I woke with a start, still trying not to scream. The clock said it was three in the morning. I was covered with a slick, cold sweat. I got up, opening and closing my hands just to prove to myself that I could. In the dim light of city nighttime, the bed looked gray. I pulled on my robe. I was totally awake, but the dream felt like it had been worked into my skin. I stood there for long minutes, trying to talk myself into going back to sleep, then I scooped up the pillow and threw it in the wastebasket. I thought that if I was quiet, I could make myself some tea without disturbing the others.

But they were already in the kitchen. All of them. Aubrey sat at the table, his hair still wild from the bed, and his expression was tight and angry. Chogyi Jake leaned against the table, his arms crossed. Ex was in a black T-shirt and sweats, his face pale and haunted.

“You too, eh?” Midian asked as I stood there, staring at them.

“I had a rough dream,” I said.

“Caught in the dark, sound of huge wings?” Aubrey asked.

“God’s eye looking down,” Ex said. His voice was bleak.

“How did…” I began, then let the question die. They’d all had the same dream. At the same time. I could see the dread in their faces.

“Wasn’t God,” Midian said. “That, ladies and germs, was Randolph Coin. He’s looking for us.”

Ten

When dawn finally came, I was surprised that it woke me. I hadn’t expected to sleep again that night. The others were all moving a little slower too, the weight of Coin’s presence still lingering in the backs of our minds. As the day grew bright and hot, the sun commanding the profound blue sky, the oppressive sense of threat faded a little. It didn’t ever quite go away. We got on with the work at hand.

I’d never really thought about fighting supernatural evil as a lifestyle choice. Still, I was surprised that it felt so much like planning a crime. The range Ex had in mind was less a formal police-style building with individual runs and paper targets than an open field down a dirt track halfway between Denver and Colorado Springs. Aubrey’s minivan looked out of place in the wide, rough terrain.

We were just setting up the targets—bales of hay with Robin Hood-esque bull’s-eyes strapped to them—when Eric’s voice spoke again.

“Hey. You’ve got a call.”

Aubrey and Ex both looked over at me as I dug the cell phone out of my pocket. The number on the ID was familiar. Candace Dorn again.

“I wish you’d change that ringtone,” Ex said as I answered it.

“Hello?” I said, putting my free hand against my other ear and walking to the back of the minivan.

“Hi,” Candace said. “I’m sorry I didn’t call back earlier. Is this Jayné?”

“Yeah. It’s me. Is everything okay? I’m really sorry about your living room, by the way. I didn’t mean to trash the place.”

“I don’t care about it,” she said. “Really. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. Aaron is back from the hospital, and he’s going to be fine.”

I hadn’t realized he’d been in, though in retrospect it made sense. Dog bites, the haugtrold cutting its own face, whatever damage Aubrey and I had managed to inflict. I glanced over at Ex as he laid out the rifles and two boxes of less arcane ammunition on a blue tarp. I wondered what exactly the exorcism process entailed.

“Good,” I said. “I’m glad to hear that. And Charlie?”

“Charlie’s doing all right too. I think he’s a little confused by the whole thing. Needy. Dogs, you know.”

I didn’t, but I made appropriate social noises. There was a pause on the line, the kind of silence where no one is bringing up the difficult issue. I would have taken the lead if I’d known what was up.

“I was…” Candace said, and then stopped. When she started again, she sounded grim. “My friend. The one who gave me your number. He said that I should have talked about this all before. He’s right, I know that. It was just with Charlie and Aaron and all the rest, I was focused on the situation at hand.”

“Sure, of course,” I said, not knowing what she meant. There was another pause on the line. “Candace. If there’s something we should be talking about, we should maybe talk about it? What’s up?”

“I needed to talk to you about the price,” she said. I could tell from the way she said it that she was past uneasy and into scared.

It was the first time the thought had even crossed my mind. Eric’s money had to have come from somewhere; that was true. And since this was what he did, I suppose it followed that whatever he’d charged for his work had to have been pretty astronomical. I didn’t know what to say. From the little empire that I’d inherited, I had to think the money had been huge. On the other hand, I hadn’t talked to the lawyer about it. Maybe the money had come from someplace else. Maybe Eric had some sort of sliding scale. I was caught flat-footed, and I felt stupid for not knowing the answer.

But then, the question wasn’t really what Eric would have done so much as what I was going to do. That made it easier.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s on the house.”

Whatever Candace had expected to hear, it wasn’t that.

“Are you…do you mean that?”

“Look, I’m actually kind of new at this,” I said. “My uncle was the expert. You didn’t get the high-powered guy, and I got some on-the-job training I needed anyway. Besides. We trashed your place.”

There was a sound I couldn’t make out. Ex, still over at the tarp, gestured to me impatiently. I held up my hand in a “one minute” gesture before I realized that what I was hearing was Candace in tears.

“I owe you,” she said. “If you ever need anything, please call me. You saved my life. You saved me.”

“I was glad we could help. Seriously. Look, Candace, I’ve got to go. But you tell Aaron to get well soon, okay? Take care.”

I dropped the call and shoved the cell back into my pocket. Ex frowned down at the rifles as I came back. Aubrey raised an eyebrow, asking wordlessly what the call had been.

“Follow-up,” I said. “Nothing important. What did I miss?”

For the next hour, Ex talked us through the workings of the rifles. It wasn’t as complex as I’d expected in theory, but the practice was tricky. I knew that the gun would kick when I fired, but I underestimated how much my sore shoulder would object. The first four shots I tried missed the target completely. The fifth got on the paper, but outside the concentric rings of the bull’s-eye. Ex walked me through the whole process, his voice serious and low. I got better until I started getting worse, and he decided I’d had enough and turned his attention to Aubrey.

It turned out Aubrey had a much better eye for the thing than I did. His second shot hit the paper target. His fourth was in the center circle. I tried to figure out what he was doing differently, but as I watched him, my mind kept wandering. The afternoon was sweltering hot, and we drank through our bottles of water long before we fired the last round. I tried a couple parting shorts and kicked out bits of hay from the bales, but nothing better than that.

I had the sense that Ex was confused that my uncanny ability to fight didn’t translate to being able to hit the broad side of a barn with firearms. I felt a little ashamed of my lack of talent, but he tried to keep my confidence up.

“It doesn’t really matter how good a hit you get on Coin,” he said as we broke down the rifles and folded up the tarp. “We aren’t trying to kill him with the shot. Graze his pinky finger, and as long as it breaks skin, we’re fine.”

“It’s going to be hard,” Aubrey said. “I mean, this was fun, but looking at a real person is going to be different.”

“He’s not a real person, though,” I said. “He’s just a rider in a stolen body.”

“It’s still going to be hard,” Ex said. His voice didn’t leave room for discussion.