didn’t seem weak. Yes, taking out Coin was up to me. No, it wasn’t anyone else’s job to make it easy. I’d tried the strategy where I relied on other people, and it had brought me here.

This was my job. I’d do it.

“Okay,” I said. “So that’s the start of a plan, right? You guys will draw off the Invisible College so I can get to Coin.”

“Great,” Midian said. “And then you can punch yourself in the face a few times to confuse him. Maybe break an arm. I mean, don’t get me wrong, kid. I’ll do what I have to do, but now you’re down to a shitload of money, whatever cantrips we can teach you, and a couple of bullets. I’m not sure what that’s going to get you. Odds-on bet is you still get your ass kicked.”

“Let me think about it,” I said.

I thought for two days and by Thursday came up with nothing. Every hour, the house pressed on me. We were hiding under our rock, and if I was in a little less trouble than Midian and Chogyi Jake, it was only a little. I didn’t turn my laptop back on, not even to check e-mail or play solitaire.

I made one furtive trip to the grocery store, scuttling through the soup aisle with my qi pulled up to my eyes, looking for tattoos and danger so intently I had a hard time shopping. When I was home, I meditated with Chogyi Jake. I practiced some simple cantrips with Midian. Here was how to project your qi to intimidate people who didn’t have any protection and why not to try it on people who did. Here was how to wrap yourself in qi as a protection. It felt more like a motivational speaker’s affirmations than magic, but Chogyi and Midian assured me that there would be more advanced work that grew out of it. And even that wasn’t enough to keep the close, hot summer air from bearing down on me.

At night, I lay in the darkness wondering where Ex was, whether he’d found someplace safe or gotten killed. I thought about Aubrey and my family and my former friends back at ASU.

I had to take Coin out. Ex couldn’t help me. Eric couldn’t help me. Midian and Chogyi Jake could only draw off as many of the Invisible College’s wizards as would fall for their distraction. I could sneak into his mansion, except that I was pretty sure I couldn’t. I could stand on the street and call him out, except he’d beat me. I could lure him into an ambush, except that as long as he had a few minions left to send in his place, he wouldn’t come for the free cheese in any trap I could think of. The sheets knotted themselves around me as I shifted. The pillows grew hot and uncomfortable, each new configuration bringing only a few minutes’ relief.

I crawled out of bed Friday morning to a blasting dawn. Light pressed in at the blinds like water spilling into a submarine. I sat on the edge of the mattress feeling sticky with old sweat, bored, frightened, and bored with being frightened. My stitches itched, but the wound in my side was mostly closed up, deep pink flesh fusing back into some semblance of normalcy. My knee was a mottled green and yellow, my body struggling to clean out the old blood, but it didn’t hurt to move it anymore. I pulled on a bathrobe, put my hair back in a bun held in place by a couple pencils, and went out to the main room. Midian stood before the back window, looking out at the slowly browning grass of the yard.

“I can’t do it,” I said.

“Yeah, I know,” he said, not looking back. “If the two of us weren’t fucked six ways to Sunday, there’d be a chance. Taking someone out like this is at least a three-man job. Probably more.”

“Maybe we could find some way to hide you guys? A ritual cleansing or something?”

“Then you’ve got no way to draw off the minions, and we’re still screwed.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Where’s Chow Yun Fat when you need him.”

“Who?”

“Chow Yun Fat. You know. Hong Kong action film star. He was in The Replacement Killers and The Corruptor. And Hard-Boiled. That’s the one where he had the gunfight while holding a baby. It was thoroughly over the top, but it was great.”

“I thought you led a sheltered life. How’d you get into gun opera?”

“College,” I said. “I had a boyfriend. Cary. He was into it, so I was too.”

“Huh. Fair enough. So how does the baby figure in?”

“There’s this cop and he’s…”

Something in the back of my head fell in place with a click I could almost feel.

“And?” Midian said.

“Hang on a minute.”

I went back to my room for the cell phone, my head suddenly feeling like champagne. I felt too nervous to go at it straight so I started by calling the hospital to check up on Aubrey. There was no change, and I was both relieved that he was all right and worried that he was still incapacitated. Then I called my lawyer and left a message with her receptionist, asking for any updated information about Coin’s schedule in the next week or two. It was only after that that I went back through the list of incoming calls and found the number that Midian had reminded me of.

The voice-mail message was short, and Candace Dorn’s voice was pleasant. I waited for the beep.

“Candace. Hey, this is Jayne Heller? Look, I’m in a little trouble. I may be in pretty big trouble. I need to ask Aaron for a favor. Could you have him give me a call? Thanks.”

I dropped the connection with a sense of excitement that bordered on dread. I had money, and a few cantrips, and two magical bullets.

And a cop. I had at least one cop. Maybe more, if he had friends he trusted.

And I wasn’t finished yet.

I knew what I needed to do. The idea of calling Candace had opened up a whole new set of options, and no matter how much I hated them, I couldn’t afford to leave any unexplored. It was to keep my friends alive. When I put it that way, my feelings didn’t matter all that much.

It took me twenty minutes to find the number. I probably could have done it with two Google searches, but I still didn’t want to boot up the computer. Eventually I got through directory assistance the old way, a computer with a vague East Coast accent patching me through. I listened to the ringing, my heart beating fast. I was hoping for more voice mail. It didn’t work out.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice said.

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I swallowed down the knot in my throat.

“Hello? Is anyone there?” she said, preparing to hang up.

“Hi,” I said. “You don’t know me. My name’s Jayne. Jayne Heller. Eric Heller was my uncle. He died. Someone killed him, and…um…anyway. I need help. I need your help.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Aubrey’s in trouble,” I said. “He could die.”

There was a moment’s silence. I could hear her breathing. When she spoke again, her voice was grim.

“Where is he?”

“Denver,” I said. “He’s in the hospital.”

“I’ll be there tonight,” his wife said.

Eighteen

I met her at the airport just at sunset. In person, Kim looked a little less like Nicole Kidman. She wore gray slacks and a simple cream blouse that would have looked perfectly in place at a baseball game or a boardroom. Her eyes were a sharp blue, her mouth tight and a little angry. She came through baggage claim without pausing at the carousel, a generic black carry-on wheeling behind her and a tasteful black purse on her arm. She only looked around for a moment before homing in on me. When she stood before me, her head cocked to the left, her eyes clicking over me like a specimen she was trying to identify, I was surprised to see she was half a head shorter than me.

“You look like him,” she said. She spoke sharply, like she was trying to bite off the last letter of every word. “I mean, not like him like him. But the family resemblance is there.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“I didn’t like Eric. I always knew that something like this was going to happen.”

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