Unclean Spirits bsd-1

by M. L. N. Hanover

  We found another stairwell and Kim started down it, but I caught her hand.

  “Up,” I said. “Let them pass us by.”

  She nodded. We ascended. We’d gotten a floor and a half up when the door we’d come through burst open. I froze and then slowly turned back, ready to launch myself at any attacker. But the wizards’ footsteps retreated, heading down toward the first floor. Some grunting marked when they ran into some poor bystander on the stairs, and then we heard a metal door slamming open. The sound was so assaultingly loud, the echoes in the concrete shaft so disorienting, that my focus failed, my qi dissipated, and my senses began to return to normal.

  I was shaking. Behind and above me, Kim’s breath was ragged.

  “Let’s go find another stairwell.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  I led the way up another flight of stairs, but the door there required a pass code, so we kept going up. On the sixth floor, we got lucky. A nurse was going out the door, and we caught it before it could close. We stepped into the new ward, walking quickly but not running. We got a couple stares, but no one tried to stop us. I put my hands in my pockets, lifted my chin, and tried to look like I knew where I was going. We passed rooms with men and women lying in bed, the low-level murmur of televisions punctuated by groans and weeping.

  As we turned a corner, Kim took a quick double-step to come next to me. At the end of the corridor, an exit sign glowed green.

  “I shouldn’t have insisted that we come here,” she said. It wasn’t phrased as an apology. It was like she was telling me some trivial fact I might not have known.

  “I shouldn’t have let you,” I said, and we reached the new stairwell. I opened the door with a clank, cutting off whatever she’d begun to say next. I went down the stairs quickly, leaning over at each landing to look for hands on the ascending rails below us. If there was anyone there, they were being quiet.

  “They’ll be watching for us,” she said. “They’ll be watching the exits.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “You have a plan?”

  “I’m thinking of one,” I said. It wasn’t true. Between immediate animal panic, concentration required by my still-unfamiliar magic, and anger at Kim, I hadn’t come up with anything more sophisticated than get down and get out. I wasn’t about to tell her that.

  We got to the ground floor and stepped out into the wide lobby from a passage I had never noticed on my previous visits. The place was built like a labyrinth, which was probably why we’d gotten this far without being discovered. Weird architecture and blind luck weren’t going to help much now. Three men stood at the information desk, talking into cell phones, but their eyes didn’t have the veiled awareness that comes from being in a conversation. They were looking for something. For us. Two were young men, broad across the shoulders and thick in the neck. The third man was smaller, older, with his back to us. When he turned, I wanted to scream.

  Power radiated from Coin like heat from a fire. His face was set in an expression of cold concentration. Bubbling panic rose up in my throat. He was here. He was waiting for me. I smelled something like burning.

  “What?” Kim murmured. “What is it?”

  I hoped Midian had been right when he’d said I was hard to notice. I took her elbow and angled her down a side hallway. I didn’t dare look back, but no one seemed to be coming after us. We passed a gift shop full of stuffed animals and snacks, the cashier looking at us incuriously as we passed.

  “Do you think they’ve spotted your car?” Kim asked.

  “Probably,” I said.

  “My things are in it.”

  “Yes, they are.”

  We turned left. Signs offered us paths to the emergency room, the bathrooms, security. I walked toward the emergency room and slid through a set of doors marked HOSPITAL PERSONEL ONLY. Curtained cubicles lined the wide room, the sounds of crying and pain making a hellish background. No one challenged us. We weren’t an obvious problem, and we were in the land of great big obvious problems. I peeked past the intake nurse and toward the lobby.

  The big man from Aubrey’s room was sitting by the emergency entrance, his expression deathly grim, black eyes still starting to form where I’d kicked him. Two men and a thin-faced woman were sitting with him. I backed up. The trap was sprung, and we weren’t getting anywhere. A soft chiming sound announced the arrival of an oversize elevator. I was trembling.

  The wide steel doors slid open, and four paramedics pushed out a gurney. The woman being wheeled past was drenched in blood, her neck encased in a stabilizing collar like something from an Egyptian tomb. The shreds of her jeans trailed after her like rags. Her eyes were blank. The paramedics moved quickly, professionally, into the emergency room. The doors clapped closed behind them even before the elevator began to close. The feeling hit my gut, a fist of fear and hope that tried to take my breath away.

  “Come on,” I said, pulling Kim into the elevator.

  “What are…”

  “That one,” I said, nodding to the injured woman. “She came from upstairs.”

  The doors hissed closed and I slid my fingers over the worn plastic buttons until the numbers stopped getting higher. There was one unnumbered button at the top. It was marked H. I pushed it.

  “Medevac,” Kim said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “There’s a helicopter up there.”

  The elevator lurched, dropped a few inches, and then started to rise. I willed it to go faster, but the numbers continued their stately progress.

  “He’s your lover, isn’t he?” Kim asked.

  “What?”

  “Aubrey? He’s your lover.”

  “We went out once,” I said.

  “I still care for him,” Kim said. Her chin jutted out, but her eyes were all apology. I stared at her, and a floor later she looked down. “I haven’t told him that since…since we split. He doesn’t know.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I thought I should tell someone. In case we’re about to die.”

  I didn’t mean to take her hand. It just seemed the right thing in the moment.

  “I can see that,” I said, and then, “I was really hoping to have a little more time before we got into the heavy emotional intimacy thing.”

  “Me too,” Kim said, and shrugged. “Sorry.”

  “It’s a fallen world. You do what you can.”

  The elevator lurched again, stopped. We turned toward the doors together, our hands still clasped. When they opened, the helipad was before us, the beacons burning red in the darkness. The transport helicopter was still there, two men in uniform standing before it in obvious conversation. No wizards descended upon us. No sense of riders pressing in from Next Door assailed us.

  I didn’t know what I was going to say, but as we walked forward, Kim dropped my hand, squared her shoulders, and stepped forward.

  “You,” she barked as we came near. “You’re the pilot?”

  The nearer man’s head snapped straight. His companion edged away as if hoping to avoid the conversation.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  Kim dug in her purse for a moment, then handed the man an identification card. I saw her picture on it and the words Grace Memorial Hospital. The place she worked in Chicago, I thought.

  “I’m here consulting on a very delicate transplantation,” she said. “I need you to take us to the airport.”

  The pilot glanced down at the identification card, back over Kim’s shoulder at me, and then down at the card again. He was shaking his head even before he spoke.

  “I can’t do that, ma’am. We’re a medevac unit, not a transport. I’m not allowed.”

  “It’s important. A child could die,” Kim said, and I felt something when she did. A prickling on my skin like someone had brushed me with a feather. Even with the August heat still radiating from the tarmac, I had goose bumps. The pilot shuddered, nodded, and turned to his helicopter, then paused.

  “There isn’t room for you in
the cockpit, ma’am,” he said. “We’re gonna have to strap you two down.”

  Kim paled, but nodded. I saw her swallow. The pilot waved to his companion, and the two trotted to the helicopter’s sides to prepare little fiberglass pods, just big enough for a dreadfully injured person.

  “Magic?” I asked. “That was a cantrip?”

  “It isn’t hard,” Kim said. “People want to do what they’re told. Men especially want to help women, and God knows you’re pretty enough that he wanted to show off. I just…nudged him a bit. It’s not like telling him we aren’t the droids he’s looking for.”

  I laughed, relief giving the sound a warmth I was surprised to feel. Her smile was less wintry.

  “I don’t think I’ve said thank you,” I said. “For coming. For helping me with this. For helping Aubrey.”

  Her expression went thin and brittle. It would have been as if the moment’s vulnerability in the elevator had never happened, except that I saw something softer in her eyes.

  “If we survive all this, I’m going to kill Aubrey myself,” she said. “Or at least wound him seriously.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “Of course, we’re not out of here yet. The helicopter could still get shot down by the Invisible College.”

  “Cheerful thought,” Kim said, and the pilot waved us over.

  They strapped me in first, wide canvas bands with industrial steel buckles cinching me in against the aluminum frame. A fiberglass pod closed over me like a coffin; a small clear space let me look out and up at the swimming stars overhead. The pilot climbed into the cockpit and started up the engines. I could feel it through the frame of the helicopter when his companion closed the pod on Kim’s side. The engine whined, and the rotors began to turn. The noise was so overwhelming it was like silence.

  Like a balloon with its string cut, we rose into the sky.

  Nineteen

  Where’s the minivan?” Midian said.

  “We lost it,” I said.

  “You lost it?”

  The taxi was pulling away from the curb. I closed the door and put my backpack on the coat hanger. The house smelled like old laundry and popcorn. Kim stared at Midian and then, shaking her head, excused herself and headed down the hall toward the bathroom.

  “How do you lose a minivan?” Midian said as I walked into the living room.

  “There we were running down the highway, and I said ‘Holy shit, Kim, I think I know why we’re getting so tired.’ Look, if it’s important, I’ll buy us another one.”

  Chogyi Jake emerged from the back. It might only have been that I’d been out in the world or that I was still coming off the adrenaline overload of my time in the hospital, but I thought he looked worse than when I’d left. The strain of holding up Eric’s protections was showing in his face. I remembered a news program I’d seen when I was a kid with men in yellow rain slickers piling sandbags against a flood. They’d had the same exhausted eyes.

  “I was starting to get worried,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “So was I. It’s okay, though. We’re here.”

  “What happened?”

  It was easier for me to retell the story to Chogyi Jake than to Midian. He listened intently and without comment. I left out how Kim had insisted on going and that I’d caved, making it sound instead like it had been a mutual lousy decision. I also skipped the part where she told me she was still in love with Aubrey. Kim came back into the room about the time I got to the part where the helicopter landed at the airport and the two of us went to look for a taxi. I saw her glance at Midian, her face perfect for the poker table.

  “You don’t get to go out without a chaperone anymore,” Midian said.

  “Bite me,” I said, and he grinned as if it was a joke. I only figured out what was funny about it after the fact.

  “Kim,” Chogyi Jake said. “I’m glad to meet you. I think we all owe you a debt.”

  “Kind of you to say so,” Kim said.

  “You know about riders?” Midian asked.

  “I’m not an expert, but yes,” she said. “I worked with Eric and Aubrey when I was still living in Denver.”

  For a minute or two, they compared their relative expertise on things occult. I couldn’t follow much of it, but I had the impression they were each favorably impressed by the other.

  “Any ideas how to beat the Invisible College?” Midian asked. Kim hesitated.

  “No,” she said.

  “Well, welcome to the club,” he said. “You want anything to eat? We’re pretty much down to leftovers, but I think I can make a decent omelet with what I’ve got.”

  Kim considered the vampire without speaking.

  “He’s really good,” I said. “Seriously.”

  “Then yes,” Kim said. “That’s kind of you.”

  Midian shrugged and limped back to the kitchen. I retrieved the report from my lawyer and gave it to Kim. She looked over it with a calm, practiced eye while the sound of chopping and the scent of butter wafted into the room. I turned to the subject of Coin and the still-unformed plan to separate the parasite from its host.

  “There are a couple of possibilities next week,” I said. “I mean, if the projections in the report are true. There’s the doctor’s appointment on Monday, and he’s speaking at an international aid foundation meeting on Tuesday night. I’ve got a request in for an updated schedule for him, though. There may be a better opportunity.”

  “The problem being that any time we plan an attack based on his established schedule, we also face his established security,” Chogyi Jake said. “It’s safe to assume that he will be protected at any of these events.”

  “And the last time we went up against him, he didn’t even need that,” I said.

  “Hey,” Midian shouted, “how do you feel about onions?”

  “Love them,” Kim shouted back, and then turned to me. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but the failure of the previous plan was that you thought you had the element of surprise and you didn’t?”

  I sat on the couch’s armrest and shrugged.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You could look at it that way.”

  “He knew how we were going to attack,” Chogyi Jake said. “Not that it would be rifles, but that we would draw him out from his wards and that we’d be using the Mark of Ya’la ibn Murah and the sigil of St. Francis of the Desert. And so he was warded against those specifically. The attack by Ex and Aubrey gave him a channel back to them. Jayné was only saved because she was wise enough not to pull the trigger.”

  I felt a momentary stab of guilt at my failure to attack and gratitude to Chogyi Jake for putting my inaction in that light. Kim only nodded.

  “Since then, they’ve been circling,” I said. “Looking for us. Midian and Chogyi can’t leave the house. It seems like I’m okay because of some old protections Eric put on me. At least that was Ex’s theory.”

  “And where is Ex?” Kim asked.

  “We don’t know,” I said. “He opted out.”

  Midian came into the room, two plates balanced on his arm. He presented one to Kim and the other to me. The omelet smelled of onions and garlic, and it tasted like heaven. Kim took a bite, nodded her approval, and Midian accepted it with a bow before sitting down. I’d raised my fork, preparing to speak as soon as I’d finished chewing, when Eric spoke from my backpack.

  I knew I was going to have to change the ringtone. I knew that it was going to be creepy for people until I did. But Kim’s reaction was still startling. Her face went white, her eyes wide. She was halfway to her feet, food forgotten, before I could stand up. She tracked me with her eyes as I crossed to the front door, dug in my pack, checked the incoming number, and answered the call.

  “Candace?” I said.

  “Jayné,” Candace Dorn said. “I know it’s late. Is it too late? I’m sorry I didn’t call back sooner. Aaron was working a double shift, and I wanted to talk with him about your call.”

  “I completely understand,” I said.

 
Kim lowered herself slowly back to her seat, her head bowed. Chogyi Jake was frowning at her, and Midian’s ruined eyebrows had lifted. I wasn’t the only one to think something interesting had just happened.

  “He’s here now,” Candace said. “I’ll get him.”

  I had a sudden flashback to sitting at my computer talking to not-Ex.

  “Candace!” I yelled. “Hold on.”

  “Yes?” she said.

  “If there’s someone else there…I mean if you’re being coerced in any way, say ‘Yes, it’s okay.’”

  She laughed. “It’s nothing like that. God. Were you thinking it would be?”

  “I’m a little jumpy,” I said. “You don’t…I mean…I’m sorry. Could you just tell me what price we agreed on for fixing your problem? Just so I know it’s you?”

  “You didn’t charge me anything,” she said. Her voice was lower now. I could imagine the furrows on her brow. “Is this serious, Jayné? Should I be nervous?”

  “Maybe a little,” I said.

  There was a fumbling sound on the far end. Someone new came on the line.

  “Jayné? This is Aaron.”

  His voice was deep and masculine and made me think of recruitment ads for the Marines. I couldn’t help smiling.

  “Hi, Aaron,” I said. “I’m glad to hear from you. You’re doing okay?”

  “I am. Had a long day today, but if there’s something going down, I can get a cup of coffee and be anywhere you need me in about fifteen minutes.”

  “Thanks. There’s nothing going on right now, but I might need a favor pretty soon here.”

  “Are you safe where you are now?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Safe as I would be anywhere. There’s something going on, though. Something big. If you’re around, I’d really like to talk to you about it.”

  “Is it another one of those fuckers that got to me?”

  “Similar idea,” I said. “Bigger scale.”

  There was a pause on the line. I heard Candace’s voice in the background. Aaron grunted in a way that sounded like assent.