I remembered the woman’s blue eyes. Whoever she was, she’d been a baby once. Her mother had held her in her arms. She’d had a first kiss. Someone had looked into those eyes with love. I saw her skull open under Midian’s bullets.
For a moment, I couldn’t breathe.
“Take your time,” Midian said. “It’s gonna be okay. Just take your time.”
It wasn’t okay for a very long time. It felt like food poisoning, or worse. But eventually my strength gave out a little, and the violence of my reactions calmed. Midian had left me alone, so I locked myself in the bathroom and took a long, cold shower. The water seemed to ground me and pull me back to myself. When I stepped out and picked up a towel, I felt fragile, but I could function.
In the apartment, I could hear Midian grunting and talking to himself. The sweet, harsh smell of his cigarettes covered anything else. I was grateful for that. I sat on the floor and dug through the puddle of my clothes until I found my cell. I looked at it for a long time before I could bring myself to make the call.
Aubrey picked up on the second ring.
“Jayne?” he said, pronouncing it wrong.
“Hey,” I said. “I need to ask you something.”
“Sure,” he said. “Anything. What’s up?”
I could hear something in the background. Voices. Traffic. The real world. I took a deep breath.
“What do you know about the Invisible College?”
There was a pause that lasted years.
“Oh, thank God,” he said. “I was afraid Eric hadn’t told you about any of it. I was going to bring it up when I got you from the airport, but I thought if he hadn’t, I’d sound like a schizophrenic. Eric’s murder. It was about Randolph Coin, wasn’t it? Was he actually trying to take Coin on?”
I leaned forward, hunched over the cell. Mostly what I felt was relief. Even if it wasn’t true, if it was all stories and deceptions and madness, at least there was someone I could talk to. I almost started crying again.
“Jayne? Are you there? Are you all right?”
“You remember how you said I should call if I needed any help?” I asked.
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“I need help.”
Four
The bodies were lined up on the wooden floor of the front room. Midian had erected a levee of towels around them and draped black plastic trash bags over their heads. I was grateful for that. The curtains were closed, cutting us off from the street and the city. With the windows covered, I realized how small the apartment was. Aubrey was leaning against the interior brick wall. Midian sat on the couch beside a rough pile of history books and loose papers, his cigarette filling the air with a dim haze. His clothes were streaked with blood. I perched on the remaining kitchen stool. The one I’d thrown in the fight had bent enough that it wobbled now. I knew how it felt.
“O-kay,” Aubrey said. Then, “Wow.”
“The upside is no cops,” Midian said. “I figure they set up some kind of sound-dampening cantrip before they broke in, or else…”
“Or else?” Aubrey asked.
“Brick walls,” Midian replied with a shrug.
Aubrey nodded. His expression was grave, but there was a businesslike quality to how he took the whole thing in. I scratched my arm. I’d found a sweatshirt in the back. It smelled like Midian’s cigarettes, but the white shirt I’d worn here was ruined. I tried not to look at the bodies.
“Well, we’ve got two issues,” Aubrey said. “We need to get rid of these guys, and we need to make sure you and Jayne are someplace safe.”
Midian smirked at the mispronunciation of my name, but didn’t correct him.
“My guess is we’ve got a little time,” Midian said. “Coin throws his ninja strike team at us and they don’t come home, he’s going to get careful for a while. But I wouldn’t want to wait until morning.”
Aubrey nodded. I wanted to say that I was sorry, but I wasn’t sure who I wanted to say it to. My mind felt like it had been sandblasted. Aubrey pulled out his cell phone.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Midian said, standing up. “I wasn’t keen on it when the kid invited you in. Who the fuck are you calling?”
“Friends,” Aubrey said. “We’ve all worked with Eric one time or another. They know the score.”
Midian frowned but didn’t stop him. I felt a rush of profound relief that Aubrey knew what to do next. I didn’t have a clue.
When I’d come out of the bathroom half an hour earlier and told Midian that Aubrey was on his way, the cursed man had almost lost his temper. He’d asked me everything I knew about Aubrey-who was he, who did he work for, how did he know Eric, why did I trust him-and it became clear that I didn’t actually know anything. Only that when I’d asked for help, he’d said yes.
After he’d arrived, there had been a brief dancing back and forth between them. Midian had given a Reader’s Digest condensation of the story he’d told me, and Aubrey had accepted it. Aubrey had explained that he and Eric had worked together before, and that he knew a little bit about Coin and the Invisible College, but that Eric had warned him off. Both men had seemed satisfied, at least provisionally. I watched it all like it was a television show.
Aubrey’s clean-up crew arrived twenty minutes later. There were two of them, both Aubrey’s age, both men, both unfazed by the corpses on the floor. The first looked vaguely Japanese, his head shaved to stubble, in a sand- colored shirt and pale, worn jeans. He said his name was Chogyi, but to call him Jake. The second, with white-blond shoulder-length hair and black clothes, only nodded to me. Chogyi Jake said his name was Ex.
“Ex?” I said. “Like in ex-football player?”
“Ex-priest,” Chogyi Jake said.
“Ex for xylophone,” Ex said, stooping by the bodies. He had lifted the plastic trash bags. “The birth certificate says Xavier. What killed them?”
“I did,” Midian said. “The kid there kept them busy while I got the gun.”
“They were armed too,” Ex said. “You let a twenty-year-old girl fight four riders sent to kill her while you rummaged around for a pistol?”
“Twenty-two,” I said.
“She was doing a pretty good job,” Midian said.
“Adrenaline,” I said. “It was the adrenaline.”
“Must have been pretty good adrenaline to give you that much precision and control,” Ex said dryly.
“The kid’s got some kind of mojo on her,” Midian said. “She didn’t trip the alarms when she came in either. I’ve been trying to figure that out.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What?”
Midian shrugged. “You shouldn’t have been able to hold those bastards off,” he said. There was a little apology in his voice. “They’re pros. They should have cleaned your clock. But they didn’t.”
“No,” I said. “It wasn’t like that. I was just scared. It was fight or flight. I don’t even know how…”
I waved my hands at the room, the corpses, the four men who I barely knew.
“It doesn’t work like that,” Ex said. “You think Eric put some kind of protection on her?”
Midian looked at the newcomer with distrust, then shrugged.
“He left her the whole joint,” Midian said. “Be all kinds of stupid not to watch out for her too.”
“I don’t have powers,” I said, louder than I’d meant to. My hands were on my knees, the knuckles bloodless and white.
“Can we get back to the issue at hand?” Aubrey said. “We’ve got a rider cult in town. They took out Eric, and now it looks like they’re after Jayne. We have four shells that we need to get rid of, and Jayne and Midian here to get to shelter. Whatever else is going on, that’s where we’re starting, okay?”
