Thirteen

We split the night into four hour-and-a-half shifts to guard Midian. Mine was three to four thirty, which slated me for a longish nap before and a short one after. Midian, his hands still tied, ignored the situation except to sigh theatrically, stretch out on the couch, and get more sleep than the rest of us. I sat in the facing chair, Eric’s shotgun across my thighs, and listened to the small sounds of the night.

The clock in the kitchen ticked quietly to itself. Sirens rose and fell in the distance. Once, a helicopter chopped the air so far away I could barely make it out. And Midian—Midian the vampire, or vârkolak, whatever that was—breathed slowly in and out in the rhythm of deep sleep. In a few hours, I was going to be looking down a rifle at the thing that had killed Eric, but just now, the world was silent and still, and my mind was clearer than I had expected it to be.

The mystery that Midian’s revelation had left me with was this: if Eric wasn’t doing this to help Midian, who was he helping? There was, I assumed, someone out there who he’d intended to benefit. Someone like Candace Dorn. I wondered how I would find those people and let them know that the thing had been done, or if they’d just know when it happened. Ex and Aubrey and Chogyi Jake hadn’t found anything in the old notebooks that explained how this whole thing had started, but there had to be more books, more records. Somewhere there had to be something about how he’d found Midian, and what came before that, and before that. Or maybe he’d kept it all in his head.

I thought about the list of properties the lawyer had shown me. And those had been the tricky ones. There were others. More. I could have spent months going through all that. Years. And if I didn’t find some master record, I’d still wonder if it existed somewhere I just hadn’t thought to look. I was out of my depth. I’d known it from the moment Uncle Eric’s fortune fell out of the sky like something from an old Looney Tunes cartoon, and sitting alone in the dead of night, I felt it deeply. I was scared, I was faking it, I was probably in gut-wrenching danger that I didn’t understand. I’d spent the last few days as disoriented and dizzy as someone on her eighth time on the roller coaster.

But there was also a small, secret joy way down deep that surprised me. I was rich beyond my wildest dreams. Things hadn’t gone the way I wanted with Aubrey, but they’d still left me feeling wanted in a way that was almost more reassuring than actually having a boyfriend would have been. And regardless of why Eric had gone after the Invisible College in the first place, I knew why I was doing it.

I was doing it for Eric.

I heard the low beeping of Aubrey’s cell phone alarm and checked the time. Four thirty. My turn at guard duty was over. I listened to the soft, shoeless footsteps as he walked down the hall toward me, and I nodded to him as he stepped into the living room.

“Everything okay?” he asked, his voice hushed.

I handed him the shotgun.

“It’ll do,” I said, and then, “Hey. About…what happened at your apartment? Midian wasn’t wrong. It was my idea too, and it’s not like I told you all about everything in my history either. So. The Kim thing was a shock, and I’m a little easier to spin right now than usual. But…”

I shrugged.

“So we’re good?” Aubrey asked.

“We’re working on it,” I said. “I mean, you’re still married.”

Halfway down to my bedroom, I stopped, considered, and then turned back. I was too wound up to sleep. I headed to the kitchen, turned on the light over the sink, and brewed up a pot of coffee that wasn’t as good as Midian’s. A little before six, the windows were bright with the coming dawn. Ex and Chogyi Jake walked in quietly. Ex looked tired but focused. Chogyi Jake might have just woken up from eight solid hours, except that his smile didn’t reach his eyes as much as usual. Without a word, Ex put the rifles on the kitchen table. The black ammunition seemed to writhe in my peripheral vision.

“Well, hey,” Midian said from the living room. “Nice day to kill someone. Is that coffee? Because if it is, you over-brewed it.”

“Good to know,” I said, and heard his wheezing chuckle.

“Okay,” Ex said, his voice cutting through the morning like a drill sergeant’s. “We’ve got one more run-through on this, and then we go.”

Midian and Aubrey came into the kitchen. Midian’s hands were free, and he was rubbing his wrists. I noticed that he kept his distance from the bullets. We went through everything again for the last time, then Ex loaded the rifles and handed one to me and one to Aubrey. Ex offered the shotgun to Chogyi Jake, but he refused it.

“When we get this done, who’s gonna want pancakes?” Midian asked, his ruined lips in a leer. I wondered how I could have imagined he was really alive.

“Let’s go,” Ex said.

We went.

THE FIRST difference I noticed was the air.

We drove north toward Commerce City, Ex in the windowless van, Chogyi and Midian in Ex’s sports car, Aubrey and I sitting silently in his minivan. The warehouses along the railroad tracks came slowly nearer, the rising sun flooded the still relatively empty highway and turned the asphalt to gold, and the air around us seemed to grow less substantial. The light moved through it differently. I put it down to my own nerves until I felt something bump against me, tapping at the base of my spine. I had the sudden physical memory of being eight years old and swimming in a lake where fish would sometimes blunder into me.

Aubrey saw me shudder.

“Yeah,” he said. “I can feel it too.”

“This is them?” I said, gesturing at the world in general. “This is the Invisible College doing whatever they’re doing?”

“It’s Next Door getting close,” Aubrey said. “I’ve felt something like this before. The riders are about to move into their new bodies.”

Something unreal moved past my legs. I felt its wake.

“I really want this over with,” I said.

By the time we got to the warehouse, I felt like the old high school science class movie of an ovum surrounded by a million flailing sperm. The air was full of unseen creatures bumping and pressing and shifting against me. There were so many, I stopped being able to tell one from another, my body just registering them as a constant, repulsive crawling. There was nothing in the early morning light to show that any of it was happening. If anything, the strangeness of the light made the world seem static, like we’d driven into a still frame from a movie. Aubrey dropped me by the train tracks. We didn’t speak, but as I lifted the rifle out of the back, his hand touched mine. The double sensation of real, human contact and the press of riders just outside reality moved me, and I was tempted to kiss him. He pulled back and I hefted the weapon, already loaded with its unpleasant black bullets. I made my way to the corner of the little building we’d picked, looking down on Google maps like God and angels. I leaned against the masonry block, the blue paint flaking away. The boxcars loomed to my left like great, blind, industrial cows. Nothing moved.

Fifty or sixty cars filled the parking lot, and three huge silver buses were parked against the side of the building. A chain-link fence surrounded the whole place. Two gates opened to the street—one wide enough for semis to negotiate with ease, one no wider than a door. The second was closer to me, chained shut. When I lifted the scope to my eye, I could read the numbers on the combination lock.

Aubrey’s minivan appeared on the street, coming down from the north, then passed out of sight, making its way toward his assassination post. I wouldn’t be able to see Aubrey or Ex and the windowless van from where I was. I sat crouched in the long, blue shadows of morning, my back against the wall, invisible creatures pressing against me.