“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, Jayné. 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.”

From the back of the house, I heard something banging. A hammer against wood. In the distance, a car alarm blared and went silent.

“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks for that. Aubrey and Ex. Hell. Just tell me that you don’t have a thing for me too.”

Chogyi’s silence dropped a charge of adrenaline into my blood. He looked away, his customary smile replaced by a grimace of embarrassment.

“Chogyi?” I said.

“I have…” he began, faltered, then tried again. “I am not perfectly comfortable with this. It isn’t you personally, but… I don’t find Caucasian women attractive.”

For the space of three heartbeats, we were silent.

“I don’t think of myself as a racist,” he said defensively, “it’s just that with white women, that little frisson is never there.”

My laughter brought Aubrey back into the kitchen. His confusion, looking back and forth between me and Chogyi Jake, also struck me as comic, and set me off again. Chogyi Jake was blushing, but maintained a dignified countenance until I could get myself under control.

It felt good to laugh. It felt good to relax and to have slept and to be with friends instead of pushing and pushing and pushing to run some race I didn’t even know how long it was. It felt safe.

I didn’t realize until that moment how long it had been since I’d felt safe.

“Is everything okay?” Aubrey asked as my hilarity faded into mere giggles.

“Just fine,” I said. “Perfect.”

That night, we ordered pizza and found a movie rental joint with a good selection of old science fiction. The microwave in the kitchen didn’t work, so we got a new one and some popcorn. Chogyi Jake was right. We were all wounded, and we were tired-worn so thin, I felt like you could see through us. I dedicated the evening to just hanging out, being relaxed, recovering. Chogyi Jake and Aubrey sat on a living room couch of old lady floral-and-lace. I lounged on the floor, my back against Aubrey’s shins. I had never seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind, so we’d gotten that and Young Frankenstein as a Teri Garr double feature. A light rain was falling against the windows, Gene Wilder and Peter Boyle were singing “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” and my mind had a pleasant, unfocused hum.

It would have been perfect, except that I kept feeling that we were missing someone. Part of my mind expected Ex to come in or call out from the other room. The guilt at having lost my temper with him was growing, and I caught myself wondering where he was and whether he’d come back if I asked him. I wondered if I wanted him to.

He was probably fine. I figured that he’d gone back to New Orleans and Karen Black. I didn’t know if it was more comforting or sad to imagine the two of them together. On the one hand, I believed Chogyi Jake when he said they didn’t really love each other. But even without that romantic spark, there was something to be said for companionship. Just being with your friends. I didn’t want to think of Ex without that. Nor, despite the sore spot that her dressing-down had left, did I wish a life of solitude on Karen.

It was hard just then-with my popcorn and my movies and Aubrey and Chogyi Jake-to imagine that I’d ever wanted to be like her. Yes, she was competent and powerful and certain, but she’d lost so much along the way. Her career. Her parents, killed in that fire. Her partner, murdered by the rider. All her friends from the FBI thinking she was nuts. When I thought about it, she was one of the most isolated people I’d ever known.

The most isolated.

Fuck.

I sat up sharply, a dozen small things that had haunted the back of my mind falling into place. Amelie Glapion’s voice asking me what I was doing in her city. Marie Laveau passing the mantle of voodoo queen down to her daughter. Marinette’s buzzsaw-in-meat voice saying, You have no place here. Aubrey calling my own mother’s scandal family business. Mfume and the rider that attacked Sabine. Parasitic wasps. Different riders with the same powers, the same ecological niches.