“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.”
“Jayné 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?”
“How are you feeling, Jayné?” Aubrey asked.
“Tired. It’s…” I checked my watch. “Two in the morning.”
“Three weeks ago in London, it would have been midnight,” Ex said.
“True,” I said. “Point being?”
Aubrey held up his hand.
“We’ve all been busting hump for… well, for months now. We’ve got six hundred books in the wiki and at least that many artifacts and items, most of which we don’t have any kind of provenance for. And we’re not a fifth of the way through the list of properties that Eric owned.”
I knew all of that, but hearing it said out loud made me want to hang my head.
“I know it’s a big project,” I said. “But it’s necessary. If we don’t know what we have to work with…”
“I agree completely,” Ex said. “The thing is, someone’s come to you with a problem. Sounds like it might be a little hairy. Are you… are we in any condition to take it on? Or do you want to finish the full inventory before we dive back into fieldwork?”
What I wanted was firmly none of the above. I wanted to stop for a while. I wanted to find a lovely alpine village, read trashy romances, play video games, and watch the glaciers melt. And there was nothing to stop me from doing it. I had the money, I had the power.
But this was what Eric did, and he left it to me, and walking away from it meant walking away from him too. I sighed and finished my coffee.
“If this lady’s on the level, she needs us. And if we wait until we’re totally ready, we’ll never do anything,” I said. “And I think we could all use a break. So here’s the plan. I’ll get us tickets to New Orleans, we’ll go save the world from abstract evil, and afterward we’ll hang out in the French Quarter for a couple of weeks and blow off steam.”
“If we’ve defeated abstract evil, I’m not sure how much of the French Quarter will still be there,” Ex said.
“First things first, padre,” I said, standing up and heading for the main rooms. In fairness, the padre part wasn’t entirely true. Ex had, in fact, quit being a priest long before I met him. Thus the Ex. Padre was what a vampire we both knew had called him, and sometimes the nickname still stuck.
The main room of the villa looked like a dorm room a week before final exams. Books filled cheap metal shelves and covered the tables. Ancient texts with splitting leather bindings, paperbacks from the 1960s with bright colors and psychedelic designs, medical papers, collections of theological essays, books on game theory, chaos theory. Grimoires of all arcane subjects waiting to be examined, categorized, and entered in the wiki that the four of us were building to support our work as magical problem solvers. Our laptop computers were all closed, but plugged in and glowing.
I sat at mine and opened it. It took me about three minutes to dig up an old e-mail from my lawyer listing all the addresses of Eric’s properties, and about thirty seconds from there to confirm that I did indeed own a house in New Orleans listed as being in the Lakeview neighborhood, and valued at eight hundred thousand dollars, so it probably had enough bedrooms for all of us. I wondered what it would look like.
I smiled to myself as I got on the travel site and started shopping for the most convenient and comfortable flights back to the States. The truth was, even as tired as I was, the prospect of going somewhere new, opening a new house or storage unit without having the first clue what we’d find gave me a covert thrill. Yes, it all flowed from the death of my beloved uncle, so there was an aspect of the macabre, but it was also a little like a permanent occult Christmas.
Well, except when evil spirits tried to kill me. I had some scars from those that kept me in one-piece bathing suits. But nothing like that had happened for months, and by the time I had four flights booked from Athens International to the Louis Armstrong International Airport, I was feeling more awake and alive than I had in days. Probably the coffee was kicking in too.
It was four in the morning and still a long way from dawn when I called Karen Black.
“Black here,” she said instead of hello.
“Hey. It’s Jayné Heller here. We talked a few hours ago?”
“Yes,” Karen said.
“I’ve talked to most of the guys, and it looks like we can get there in about two days. So Thursday, middle of the morning, but I’ll call you as soon as we’re in and settled. That sound okay?”
“That’s great,” she said. I could hear the smile in her tone, and I smiled back. Always good to save the day. Her next words were more sober. “We should talk about the price.”
“We can do that once we get there,” I said.
“I can do that,” she said, and paused. “I don’t mean to… When I called before, I was a little scattered. I didn’t say how sorry I am to hear about Eric. It was rude of me.”
“Don’t sweat it,” I said. “And thanks. I was… I was sorry to lose him. I’m a little thin on family generally speaking, and he was pretty much the good one.”
“He was a good man,” she said, her voice as soft as flannel. To my surprise, I found myself tearing up a little. We said our good-byes and I killed the connection.