I sat on the couch, my knees drawn up to my chest, watching and listening. Through the evening, the four men had decoded Eric’s plan, details unfolding like petals falling open.
According to the calendar Eric had left us, the Invisible College was scheduled to begin the rituals that would summon riders and inject them into the new crop of initiates within the next day or two. As the ceremonies continued, the gap between the real world and what Eric called the Pleroma and Aubrey referred to as Next Door would turn permeable. Randolph Coin would be at his most vulnerable just before the final ceremony, scheduled for just after dawn on August 11, one week from today.
So now we had a countdown. Seven days.
In seven days, we were going to kill someone. The thought made my skin crawl. Or we were going to get the rat bastard who’d killed Eric, which felt better. My head kept bouncing between anxiety and wrath, like I was two different people.
“This is all from the one storage unit, right?” Ex asked, walking into the main room. “You didn’t make it to the other one?”
“No room in the car,” Aubrey said.
“We need to get to that other one,” Ex said. “I think it has props for the invocation to draw Coin out. We’ll need to inventory those.”
“I’ve got to…” I said, standing and heading for the back door. “Excuse me.”
I heard the silence behind me as I walked out into the backyard. I could feel their eyes on my back even after I closed the door. The yard was immaculate: the grass green as emeralds and freshly cut, mums in the flower beds threatening to bloom, a cherry tree with a little overripe fruit still on the branches making the air heavy with sweetness and corruption. I sat in the darkness and stared up at the moon. I saw the inked face of the blue-eyed woman.
The door slid open behind me, and then just as quietly shut.
“Hey. Are you all right?”
Aubrey looked uncertain in the dim light. He was wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt with the logo of an old science fiction show, long since off the air. His hair was mussed. It occurred to me that we’d forgotten to stop by his labs at the university.
“I can’t do this,” I said. “We’re talking about murdering someone.”
He came to my side and lowered himself to the ground, legs crossed.
“I thought you understood,” he said. “These aren’t people. Not anymore. They’re-”
“Riders,” I said. “Spiritual parasites that have magic powers and take over people’s bodies. I understand that. I just…”
I closed my eyes and saw Midian fire his Lugar into the back of the woman’s head.
“Jayne?”
“I just don’t believe it,” I said. “I want to. But I don’t.”
“You think we’re lying?” he asked. The idea seemed to surprise him. I didn’t laugh, partly because it wasn’t funny.
“It isn’t about trust. I believe that you think it’s true,” I said. “That’s not the same. I grew up with a father who knew how the world worked. Who knew how God worked, and what was right and what was wrong. And I believed everything he said because he was sure. And then when it turned out that I wasn’t sure…”
I spread my hands.
“Knowing that you all believe it isn’t the same as believing it myself,” I said. “And I can’t do this if it isn’t true. I can go to the police. I can hire a bodyguard. I can do a lot of different things, but I can’t kill someone.”
Aubrey was quiet. I wanted to brush the hair away from his eyes. I wanted to ask him to forgive me.
“If you knew that riders were real,” he said. “If you had evidence that the world really does work the way we all say it does, could you trust me about Coin and the Invisible College?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably.”
He was silent for a moment, then sighed and looked up at the moon with me. I could feel the subtle warmth of his body. Somewhere nearby, a police siren rose and faded away. My stomach felt like I swallowed a bowlful of lead shot.
“You’re angry?” I asked.
“What? No! No, I’m not mad. I’m just thinking.”
“Did you believe it? When Eric came to you and told you all about this…this stuff. Did you believe it?”
“No,” Aubrey said. “He had to prove it to me.”
A minute later, he rose and walked slowly back into the house. I heard voices raised in conversation. Midian, Ex. I didn’t think Chogyi Jake ever raised his voice, so if he was talking I might never know. He reminded me of my mother that way.
I had ten thousand dollars in my pocket, less forty that I’d spent on pizza and beer for the bunch of them. I could Google private investigators tonight, make a half-dozen calls in the morning, and set hounds on Randolph Coin’s heels. If he was really the person who’d killed Eric, I could get the evidence and have the bastard thrown in jail for the rest of his life. I didn’t know why that seemed to make less sense than magical vigilantes taking on a society of evil wizards.
I thought of the three small stones dropping at the apartment, one-two-three. It could have been some kind of magical alarm system. It could have been something else.
I put my head in my hands and hoped that my mind would clear. It didn’t.
I heard Aubrey come back out. When I looked over, something was glowing white and blue in the palm of his hand. It said something about my state of mind that I thought it was a ball of witch fire or some other tiny miracle. Then he stepped a little closer, and it was just the screen of Eric’s cell phone. He held it out to me.
“Call her,” he said.
“Who?” I asked, taking the phone. It was warm.
“The woman that called. The one with the dog.”
I looked down at the phone. The icon for voice mail was still there.
“What if she’s with the Invisible College?” I said.
“I’ll take one of the shotguns,” Aubrey said, and something in his voice was light, even though I knew he was serious. I thumbed through the logs, found the most recent missed call, and selected the menu option that returned it. Aubrey sat next to me. The branches of the cherry tree shifted in the breeze.
“Hello?” a woman said. I thought the voice was the same, but it seemed tighter.
“Hi,” I said. “This is Jayne Heller. I think you called my uncle Eric?”
“Oh, thank God,” the woman said. She sounded like she was crying. “Oh, thank God.”
I’d expected at the soonest, we’d arrange to meet the woman and her dog sometime in the morning. But ten minutes after I ended the call, Aubrey and I were in his minivan headed north for Boulder.
“It used to be left-wing hippie central, kind of the way Colorado Springs is the home port of all the right-wing nut jobs,” Aubrey said. “There were a lot of people dabbling in alternative spiritualities and magic and drugs and things. These days, it’s mostly people who feel like they’re saving the planet because they’re buying groceries from Whole Foods.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Did she tell you anything about what was going on?”
“Just that her dog wanted her to call us,” I said. “I think it has to do with her boyfriend too, but I’m not sure.”
“She was pretty upset, sounds like.”
“Yeah,” I said. Ahead of us, taillights tracked off into the darkness, lines of red in the black. “Yeah, she was pretty messed up. I don’t know what we’re doing, though. I don’t know anything about what Eric used to do.”
“I know enough to start,” Aubrey said. “Hopefully it’ll be simple.”
We turned onto Highway 36, and then sooner than I’d expected, we were pulling onto the South Boulder Road exit. A knot was tying itself in my belly, embarrassment and fear.
I was embarrassed because I was about to go talk to a stranger-a desperate one-about supernatural ghosties slipping into her dog’s mind, and only half of me thought it was possible. The fear was because the other half thought it was.
