

It was a little past noon now, the temperature rising up into the nineties. The air smelled like gasoline and tar. The traffic was thick but not slow, and it seemed to take all my attention just to keep up with it. My body seemed to know better than I did what needed to be done. I let reflex take over, and I was a little surprised under half an hour later to find myself pulling up to the brick house. Eric's house. My house. The windowless van was on the street, the black sports car in the carport. The lawn looked thirsty. I wondered when I was supposed to have watered it.

I walked in the front door and dropped my keys on the side table. Ex came out from the kitchen, a shotgun held at half ready, like he didn't know whether to expect a friend or an assault team. Which was probably reasonable. We stared at each other for a long moment. He seemed tired. His white-blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail tied with a strip of leather. His black shirt was torn at the cuffs. He looked angry, but not with me.

He looked haunted.

It happened on his watch, I thought to myself. He did his best, and this is what came of it. Poor little tomato.

I took his hand without realizing I was going to. He looked surprised for a second, then squeezed my hand gently. He started to say something, stopped, and looked down.

It's all right, I wanted to say. Except that it wasn't.

"How is he?" Ex asked.

"Stable," I said. "Just not in there."

"It's the fucking Voice of the Abyss," Midian rasped from behind Ex. "If he hadn't done that bullshit with the dog, he'd have held it together. You know. Maybe."

Midian sat at the table. His shirt was off, and a bandage wrapped his wasted belly. Blood dark as India ink was soaking through.

"I thought Coin was supposed to be vulnerable," I said.

"He was," Midian said with a grimace. "Fucker was barely able to ignore everything we threw at him and cripple us before he went back inside."

"Is that supposed to be funny?" I asked.

"What do you want to hear, kid?" Midian said. The gravel and whiskey voice seemed almost compassionate. "We took our shot. It didn't work out."

"Where's Chogyi Jake?" I asked, a sudden stab of panic hitting me.

"Meditating," Ex said. "He's okay. I think he's okay."

"So what the fuck happened?"

"We made some assumptions," Ex said.

"And?"

"And it turned out Coin was a little more paranoid than we thought. He was protected. Personally protected, not just by the wards they had on-site," Ex said. "From what we can tell, he was ready for exactly the forms we were using. He suckered us."

"Meaning someone ratted us out," Midian said. "My guess? Eric may have spilled a couple of beans on his way down."

"And now their initiation rite's done, so they aren't tied up with that anymore. Coin has a couple hundred of his people free to act against us. And he's not locked to any particular location, so we don't know where he is," Ex said. He sounded tired. "We knew it was a risk."

My shock was starting to wear thin, numbness giving way to something less gentle.

"Actually," I said, "I'm pretty sure 'Oh, and we might all die' wasn't part of the discussion when I was in the room. I thought you guys knew what you were doing."

"Well," Midian said, his voice sharp and grating, "maybe you should have spent a little more time planning and a little less playing at the mall and getting your ashes hauled."

"Stop it," Ex snapped, but it was too late by then. Midian was rising to his feet, one bone-thin hand pointing toward me. His lips drew back from the blackened teeth, and his voice buzzed with anger and physical pain.

"Look, kid, I don't care if you want to candy-ass your way through life. You've got the cash. Do what you want. You want to take over Eric's plans and then let everyone else do the work because they're older than you are and they've got cocks? Fine with me. No trouble. But I've got a half a liter of crap leaking out of me right now that should have stayed inside, and I'm not in the mood to hear you bitch that the plan you couldn't be bothered to make for yourself didn't work out."

"I said stop it," Ex said, stepping between me and Midian's accusing fingers.

"I don't need that shit," I yelled. "I just got back from the hospital. Aubrey could have died because of this. He might be dying right now. You don't know."

"I knew Eric Heller, kid. I worked with him. He was hard-fucking-core," Midian went on. "You lost a man. That's normal. Wouldn't even have slowed Eric down, but you're about as hard as fucking marshmallow, aren't you? You want my advice? Get your sad ass out of here. Go hang out at Cabo or whatever you people do. Coin'll track you down. He'll kill you. But at least you won't be in my fucking way."

The sound of Ex chambering a shotgun round silenced us both. He had the barrel leveled at Midian's face. The vampire seemed to notice the gun for the first time, yellow eyes going wide, then narrow.

"I'm going to ask you to sit down," Ex said. "I'm not going to ask twice."

Midian sank back into his chair, sneering but silent. Ex followed his descent with the gun. I leaned against the counter, arms crossed like I was hugging myself. I hated the tears tracking down my cheeks. They felt like traitors. Ex didn't look back. It was only the shift in his shoulders and the gentle tone of voice that showed he was talking to me.

"There wasn't anything you could have done differently."

"She could have pulled the trigger," Midian said. "Or didn't you notice that you and the smiling professor were the only ones who actually fired a round?"

In the silence that followed, I watched Ex's back go stiff, the angle of his head move half a degree as he considered this. I wondered if Midian was right. If I'd fired, maybe it would have overwhelmed Coin's defenses. I closed my eyes, and I could feel the metal curve of the trigger against my protesting finger.

"Resisting the urge toward violence isn't a bad thing," Chogyi Jake said. I opened my eyes. He'd changed from the blue robe into a simple white T-shirt and blue jeans. His skin had an ashen tone that worried me, but his smile was the same as ever. "The question remains, what are we going to do now?"

"I think we're still safe if we stay inside the house," Ex said, not lowering the gun. "Eric's wards kept them away from here when they were searching before the ceremony."

"The Invisible College is stronger now. How long do you think the wards will hold?" Chogyi Jake asked, leaning on the counter beside me. I could feel the warmth coming from his skin, and the smell of fresh soap.

"We can prop them up. But no, not long," Ex admitted. "We have to go to ground. Stay where the Invisible College can't find us until things blow over. I've been thinking about it. It makes the most sense to split up. Jayn¨¦'s got the resources to get out of the country, and Eric's sure to have some other places as protected as this one. It's just a question of finding which one."

"And you?" Chogyi asked.

"I've got some ideas," Ex said.

"And Aubrey?" I asked. My voice was shaking a little, but I wouldn't let that stop me. "Aubrey isn't going anywhere the way he is now. Even if we got the hospital to discharge him."

"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.

"Jayn¨¦," 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.