“That’s not what I’m here to talk about,” I said, feeling the moral high ground shifting under my feet.

“Well, I’ve brought it up,” Aubrey said.

I opened my mouth, a thousand practiced zingers suddenly falling apart before I could deliver them. Aubrey shook his head, something between sorrow and disgust in his eyes.

“I don’t deserve this, Jayné,” he said. “Kim and I aren’t together. We haven’t been for a long time. And as far as I can tell, you’re treating me like I’ve somehow betrayed you personally because I haven’t filed all the paperwork in a timely fashion.”

“I think being married is more than that,” I said.

“Have you ever been married?”

“No,” I said, “but…”

I knew the next words. I could feel the syllables against my tongue. Marriage is sacred. And I could hear the voice that was saying them. It was my mother’s. It all fit together with a click that was nearly physical.

I had rejected my parents and their parochial, small, restrictive ideas. I had broken off with my family and allowed myself the kind of experiences they were always tacitly afraid I’d have—sex, beer, R-rated movies—and I’d pretended that I had remade myself. But Aubrey’s history took me by surprise, and I’d reacted like I was still sitting in the fourth pew. My liberal, broad-minded tolerance could still be scratched off with a fingernail.

“Fuck,” I said, anger and embarrassment giving the word weight. Aubrey waited. The silence went on. I had to say something else.

“You’re right. I shouldn’t have dug through your computer,” I said. “I shouldn’t have freaked out and bolted. But here’s the thing. I don’t have a great track record with…trusting people. Especially when it comes to sex. You’re still married to this woman I’ve never met, and okay, maybe it’s all just paperwork. But you are, and I found out right after we’d slept together. I’d love to pretend it was all okay with me, but it’s not. I’m sorry it’s not. I really, really want it to be. But it’s just…”

Outside, Midian laughed. Ex said something I couldn’t make out. Aubrey sucked in his breath. I felt like we were breaking up. There was a knot in my throat. I wanted to cry. Because that one last level of humiliation would have just put the cap on the whole conversation.

“I understand,” he said.

“We need to be able to work together,” I said, leaning forward on the couch. “Coin’s a badass. He killed my uncle. He’s kept Midian under a curse for two hundred some years. And I’m taking him on. We’re taking him on. Knowing someone close to me, someone important, is holding back information is hard. I know I shouldn’t pass that kind of judgment, but when I…um. Aubrey? What is it?”

His body had gone tense, the color drained from his face. When he spoke, his voice was very steady and controlled.

“How long has Midian been under a curse?”

“Two hundred something years,” I said. “He said he was born at the end of the French Revolution. Why?”

“He’s two hundred years old?”

“A little more than that, but yeah.”

Aubrey stood up carefully and walked to the kitchen. I looked at the empty doorway, then unfolded myself from the couch and followed. The duffel bag of guns we’d found in the storage facility was still there on the floor. Aubrey knelt beside it.

“Aubrey?”

“Curses don’t make people live indefinitely, Jayné. Outliving your life span is something people try for. Living two hundred years isn’t a curse. It’s something else.”

He took out one of the shotguns, checked to be sure it was loaded, and handed it to me. I took the wood stock and cold steel barrel in my hands, my mind still back on Kim and sex and Ray Charles singing over coffee. The gun seemed out of place.

“Midian?” I said. “This is about Midian?”

Aubrey took out another shotgun, chambered a round, and looked up at me.

“If he’s lying about the curse, we need to know why,” Aubrey said. “If he’s not lying about the curse, he’s not a human.”

“Oh,” I said. The air seemed to have gone out of the room. I was having a hard time catching my breath.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

I looked down at the shotgun in my hands. Salt, silver, and iron. Defense against a wide variety of riders. I felt like I’d woken up and found a rat crawling on my leg. I nodded.

“Follow me,” Aubrey said.

We stepped onto the back porch with the guns already drawn. Chogyi Jake, the first to notice us, cocked his head in something that seemed no more than mild curiosity. Ex leapt up, his chair tipping backward and onto the grass. Midian’s ruined head was toward us, wisps of hair clinging to it like trails of fungus. When he turned to look over his shoulder at us, his yellowed eyes were expressionless. He picked up his cigarette, took a deep breath, and let the smoke seep out his nostrils.

“Aubrey. Jayné,” Ex said. “Put down the guns.”

Midian lifted a hand and waved Ex’s words away. He shifted his chair to face us, two shotgun barrels pointing at his head. The ruined man sighed.

“It was the Bastille Day crack, wasn’t it?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I was kind of hoping you wouldn’t remember that,” he said, and wheezed out a laugh. “I always talk before I think. It’s a vice.”

“What the fuck is going on?” Ex demanded, his face flushing red. Midian gestured toward me and Aubrey with his cigarette, the smoke leaving a trail behind it.

“The kids here just figured out I’m a vampire,” he said.

“BUT I’VE seen you in daylight,” I said.

“That’s nosferatu,” Midian said. “I’m vârkolak. Don’t let it bug you. Taxonomy’s always a bitch.”

We’d moved into the living room, each of us keeping Midian covered as we’d left the backyard behind. Midian sat in the overstuffed chair, a cigarette still between his thin, fleshless fingers. Ex and Chogyi Jake had grabbed guns too, but Midian’s casual air—legs crossed, black-toothed smile more amusement than chagrin—made me feel like we were being silly somehow. After all, he’d been with us for days. He’d been cooking our food, taking his turn at guard duty. If he’d wanted to kill us, we’d all be dead by now.

“I don’t believe it,” Ex said. His face was blank as a mask, but I could guess at the rage behind it. “Eric fought against riders, not next to them.”

“Eric did whatever he needed to do,” Midian said. “If he needed to get his hands dirty along the way, he wasn’t the guy to hesitate.”

“What else were you lying about?” I asked.

Midian looked at me with disappointment in his eyes. It was like seeing a teacher’s reaction when a student asked a particularly stupid question. The ruined man sighed.

“Well,” he said, “first off, I sort of let you think Eric was doing me a favor with this whole Invisible College thing. Not quite true. Eric came to me.”

“Why would he think you’d fight against one of your own kind?” Ex asked.

“Jesus Christ, padre,” Midian said. “My own kind. Shit. Would you say that to a black guy? Or a Jew? I’m a rider, Coin’s a rider, that doesn’t make us buddies. Look around the room here. You’ve got the girl here who can’t figure out if she’s a kick-ass superhero or a college dropout loser. The biologist guy who can’t stop feeling guilty for getting in her pants. Which, I’ll point out, was not exactly just his idea, but they don’t remember that. Tofu boy over there, who’s showing his dedication to nonviolence by helping to shoot Coin in the head, but it’s okay because he’s not the one pulling the trigger and anyway Coin’s not human. Shakyamuni’d be real proud of him for that doublethink. And you caught between a bunch of promises you’ve made to some great big Nobodaddy in the sky, a lifelong apology for fucking up when you were a kid, and a perfectly natural jealousy—”

“Drop it,” Ex said. “You can’t split us apart.”

“That’s the point, dumbfuck. You are split apart,” Midian said, sitting forward. His contempt ignored the shotgun Ex pointed at his chest. “You’ve got four people here, and six different sides. It’s no different Next Door. The loupine fight the ifrit, who ally with the zombii, unless they’re at war with them. The orisha undermine everything the noppera-bō try to do. The Graveyard Child works against Father Ba’al, and they both hate the Black Sun. It’s a fucking mess over there.”