He held out his hand to show me-shining, clean, searing his flesh with the heat of the discharge-the bullet, its etched markings squirming as if they were in pain. It was my turn to shriek.
Aaron was at my side. I hadn’t known he was there until he pulled me back. A black pistol in his hand fired three times, four. Coin stood up, brushing the grit and gravel from his knees, ignoring Aaron as if he wasn’t there.
“The car!” Aaron yelled. “Get in the car!”
I turned and ran. Coin shouted out words I couldn’t comprehend, and something detonated. I skidded and fell on the pavement, my hands and knees skinned. I wasn’t gong to make it to the car.
Candace was in the driver’s seat, her face pale. She’d forgotten to put on her ski mask, or else had already taken it off. I saw Kim in the backseat, her hand pressed against the window. She could have been a world away. As I rose to my feet, I wondered whether she’d gotten my laptop. It was a disconnected thought, something plucked from the middle of a car wreck.
Aaron was on the ground. Blood flowed from his nose. His eyes weren’t focused. Coin stood over him, head tilted like a man considering a crossword puzzle. I knew the next thing the rider would do would be to kill him. Or worse.
It was pointless. The Hail Mary throw. I gathered my qi the way Chogyi and Ex and Midian had taught me. In the thinned universe of Kim’s cantrip, it seemed weak even to me. I pushed it out my mouth as I shouted.
“Leave him alone!”
Coin looked up. His eyebrows rose. His hand moved faster than a human’s. The fabric of the world pulsed. The sense of being in a clockwork of physics faded. Someone was honking. I heard tires squeal. We were causing a traffic jam. If the plan had worked, Kim and Aaron and Candace and I would already be gone, speeding south on the highway, Coin dead on the road behind us. Aaron groaned, rolled over, rose to his elbows.
“Leave him alone,” I said again. “He isn’t your problem.”
“And you are?” Coin asked. “My problem. It’s you?”
“Yeah, it’s me,” I said. “So leave him the hell alone.”
We stood there for the space of five fast heartbeats. I had time to hope that Midian and Chogyi Jake had gotten away. I heard a car door open behind me.
“You aren’t Eric Heller,” he said. “Who are you?”
I pulled off my ski mask. I’d almost sweat through it in the few minutes I’d had it on. The air felt cold against my neck. I shook my head to get the hair out of my eyes. Candace stepped into my peripheral vision, a pistol in her hand. Coin didn’t even bother to look at her. His eyes were on mine. I felt something cold traveling up my spine. Aaron rose to his knees. Coin stepped forward, and Candace started firing. Four fast shots. Someone off to my left started screaming. An engine revved. Coin looked at her, his lips drawing back.
“No! Candace! Get Aaron and get back in the car!” I said, stepping between them. Then to Coin, “Leave them out of it.”
“As you’ve left Alexander out?” Coin said. He meant the big one. The one we’d killed.
“Alexander was mine too,” I said. “They were all mine. You want this stopped? I’m the one. Just me.”
Coin looked back over his shoulder, toward the body of his fallen man. I thought I saw something like sadness in his eyes. Then he turned back to me and nodded.
“Just you,” he said.
He closed his eyes, balled his fists, and shouted. The sound was deafening, a thousand times louder than anything human, and more complex. There were storms in his voice. Earthquakes. Huge beings moving underground. I felt my body tip back and thought I was falling.
When I looked down, the streets were a hundred feet below me. Aaron and Candace were gone, but I saw her car, just beginning to move, finishing the long arc to the south. I saw the tangle of cars and trucks, semis and motorcycles that had piled up behind us. The stolen Hummer, its black doors standing open. Coin’s car with its crumpled hood. The huge man’s body. I could even see the pool of blood.
And then it was two hundred feet below me. And then a thousand. I dropped the rifle, the small black stick flipping down through the empty air. The great asphalt cloverleaf of the highway spun in the distance. I felt a sudden regret. My plan hadn’t worked any better than Eric’s. I wondered what I could have done differently. If there had ever really been a way to win.
Something profoundly cold touched the back of my mind, and the gray world went black.
Twenty-five
I was cold.
Slowly, I became aware of other things. My knees hurt. There was a crick in my neck. All I could hear was a soft wind. When I moved, it made a scraping sound like gravel. But mostly, I was cold. I shifted my head, and something soft and chilly moved under me. I let my eyes slit open. My backpack. My head was resting on my leather backpack like it was a pillow.
I tried to remember where I was, how I’d gotten there. I had a sense of urgency. It was all very, very important. If I could just put my mind back together…
I sat up. The city spread out below me, streets marked by the glowing yellow lines of their lights, the shifting red of taillights in traffic. The western sky was red and gold, the sun already set. All around me was pebbled gray gravel, wide sheet-metal ductwork on raised steel beams. Something partway between a radio antenna and the Eiffel Tower rose up to my left, a red beacon glowing at its tip.
A skyscraper. I was on top of a skyscraper. I tried to stand, but my knees were weak beneath me. I turned slowly. There was a door-green and rust with a dead bolt lock. Coin was sitting beside it. Five inches above his open hand floated a small cylinder of metal that came to a point at one end. The bullet.
The thing in Coin’s body looked over at me, then back at the artifact floating above its hand.
“Nasty piece of work, this,” it said. Its voice was conversational, deep, inhuman. “Ya’la ibn Murah and St. Francis of the Desert both. Unpleasant.”
I tried to think, to focus. I had to say something.
“Fuck you,” I slurred.
It made a soft tsk-tsk and shook its head.
“It isn’t yours. I know that,” the thing said. “Heller designed it. It’s his style. Oh yes, I know my enemies. And I’ve known Heller quite well. You, though, I confess I didn’t expect. You’re Jayne, yes?”
He knew how to pronounce my name, and for the first time since I’d come to, I felt the deep, penetrating rush of fear. Far to the south, a storm cloud still hung on the horizon, lightning flashing so far away there was no thunder. Coin nodded.
“The niece,” it said. “The heir. Eric’s next incarnation. I thought we had put an end to all that, but here you are. And Alexander gone because of it. I suppose I should have guessed. Heller was the past master of putting things in motion.”
“You killed my uncle,” I said. My voice sounded steadier now.
“Yes,” Coin said.
“You’re going to kill me,” I said, sure as I did that it was the truth.
The rider narrowed its stolen eyes. The bullet slid down through the air to land on its upturned palm.
“Possibly,” it said. “If it’s necessary.”
I almost had my feet back. The city below us glittered and darkened. Somewhere out there, down below us, Midian and Chogyi Jake were running for their lives. And Candace and Aaron and Kim. Every minute I kept Coin focused on me was one that its attention wasn’t turned to them.
Run, I thought. Wherever you are out there, get the hell away from here. Live.
“How much do you know?” it asked.
“Enough,” I said. It was silent for a long moment, then nodded.
“And you have made yourself part of this,” he said. It was almost a question.
“Yeah,” I said. The thing in Coin’s body sighed.
“You are a woman of great power. Great potential,” it said. “You needn’t take your uncle’s path. Even with
