“Stop it,” Ex snapped, but it was too late by then. Midian was rising to his feet, one bone-thin hand pointing toward me. His lips drew back from the blackened teeth, and his voice buzzed with anger and physical pain.

“Look, kid, I don’t care if you want to candy-ass your way through life. You’ve got the cash. Do what you want. You want to take over Eric’s plans and then let everyone else do the work because they’re older than you are and they’ve got cocks? Fine with me. No trouble. But I’ve got a half a liter of crap leaking out of me right now that should have stayed inside, and I’m not in the mood to hear you bitch that the plan you couldn’t be bothered to make for yourself didn’t work out.”

“I said stop it,” Ex said, stepping between me and Midian’s accusing fingers.

“I don’t need that shit,” I yelled. “I just got back from the hospital. Aubrey could have died because of this. He might be dying right now. You don’t know.”

“I knew Eric Heller, kid. I worked with him. He was hard-fucking-core,” Midian went on. “You lost a man. That’s normal. Wouldn’t even have slowed Eric down, but you’re about as hard as fucking marshmallow, aren’t you? You want my advice? Get your sad ass out of here. Go hang out at Cabo or whatever you people do. Coin’ll track you down. He’ll kill you. But at least you won’t be in my fucking way.”

The sound of Ex chambering a shotgun round silenced us both. He had the barrel leveled at Midian’s face. The vampire seemed to notice the gun for the first time, yellow eyes going wide, then narrow.

“I’m going to ask you to sit down,” Ex said. “I’m not going to ask twice.”

Midian sank back into his chair, sneering but silent. Ex followed his descent with the gun. I leaned against the counter, arms crossed like I was hugging myself. I hated the tears tracking down my cheeks. They felt like traitors. Ex didn’t look back. It was only the shift in his shoulders and the gentle tone of voice that showed he was talking to me.

“There wasn’t anything you could have done differently.”

“She could have pulled the trigger,” Midian said. “Or didn’t you notice that you and the smiling professor were the only ones who actually fired a round?”

In the silence that followed, I watched Ex’s back go stiff, the angle of his head move half a degree as he considered this. I wondered if Midian was right. If I’d fired, maybe it would have overwhelmed Coin’s defenses. I closed my eyes, and I could feel the metal curve of the trigger against my protesting finger.

“Resisting the urge toward violence isn’t a bad thing,” Chogyi Jake said. I opened my eyes. He’d changed from the blue robe into a simple white T-shirt and blue jeans. His skin had an ashen tone that worried me, but his smile was the same as ever. “The question remains, what are we going to do now?”

“I think we’re still safe if we stay inside the house,” Ex said, not lowering the gun. “Eric’s wards kept them away from here when they were searching before the ceremony.”

“The Invisible College is stronger now. How long do you think the wards will hold?” Chogyi Jake asked, leaning on the counter beside me. I could feel the warmth coming from his skin, and the smell of fresh soap.

“We can prop them up. But no, not long,” Ex admitted. “We have to go to ground. Stay where the Invisible College can’t find us until things blow over. I’ve been thinking about it. It makes the most sense to split up. Jayné’s got the resources to get out of the country, and Eric’s sure to have some other places as protected as this one. It’s just a question of finding which one.”

“And you?” Chogyi asked.

“I’ve got some ideas,” Ex said.

“And Aubrey?” I asked. My voice was shaking a little, but I wouldn’t let that stop me. “Aubrey isn’t going anywhere the way he is now. Even if we got the hospital to discharge him.”

“I’m working on that,” Ex said. “I think there are some ways I might be able to break the curse Coin put on him. Midian’s right. If he hadn’t already been weak, he probably wouldn’t have suffered any worse than I did. And since I got hit at the same time, there may be a connection that I can work with—”

“Or maybe the bluebird of happiness will come down and shit on your head,” Midian growled. “I’ve been trying to break one of Coin’s pulls since your great-grandfather was a dirty thought.”

“I didn’t say it’d be easy,” Ex said, “but I’ve got some ideas—”

“I know how,” I said. “I mean, we all know how to do it, don’t we?”

Ex looked back at me now. The shotgun tracked down to the floor. Chogyi turned to me, his expression questioning. I shrugged.

“We kill Coin,” I said. “That’ll break all his enchantments, right? Midian’s and Aubrey’s both. Plus whatever got Eric after him in the first place.”

Midian coughed out a derisive laugh.

“Hey, kid. We went after him today when he was at his weakest, and maybe you didn’t notice, but we got our asses handed to us. He’s about a hundred times stronger now than he was at six this morning, and he doesn’t have anything else to distract him.”

“Okay,” I said. “So it’ll be hard. But we still have decades of research that Eric did. We still have Midian and that Cainite resonance whatever it is. We’ve got the three of us, and—”

“No,” Ex said. “We tried, and we failed. We’re going to hide out now. Maybe later, when it’s not so dangerous, we can think about going back on the offensive, but right now, we can’t. It would be suicide.”

“Then you don’t have to do it,” I said.

Three pairs of eyes were on me. Ex, shocked. Chogyi Jake, considering. Midian, amused. I felt my chin lift.

“Jayné,” Ex said. “You don’t have to prove anything here. What happened wasn’t your fault. It was mine.”

“It’s not about fault,” I said, willing myself to believe the words as I spoke them. “It’s just about what we do next, right?”

“Let’s sleep on it,” Ex said. “I’m pretty comfortable that the wards will hold for tonight at least. Let’s not make any decisions until we can calmly, rationally look at what happened.”

Chogyi Jake nodded in my peripheral vision. I felt my mouth harden. I was being a brat. Midian’s words had hit me deeper than I wanted to admit, as did the guilt at Aubrey’s half-death and my own failure at the warehouse. I was trying to show them all that I was just as hard-core as Uncle Eric even though they knew I wasn’t. And I knew too.

And underneath that, I knew I had to try.

“Okay, we’ll wait until tomorrow,” I said. “But after that, I’m killing him.”

I called the hospital from my bedroom. The intake nurse had put my name and cell number in Aubrey’s chart along with the lie that I was family and his contact person. The person on the other end couldn’t tell me much except that Aubrey had been admitted and they were keeping him under observation. When they offered to have the doctor call me back when he had a minute, I said yes and let the call drop.

All around me, Eric’s things loomed like ghosts. His shirts, his furniture, his magazines. I turned on my laptop, checked my e-mail, Googled unsuccessfully for anything that talked about gunshots being fired in the Commerce City suburb of Denver, and tried to think of something else I should look for, some piece of data that would turn the whole world right again. I wound up staring at the screen with a feeling that there wasn’t enough air in the room.

I wanted to cry, but I was also tired of crying. I wanted to scream and throw things and make the world be fair, but I didn’t know what I meant by the world anymore. The fact was I’d let myself look forward to this day, to after-Coin. I’d let myself imagine a future where maybe I’d have friends, even a lover, and money and safety and options. Instead of that, I was locked down, hiding under Eric’s undetectable protections while the people who’d killed him walked free.

The disappointment and despair were as familiar as coming home.