Darker Angels

“Everything fell apart because no one was in charge. Myself, I thought that since Karen was the one that called us in, she would at least be consulted before we went in and screwed everything up.”

“What is your problem, Ex?” Aubrey said. “You’re talking like everything that’s gone wrong here is Jayne’s fault.”

“Well, there’s a hypothesis,” Ex said, his lip rising in a sneer. “Why don’t we explore that.”

Something in my brain hit overload, and the pain and shame and sorrow all shifted into rage. Ex was attacking me, kicking me when I was down. I was betrayed.

“Why don’t we not,” I said. “This was a bad idea. The postmortem can wait.”

“And now, just like that,” Ex said and snapped his fingers, “you’re the boss again.”

At the bar behind Chogyi Jake, an older man turned to look at us. The volume of our conversation was starting to rival the television. My hands were on my knees, fingers digging into my legs.

“Why are you doing this?” I said, keeping my voice down.

“I understand that you wanted to be like Karen,” Ex said. “Karen’s a very accomplished, experienced, wise woman. She’s in control of her own sexuality in a way that nobody who’s barely out of high school could be.”

“My sexuality? How the fuck did my sexuality get into this?” I said, my voice buzzing with anger. “Jesus! Who’s feeding you these lines? Is this Karen, because I’m pretty sure she already chewed me out.”

“Just let me finish,” Ex said. “I think you owe me that much. Karen is powerful, and she’s sure of herself. It’s perfectly understandable that someone who wasn’t would overcompensate.”

My rage topped out. It felt like calm. The exhaustion of travel, the humiliation of failure, the hurt of Ex’s ambush-all of it fell away like shrugging off a jacket. The sound of the bar and television faded. I think I laughed.

“Walk away from this table,” I said.

“No. You owe me at least-”

“Ex, you’re fired. Now walk away,” I said. All of us were silent for a heartbeat. “That powerful enough for you?”

Ex went pale, then flushed red, then pushed back from the table and stalked out into the terminal, his black shirt and pale ponytail vanishing into the river of humanity. None of us spoke. I finished Aubrey’s rum-and-coke, walked to the nearest restroom, and sat in the stall with my head in my hands until it was time to board the plane.

Ex didn’t make the flight.

I WOKE up in an unfamiliar room. The bed smelled like dust. The ceiling was canted oddly, like the dormer of an old house. Cream-colored paint took on the orange of the soft, translucent curtains. I didn’t know who or where I was, and I had the sense that I didn’t want to. I lay on my pillow, savoring the moment of sleep-induced amnesia. Something on my arm itched-a wide, ugly cut. And then like a lead weight pressed on my sternum, it all came back.

We’d reached the Savannah house after midnight. An envelope with the keys had been waiting for us under the front mat. We hadn’t spoken on the flight. We barely talked on the way in. I’d walked through the house once to quell my only semirational fear that something or someone might be hiding in it, then found a bedroom, stripped down to T-shirt and underwear, curled up, and collapsed. My clothes were still in the pile by the door, and I pulled on my jeans before venturing out.

The bathroom was just down the hall, and someone had laid out my travel pack and robe. I showered, brushed my hair, brushed my teeth. All the little rituals that reminded me I was human. Wrapped in the soft terry cloth of my bathrobe, I made my way down a flight of white-painted stairs and into the scent of bacon and coffee and the sound of ecstatic voices raised in song and filtered through a cheap radio.

The kitchen was all done in yellow tile and oiled hardwood. A slight haze of smoke hung in the air, a remnant of the pan-fried bacon still draining grease onto folded paper towels. The radio on the sideboard shone silver and sang gospel. My stomach woke with a physical lurch.

“Hello?” I said. “Anyone here?”

“Jayne!” Aubrey’s voice called from the back hall. Two sets of footsteps came toward me; Aubrey and Chogyi Jake. Reflexively, I wondered where Ex was, then remembered. I plucked a strip of bacon off the pile just as they came in.

“She wakes,” Aubrey said, moving in for a brief hug that was only made awkward by the bacon in my fingers and the brief but intense pain of my broken ribs. Chogyi Jake opened the refrigerator and took out a couple of eggs. In the moment before the door closed, I caught a glimpse of orange juice and bread.

“Someone’s been shopping,” I said. “What time is it?”

Aubrey shut off the radio and sat up on the counter.

“Seven thirty,” he said.

“Wow,” I said. “I didn’t sleep much.”

Chogyi Jake and Aubrey exchanged a look.

“What?” I said.

“It’s Sunday,” Chogyi Jake said. “You’ve been asleep for over thirty hours.”

“Oh,” I said, then, “Wow. I slept a lot. What did I miss?”

“Very little,” Chogyi Jake said. “We did a rough inventory of the house. I bought some groceries. There’s cable television and broadband access.”

“We watched a couple movies last night,” Aubrey said. “We needed to wind down a little.”

“Good,” I said. Chogyi Jake cracked the eggs onto a skillet where they sizzled and popped. “And you’re both all right?”

“A few nightmares,” Aubrey said. “More Marinette fallout. Nothing I can’t handle.”

“Fine,” Chogyi Jake said. “Thank you for asking.”

“No word from Ex, then?” I said, already knowing the answer. Aubrey shook his head, then looked down. I could see the banked anger in the way he held his shoulders and the set of his jaw. Chogyi Jake flipped the eggs.

“I’m going to go put the tools up,” Aubrey said.

“Tools?” I said.

“There’s a sealed closet we’re trying to take a look at,” he said. “May be nothing. Or it may be where Eric stored something. More data for the wiki.”

“No rest for the wiki-ed,” I agreed. “Or, y’know, maybe a little.”

Aubrey moved toward me, hesitated, then kissed the crown of my head, and walked back along the hallway. I watched him go with a sense of regret I couldn’t quite explain.

“How’s he doing really?” I asked softly enough that my voice didn’t carry over the eggs.

“He’s wounded. We all are,” Chogyi Jake said. “He tries to protect you from the worst of it. The rider shook his confidence in himself.”

“My fault again,” I said.

“If you say so.”

“Ex would say it for me,” I said.

“He might have,” Chogyi Jake said, then killed the fire and lifted the eggs onto a plate for me. “I am going to betray a confidence. I don’t like to, but it’s the choice I’ve made.”

“Um. All right,” I said, reaching for a fork.

“Ex has certain feelings for you that he has tried to deny,” he said.

My fork stopped on its way toward the eggs. I stared at Chogyi Jake.

“Certain feelings?” I said.

“He’s a complicated man,” Chogyi Jake said. “His previous experiences with women have been scarring.”

“Wait a minute. Ex has a thing for me?”

“He does. And when he attacked you at the airport, it wasn’t what it seemed.”

“So what was it?”

“He needed your permission to leave,” Chogyi Jake said. He paused for a moment, and I had the impression that he was gathering himself for some particularly unpleasant chore. “He and I spoke about Karen when we first went to New Orleans. We both knew the pressure that she would put on you, just by being who she is. He played on that. He needed you to push him away because it was the only way he could leave.”

You don’t have to apologize to anyone, Ex said from my memory. Meaning you’re good enough, Jayne. You’re fine just the way you are. Of course he’d been saying I love you. I closed my eyes.

“Well fuck,” I said.

“When Aubrey was taken by Marinette…”

“I asked Ex to save the guy he most wanted to see out of the picture,” I said. “He sucked it up, did the right thing, and then I fell into bed with Aubrey.”

“You did,” Chogyi Jake said. “What Ex said wasn’t a reflection of your capabilities, or even of his real opinion of you.”

“But he and Karen were lovers… they probably still are…”

“He took up with Karen after he’d just found you and Aubrey in bed together,” Chogyi Jake said. “Karen was there, she was… available. I don’t believe he loves her, and I don’t believe she loves anyone.”

“You really don’t like her much, do you?” I said, putting down my fork and rubbing my eyes with the palms of my hand.

“No,” he said, thoughtfully. “I really don’t.”

“Does Aubrey know?”

“That I don’t like Karen?”

“About Ex.”

“Ah. No, I didn’t see a reason to tell him. Ex would be humiliated and hurt if he knew I’d told you. But it didn’t seem to serve you or Ex to keep the secret.”

“And so you broke your promise not to tell,” I said.

“I made that choice, yes.”