Twenty-two
My covert Monday morning coffee run failed. I went out alone in Chogyi Jake’s van, picked up a few bags of food, and headed toward the nearest Starbucks, my mind on a cup of coffee and a slice of pound cake, and I almost didn’t see the trap. Two middle-aged women sitting at the entrance, smiling and talking to each other. When I pulled my will into my eyes, their glamour faded, the tattoos on their faces and hands appeared, and I turned the van back out of the parking lot, shaking almost too hard to drive.
They were closing in.
I didn’t tell anyone about it when I got back to the house. Aaron and Candace were back up in Boulder, taking care of things on that end. Midian was cooking. Chogyi was meditating and chanting, adding more spiritual sandbags to the levee. Kim was strewing ash and salt around the house until we ran out. Then she started pacing, her mouth set in a permanent frown. I sat on the couch, staring at the map of Denver and the calamity of streets that met downtown and trying not to think about how stupid it would have been to die at the coffee shop.
I hadn’t slept well, waking up at four in the morning with the unshakable certainty that I’d found a flaw in our plan. As I came more awake, the objections turned into fluff and dream logic-something about how safety cones were orange and all we had was yellow paint. By the time I’d shaken off the sense of panic, I’d also stopped being anything near sleepy. It had been Chogyi Jake’s turn to sit watch, and I’d sent him off to bed, made a cup of green tea, and watched television with the sound off until dawn came creeping through the window.
I knew Coin was there, as close as my laptop or waiting in the street. I couldn’t tell anymore whether I was feeling the pressure of his magic eating away the safety of the wards, or if it was just my own paranoia. With my spare nervous energy, I started writing a list of the crimes I was about to be party to. Murder. Theft. Discharging a weapon inside the city limits. Reckless driving. When I got to
I wanted to call the hospital, to find out if Aubrey was still okay. If he was still the cheese in their mousetrap. I wanted to go back to Ex’s garage apartment and kick his ass or talk sense to him. I wanted to be with Aaron and Candace when they stole the car from the safe-house jerk. I wanted to know how to clean a rifle so I could take mine apart and put it back together a couple thousand times in the course of the day. I wanted my uncle back. I wanted to talk to my mother.
More than anything else, I wanted Kim to stop pacing.
“Hey,” I said. “You got a minute?”
Kim looked at me like I’d asked if she was a biped. I gestured to the couch. She sat. Her eyes were bright blue and hard as marbles. I had a brief vision of the woman who’d attacked me that first day, wide blue eyes, the Slavic accent asking
“Are you going to be okay with this?” I asked.
“I’ll be fine,” Kim said. “It’s you I’m worried about.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “If I lose whatever protections Eric put on me in order to break the Invisible College, then-”
“No,” Kim said. “I mean, how did he find you?”
I blinked. It took a couple of breaths before I understood the question.
“Ex, you mean?”
“If that’s his name. You’re supposed to be hard to locate with magic, right? So how did your priest friend evade the Invisible College, move to his own little bolt hole to keep a low profile, and still know where we were?”
“Maybe he’s good at it?” I said. “He does know where the house is.”
“Then he’s been out there, sticking himself out like a flag?” Kim said, her voice fast and hard. “Because if they can see him, and he’s close by, then it’s just as good as them knowing where you and Jake and that whatever-it-is that does all the cooking are.”
“Varkolak,” I said. “Midian’s a
Kim shooed the word away. I started to marshal my thoughts. If the Invisible College could use Ex to find me, they would have done it already. The fact that there weren’t ninja wizards breaking down the door was plenty of evidence that we were okay. Plus which, one more day wasn’t going to matter. Either we’d have succeeded in breaking the College, or we’d be so deep in trouble nothing was going to help.
Except that Kim knew Ex wasn’t a bad guy. Self-important, overbearing, and burdened by an unrealistic idea of his own responsibility, yes. Dangerous to us, no. This, I thought, was her version of waking up at four in the morning worrying about orange safety cones.
“Freaked about tomorrow?” I asked.
She shook her head, then a moment later she nodded.
“This is why I left in the first place,” she said. “Eric and his covert world. The things he would do. That he would have us do. And now here I am, back in the middle of it. And he’s not even here.”
There was a deepness in the way she said the last phrase. He’s not even here. Longing. Sorrow. Emptiness. She wasn’t talking about Eric anymore. She meant Aubrey.
“What are you going to do if we win?” I asked. “What are you going to do afterward?”
“Go back to work,” she said. “They think I’m still in Chicago. I’ve been calling the front office on my cell phone every morning, holding my nose and telling them I still don’t feel well. They think I’ve got the cold from hell. But there’s a budget meeting on Thursday, and I have to…I have to be there for it.”
Kim seemed to deflate. She stared at the television. It was an advertisement for something, but I couldn’t guess what the product was. Abstract happiness, maybe. I cleared my throat.
“I’m not in love with Aubrey,” I said. “I have a crush on him. He’s really cute, and really nice. And he can dance.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “The thing is, I’m not really in the best place to be making that kind of decision right now. A couple weeks ago, I was a college dropout hoping I could land a job waiting tables at Applebee’s. And now I’m-”
I gestured at the house, the walls. Kim looked at the place as if it was a real indication of who I had become. She nodded.
“That isn’t the only question, though,” she said. “You can’t be sure what he feels for you.”
I wanted to object, to tell Kim that Aubrey clearly didn’t love me or want me or whatever it was she was afraid of, but we both knew I’d be making it up. This wasn’t the time to close my eyes and pretend the world was what I wanted it to be.
“I don’t know what he feels,” I said. “We were on kind of iffy footing when it happened.”
A tight smile flickered over Kim’s lips.
“With any luck, we’ll be able to worry about all this next week,” she said.
My cell phone rang. Kim jumped a little as I dug it out of my pack. I thought of the fear in her face the first time my cell phone rang. When she heard Eric’s voice. It was one of the functionaries at my lawyer’s office returning my call. He’d gotten my message that morning and had a couple of questions about how I wanted him to proceed. I stuck my hand flat over the other ear and walked out back, talking it over with him.
The plan this time was a lot more complex than our last one had been. We had the cars we needed for the actual assault, or would after Aaron had completed his work stealing the one he’d be driving. I had one rifle, and the second was coming with the stolen car. I’d picked out a place near the convention center that had free wireless access. Midian and Chogyi Jake were ready to act as decoys, drawing off as many parasitized victims of the Invisible College as they could.
The trick was to not let my decoys get killed over it. And that meant making sure they were moving quickly and unpredictably. The good news was that that required only money, and I had that.
“Okay,” I said as the lawyer’s functionary finished talking. “Can you e-mail me the address of the airstrip?”
“It’s on its way,” he said. “And the motorcycles will be there between noon and two o’clock tomorrow.”
“Great,” I said.
“Is there anything else I can do for you, Ms. Heller?”
A cadre of priests chanting exorcism rites. The number of a really good pizza joint. Some groceries.
“No,” I said. “I think we’re good.”
I dropped the connection and went back into the kitchen. Midian was leaning over a wide metal bowl with a
