Unclean Spirits

Eleven

Her name was Kimberly. She had her PhD from UC Berkeley, several papers listed in the indexes of things like Clinical Microbiology and The Journal of Parasitology. From what I could tell, she was presently on staff with a research project out of Grace Memorial Hospital in Chicago. And she had cowritten at least two papers with Aubrey. One was called “Patterns in Parasitic Modification of Host Behavior,” and the whole thing was posted on a newsgroup, ripped off from a magazine called Nature. The other one I found was “Cystic Extent as Behavioral Metric in T. gondii Infection.”

In the pictures of her that I found online, she had shoulder-length auburn hair and surprisingly blue eyes. When she smiled, she looked a little like Nicole Kidman. I found a website with pictures of a rafting trip that she and Aubrey both went on a few years before. There were four other couples, but I kept staring at Aubrey, who was laughing, his arms around his wife. In the photograph, his wedding ring seemed to glow.

She was beautiful. She was well educated. She was married to the man I’d just fucked. I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. I sat in the darkness, the robe catching on my stitches when I breathed. The right thing to do was wake him up and ask him. Talk to him. Let him explain.

Instead, I pulled up Thunderbird and went through his e-mail. A quick search of his inbox listed a dozen messages from her in the last weeks. I read the last four, hoping they were talking about divorce. They weren’t. The best thing I could say was they weren’t love letters. The tone between them was intimate and friendly, talking about old friends and shared sources. The last one was from only two days ago. It was a short note saying that she was sorry to hear about Eric’s death, and telling him to be careful. When I pulled up a copy of his previous year’s tax returns, it listed his status as married.

I left the laptop on the couch. I managed to get all of my clothes up off his floor without waking him. I dressed in the bathroom with shaking hands. I thought I might cry or throw up, but I just pulled on my underwear and my skirt. The scoop top was badly wrinkled, but I wasn’t going back in to steal one of Aubrey’s shirts. If I looked like I was on the walk of shame, that was pretty much dead accurate. I pulled the top on, put my feet in my low, comfortable heels, and grabbed my purse on the way out.

The university district came to life slowly as the black night sky paled to blue. I found a coffee shop, where I ordered a cappuccino with two extra shots and a lousy pastry that I looked at more than actually ate. The fatigue of a sleepless night had started to wear on me. My side ached, my ribs ached, my knee was swelling again where the haugtrold had wrenched it. I’d been dancing on it. How stupid was that? I’d been hurt, almost killed, and I’d numbed the wounds with martinis and techno-pop in an all-out effort to get myself seduced by Aubrey, the married guy. Nice going, Jayné.

I wanted the coffee to be as bad as the pastry. I wanted bitter, tasteless blackness and half-soured cream, but it was actually pretty good. The barista was maybe a year younger than me, with a pierced tongue and nose. She put on a Ray Charles CD, raised her eyebrows at me to ask if I needed anything, and left me alone when I shook my head. I cupped the cappuccino in my hands and let the music and the dawn change the moment for me.

Okay, I felt stupid. Okay, I’d been humiliated. It wasn’t the first time. It probably wouldn’t be the last. I’d let myself fall for a guy who had lied to me, or at least omitted a great big honking truth that pretty much anyone would have seen as worthy of mention. I wondered whether I would have done anything different if I’d known he was married. I was fairly certain I would have.

On the upside, I still had the money and property Eric had left me. Midian and Ex and Chogyi Jake were all probably at my house right now, working on the plan to avenge Eric and break the Invisible College. I’d helped save Candace and Aaron from a rider. I just had to stop the bullshit, decide what was actually important to me, and take care of business. Going to bed with Aubrey had been a mistake. Mistakes happen. It was time to move on.

I thought back to my post-shopping breakdown with Chogyi Jake. It was possible that I was a little more vulnerable and raw than I wanted to admit. Going for Aubrey—going for anyone—was a normal kind of screwup to make. Lonely little girl reaches out to the first kind face that wanders by. Pathetic? Okay, I could accept that. I just wouldn’t let it happen again.

I wondered if Ex and Chogyi Jake knew about Kimberly. Ex, maybe. It would explain why he’d seemed so pissed off at the two of us going out. I thought Chogyi Jake would have warned me. Maybe. Or maybe not. They were quick enough to hide the bodies of the people I’d helped kill, but maybe that didn’t really put them on my side.

Whatever my side was.

“Fuck you, Aubrey,” I said to myself. “I needed a stand-up guy, and I got you instead. How fair is that?”

People came in and out of the coffee shop, mostly students, I guessed. The barista worked her machine in bursts of steam and the gurgling of espresso. Ray Charles calling his friend to go get stoned segued to a cover of “Yesterday” that pointed out how clean and soulless Paul McCartney really sounded. It was nice sharing a little morning pain with Ray, if only because he put me in perspective. I finished my coffee, left the pastry half eaten, and headed out to the street. It took a while to find a taxi, but I managed, and twenty minutes later I was home.

“Sweet fucking Jesus,” Midian said as soon as I walked in. “I figured you for dead.”

“Not dead,” I said, and tossed my purse on the couch. “Where is everyone?”

“Out looking for you,” Midian said. “Aubrey came by a couple hours ago looking like someone stole his dick and said you’d gone missing.”

“Well, you can tell him I’m back,” I said. “I need to get into some clean clothes.”

“Not such a good date, eh?” Midian asked. It was hard to tell with his ruin of a voice, but I thought he was a little amused. I didn’t answer.

I’d changed into jeans and one of Eric’s white button-down shirts when I heard Aubrey and Ex arrive. Their voices were harsh, like they’d been fighting. I stretched, summoned up my righteous anger, and headed out to take the bull by the horns.

Ex was livid. He wheeled on me as soon as I appeared in the living room.

“What exactly was that little stunt supposed to—”

“Jayné,” Aubrey said at the same time, “we need to talk about—”

I put my palm out toward Ex, shutting him down, and turned to Aubrey.

“We need to talk?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Please, I understand what happened, and I know what it seems like, but—”

“Are you and Kimberly divorced?” I asked.

Aubrey blushed and looked down at his feet. Ex’s jaw actually dropped. I’d always thought that was just a figure of speech. Apparently he hadn’t known.

“Aubrey?” I said.

“We’re separated,” he said.

“Not divorced,” I said.

“No.”

“So then still married.”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t tell me,” I said.

“No,” Aubrey said. “I should have.”

“Okay,” I said. “We’ve talked.”

I brushed past Ex and into the kitchen. It was probably only my own embarrassment and humiliation that made me read Ex’s expression as delight. When he and Aubrey followed me in a moment later, they were both perfectly sober. Midian was sitting at the kitchen table, the telephone handset to his ear.

“Jake,” he said, pointing at it. “He put me on hold. It’s okay, though. You two were loud enough back there I followed everything.”

“Good,” I said. “It’s Friday morning, almost ten o’clock. This time tomorrow, Randolph Coin’s going to be dead. Let’s try to focus on that, okay?”

“Fine by me,” Midian said, and then, into the handset, “Yeah. She’s back. Everything’s fine, or, well…fuck it, it’s close enough. Get your ass back to the ranch here, and we’ll finish up. Yeah, what?”

He paused, frowned, and shook his head.

“No. If they don’t have yellow onions, I’ll think of something else. Just bring me the rest of it,” he said, and then put the handset back in its cradle. “Since he was out anyway, I asked him to pick up some stuff. Didn’t figure we’d be going out for dinner.”

“Yeah, probably not,” I said. “Let’s go over the plan again.”

No one suggested anything else. I took out the maps and schematics, and Ex walked through the whole thing again, quizzing the three of us. Aubrey answered his questions in a clipped, hard voice and sat with his arms crossed. When Chogyi Jake appeared with a bag of groceries, Ex made him go through the whole thing by himself while Midian made ham sandwiches with fresh tomatoes and hot mustard for lunch. My brain was a storm of anger, betrayal, and humiliation, but I forced myself to follow the details of the plan. Midian and Chogyi Jake at the southeast edge of the property. Ex in his car to the north, me in among the railroad tracks to the west, and Aubrey in his minivan to the south. Three different angles, so that no matter where Coin stood, at least one of us would have a clear shot. When Chogyi Jake and Midian had drawn Coin out past his protections, Midian would give the signal by raising both hands. If for any reason he couldn’t do that, Chogyi Jake would drop to the ground. The plan to go out and look at the place physically seemed to have fallen by the wayside in the day’s drama. I didn’t bring it up.

The air between me and Aubrey should have bent with the tension, but Chogyi Jake either didn’t notice anything or, more likely, dedicated himself to ignoring it. Anything that Ex felt was covered by his drill sergeant attitude.

I felt my mind starting to get fuzzy at about one o’clock. I’d been up since eight in the morning the day before, too excited by the twin prospects of going shooting and my ill-fated date to sleep in. That put me at about twenty-nine hours awake.

“I’m going to crash for a while,” I said. “Knock if something happens.”

The silence that accompanied me out of the kitchen told me that the house would have to be on fire before anyone disturbed me. That suited me just fine.

I stripped and crawled into bed, one pillow under my head, one over it to block out light and sound. My muscles seemed to vibrate with fatigue. This time tomorrow, it’ll all be over, I told myself. I’ll be safe and rich and God as my witness, I’ll be straight the fuck out of this city. I could go back to ASU. Paying tuition out of pocket would be easy. I could get my degree. I could transfer to some other university. Hell, I could probably buy my way into the Ivy League with a few weighty donations here and there.

It was a strange thought. In a way, everything was ending tomorrow. The shot that took out Coin and broke the Invisible College also freed me. No more tattooed ninja hit squads breaking down my doors. No more need for bodyguards like Ex and Chogyi Jake. Or Aubrey.

I imagined myself going back. Driving up to the dorms in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce, maybe. I pictured Cary’s reaction, seeing me rising like a phoenix from the ashes and salted earth I’d left behind me. I slid from that to going home, paying off the mortgage on my parents’ house, buying my mother a car, telling my father that I wouldn’t go to church on Sunday if I didn’t want to, and watching him realize that his power over me was gone. Even his power to drive me away. Somewhere in it, I had become the primary funding behind the hospital in Chicago, dressed in a good Armani suit with Nicole Kidman-esque Kimberly asking my permission to go ahead with her work. I didn’t notice the shift between daydream and dream until I found myself in the nightmare of wings and Coin’s massive eye and woke with a shout.

The door thumped, someone throwing a shoulder against it. Someone was calling my name. Ex, I thought, the last shreds of dream fading. Ex was screaming my name. But at least he was pronouncing it right.

“I’m okay!” I shouted back. “Leave the door alone. I’m fine.”

“What the fuck is going on in there?”

“Bad dream,” I said. “I’m fine. I’ll be out in a minute. Just calm down.”

I’d been asleep almost four hours. I hauled myself up out of bed, vague and hungover. My skin felt sticky with rank sweat. My period had started a week early. I needed a shower.

“You’re all right?” Ex’s voice sounded like he was expecting me to lie. “Was it Coin again?”

“I don’t know. Maybe,” I said, the details of the dream already out of reach. “I’m fine. I’m just still waking up. I’ll be out.”

Ex’s silence seemed untrusting, but I ignored it and pulled myself into the bathroom. If he broke the door down to rescue me from a bad dream, I’d throw him out of my house. I was deeply weary of dealing with male bullshit. I felt tired and sluggish. Happily, I had my old leather backpack in the bedroom with me. Going out to hunt for tampons wasn’t something I particularly wanted to deal with at the moment.

The water helped. I washed my hair three times just for the pleasure of feeling the warmth running down my back. I prodded the wound in my side. It itched and felt odd when I tugged at the stitches, but it didn’t particularly hurt. The bruises on my knee and back were also starting to heal, going from storm-cloud blue to a deep green with yellow and brown at the margins. I got a glimpse of the tattoo, a remnant of my sixteenth birthday’s drunken binge, on the small of my back. In the mirror, it looked like oriental script, though I’d been assured by several people back at ASU that it wasn’t. I felt a sudden nostalgia for the days when keeping my parents from knowing I had a tattoo was the biggest risk I had to deal with.

I put on my own T-shirt, my old jeans, and pulled my hair back into a ponytail. I considered myself in the mirror, then without thinking, my hand reached out for the eyeliner. I didn’t give a damn what any of them thought, but looking decent made me feel better. When I came down the hall, the smell of steak, wine, and grilled onions greeted me like a friend. The windows were ruddy with the warm light of sunset. I had a momentary image, the memory of a dream I’d almost forgotten. A black disk like a sun that radiated like light, but different.

“Jayné.”

Ex was sitting alone on the couch. His blond hair was unbound and flowing over his shoulders. His expression was grim.

“Ex,” I said, folding my arms.

“I need you to make peace with Aubrey,” he said softly.

“I really don’t see how that’s any of your business,” I said.

He held up a hand, and his expression made it a request for silence instead of a command. I nodded my permission for him to go on. He stood up, his hands clasped in front of him in a way that made me think of prayer. He was taller than I was under normal circumstances, and I hadn’t put on shoes. I felt like a kid at the principal’s office.

“We’re going into something tomorrow that is already profoundly difficult,” he said. “We’ve gone over everything often enough that I know it starts to seem easy or certain. That’s why I keep going over it. But the truth is we’re taking a huge risk. We can’t be divided or distracted.”

“We can’t?” I said. I had been through about as much condescension as I was in the mood for, and Ex saw that.

“I’m not asking you to do this for him or yourself. I’m asking for me,” he said. “If something goes wrong, if someone gets hurt or killed, and it’s because I didn’t say the right thing or do what I needed to, then it’s going to be my fault. Right now, I’m afraid that you and Aubrey are going to be distracted. And I don’t want to see either of you hurt again.”

“Not on your watch,” I said. I’d meant to say it with contempt, but it didn’t come out that way. I felt myself soften a little. “So you want me to just blow it off?”

“Not especially, no,” Ex said. “But I want you two at peace with each other.”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. We looked at each other in the warm light of evening. He was a hard-faced man, and he didn’t look away from me.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“They’re all out back. The kitchen’s too hot to eat in. And I wanted to talk to you first, so I sent them out.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do the olive branch thing. But I’m not looking to forgive and forget.”

“And I’m damned glad of that too,” Ex said with a rare smile. It crossed my mind briefly that I should ask what he meant by the comment. But he was already walking toward the backyard, and with everything that changed in the course of the evening, by the time we spoke again I’d forgotten what he’d said.