Darker Angels

“Unh?” I grunted into the receiver.

“Eric, it’s Karen. I’ve found it!” a woman said. “It’s in New Orleans, and I know where it’s going next. There’s a little girl with Sight, and she says her sister is the next target. I don’t know how long I’ve got. I need you.”

It was a lot to take in. I hesitated, and the woman misinterpreted my silence.

“Okay, what’s it going to take?” she demanded. “Name your price, Heller.”

“Actually,” I said. “That’s complicated. I’m Jayne. Eric’s niece. He’s… um… he passed on last year.”

It was Karen Black’s turn to be silent. I gave her a moment to let it sink in. I skipped the parts about how he’d been murdered by an evil wizard and how several of Eric’s old friends, along with a policeman who owed me a favor and a vampire with a grudge against the same wizard, had teamed up to mete out summary roadside justice. I could get back to that later if I needed to.

“Oh,” she said.

“Yeah. He left me pretty much everything. Including the cell phone. So… hi. Jayne here. Anything I can do to help out?”

The pause was longer this time. I could guess pretty well at the debate she was going through. I gave her a hand.

“This is about riders, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “So you know about them?”

“Abstract spiritual parasites. Come in from Next Door or the Pleroma or whatever you want to call it,” I said as I walked carefully back to the bed. “Take over people’s bodies. Have weird-ass magical powers, kind of like the magic humans can do, but way more effective. Yeah, I’ve got the For Dummies book, at least.”

“All right,” she said. “Did Eric… did he even mention me?”

“No,” I said. “Sorry.”

The woman on the other end of the line took a breath as I got back under the covers and pulled the pillow behind my back. I heard Aubrey cough from one of the bedrooms down the hall.

“All right,” she said. “My name is Karen Black. I used to be a special agent for the FBI. About ten years ago, I started tracking down what I thought was a fairly standard serial killer. It turned out to be a rider. We caught the horse, a man named Joseph Mfume, but the rider switched bodies.”

“So not so easy to track,” I said.

“No,” she agreed. “My supervisors wanted me to stop. They didn’t believe there was anything to it. And… well, X-Files was still popular back then. There were jokes. I was referred for psychiatric counseling and taken off active duty. I resigned and went on with the investigation myself. Eric and I crossed paths a few times over the years, and I was impressed with his efficiency. I’ve found where the rider is going to strike next, and I need help to stop it. I thought of Eric.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Can you help me?”

I rubbed my eyes with my free hand until little ghosts of false light danced in my vision.

“Hell if I know,” I said. “Let me talk to my guys and call you back.”

“Your guys?”

“I kind of have a staff,” I said. “Experts.”

I could hear her turning that over too. I wondered how much she’d known about Eric’s financial situation. For a man with enough money to buy a small third-world nation, he hadn’t flaunted it; I hadn’t even known until he left me the whole thing. My guess was Karen hadn’t expected Eric to have a staff.

“I don’t know how much time I have,” she said.

“I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Promise. We’re in Athens right now, so it may take me a few days to get to New Orleans.”

“I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s not that long a flight,” Karen said, impatience in her tone. “You could drive it in eight hours or so.”

It took me a second to process that.

“Not Georgia Athens,” I said. “Athens Athens. Cradle of civilization.”

“Oh,” she said, and then, “Oh fuck. What time is it there?”

I snuggled down under my covers and looked at the bedside clock.

“One in the morning,” I said.

“I woke you up,” she said. “I am so sorry…”

Amid a flurry of apologies and promises to return calls, Karen and I let each other go. I dropped the phone next to the clock and stared at the ceiling.

The last six months had offered me a wide variety of bedroom ceilings. The first at Eric’s house in Denver when I was first thrown into the world of riders and possession and magic. Then the dark wood and vigas of an old ranch outside Santa Fe, then a place in New Haven with honest-to-God mirrors over the bed and red silk sheets, followed by a gray-green retro-seventies number in a rentcontrolled apartment building in Manhattan that was so small I got hotel rooms for the guys. There had been a much more civilized beige with a little unprofessional plaster repair near the corner in a townhouse in London, and now the bare white with deep blue notes that said this Greek villa had been a full-on tourist trap rental before Eric bought it.

The guys had been with me the whole time, apart from a couple weeks when Aubrey had gone back to his former job at the University of Colorado to tie up some loose ends on his research. In the long, complex process of inventorying the property and resources Eric had left behind, we hadn’t stayed anyplace more than two months running, and most considerably less. None of it seemed like home to me, and from experience, I knew I could stare at the dim white above me for hours and still not sleep.

With a sigh, I got up, pulled on my robe, and made my way downstairs to the kitchen. A newspaper on the cheap yellow Formica table yelled out headlines in an alphabet I didn’t understand. I poured myself a bowl of cereal with little bits of dried fruit and added milk that tasted subtly different from the 2% I’d grown up with.

I heard the door of one of the other bedrooms open and soft footsteps come down the stairs. After so many months together, I could differentiate Aubrey from Ex from Chogyi Jake without looking.

“Why do you think it is,” I asked, “that someone can on the one hand be talking you into a fight against evil spirits and semi-demonic serial killers, but then on the other get embarrassed when they figure out they woke you up to do it?”

“I don’t know,” Aubrey said as he sat down across from me. “Maybe he just didn’t want to be rude.”

“She didn’t want to be rude,” I said. “Sexist.”

Aubrey smiled and shrugged. Aubrey was beautiful the way a familiar leather jacket is beautiful. He wasn’t all muscles and vanity, he didn’t spend hours on his wardrobe and hair. His smile looked lived-in, and his body was comfortable and reassuring and solid. He always reminded me of Sunday mornings and tangled sheets.

We’d been lovers once for about a day before I found out that-point one-he was married and- point two-I have a real hangup about sleeping with married men. I still had uncomfortably pleasant erotic dreams about him sometimes. I also had divorce paperwork in my backpack, filled out by his wife with her signature and everything. I hadn’t told him about that. It was one of those things that was so important and central to my life that putting it off had been very easy. Every time a chance came up to talk about it, I’d been able to find a reason not to.

“What’s the issue?” he asked, and I startled a little, my still-exhausted mind interpreting the question as being about the divorce papers. I pulled myself together.

“There’s an ex-FBI agent in New Orleans. She’s on the trail of a rider that’s a serial killer,” I said, and yawned. “Are there a lot of those?”

“Depends on who you ask,” he said. “There are a lot of serial killers who claim to be demons or victims of demonic possession. You remember the BTK killer? His pastor said right through the end that the voice coming out of the guy wasn’t the man he knew. There are some people who think that all serial killers are possessed. Serial arsonists, too. Is that the last of the milk?”

“No, there’s another whole bottle in the fridge,” I said around my spoon. “So is it true? Are they all riders?”

“Probably not,” Aubrey said. “I mean some serial killers blame porn or bad parenting or whatever. And you can be mentally ill without there being a rider in your head. But by the same token, I’d bet that some are.”

“You’d buy it? This FBI lady has been tracking down a body-hopping serial killer, she’s managed to get one step ahead of it, and needs help. Sounds plausible?”

“We’ve all seen weirder,” Aubrey said as he measured out enough coffee for three of us. Chogyi Jake always opted for tea. “Do you have any reason to think it’s not on the level?”

“You mean is it the bad guys setting a trap? I don’t have any reason to think so,” I said. “Also no reason not to, though. I could get a background check on her, I guess.”

“Might be wise.”

I didn’t hear Ex coming. He just breezed in from the hallway. Even the T-shirt and sweats he slept in were black. His hair was loose, a pale blond flow that softened his features. Usually he wore it back.

“Since we apparently aren’t sleeping tonight, what are we talking about?” he asked as he pulled out a chair and sat at the table.

“Serial killers, demonic possession,” I said. “Same as always.”

“Jayne got us a job,” Aubrey said.

I ran down the basics again while I finished eating and Ex and Aubrey started. The coffee smelled good-rich and reassuringly heavy-so I had a mug myself. I had to give it to Greece, the coffee was great. Ex pulled back his hair into a severe ponytail, tying it with a length of leather cord while I talked. The softness left his face.

“Officially, it’s one out of seven,” Ex said when I finished. “Or that’s what Brother Ignatius said back when I was in seminary. A little under fifteen percent of serial killings are the result of possession.”

“Creepy,” I said.

Aubrey and Ex looked at each other across the table. I could tell there was some kind of subterranean masculine conversation going on, and it annoyed me that I was being left out.

“What?” I said. “It’s creepy. What?”