I wanted. I wanted him to touch me. I wanted his body to reassure mine. I wanted something that would take away everything I’d seen and touched and done, something bright and good and true. Something that would hold off death. I wanted him to say my name again, and not in the tone he’d just used.
The voice, when it came, wasn’t his. It came from the back of the house, and it was Uncle Eric’s.
“Hey,” it said, “you’ve got a call.”
I yelped and jumped back, my heart thumping like a pair of sneakers in a dryer. Aubrey looked at me, and then back at the dark hallway.
“Hey,” the voice came again. It was tinny, like someone talking through a computer. “You’ve got a call.”
Aubrey walked back into the darkness. I followed. Eric’s voice led us to the bedroom. A huge, elaborate cell phone glowed on the bedside table, its screen the size of my palm. The voice was Eric’s ringtone. I picked it up. The incoming call wasn’t a number I recognized. Aubrey shook his head; he didn’t know either.
“Let it drop to voice mail,” he said. I did, and when the icon appeared saying that there was a message waiting, I thumbed through the menu system until I found it. The cell dialed. I put it on speaker.
“Um,” the cell said. “Hi. I’m looking for Eric Heller? My name’s Candace Dorn? A friend of mine told me that you were in Denver right now and you could help people with…um…weird problems? I know this sounds really odd, but I think there’s something wrong with my dog. He wanted me to call you.”
The voice sighed, as if giving up something. When she spoke again, she sounded resigned.
“My dog wanted me to call you. If you don’t think I’m a complete nutcase, could you please call me back?”
She left her number, said thanks, and hung up. I looked over at Aubrey.
“Her dog?” I said.
“It’s possible,” Aubrey said. “Sometimes dogs can pick up on things. If there’s a rider trying to cross over from Next Door, or if someone is being ridden. I’ve heard weirder things. And that’s what Eric does. Well, did.”
“Helped people with their dogs?”
Aubrey chuckled, then smiled, then sobered.
“Eric did what needed doing,” he said. “It kept him busy. There are probably going to be a lot of people looking for him. For a while, at least.”
“I should call her back,” I said, “and tell her that we can’t help.”
Before I could press the button, he reached out, putting his hand over mine.
“Let’s hold off,” he said. “Just in case she’s really with the Invisible College.”
“Right,” I said. “I should have thought of that.”
I looked into his eyes. The desire I’d felt was still there, and I thought maybe I could also see a little of it in him. But the moment had passed. He felt it too, because he sighed.
“I’m going to try to scare up some food,” he said. “Then you should sleep, if you can.”
“What about you?” I asked.
“I’ll be here,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
We ate grilled cheese sandwiches with the crusts cut off and ginger ale from bottles he found in a dusty back cabinet. We didn’t talk much, and when we did, it wasn’t about anything. When I made my way back to the bedroom, he didn’t follow me.
I expected to fall asleep quickly, but as tired as I was, I couldn’t wind down. Instead, I punched the pillows into new shapes. I shifted to my back or my belly or my side. I got up and did sit-ups to tire myself out. I looked out the windows. I wondered what my parents would think.
The thought alone evoked my father’s glowering disapproval and my mother’s rabbitlike fear. Uncle Eric had been rich beyond any of our dreams. He’d spent his days fighting against spirits that invade the world and possess human bodies. No wonder Dad freaked out. Anything that didn’t fit into his neatly packaged worldview was evil by definition. Mom would have just made some tea and ignored the idea that anything was happening anywhere. It wasn’t really something I’d been thinking of majoring in either, for that matter. The question was, now that it had all fallen into my lap, what was I going to do about it?
Just after midnight, I gave up, put on my same blue jeans and liberated another one of Eric’s white button- down shirts. The living room was silent, the flickering blue of the television the only light. Aubrey lay on the couch, his arm tucked under his head, his eyes closed. I stood there for a few seconds, watching him breathe, then went back and got a blanket to put over him. The television was on a news station and muted. I turned it off.
The sane thing would have been to get a boatload of money, sell all the properties just in case there were two-hundred-year-old curse victims hanging out in them, and begin again someplace new. Start from scratch and forget the last twelve hours, like they’d never happened.
I wondered if they would let me. The Invisible College. I remembered the blue-eyed woman. I saw her die again, and if my heart sped up and my throat closed down, it wasn’t as bad as it had been before. She’d been dead before she walked in. She’d been possessed by something from outside the real world and sent to finish the job they’d started when they killed my uncle. She was a victim, not of me but of Randolph Coin. Or whatever evil spirit had taken over Coin’s body.
I wanted to believe it, and I halfway did. But only halfway. Faith and I had always had a difficult relationship, and we were talking about killing people-killing
Was it more likely that spirits from outside reality snuck in and took people over, or that people went nuts sometimes? Or got involved with cults? Was it more likely that I had magic superpowers I’d never known about, or that I’d had a hellish adrenaline rush and the people I was fighting weren’t actually all that competent? Was it more likely that Midian was two-hundred-plus years old, or that he was a disfigured guy in his fifties with a lousy set of coping skills? Aubrey seemed kind and sane and good, but I’d known a lot of men who seemed just the same and believed in things that I didn’t. God, for instance.
I looked at the window, and the darkness had made it a mirror. Here was a woman on the trailing edge of twenty-two with no friends left. No family left. A shitload of money from nowhere, and the man who’d given it to her-who, judging from the way he’d put her name on everything, had always meant for her to have it-had been murdered.
I looked the same. Same dark eyes. Same black hair. Same mole I’d always told myself I’d have taken off as soon as I had the tattoo removal done. But I wasn’t the same. And if everyone I’d met that day-Midian, Aubrey, Jake, Ex-was insane or deluded, I wasn’t sure it changed anything. Uncle Eric was dead. Someone had killed him. And I was going to find out who. Randolph Coin was the best lead I had. So that was the lead I’d follow.
A sound caught my attention. The click of metal against metal in a slow, almost meditative rhythm. It was me. Without even noticing, I’d taken the key ring out of my pocket and was tapping it against my thigh. The key to the doomed apartment, and two others. Storage facilities. I lifted the keys, running my fingers over their teeth.
“Yes, little tomato,” I said to the key ring. “I’ll check you out too.”
Five
I was asleep when the others arrived. I woke up to the sound of voices and the smell of fresh coffee. I pulled myself together: quick shower, fresh clothes, and out to the kitchen. Midian, his ruined face seeming oddly comforting only because it was familiar, stood at the stove wearing a buff-colored apron. Ex and Aubrey were sitting at the table where the lawyer and I had been just the day before. Chogyi Jake smiled at me in greeting while he poured coffee into a black mug.
It was like walking into someone else’s home. The four of them all seemed perfectly at ease. It was like they all belonged there and I was the intruder, awkward and out of place. I hadn’t bothered with shoes. The kitchen tile was cool against my soles, and the coffee almost too hot to drink.
“I was wondering if you were going to get up,” Midian said. “You aren’t Jewish or Muslim or anything fucked up like that, are you?”
“Excuse me?” I said.
In answer, he held up a package of bacon, his desiccated face taking on a querying expression.
