Unclean Spirits

“Excellent. And, since I have you here, could I put upon you to sign a few little things for us? Once we have these out of the way, I can move ahead on the property transfers with much less bother for you.”

If she’d pulled out a scroll of human skin covered with Latin and asked me to sign in blood, I probably would have done it. Everything was paper and ink, though, and there was only a little Latin.

I GOT back to the house feeling a bit high. With the front door closed behind me, I took a silent bow and Chogyi Jake and Midian applauded. Afterward, I sat on the couch and gave them the blow-by-blow of the meeting. Chogyi Jake looked pleased, but the circles under his eyes were getting darker. He didn’t make a point of it, but I knew he was pouring himself into keeping the wards around the house strong. I wondered how many times he had saved us already without my even knowing about it.

While the pair of them cooked, I went to the back bedroom and turned on the laptop. I had a list of things I wanted to look up-what exactly a varkolak was being near the top of the list. I waited while a metric assload of spam downloaded to my inbox. Nothing for me. Nothing personal. I checked my brother’s blog, but he hadn’t posted anything in months. I thought about checking back with my former friends again, but the more I turned the idea over, the more pathetic it seemed. The world had moved on. Several times. There wasn’t any point.

A varkolak turned out to be something about halfway between a vampire and a werewolf, or a vampire without any sign of its bestial nature, or a werewolf that doesn’t change shapes. There was a whole lot of information, and no way to know whether any of it was more reliable than going out to Midian and asking him. And that was the same problem I had with the bigger issue of Coin too.

I needed an angle. Coin had all the power right now. That had to change. I had gone through five or six promising-looking boards without finding anything solid about the Invisible College in general or Randolph Coin in particular when my old chat program popped a window open. That hadn’t happened in weeks, and the screen name wasn’t one that I recognized. Once I parsed it, though, it made sense.

EXTOJAYNE: Ping

I felt the blood go out of my face, and my heart ramped up. The first thing I felt was shock at Ex’s sudden virtual arrival. The second thing I felt was pissed off. I leaned forward, fingers hovering over the keys. I tried to decide what I wanted to say. If I wanted to.

EXTOJAYNE: Are you there? JAYNEHELLER: I’m here. How did you find this account? EXTOJAYNE: It’s your name. It wasn’t hard. Are you OK?

I could hear Ex’s voice, could see the concern in his face as he asked. It only made me angrier. No, I wanted to say, I’m getting a little sick of being betrayed by the people who I thought were my friends. No, you fucking thief. I cracked my knuckles and summoned up my best sarcasm before answering.

JAYNEHELLER: I’m great. Thanks. EXTOJAYNE: Good. Is Midian with you? JAYNEHELLER: He’s not in the room, if that’s what you mean. He’s off cooking. As always. Mind telling me where you are? EXTOJAYNE: I’m all right. I’m worried about you. JAYNEHELLER: You really show it. But it wasn’t the question I asked. EXTOJAYNE: I can’t stay on long. I’m worried. The assassination attempt. I think the College’s blowback may have gone past Midian into the other one. JAYNEHELLER: The other one? You mean Chogyi Jake? EXTOJAYNE: Chogyi Jake. Has he been acting normal? Is he there too? JAYNEHELLER: Yeah, we’re all here. What do you mean blowback? Where are you? EXTOJAYNE: Don’t worry about me. Nothing’s changed. Give me a status report. I need to know where things stand.

I’d gotten as far as typing Who are you to demand anything of me when my fingers stopped. I felt the jaw- clenching anger shift in me like a car starting to fishtail on ice. I stared at the screen.

EXTOJAYNE: Jayne? Are you there?

My hand reached out and tapped the backspace key, cutting back my message word by word.

Who are you

I erased the whole thing and started over, my chest tight with fear.

JAYNEHELLER: Well, we’ve gotten the go-ahead from the guy with the rabbits. And your buddy from Texas should be here tomorrow about noon.

I hit send and waited. The icon showed that whoever was on the other end of the chat was typing. If it was Ex, he’d ask me what I was talking about.

Come on, I thought, ask me what I’m talking about.

EXTOJAYNE: Good. What else?

I stared at the screen for what seemed like hours but was only a few seconds. My hands shook so hard I could barely type.

JAYNEHELLER: Someone’s calling. Gotta go.

I turned off the computer and sat on the bed for a while with my hands trembling. It was them. I’d been talking to one of them. They knew that Ex had been working with me and that he wasn’t here, or else they wouldn’t have tried to pass themselves off under his name. I didn’t know how they’d figured that out.

They didn’t know he’d taken everything in an attempt to stop me from moving against Coin again; otherwise they wouldn’t have asked how things were going. I didn’t know why they hadn’t figured that out.

And they knew Chogyi Jake’s name and that he and Midian and I were all together because I’d just told them.

I wondered if it was possible to track an instant message back to where it had physically originated. Maybe it was all relayed through a server over at AOL, but I had the sense it was peer-to-peer, in which case they’d have the IP address of the network here. They wouldn’t be able to translate that into a street address without hacking the living snot out of Eric’s service provider. They were evil wizards. Getting into a router configuration might not be beyond them, but then again, Eric had done a pretty thorough job of keeping the house off their radar. Chances were good that the service record would keep the address obscured. I wished that Eric had left me some record of what exactly my defenses were.

I’d known that they were out there. I’d known they were looking for us. Actually catching sight of one of the hunters shook me more than I’d expected it to. I started to wonder how big a risk I’d been taking when I went to see the lawyer. How were Coin and his people going to come after us now? Would he go after my family? I tried to imagine my mother at the mercy of tattooed wizards possessed by evil parasites. It would pretty much confirm everything my parents thought about me, and that was the lowest reason on the list for keeping it from happening.

In the kitchen, Midian and Chogyi Jake were talking about different mythological loci and the relationship between choice and will. A couple hours ago, I’d have cared. Instead, I sat down at the table with my head in my hands until they both went silent.

“You okay, kid?” the vampire asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

Seventeen

I slept badly, every passing car or creaking wall startling me awake. At three in the morning, I came within two digits of calling home and telling my parents to take my brothers and get out of the house. The only thing that stopped me was knowing that they wouldn’t do it. I lay on the bed, drifting in and out of unpleasant dreams, and watched the curtains turn light again with the approaching dawn. At no point in the night did I even move toward turning on my laptop.

Midian and Chogyi Jake had been pretty quiet after I told them about the fake Ex, but neither had given me any grief for being taken in, even briefly. We agreed that the three of us would use the word elephant someplace in the first sentence or two if we were ever communicating across the net, and Midian made a joke about policy being the surest evidence that something had already been fucked up.

The doorbell rang at eleven in the morning, and the sound knotted my guts. Midian, watching television with the captioning on and the sound off, rose from the couch. Chogyi Jake came in from the kitchen. The doorbell rang