I wasn’t sure until the second time that I’d actually heard the knock at the door. I said to come in. Ex walked in slowly, his hands in his pockets, his eyes shifting onto anything besides me sitting cross-legged on the bed. He leaned against the wall beside the dresser. From where I was, his face was both toward me and echoed in profile in the mirror. He looked like a magazine cover.

“How serious are you about going after Coin?” he asked.

I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. After a few seconds, he seemed to find an answer in the silence. He drew a long breath and let it out slowly.

“I think that you shouldn’t,” he said.

“I kind of have to,” I said.

“Aubrey.”

“That’s part of it, yeah. I got him into this. If it wasn’t for me, he wouldn’t have been so vulnerable. He wouldn’t be where he is now.”

“And you’re in love with him.”

I looked down at my laptop screen.

“Things with him really aren’t as straightforward as all that,” I said, trying to lighten the tone. “Aubrey and me…I don’t know. I have a problem dating someone with a wife. Maybe it’ll work out. Maybe it won’t. But I won’t know as long as he’s in a coma, right?”

“You do what you have to do to protect the people you care about,” Ex said.

I smiled and nodded because I thought he was talking about me and Aubrey. I thought the gray, sorrowful tone in his voice was him giving up on talking me out of trying again. I didn’t understand that he was actually apologizing until morning came and I found out Ex had gone and taken the guns and all of Eric’s books with him.

Fifteen

The rage felt good. I broke every plate in the kitchen, china shattering against the tile floor. I screamed every obscene word and phrase I knew and then started inventing. I tipped the chairs over and threw a full coffee cup against the living room wall, leaving a dark stain on the paint and a gouge in the plaster. My muscles felt warm and loose and I was about three inches taller than normal, the righteous anger puffing my body larger and stronger and making me sure of myself. I nursed it because I knew that when it was gone, there wouldn’t be anything left.

Midian and Chogyi Jake didn’t try to stop me or restrain me or talk sense. Midian just sat on the couch, his wrists still bound, his belly still bandaged. Chogyi Jake followed me in silence, standing witness to my violence with the same impartiality he’d had during my meltdown at the shopping mall. I shouted at him a few times too, but he didn’t react at all, and it started to take the momentum out of my tantrum.

When I lost that too, I sat on the stone hearth in front of the empty fireplace—my elbows on my knees, my head in my hands—and cried. The house was trashed. It was going to take hours just to clean it up. Part of me wanted to go get the broom and dustpan and start putting it all back together, if only to prove that I had a little control over something. Most of me just wanted to sit there and give up.

“He meant well,” Chogyi Jake said. His voice was soft.

“He’s a fucking asshole,” I managed between sobs.

“He’s a fucking asshole who meant well.”

I glanced up. Coming from anyone else, the amusement would have been an insult. Coming from Chogyi Jake, it seemed like compassion. Midian coughed, then winced. His bound hands went to his side. Shirtless, he looked like something from Jim Henson’s worst nightmare, his flesh ropy and dark and implausible. The bleeding had slowed, but whatever Coin had done to him was a long way from being healed. The same could be said of all of us.

“I thought we couldn’t leave the house,” I said. “I thought it wasn’t safe.”

“It isn’t,” Chogyi Jake said. “Ex is risking himself to keep you from harm.”

“Or to keep me under his fucking control.”

“Yeah, well,” Midian croaked. He always sounded like something in his throat was about to come loose. “Who’d have guessed a Jesuit priest would be paternalistic.”

“Ex-priest,” I said.

“Whatever.”

“Rest,” Chogyi Jake said. “This will all be much better if we can regain some sense of our center.” His eyes were bloodshot. I should have been taking care of him, not the other way around.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m tired,” he said. From him, it was like an admission that he was near collapse. I realized that I didn’t know how deeply our failure with Coin had hurt him. I felt bad that I hadn’t thought to ask.

The house had become a submarine, dead on the ocean floor. Everything looked the same, apart from the damage I’d done. But the air was different. The light that pressed in at the windows trapped us. Whatever magic Eric had put on the building to keep us safe, I could feel it weakening, and I didn’t know how much of that was true and how much was just my own growing fear and hopelessness.

I sat in the kitchen, my stomach too knotted for food or coffee. Chogyi Jake went to each of the windows and doors, chanting and pouring out lines of rice and salt. Propping up the wards. Buying us time.

I pictured Aubrey sitting across from me. His honey-colored hair. His bright eyes. His fingers closed around mine. In my imagination, all the anger and weirdness from our failed date was gone. I wanted badly for it to be true. Tears ran down my cheeks. I let them.

“I blew it,” I said to my imaginary Aubrey. “I don’t know how I managed to fuck everything up again, just like always.”

My hands were rubbing my thighs, the palms pressing into the denim hard enough for the friction to warm them. To hurt a little.

“I think I have to run away now,” I said. “I’ve lost you and Ex. And Midian, kind of. I mean since he turns out to be one of the bad guys, that kind of takes him off my assets column. So…”

My hand was tapping on my thigh, just a light movement, like a kid tugging at her mother’s dress. I watched my own fingers, my mind mostly empty, but aware of something happening in the background. Some thought that was struggling to bubble up from my subconscious.

“I’m down to nothing,” I said. “Taking on Coin now is a hundred times dumber than when we did it before. I don’t have the books. I don’t have the rifles. I don’t have the magic bullets. I’ve lost…”

I put my hand into the pocket of my jeans, looking for something without knowing quite what it was. It came back out with six hundred-dollar bills. Some of the change from my shopping spree. I looked down at the money. Benjamin Franklin looked back up at me.

“I’ve lost everything,” I said, but the conviction was gone from my voice. I shuffled the bills one after another. The thought wasn’t quite formed yet, but I was starting to sense a vague shape. Midian coughed.

I stood up with the weird feeling that I was floating. My backpack was sitting by the front door. I unfastened the straps. Aubrey’s keys rested on top of the undifferentiated mess of my life.

“Chogyi!” I shouted.

I held the keys as he came down the hall. Midian was silent. I could feel him listening to us.

“I need to go out,” I said. “How dangerous is that going to be?”

“Very,” he said.

“What about that thing where I didn’t set off the alarms in Midian’s apartment? Do you think that’ll make it harder for Coin to find me too?”

Chogyi paused, considering. “If it’s difficult for one magic to see you, it may be a general effect. And you didn’t fire the rifle, so Coin’s wards haven’t interacted with you directly.”

“You’re not sure, though.”

“No.”

I took a deep breath.

“I’m going to risk it,” I said. “If I’m not back by nightfall, plan without me.”

I almost expected him to stop me. I don’t know why. I trotted out to the minivan and headed north quickly, before I lost my nerve. Half an hour and a certain amount of dithering later, I parked on Brighton Boulevard where it bellied up next to the railroad tracks. I sat in the minivan, looking to the east, past the boxcars and toward the warehouses. I got out with a sense of unreality, locked the door behind me, and set out across the tracks. A homeless guy leaned against a huge black trash bag half a block down. I paused, remembering what Ex and Chogyi Jake had taught me. I drew up my qi, placing it just behind my eyes. The homeless guy was still just a homeless guy.