Unclean Spirits Part 10

"Yeah," I said. "I know what you mean."

"I'm sorry," he said. "That's not very good first-date chatter, is it?"

"It's weird," I said.

"In all kinds of ways," Aubrey said. "Apart from all the rest of it, I keep trying to wrap my head around the idea that you're the girl Eric talked about. You aren't what I expected."

"How so?" I asked. "I mean, what kinds of things did he say about me?"

Aubrey thought about that for a second.

"He wasn't wrong about any of it. It's just the person he was talking about was a kid, and you aren't. He said you were smart. Mouthy. That his brother was about the worst match for you as a father that he could imagine," Aubrey said. "I didn't get the feeling that they particularly got along, Eric and your dad."

"Cats. Dogs," I said. "Our family has had its Jerry Springer moments."

"I heard a little bit about that. There was some static when you stopped believing in G.o.d."

"It didn't start out that way," I said. "It's where it ended up. Maybe it's where it had to end up."

"How'd it start, then?"

"I stopped believing in h.e.l.l," I said. "I kept thinking about it, and I just couldn't make it square up. My dad and the pastor and everyone, they kept talking about a G.o.d that loves people and wants us to be well and happy, and then they'd talk about all the terrible things that would happen to me forever if I p.i.s.sed him off. It just didn't make sense, you know? Why would someone that loves you make it so that you could be tortured forever just because you didn't do what he said? So I figured they were wrong. I figured that there wasn't really a h.e.l.l, because G.o.d loved us and he wouldn't do that to us."

"How old were you?"

"About twelve, I think," I said. "I tried to explain it to my dad, but he didn't think much of it. Eventually, I figured out that I shouldn't talk about it. But then I started thinking about other things that didn't make sense. I looked at the world, and it just seemed...I don't know...bigger than what they were telling me. And somewhere in there, I woke up and thought, you know, if Jesus died for my sins, that's not really something I asked him to do."

Aubrey laughed. It was a warm sound, and I relaxed a little, just hearing it.

"It sounds like you didn't lose faith in G.o.d as much as in your church," Aubrey said.

"When you stop believing in someone who's been telling you stories, you stop believing in the stories too," I said. "I wanted to believe, just for tactical reasons. It would have made my life a lot easier. But there you go."

The food came, and it was better than I'd expected. It turned out ropa vieja meant "old clothes" but was really shredded beef with some genuinely wonderful spices. We talked a lot about my family and Eric and behavior-changing brain cysts, which should have been gross but was actually really interesting. The background fear faded if it never quite went away. I had flan for desert. Aubrey just drank coffee.

"So," he said when I put down my fork, "you think Midian's cleaned them out yet?"

"Probably not yet," I said.

He smiled.

"Yeah," he said. "Me neither."

We went to a nightclub in an old church that played well-mixed techno. Despite my expectations, the Goth contingent was in the minority. Most of the people seemed like young-professional types and college students. I danced for a while, Aubrey near me, but not so close that we were really dancing together. Then the floor began to get crowded, the bodies of strangers pus.h.i.+ng us closer. My anxiety about the Invisible College and Coin and the nightmare was all still there, but instead of spoiling the night, it made things sharper. More real. I could see how someone could wind up addicted to danger.

I took a break, drank a martini, and went back out determined to put the uncertainty behind me. When we started dancing again, I took Aubrey's arms and put them around me. He went awkward and unsure for maybe two minutes, and then we were leaning into each other. The music didn't stop, and I didn't want it to.

The high Gothic vault above us glittered with mirror b.a.l.l.s and glowed with blue and orange lights just bright enough to give us our shadows. Stained-gla.s.s windows looked down on us. Aubrey's body was warm under my hands, and his face had a seriousness that suited it even more than his smiles. He was a good dancer once he relaxed, and it turned out so was I.

I had a second martini, and then another drink that I couldn't quite identify. When I started feeling light-headed, I went up to the rooftop deck for some air. The city lay spread out before me in the darkness, glittering black and orange. The night had cooled down to comfortable, the breeze warm against my skin like Denver itself exhaling gently against me. I heard Aubrey come up behind me; I could already recognize his footsteps. When he put his hand on my shoulder, I leaned back against him.

"It's beautiful," he said.

"Yeah."

"You are too."

I turned, lifting my mouth to his. He tasted like good whiskey and fresh coffee. He smelled like musk and spice. I rested my head against him and tried to catch my breath.

"You know," I said softly, "you never did show me your apartment."

It was a small place near the university. A low counter separated the kitchen from a living room hardly wide enough to hold the couch. The bedroom was smaller than either, a queen-size bed pressed into a corner to leave a path. But the floors were wood and had been polished until they glowed, and every spare surface was piled with books and unlit candles. When we got there, he started to say something, but I stopped him for fear of losing the moment.

There had been times I'd seen a naked man and thought it was exciting or funny or weird. Lying on Aubrey's half-made bed and seeing him lit only by the soft light that filtered in from the street was the first time I'd thought a man was beautiful. My body had a warm, relaxed feeling, the bruises and cracked ribs only a seasoning on a rising tide of pleasure. Aubrey's skin against mine was rough and sweet and perfect. His fingers were gentle, and even with st.i.tches holding my side together, I felt beautiful. I came once before he was in me. He had a three-pack of condoms in his bedside table in an unopened box. We went through two of them.

In the aftermath, sweat drying on my back and neck, my body still twitching, I listened to his breath as he fought against sleep. The clock at the bedside said it was a little after three in the morning. I was awake and as alert as I'd ever been. I slid out from under the bunched sheet and paused in the doorway to look at Aubrey stretched out, naked and spent, his eyes closed, one arm raised over his head. He looked strong and vulnerable both. He didn't know who I was. Not really. There were only stories that Eric had told him, a few shared days, and the fact that when I'd needed someone, I'd called him.

And when I'd called him, he'd been there. It was about as much as I knew of him too. So maybe it was enough.

My clothes were in knots on the floor, and I didn't bother trying to untangle them. I took myself to his bathroom, had a quick shower, and wrapped myself in his robe-soft green terry cloth that smelled like him. When I went to the kitchen, I didn't turn on the lights for fear of waking him. Between the shower and the deepest part of the night, it was cool enough that a cup of tea sounded good. I boiled some water, found a cup and a box of tea bags by the light of the gas flame, and took myself out to the couch while the tea steeped.

Aubrey's computer was an old laptop perched on the couch's armrest. I booted it up, found wireless service, and pulled up Firefox. I figured that if there was something in his work that had caught Eric's attention, it would be good for me to know. Besides which, I wanted to be able to talk to Aubrey about the things that were important to him without sounding like an idiot. I Googled Toxoplasma gondii and his name.

That's how I found out about his wife.

Eleven.

Her name was Kimberly. She had her PhD from UC Berkeley, several papers listed in the indexes of things like Clinical Microbiology and The Journal of Parasitology. From what I could tell, she was presently on staff with a research project out of Grace Memorial Hospital in Chicago. And she had cowritten at least two papers with Aubrey. One was called "Patterns in Parasitic Modification of Host Behavior," and the whole thing was posted on a newsgroup, ripped off from a magazine called Nature. The other one I found was "Cystic Extent as Behavioral Metric in T. gondii Infection."

In the pictures of her that I found online, she had shoulder-length auburn hair and surprisingly blue eyes. When she smiled, she looked a little like Nicole Kidman. I found a website with pictures of a rafting trip that she and Aubrey both went on a few years before. There were four other couples, but I kept staring at Aubrey, who was laughing, his arms around his wife. In the photograph, his wedding ring seemed to glow.

She was beautiful. She was well educated. She was married to the man I'd just f.u.c.ked. I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. I sat in the darkness, the robe catching on my st.i.tches when I breathed. The right thing to do was wake him up and ask him. Talk to him. Let him explain.

Instead, I pulled up Thunderbird and went through his e-mail. A quick search of his inbox listed a dozen messages from her in the last weeks. I read the last four, hoping they were talking about divorce. They weren't. The best thing I could say was they weren't love letters. The tone between them was intimate and friendly, talking about old friends and shared sources. The last one was from only two days ago. It was a short note saying that she was sorry to hear about Eric's death, and telling him to be careful. When I pulled up a copy of his previous year's tax returns, it listed his status as married.

I left the laptop on the couch. I managed to get all of my clothes up off his floor without waking him. I dressed in the bathroom with shaking hands. I thought I might cry or throw up, but I just pulled on my underwear and my skirt. The scoop top was badly wrinkled, but I wasn't going back in to steal one of Aubrey's s.h.i.+rts. If I looked like I was on the walk of shame, that was pretty much dead accurate. I pulled the top on, put my feet in my low, comfortable heels, and grabbed my purse on the way out.

The university district came to life slowly as the black night sky paled to blue. I found a coffee shop, where I ordered a cappuccino with two extra shots and a lousy pastry that I looked at more than actually ate. The fatigue of a sleepless night had started to wear on me. My side ached, my ribs ached, my knee was swelling again where the haugtrold had wrenched it. I'd been dancing on it. How stupid was that? I'd been hurt, almost killed, and I'd numbed the wounds with martinis and techno-pop in an all-out effort to get myself seduced by Aubrey, the married guy. Nice going, Jayne.

I wanted the coffee to be as bad as the pastry. I wanted bitter, tasteless blackness and half-soured cream, but it was actually pretty good. The barista was maybe a year younger than me, with a pierced tongue and nose. She put on a Ray Charles CD, raised her eyebrows at me to ask if I needed anything, and left me alone when I shook my head. I cupped the cappuccino in my hands and let the music and the dawn change the moment for me.

Okay, I felt stupid. Okay, I'd been humiliated. It wasn't the first time. It probably wouldn't be the last. I'd let myself fall for a guy who had lied to me, or at least omitted a great big honking truth that pretty much anyone would have seen as worthy of mention. I wondered whether I would have done anything different if I'd known he was married. I was fairly certain I would have.

On the upside, I still had the money and property Eric had left me. Midian and Ex and Chogyi Jake were all probably at my house right now, working on the plan to avenge Eric and break the Invisible College. I'd helped save Candace and Aaron from a rider. I just had to stop the bulls.h.i.+t, decide what was actually important to me, and take care of business. Going to bed with Aubrey had been a mistake. Mistakes happen. It was time to move on.

I thought back to my post-shopping breakdown with Chogyi Jake. It was possible that I was a little more vulnerable and raw than I wanted to admit. Going for Aubrey-going for anyone-was a normal kind of screwup to make. Lonely little girl reaches out to the first kind face that wanders by. Pathetic? Okay, I could accept that. I just wouldn't let it happen again.

I wondered if Ex and Chogyi Jake knew about Kimberly. Ex, maybe. It would explain why he'd seemed so p.i.s.sed off at the two of us going out. I thought Chogyi Jake would have warned me. Maybe. Or maybe not. They were quick enough to hide the bodies of the people I'd helped kill, but maybe that didn't really put them on my side.

Whatever my side was.

"f.u.c.k you, Aubrey," I said to myself. "I needed a stand-up guy, and I got you instead. How fair is that?"

People came in and out of the coffee shop, mostly students, I guessed. The barista worked her machine in bursts of steam and the gurgling of espresso. Ray Charles calling his friend to go get stoned segued to a cover of "Yesterday" that pointed out how clean and soulless Paul McCartney really sounded. It was nice sharing a little morning pain with Ray, if only because he put me in perspective. I finished my coffee, left the pastry half eaten, and headed out to the street. It took a while to find a taxi, but I managed, and twenty minutes later I was home.

"Sweet f.u.c.king Jesus," Midian said as soon as I walked in. "I figured you for dead."

"Not dead," I said, and tossed my purse on the couch. "Where is everyone?"

"Out looking for you," Midian said. "Aubrey came by a couple hours ago looking like someone stole his d.i.c.k and said you'd gone missing."

"Well, you can tell him I'm back," I said. "I need to get into some clean clothes."

"Not such a good date, eh?" Midian asked. It was hard to tell with his ruin of a voice, but I thought he was a little amused. I didn't answer.

I'd changed into jeans and one of Eric's white b.u.t.ton-down s.h.i.+rts when I heard Aubrey and Ex arrive. Their voices were harsh, like they'd been fighting. I stretched, summoned up my righteous anger, and headed out to take the bull by the horns.

Ex was livid. He wheeled on me as soon as I appeared in the living room.

"What exactly was that little stunt supposed to-"

"Jayne," Aubrey said at the same time, "we need to talk about-"

I put my palm out toward Ex, shutting him down, and turned to Aubrey.

"We need to talk?" I asked.

"Yes," he said. "Please, I understand what happened, and I know what it seems like, but-"

"Are you and Kimberly divorced?" I asked.

Aubrey blushed and looked down at his feet. Ex's jaw actually dropped. I'd always thought that was just a figure of speech. Apparently he hadn't known.

"Aubrey?" I said.

"We're separated," he said.

"Not divorced," I said.

"No."

"So then still married."

"Yes."

"And you didn't tell me," I said.

"No," Aubrey said. "I should have."

"Okay," I said. "We've talked."

I brushed past Ex and into the kitchen. It was probably only my own embarra.s.sment and humiliation that made me read Ex's expression as delight. When he and Aubrey followed me in a moment later, they were both perfectly sober. Midian was sitting at the kitchen table, the telephone handset to his ear.

"Jake," he said, pointing at it. "He put me on hold. It's okay, though. You two were loud enough back there I followed everything."

"Good," I said. "It's Friday morning, almost ten o'clock. This time tomorrow, Randolph Coin's going to be dead. Let's try to focus on that, okay?"

"Fine by me," Midian said, and then, into the handset, "Yeah. She's back. Everything's fine, or, well...f.u.c.k it, it's close enough. Get your a.s.s back to the ranch here, and we'll finish up. Yeah, what?"

He paused, frowned, and shook his head.

"No. If they don't have yellow onions, I'll think of something else. Just bring me the rest of it," he said, and then put the handset back in its cradle. "Since he was out anyway, I asked him to pick up some stuff. Didn't figure we'd be going out for dinner."

"Yeah, probably not," I said. "Let's go over the plan again."

No one suggested anything else. I took out the maps and schematics, and Ex walked through the whole thing again, quizzing the three of us. Aubrey answered his questions in a clipped, hard voice and sat with his arms crossed. When Chogyi Jake appeared with a bag of groceries, Ex made him go through the whole thing by himself while Midian made ham sandwiches with fresh tomatoes and hot mustard for lunch. My brain was a storm of anger, betrayal, and humiliation, but I forced myself to follow the details of the plan. Midian and Chogyi Jake at the southeast edge of the property. Ex in his car to the north, me in among the railroad tracks to the west, and Aubrey in his minivan to the south. Three different angles, so that no matter where Coin stood, at least one of us would have a clear shot. When Chogyi Jake and Midian had drawn Coin out past his protections, Midian would give the signal by raising both hands. If for any reason he couldn't do that, Chogyi Jake would drop to the ground. The plan to go out and look at the place physically seemed to have fallen by the wayside in the day's drama. I didn't bring it up.

The air between me and Aubrey should have bent with the tension, but Chogyi Jake either didn't notice anything or, more likely, dedicated himself to ignoring it. Anything that Ex felt was covered by his drill sergeant att.i.tude.

I felt my mind starting to get fuzzy at about one o'clock. I'd been up since eight in the morning the day before, too excited by the twin prospects of going shooting and my ill-fated date to sleep in. That put me at about twenty-nine hours awake.

"I'm going to crash for a while," I said. "Knock if something happens."

The silence that accompanied me out of the kitchen told me that the house would have to be on fire before anyone disturbed me. That suited me just fine.

I stripped and crawled into bed, one pillow under my head, one over it to block out light and sound. My muscles seemed to vibrate with fatigue. This time tomorrow, it'll all be over, I told myself. I'll be safe and rich and G.o.d as my witness, I'll be straight the f.u.c.k out of this city. I could go back to ASU. Paying tuition out of pocket would be easy. I could get my degree. I could transfer to some other university. h.e.l.l, I could probably buy my way into the Ivy League with a few weighty donations here and there.

It was a strange thought. In a way, everything was ending tomorrow. The shot that took out Coin and broke the Invisible College also freed me. No more tattooed ninja hit squads breaking down my doors. No more need for bodyguards like Ex and Chogyi Jake. Or Aubrey.

I imagined myself going back. Driving up to the dorms in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce, maybe. I pictured Cary's reaction, seeing me rising like a phoenix from the ashes and salted earth I'd left behind me. I slid from that to going home, paying off the mortgage on my parents' house, buying my mother a car, telling my father that I wouldn't go to church on Sunday if I didn't want to, and watching him realize that his power over me was gone. Even his power to drive me away. Somewhere in it, I had become the primary funding behind the hospital in Chicago, dressed in a good Armani suit with Nicole Kidmanesque Kimberly asking my permission to go ahead with her work. I didn't notice the s.h.i.+ft between daydream and dream until I found myself in the nightmare of wings and Coin's ma.s.sive eye and woke with a shout.

The door thumped, someone throwing a shoulder against it. Someone was calling my name. Ex, I thought, the last shreds of dream fading. Ex was screaming my name. But at least he was p.r.o.nouncing it right.

"I'm okay!" I shouted back. "Leave the door alone. I'm fine."

"What the f.u.c.k is going on in there?"

"Bad dream," I said. "I'm fine. I'll be out in a minute. Just calm down."

I'd been asleep almost four hours. I hauled myself up out of bed, vague and hungover. My skin felt sticky with rank sweat. My period had started a week early. I needed a shower.

"You're all right?" Ex's voice sounded like he was expecting me to lie. "Was it Coin again?"