Unclean Spirits bsd-1

by M. L. N. Hanover

  And underneath that, I knew I had to try.

  “Okay, we’ll wait until tomorrow,” I said. “But after that, I’m killing him.”

  I called the hospital from my bedroom. The intake nurse had put my name and cell number in Aubrey’s chart along with the lie that I was family and his contact person. The person on the other end couldn’t tell me much except that Aubrey had been admitted and they were keeping him under observation. When they offered to have the doctor call me back when he had a minute, I said yes and let the call drop.

  All around me, Eric’s things loomed like ghosts. His shirts, his furniture, his magazines. I turned on my laptop, checked my e-mail, Googled unsuccessfully for anything that talked about gunshots being fired in the Commerce City suburb of Denver, and tried to think of something else I should look for, some piece of data that would turn the whole world right again. I wound up staring at the screen with a feeling that there wasn’t enough air in the room.

  I wanted to cry, but I was also tired of crying. I wanted to scream and throw things and make the world be fair, but I didn’t know what I meant by the world anymore. The fact was I’d let myself look forward to this day, to after-Coin. I’d let myself imagine a future where maybe I’d have friends, even a lover, and money and safety and options. Instead of that, I was locked down, hiding under Eric’s undetectable protections while the people who’d killed him walked free.

  The disappointment and despair were as familiar as coming home.

  I wasn’t sure until the second time that I’d actually heard the knock at the door. I said to come in. Ex walked in slowly, his hands in his pockets, his eyes shifting onto anything besides me sitting cross-legged on the bed. He leaned against the wall beside the dresser. From where I was, his face was both toward me and echoed in profile in the mirror. He looked like a magazine cover.

  “How serious are you about going after Coin?” he asked.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. After a few seconds, he seemed to find an answer in the silence. He drew a long breath and let it out slowly.

  “I think that you shouldn’t,” he said.

  “I kind of have to,” I said.

  “Aubrey.”

  “That’s part of it, yeah. I got him into this. If it wasn’t for me, he wouldn’t have been so vulnerable. He wouldn’t be where he is now.”

  “And you’re in love with him.”

  I looked down at my laptop screen.

  “Things with him really aren’t as straightforward as all that,” I said, trying to lighten the tone. “Aubrey and me…I don’t know. I have a problem dating someone with a wife. Maybe it’ll work out. Maybe it won’t. But I won’t know as long as he’s in a coma, right?”

  “You do what you have to do to protect the people you care about,” Ex said.

  I smiled and nodded because I thought he was talking about me and Aubrey. I thought the gray, sorrowful tone in his voice was him giving up on talking me out of trying again. I didn’t understand that he was actually apologizing until morning came and I found out Ex had gone and taken the guns and all of Eric’s books with him.

  Fifteen

  The rage felt good. I broke every plate in the kitchen, china shattering against the tile floor. I screamed every obscene word and phrase I knew and then started inventing. I tipped the chairs over and threw a full coffee cup against the living room wall, leaving a dark stain on the paint and a gouge in the plaster. My muscles felt warm and loose and I was about three inches taller than normal, the righteous anger puffing my body larger and stronger and making me sure of myself. I nursed it because I knew that when it was gone, there wouldn’t be anything left.

  Midian and Chogyi Jake didn’t try to stop me or restrain me or talk sense. Midian just sat on the couch, his wrists still bound, his belly still bandaged. Chogyi Jake followed me in silence, standing witness to my violence with the same impartiality he’d had during my meltdown at the shopping mall. I shouted at him a few times too, but he didn’t react at all, and it started to take the momentum out of my tantrum.

  When I lost that too, I sat on the stone hearth in front of the empty fireplace—my elbows on my knees, my head in my hands—and cried. The house was trashed. It was going to take hours just to clean it up. Part of me wanted to go get the broom and dustpan and start putting it all back together, if only to prove that I had a little control over something. Most of me just wanted to sit there and give up.

  “He meant well,” Chogyi Jake said. His voice was soft.

  “He’s a fucking asshole,” I managed between sobs.

  “He’s a fucking asshole who meant well.”

  I glanced up. Coming from anyone else, the amusement would have been an insult. Coming from Chogyi Jake, it seemed like compassion. Midian coughed, then winced. His bound hands went to his side. Shirtless, he looked like something from Jim Henson’s worst nightmare, his flesh ropy and dark and implausible. The bleeding had slowed, but whatever Coin had done to him was a long way from being healed. The same could be said of all of us.

  “I thought we couldn’t leave the house,” I said. “I thought it wasn’t safe.”

  “It isn’t,” Chogyi Jake said. “Ex is risking himself to keep you from harm.”

  “Or to keep me under his fucking control.”

  “Yeah, well,” Midian croaked. He always sounded like something in his throat was about to come loose. “Who’d have guessed a Jesuit priest would be paternalistic.”

  “Ex-priest,” I said.

  “Whatever.”

  “Rest,” Chogyi Jake said. “This will all be much better if we can regain some sense of our center.” His eyes were bloodshot. I should have been taking care of him, not the other way around.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I’m tired,” he said. From him, it was like an admission that he was near collapse. I realized that I didn’t know how deeply our failure with Coin had hurt him. I felt bad that I hadn’t thought to ask.

  The house had become a submarine, dead on the ocean floor. Everything looked the same, apart from the damage I’d done. But the air was different. The light that pressed in at the windows trapped us. Whatever magic Eric had put on the building to keep us safe, I could feel it weakening, and I didn’t know how much of that was true and how much was just my own growing fear and hopelessness.

  I sat in the kitchen, my stomach too knotted for food or coffee. Chogyi Jake went to each of the windows and doors, chanting and pouring out lines of rice and salt. Propping up the wards. Buying us time.

  I pictured Aubrey sitting across from me. His honey-colored hair. His bright eyes. His fingers closed around mine. In my imagination, all the anger and weirdness from our failed date was gone. I wanted badly for it to be true. Tears ran down my cheeks. I let them.

  “I blew it,” I said to my imaginary Aubrey. “I don’t know how I managed to fuck everything up again, just like always.”

  My hands were rubbing my thighs, the palms pressing into the denim hard enough for the friction to warm them. To hurt a little.

  “I think I have to run away now,” I said. “I’ve lost you and Ex. And Midian, kind of. I mean since he turns out to be one of the bad guys, that kind of takes him off my assets column. So…”

  My hand was tapping on my thigh, just a light movement, like a kid tugging at her mother’s dress. I watched my own fingers, my mind mostly empty, but aware of something happening in the background. Some thought that was struggling to bubble up from my subconscious.

  “I’m down to nothing,” I said. “Taking on Coin now is a hundred times dumber than when we did it before. I don’t have the books. I don’t have the rifles. I don’t have the magic bullets. I’ve lost…”

  I put my hand into the pocket of my jeans, looking for something without knowing quite what it was. It came back out with six hundred-dollar bills. Some of the change from my shopping spree. I looked down at the money. Benjamin Franklin looked back up at me.

  “I’v
e lost everything,” I said, but the conviction was gone from my voice. I shuffled the bills one after another. The thought wasn’t quite formed yet, but I was starting to sense a vague shape. Midian coughed.

  I stood up with the weird feeling that I was floating. My backpack was sitting by the front door. I unfastened the straps. Aubrey’s keys rested on top of the undifferentiated mess of my life.

  “Chogyi!” I shouted.

  I held the keys as he came down the hall. Midian was silent. I could feel him listening to us.

  “I need to go out,” I said. “How dangerous is that going to be?”

  “Very,” he said.

  “What about that thing where I didn’t set off the alarms in Midian’s apartment? Do you think that’ll make it harder for Coin to find me too?”

  Chogyi paused, considering. “If it’s difficult for one magic to see you, it may be a general effect. And you didn’t fire the rifle, so Coin’s wards haven’t interacted with you directly.”

  “You’re not sure, though.”

  “No.”

  I took a deep breath.

  “I’m going to risk it,” I said. “If I’m not back by nightfall, plan without me.”

  I almost expected him to stop me. I don’t know why. I trotted out to the minivan and headed north quickly, before I lost my nerve. Half an hour and a certain amount of dithering later, I parked on Brighton Boulevard where it bellied up next to the railroad tracks. I sat in the minivan, looking to the east, past the boxcars and toward the warehouses. I got out with a sense of unreality, locked the door behind me, and set out across the tracks. A homeless guy leaned against a huge black trash bag half a block down. I paused, remembering what Ex and Chogyi Jake had taught me. I drew up my qi, placing it just behind my eyes. The homeless guy was still just a homeless guy.

  Ten minutes later, I was crouching where I’d been before, the flaking wall against my back, my heart tripping over itself. My throat was dry. I leaned over to peer at the warehouse. The buses were gone. Only half a dozen cars remained. I looked for people, but didn’t see anyone. I made myself stay still as I scanned the ground. It had only been one day, and in a part of the city that stayed pretty much dead as a cod all weekend. The chances were that it would still be where I’d dropped it.

  I saw it. The rifle lay flat, its barrel still pointing roughly toward the warehouse. I inched forward, one eye on the warehouse, one on the rifle. The sun left it almost too hot to touch, but I got my hand around it and trotted back to the cover. I tried to remember how many times I’d fired while Coin walked back from the carnage. Three, I thought.

  One round still waited in the chamber, one in the magazine. Carefully, I lifted the cartridges out, feeling the carved designs squirm against my fingertips. I dropped the nasty little things into my backpack, tucked the rifle under my arm, and jogged back to the minivan.

  Despite Ex’s best efforts, I had two bullets made for killing riders. It was a thin victory, but I took pride in it. I drove back to the house with a growing sense of possibility.

  When I got there, I swept up the ruined dishes. I cleaned the coffee stain off with a rag and warm water while Midian sat on the couch, watching me with silent, dead eyes. I stood back, considering the wall. After a little scrubbing, the biggest problem was that the cleaned bit now looked brighter than the rest of the wall. I looked around, suddenly aware of all the little ways that the house had fallen into disrepair during the time I’d been in it.

  “Well,” I said. “Okay.”

  “Okay?” Midian asked.

  I looked at him, then went to the kitchen and came back with a carving knife in hand. The yellow eyes tracked me uncertainly.

  “If I let you go, are we going to be cool?” I asked.

  “You’re serious?” he asked. “I’m a fucking vampire, you know.”

  “Eric was willing to work with you,” I said. “And besides, I kind of like you. So are we going to be cool or not?”

  “As long as we want the same thing. After that, we’ll have to see how it plays out,” he said. And then, “Hey, kid. At least I’m not bullshitting you, right?”

  I answered by cutting the rope around his wrists. He rubbed the desiccated, time-dark flesh and looked up at me.

  “For someone who’s totally fucked, you’re looking pretty chipper,” he said.

  “Yeah, well,” I said. “I’m going to clean the place. You want to whip us up some dinner?”

  The vampire shrugged, then stood up.

  “I’m on it,” he said.

  I dug a vacuum cleaner out of a closet and set to getting all the coffee cup fragments out of the carpet. I threw out the tray Midian had been using for his dead cigarettes, gathered up all the dirty glasses and dishes that had found their way to the flat surfaces of the house, and brought them home to the dishwasher. The bright spot on the wall kept bothering me. There was only one thing, I decided, to be done about it. I got my laptop out from the bedroom, hooked it up to Eric’s modest stereo speakers, and cranked up some music. China Forbes sang an old Carmen Miranda tune, and I started washing down all the walls in the living room while I danced to it. About twenty minutes and two walls later, Chogyi Jake came out from the back, surprised to see something happening that wasn’t about ruining the flatware.

  “I’m not cleaning the main bathroom. I’ve been using my own,” I said over the section of “Dosvedanya Mio Bambino” that they lifted from “The Happy Wanderer.” “All that mess in there is you guys.”

  Chogyi Jake tilted his head in obeisance, just on the friction point between mocking and sincere. I went back to the walls and saw him a few minutes later, heading from the kitchen to the back bathroom with a bucket and a sponge. If Midian’s return to freedom was an issue, he didn’t bring it up.

  The music went from the Cuban-dance-band-meets-chamber-orchestra of Pink Martini to a mix CD I burned from my first-semester dorm mate’s music. The old familiar Goth-punk songs didn’t depress me the way they usually did. A scent equal parts butter, beef, and wine wafted out of the kitchen. When I finished with the walls, I went back and stripped the sheets off all the beds and gathered up my own old laundry. On my way through the kitchen toward the laundry room, I stopped to admire Midian’s upcoming feast.

  “It’s all tapas,” Midian said. “For one thing, we’re down to not enough groceries for anything big. And for another, you need new plates.”

  “Check. New plates,” I said with a nod. “I’m on it.”

  He shook his head in apparent disgust.

  “I think mood swings run in your family, kid,” Midian said, but he smiled when he said it.

  We ate dinner early, the sun still high in the late summer sky. I’d found a bottle of red wine that went pretty well with Midian’s spread. Cheese and tomatoes, strips of fried beef, toasted French bread with a spread of garlic and olives. The three of us sat around the kitchen table. Outside, the day was blisteringly hot.

  “So,” Midian said, looking at me through the red swirl of wine in his glass, “you want to tell me what happened to change totally fucked girl into Little Mary Sunshine? Because right now, I’m thinking bipolar.”

  “Working meditation is always useful,” Chogyi Jake said around a mouthful of garlic and olive.

  “I think we call that petty control over your immediate physical environment,” I said.

  “That’s as good a name as any,” Chogyi Jake said. “The thought is the same. It’s a way to bring yourself together. Cope with anxiety and fear.”

  “It’s not just about making the place smell less like a cheap bar? Which reminds me. No more smoking in the house.”

  “Hey!” Midian said, putting down his glass.

  “You want to go outside and see if the magic anticultist wards cover the backyard, that’s up to you,” I said. “But not in the house.”

  Midian frowned, considered for a moment, then nodded.

  “I’m not hog-tied and sleeping with a shotgun pointing at my skull,” he said. “I can d
eal with the trade-off. But back to the issue at hand.”

  “Well, I was feeling pretty screwed over,” I said. “And now I’m not.”

  “Yeah,” Midian said. “That’s the part that’s confusing me. Because from here it’s still looking pretty bleak.”

  I wiped my mouth with a paper napkin and leaned back in my chair. My backpack was on the counter by the phone book, and I reached for it while I spoke.

  “When that fucking asshole Ex took off,” I said in my best calm, reasonable voice, “I felt like he’d taken my only shot at dealing with Coin. I didn’t have anything anymore. You know? But today I realized that’s not true. I’ve got the two of you.”

  “Yeah,” Midian said. “And a powerful-as-fuck wizard trying to kill you. Is this a very special Blossom? Did I miss the part where we all learned and hugged and grew?”

  “I can still tie you back up,” I said. Midian raised his hands in mock surrender.

  “You were saying,” Chogyi Jake said.

  “Right. Well, the two of you,” I said. “And I have these.”

  I placed the rifle cartridges on the table with a soft tap. Midian moved back an inch or two, but Chogyi Jake scooped one up, rolling it in his fingers as he examined the graven symbols. When he looked over at me, his brows were raised, inviting me to go on.

  “And,” I said, “I have a lot of money…”

  Sixteen

  I left the house in the best outfit to survive the shopping fiasco: a deep blue blouse with black slacks and a jacket. With my hair up and a little tasteful eyeliner and lipstick, I thought I looked the consummate professional. Right up until I reached my destination.

  I drove carefully, one eye on the road, one on the rearview. Every time I stepped out of the house I felt like a field mouse watching for hawks. Every driver on the road might be one of Coin’s people. Every kid on the street could be watching for me. I hated it, but I didn’t let it stop me. I didn’t feel even vaguely safe until I got to my lawyer’s office.