“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 circumstances, 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 space 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 embarrassment was showing, and it only made me more embarrassed. “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 fucking 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 butter, 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 Heller 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 classic example of parasitic mind control.”
“Parasitic
“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 passes 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 poop, aren’t we?”
“Well, yeah,” he said. I weighed whether to change the subject back to mystical assassins and my recent slaughter thereof, and reluctantly decided to stay with the poop-eating mice. We paused at a red light. Two homeless men passed 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
“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?”
