by Midian and Chogyi Jake picking the right moment to break cover and get themselves chased and by feeding a little clever misdirection to the fake Ex. All of that was just to get Coin and his bodyguard out where we could take a crack at them.
The best-looking option thus far involved getting two cars, one with Candace at the wheel and Kim in the back, the other with Aaron and me. We could follow Coin when he left the convention center. Once we were sure where he was going, it wouldn’t be hard to get the two cars close to him. Kim would damp out Coin’s powers, Aaron would run him off the road (he’d been trained in that sort of thing and had no lack of confidence in his ability), and then he and I would finish things off with the bullets I’d recovered from our first attempt. Candace and Kim would pick us up, and we’d vanish into the night.
“It’s cleaner than it looks,” Aaron said. “There were three guys that got killed in the last five or so years with the same MO. They were all traffickers. Coin’s a higher tax bracket than those guys were, but the chances are when the Denver cops see this, they’ll assume he was involved and not look at it too hard.”
“Hey,” Midian said, tapping Aaron on the knee with one skeletal hand. “Tell her what they call that. This is great, kid. You know what the cops call it when some mad fuck who needs to die gets aced by a civilian?”
“What do they call it?” I asked.
“Misdemeanor murder,” Aaron said. “It happens. We get someone who everyone knows has been selling crack in the school yard, but we could never prove it. Someone does the obvious thing. There’s just not much point in spending the resources on the investigation.”
“Don’t you just love that there’s a name for that?” Midian cackled. “Renews my faith in mankind.”
Actually, it creeped me out, but I put my reaction aside.
“Are you sure we can make this look like a drug hit?” I asked.
“I’m sure,” Aaron said. “I’m going to borrow some things from the evidence store back at home. We can drop it in Coin’s car when we leave. Or in the one we’re driving. If it’s on the scene, the guys down here will put it together. They’re not dumb.”
I nodded. It occurred to me for the first time that I had put all my time and concentration into killing Randolph Coin, and none at all into getting away with it. This was going to look like murder, and I couldn’t really tell the judge about riders from the Pleroma unless I was pushing for an insanity plea. Sobering thought.
“But the car that we use to run him off the road,” I said. “That’s an issue, right?”
“Actually,” Candace said, “we can kind of kill two birds with one stone.”
“There’s a place just north of Boulder,” Aaron said. “There’s no business going on there, but we’re all pretty sure it’s a way station. A safe house the bad guys use to move drugs and girls from the West Coast out east. We’ve never had enough to get a warrant, dig into things.”
“Okay,” I said, pulling the word out to three syllables.
“So the second car,” Aaron said. “I’m going to borrow it from the guy who owns the house. If it’s involved in a homicide in Denver, I’m pretty sure we can shut down everything else the fuckhead’s up to too.”
I laughed and sat down on the hearth.
“We may be a force for good in the world after all,” I said. “What about the Calling Malkuth thing?”
“I think it will work,” Chogyi Jake said. “It isn’t a configuration I’d seen before, but everything that Kim’s showed me fits together well.”
“There is a problem,” Kim said, her head turned to Chogyi and away from me. “Jayne’s protections. I don’t know what this will do.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
“It is a consideration,” Chogyi Jake said.
“It really isn’t,” I said. “Are we thinking we’ll have two rifles?”
“One for each of us,” Aaron said, nodding.
“One per bullet,” Midian said. Then, “You know, kid, you aren’t the world’s best shot. And the last time you were looking down a barrel at Coin…”
“That was last time,” I said. “This is point-blank. I can’t miss.” And this time, I was going to pull the trigger.
“So we’re on?” Midian asked.
I hesitated, wondering what Ex would have thought if he’d come in. If he would have been swayed by it. If he would have thought I stood a chance, or been just as certain that I was fooling myself. I couldn’t answer those questions, and they didn’t matter anymore. Ex’s opinion wasn’t as important as mine.
“We’re on,” I said. And then a moment later, “Hey, can you guys ride motorcycles?”
Twenty-two
My covert Monday morning coffee run failed. I went out alone in Chogyi Jake’s van, picked up a few bags of food, and headed toward the nearest Starbucks, my mind on a cup of coffee and a slice of pound cake, and I almost didn’t see the trap. Two middle-aged women sitting at the entrance, smiling and talking to each other. When I pulled my will into my eyes, their glamour faded, the tattoos on their faces and hands appeared, and I turned the van back out of the parking lot, shaking almost too hard to drive.
They were closing in.
I didn’t tell anyone about it when I got back to the house. Aaron and Candace were back up in Boulder, taking care of things on that end. Midian was cooking. Chogyi was meditating and chanting, adding more spiritual sandbags to the levee. Kim was strewing ash and salt around the house until we ran out. Then she started pacing, her mouth set in a permanent frown. I sat on the couch, staring at the map of Denver and the calamity of streets that met downtown and trying not to think about how stupid it would have been to die at the coffee shop.
I hadn’t slept well, waking up at four in the morning with the unshakable certainty that I’d found a flaw in our plan. As I came more awake, the objections turned into fluff and dream logic-something about how safety cones were orange and all we had was yellow paint. By the time I’d shaken off the sense of panic, I’d also stopped being anything near sleepy. It had been Chogyi Jake’s turn to sit watch, and I’d sent him off to bed, made a cup of green tea, and watched television with the sound off until dawn came creeping through the window.
I knew Coin was there, as close as my laptop or waiting in the street. I couldn’t tell anymore whether I was feeling the pressure of his magic eating away the safety of the wards, or if it was just my own paranoia. With my spare nervous energy, I started writing a list of the crimes I was about to be party to. Murder. Theft. Discharging a weapon inside the city limits. Reckless driving. When I got to possession, I started laughing so hard I had to put the pen down.
I wanted to call the hospital, to find out if Aubrey was still okay. If he was still the cheese in their mousetrap. I wanted to go back to Ex’s garage apartment and kick his ass or talk sense to him. I wanted to be with Aaron and Candace when they stole the car from the safe-house jerk. I wanted to know how to clean a rifle so I could take mine apart and put it back together a couple thousand times in the course of the day. I wanted my uncle back. I wanted to talk to my mother.
More than anything else, I wanted Kim to stop pacing.
“Hey,” I said. “You got a minute?”
Kim looked at me like I’d asked if she was a biped. I gestured to the couch. She sat. Her eyes were bright blue and hard as marbles. I had a brief vision of the woman who’d attacked me that first day, wide blue eyes, the Slavic accent asking Who are you? I tapped Kim’s knee with the flat of my hand.
“Are you going to be okay with this?” I asked.
“I’ll be fine,” Kim said. “It’s you I’m worried about.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “If I lose whatever protections Eric put on me in order to break the Invisible College, then-”
“No,” Kim said. “I mean, how did he find you?”
I blinked. It took a couple of breaths before I understood the question.
“Ex, you mean?”
“If that’s his name. You’re supposed to be hard to locate with magic, right? So how did your priest friend evade the Invisible College, move to his own little bolt hole to keep a low profile, and still know where we
