Unclean Spirits Part 4

"Right," I said. "I should have thought of that."

I looked into his eyes. The desire I'd felt was still there, and I thought maybe I could also see a little of it in him. But the moment had pa.s.sed. He felt it too, because he sighed.

"I'm going to try to scare up some food," he said. "Then you should sleep, if you can."

"What about you?" I asked.

"I'll be here," he said. "Don't worry."

We ate grilled cheese sandwiches with the crusts cut off and ginger ale from bottles he found in a dusty back cabinet. We didn't talk much, and when we did, it wasn't about anything. When I made my way back to the bedroom, he didn't follow me.

I expected to fall asleep quickly, but as tired as I was, I couldn't wind down. Instead, I punched the pillows into new shapes. I shifted to my back or my belly or my side. I got up and did sit-ups to tire myself out. I looked out the windows. I wondered what my parents would think.

The thought alone evoked my father's glowering disapproval and my mother's rabbitlike fear. Uncle Eric had been rich beyond any of our dreams. He'd spent his days fighting against spirits that invade the world and possess human bodies. No wonder Dad freaked out. Anything that didn't fit into his neatly packaged worldview was evil by definition. Mom would have just made some tea and ignored the idea that anything was happening anywhere. It wasn't really something I'd been thinking of majoring in either, for that matter. The question was, now that it had all fallen into my lap, what was I going to do about it?

Just after midnight, I gave up, put on my same blue jeans and liberated another one of Eric's white b.u.t.ton-down shirts. The living room was silent, the flickering blue of the television the only light. Aubrey lay on the couch, his arm tucked under his head, his eyes closed. I stood there for a few seconds, watching him breathe, then went back and got a blanket to put over him. The television was on a news station and muted. I turned it off.

The sane thing would have been to get a boatload of money, sell all the properties just in case there were two-hundred-year-old curse victims hanging out in them, and begin again someplace new. Start from scratch and forget the last twelve hours, like they'd never happened.

I wondered if they would let me. The Invisible College. I remembered the blue-eyed woman. I saw her die again, and if my heart sped up and my throat closed down, it wasn't as bad as it had been before. She'd been dead before she walked in. She'd been possessed by something from outside the real world and sent to finish the job they'd started when they killed my uncle. She was a victim, not of me but of Randolph Coin. Or whatever evil spirit had taken over Coin's body.

I wanted to believe it, and I halfway did. But only halfway. Faith and I had always had a difficult relationship, and we were talking about killing people-killing more people-based on nothing but faith. Sitting in the dark at the kitchen table listening to the air conditioner hum, my mind kept circling back to prod at things.

Was it more likely that spirits from outside reality snuck in and took people over, or that people went nuts sometimes? Or got involved with cults? Was it more likely that I had magic superpowers I'd never known about, or that I'd had a h.e.l.lish adrenaline rush and the people I was fighting weren't actually all that competent? Was it more likely that Midian was two-hundred-plus years old, or that he was a disfigured guy in his fifties with a lousy set of coping skills? Aubrey seemed kind and sane and good, but I'd known a lot of men who seemed just the same and believed in things that I didn't. G.o.d, for instance.

I looked at the window, and the darkness had made it a mirror. Here was a woman on the trailing edge of twenty-two with no friends left. No family left. A s.h.i.tload of money from nowhere, and the man who'd given it to her-who, judging from the way he'd put her name on everything, had always meant for her to have it-had been murdered.

I looked the same. Same dark eyes. Same black hair. Same mole I'd always told myself I'd have taken off as soon as I had the tattoo removal done. But I wasn't the same. And if everyone I'd met that day-Midian, Aubrey, Jake, Ex-was insane or deluded, I wasn't sure it changed anything. Uncle Eric was dead. Someone had killed him. And I was going to find out who. Randolph Coin was the best lead I had. So that was the lead I'd follow.

A sound caught my attention. The click of metal against metal in a slow, almost meditative rhythm. It was me. Without even noticing, I'd taken the key ring out of my pocket and was tapping it against my thigh. The key to the doomed apartment, and two others. Storage facilities. I lifted the keys, running my fingers over their teeth.

"Yes, little tomato," I said to the key ring. "I'll check you out too."

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 ap.r.o.n. 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 f.u.c.ked 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 embarra.s.sment was showing, and it only made me more embarra.s.sed. "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 f.u.c.king 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 b.u.t.ter, 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 h.e.l.ler 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 cla.s.sic 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 pa.s.ses 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 p.o.o.p, aren't we?"

"Well, yeah," he said. I weighed whether to change the subject back to mystical a.s.sa.s.sins and my recent slaughter thereof, and reluctantly decided to stay with the p.o.o.p-eating mice. We paused at a red light. Two homeless men pa.s.sed 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 p.r.o.ne to violence."

"And women?"

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

"s.e.x," he said. "It makes women more affectionate and p.r.o.ne to...ah..."

"Get p.r.o.ne?" 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 s.e.x. 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 pa.s.sed.

"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 G.o.d 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 s.p.a.ce 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 alt.i.tude 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.