Unclean Spirits

Five

I was asleep when the others arrived. I woke up to the sound of voices and the smell of fresh coffee. I pulled myself together: quick shower, fresh clothes, and out to the kitchen. Midian, his ruined face seeming oddly comforting only because it was familiar, stood at the stove wearing a buff-colored apron. Ex and Aubrey were sitting at the table where the lawyer and I had been just the day before. Chogyi Jake smiled at me in greeting while he poured coffee into a black mug.

It was like walking into someone else's home. The four of them all seemed perfectly at ease. It was like they all belonged there and I was the intruder, awkward and out of place. I hadn't bothered with shoes. The kitchen tile was cool against my soles, and the coffee almost too hot to drink.

"I was wondering if you were going to get up," Midian said. "You aren't Jewish or Muslim or anything fucked up like that, are you?"

"Excuse me?" I said.

In answer, he held up a package of bacon, his desiccated face taking on a querying expression.

"Yes, I'd love some bacon," I said. "Thanks."

"We were just going over strategy," Aubrey said. "How to proceed from here."

"The...um..." I said, gesturing vaguely with the coffee.

"No one's finding those bodies," Midian said, slapping several slices of bacon onto a hot skillet. He raised his voice over the sudden violent sizzling. "Say what you will about these boys' moral systems, they're effective when it comes to hiding evidence."

Ex shot an angry look at Midian. Chogyi Jake seemed more amused. I had the sense from Aubrey that the morning had been going pretty much along these lines. I hopped up on the counter. It was the sort of thing that would have made my father crazy, and even in these surreal circumstances, I felt a little rebellious doing it. None of the men present had any objection.

"Well, I have some things I need to do," I said. "I have to take Eric's death certificate to a couple banks and fill out signature cards and things, unless you guys plan to buy all my food and stuff."

"Everything does go better with money," Midian said, nodding his approval in my general direction. "Eggs with that?"

"Sure," I said.

He moved the still-frying bacon to one side of the skillet and cracked two eggs into the grease in the cleared space while Ex shook his head and said, "I don't like it. We're under siege here. We need to take precautions."

"Not siege," Chogyi Jake said. "Attack, yes, but to say siege presupposes that our movements are limited."

"And it's not really you," I said. I hadn't thought about the words, they just came out. Four pairs of eyes turned to me. I shrugged. "They came after me. Well, me and Midian. I pulled Aubrey into it, and he pulled you guys."

"She's right," Ex said. "Coin doesn't have a lock on the three of us. If there's legwork to be done, it should be-"

Midian coughed out his derision.

"Don't be a schmuck, Ex. The girl's cutting you loose. Over easy all right? I can do over medium if you really want, but I'm not feeding you a hard yolk."

"It's fine," I said, trying not to look at Ex or Aubrey. I was sure my embarrassment was showing, and it only made me more embarrassed. "And I'm not...I don't see how I'm in a position to cut anyone loose or keep anyone on, for that matter. But I am a big girl. All grown up. I don't want any of you in trouble over me."

Somehow saying it out loud lent me the confidence to meet Aubrey's eyes. He looked sympathetic but also resolute.

"Eric was a friend of ours," Aubrey said. "Of all of ours. This isn't just your fight."

"We know the risks," Chogyi Jake said.

"Better than you do," Ex finished.

"Three fucking musketeers. That makes you d'Artagnan," Midian said, handing me a plate. The eggs were touched with rosemary, two strips of crisped bacon at the side, a slice of golden-brown toast with an almost subliminal layer of butter, and a sprig of parsley to set the whole thing off.

"Thank you," I said. I actually meant about the food, but Ex was the one who replied.

"Not needed," he said. It was the kindest tone he'd taken all morning. "This is what we do."

The conversation barreled ahead as I ate. By the time I used the last crust of the toast to sop up the last golden trail of egg, Aubrey had a game plan in place. He would take me to run my errands-bank and Eric's storage facilities both-while Ex went back to the apartment on Inca to make sure everything that needed cleaning was cleaned and also to retrieve the books and whiteboard I'd seen when I was there. Chogyi Jake and Midian were going to stay at the house and go over Eric's wards and protections, including digging up any information that would explain why I'd suddenly gotten good at fighting and hadn't set off Midian's alarms. We would reconvene that evening with any new information in hand and decide what we were going to do.

Going out to Aubrey's minivan, I saw the van Chogyi Jake had talked about last night, its paint a faded noncolor and windowless in a way that would have made me nervous if I was walking alone. A black, almost chitinous sports car was parked beside it.

"Ex?" I asked, nodding at the sports car.

"Ex," Aubrey agreed. "You've got the directions to your banks?"

I held up three MapQuest printouts.

"And the storage joints besides," I said as he pulled out. The air conditioner hummed, cranking out a cool breeze to fight the August heat. I watched the house in the side mirror as we drove away. It could have been anyone's. There was nothing about it that gave any hint that Eric Heller had been anything particularly special. We turned at the intersection of a bigger, busier street, and the house vanished.

"I've got one thing I need to do when we're done," Aubrey said. "It's just a quick stop to pick up some things."

"Your place?"

"My work, actually," he said.

"Oh," I said, then laughed. "You know, I never really thought of you as having a job. What do you do when you aren't fighting the forces of darkness?"

"I'm a research biologist," he said. "I've got a grant from the NIH, and I'm based at the University of Denver. It's how I met Eric."

"Seriously? And you're studying what? The biomechanics of ghosts?"

He laughed. I liked the way he laughed. I had the sudden physical memory of leaning in last night, almost kissing him. It was disorienting.

"Parasitology," he said. "Did you say Seventeenth Street?"

"And Stout, yeah. So you work with...what, stomach worms?"

"My dissertation was on behavior modification of mammals by single-cell parasites. Eric read it and tracked me down. Have you ever heard of Toxoplasma gondii?"

"I was an English major, when I was anything," I said. "If Shakespeare wrote a sonnet about it, I might have run into it. Otherwise, no."

"It's a really cool organism," he said. "Pretty much the classic example of parasitic mind control."

"Parasitic mind control?" I said. My flesh crawled a little.

"In mammals at least. There are some pretty great ones for insects and mollusks too, but if you want to play with hosts that have spinal cords, T. gondii is the best game in town."

Aubrey's eyes were bright, and he leaned forward over the steering wheel as he spoke. Enthusiasm made him seem younger than he was. I kind of wished he was getting jazzed about something with a lower ick factor, but as he went on, the urge to wash my hands lessened a little and I found myself getting interested.

"It usually lives in a cat's intestinal tract," he said. "We call the cat the final host. It's where the organism really wants to be."

"So what does it do to the cat's mind?" I asked.

"Nothing. Zip. Nada. But there's a middle part. In order to get from one cat to another, it passes through mice. So the first step is to go from the inside of a cat to the inside of a mouse."

"And you do that by...?" I asked just a heartbeat before I figured it out. I made a face. "We're about to talk about mice eating cat poop, aren't we?"

"Well, yeah," he said. I weighed whether to change the subject back to mystical assassins and my recent slaughter thereof, and reluctantly decided to stay with the poop-eating mice. We paused at a red light. Two homeless men passed beside the car, faces flushed with the heat.

"The thing that's interesting is what happens once it's inside the mouse," Aubrey continued. "Normally, mice avoid anyplace that smells like a cat's living there. Just good sense. But infect a mouse with T. gondii, and it isn't afraid anymore. In fact, it starts liking the smell. The infected mouse starts hanging out where cats are more likely to be. Good for the cat, because it's more likely to get a meal. Good for the parasite. It can get into a fresh host. Lousy for the mouse."

"Okay, that's the creepiest thing ever," I said. "I think I get it, though. That's like riders. The things that are inside Coin? And the ones we killed last night?"

The light turned green. Traffic started moving.

"Some riders can be like that, yeah," Aubrey said. "I don't think the Invisible College ones are quite that flavor. But there are also a lot of riders that will just hang out in the back of someone's mind and...change them. You know?"

"The way your amoeba thing changes mice," I said.

"Actually, the way it changes people. T. gondii infects humans too. People with the cysts in their brain suffer mild disinhibitions. Men become more prone to violence."

"And women?"

Aubrey glanced over at me and then back at the road.

"Sex," he said. "It makes women more affectionate and prone to...ah..."

"Get prone?" I suggested. A green sedan cut in front of us. Aubrey swore, hitting the brakes and his horn at the same time. I took the opportunity to switch subjects.

"So Eric read your paper and tracked you down?"

"Yeah," Aubrey said. He seemed relieved not to be talking about sex. I wasn't sure whether I was or not. "He was working on an idea about riders. See, there are some things about riders that look a lot like biological agents. And then there are things that really just don't. What we were doing was sort of reverse-engineering riders. Figuring out what kinds of constraints are on them from the way they act."

"Hey, that was Stout," I said, pointing back at the street sign we'd just passed.

"It's a one-way. They all are downtown. We'll go down Champa and turn around."

"Okay," I said. "Sorry. You were saying? Reverse engineering something?"

"Yeah, like cicadas. Did you know cicadas have prime-numbered cycles?"

"I did hear about that, yeah," I said. "Something about staying away from things that eat them, right?"

"That's the theory. If the cicadas are trying to avoid a predator with a five-year cycle, they develop a thirteen-year period and only coincide with the predator every sixty-five years."

"Okay," I said. I was getting a little lost, but I didn't want Aubrey to think I was stupid. "So what's the five-year predator?"

"There isn't one," he said. "At least not now. But that the prime numbers show up suggests that there was one, even if it's already gone extinct. So when primes show up in riders, maybe it's because there's something out there that they're avoiding. The Invisible College is actually a good example of that. They have this ceremony every seven years. Why seven?"

"Because it's a prime, and they're avoiding something?" I said.

"Maybe, yeah. Or then again, maybe because there are seven wandering stars," Aubrey said. "Or because God made the world in seven days. Or there are supposed to be seven categories of the soul. It's hard to know what kinds of rules actually apply. Eric wasn't about to let any good hypothesis go untested, though. Here, this is Seventeenth Street. I'm going to grab that space and we can walk from here."

"Sounds good," I said, noticing for no good reason that seventeen was a prime. I got out of the minivan, stepping into the beating sun. I felt a little light-headed, but whether it was the conversation or the altitude or just the spiritual jet lag that my utterly transformed life brought on, I couldn't say. Aubrey came up at my side, his fingertips brushing my arm. I let him lead me across the street.

"Eric thought if we could figure out how riders changed people, we could make a better guess at what they wanted. What their agenda was."

"Midian said they're an infection," I said.

"Midian has some simplistic ideas about infection," Aubrey said.

The bank was down a very short block. As if we'd agreed on it, Aubrey and I dropped the subjects of parasites and spirits when we entered the dry, cool desert of the financial world. The lawyer had given me the name of the woman to ask for when I got to the desk. I expected to be put in one of the little wood-grain cubicle offices that competed for space with the line of tellers, but instead Aubrey and I were escorted to an elevator, and then up to a plush private office where I presented my paperwork, signed theirs, and was given access to the first of Eric's cash accounts. They promised me an ATM card in about a week. Just to see if I could, I withdrew ten thousand dollars in cash. The woman didn't blink.

"Dinner's on me," I said as we walked back out onto the street. Aubrey looked stunned.

"It really is," he said.

There were other banks and more paperwork, but I put them aside. My hands kept finding their way to the keys for the storage units, fidgeting with them. Whatever I was getting into, I now had enough money in my name to do whatever needed doing. Aubrey was oddly quiet as we walked, and I took the chance to pull out the MapQuest printouts and see which of my next stops looked closest. I didn't realize how much the August heat had been pressing on me until Aubrey started up the car and the first blast of the air conditioner hit my skin.

"Okay," I said. "This one's on Eighteenth Street. That should be pretty close, right?"

"What? Oh. Yeah, that's over by the Children's Hospital. We could almost walk to that."

"Let's drive anyway," I said. And then, "Hey, are you all right?"

"I'm fine," Aubrey said. "I just...Eric and I never talked about money. I didn't know that he was in that kind of tax bracket."

"Me either," I said as we pulled out into traffic. "Turns out there was a whole lot I didn't know."

Aubrey smiled, but his brows didn't quite lose their furrow. It was only a few minutes before we pulled into the storage facility. The gate code was written on the key chain. I read it to Aubrey, and he leaned out and punched the buttons. The bar rose, and we headed into the asphalt rat maze that was the storage joint.

I didn't know quite what I'd expected, but this place wasn't it. It was too prosaic. White stucco buildings with green garage doors lined a dozen tight alleyways. A family was loading boxes into the back of a big orange U-Haul truck, a girl maybe eight years old waving to us as we passed.

Aubrey cruised down two alleys, struggling to make the turns before I saw the numbers for Eric's unit. We came to a halt just outside it. I fit the key into the padlock. The click as it came free was soft and deep. The lock was heavier in my hand than I'd expected. I took hold of the rolling door, prepared to lift it up, but I hesitated. Despite the heat, I shivered.

"The people who have the thing," I said. "They don't know it, do they?"

"The people who have what?"

"The T. whatever. The parasite," I said.

"No. I mean, you could test for antibodies and find out, but generally there aren't many symptoms."

"Except that it changes who they are," I said.

Aubrey wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of one hand. A few alleys over, the U-Haul truck started up with a loud rattle. I kept my fingertips on the shaped metal handle of the garage door, hesitating.

"Is something wrong?" he asked.

Yes, I wanted to say. I fought four people with guns to a standstill yesterday. I walked through Midian's magic alarms like they weren't there. I have more money in my backpack right now than I've ever had in my bank account. And what if whatever's in here changes things again? I didn't particularly like who I was last week, but at least I knew who I was.

"No," I said. "It's nothing."

"You're cool?"

"Cucumberesque," I said.

I tightened my grip on the handle and pulled. The garage door shrieked in metallic complaint and rose up. Daylight spilled into a concrete cube behind it, smaller than an actual garage. White cardboard boxes were stacked three deep against the walls, and an industrial-looking set of steel shelves at the back supported a collection of odd objects. A violin case, a duffel bag, two translucent bowling balls, a stuffed bear with a wide pink heart embroidered on its chest.

It looked like a secondhand store, but it felt like a puzzle. I picked up the stuffed bear. The nap of the fake fur was worn, the thread that made its mouth was loose and thin with use. A child had loved this bear once. I wondered who that had been, and what had brought the beloved object here.

"I've got something," Aubrey said.

He was standing beside the stack of boxes, the top one open. Looking over his shoulder, I saw a stack of three-ring binders with words stenciled on the spines: INVISIBLE COLLEGE -1970-1976. INVISIBLE COLLEGE -1977-1981. There were easily a dozen of them. Aubrey lifted one out and opened it.

"What is it?"

"Newspaper clippings. Lists of names and places," he said with a sigh. "I don't know what it all means."

"Let's get it in the car," I said. I suddenly wanted very badly to just leave. "Let's get as much of this out of here as we can and we'll make sense of it later."

He grunted in agreement and hauled the box out toward his car. I grabbed the next box and followed him. It wasn't until we picked the duffel bag up off the shelf that we found the guns.