I needed an angle. Coin had all the power right now. That had to change. I had gone through five or six promising-looking boards without finding anything solid about the Invisible College in general or Randolph Coin in particular when my old chat program popped a window open. That hadn’t happened in weeks, and the screen name wasn’t one that I recognized. Once I parsed it, though, it made sense.

EXTOJAYNE: Ping

I felt the blood go out of my face, and my heart ramped up. The first thing I felt was shock at Ex’s sudden virtual arrival. The second thing I felt was pissed off. I leaned forward, fingers hovering over the keys. I tried to decide what I wanted to say. If I wanted to.

EXTOJAYNE: Are you there?

JAYNEHELLER: I’m here. How did you find this account?

EXTOJAYNE: It’s your name. It wasn’t hard. Are you OK?

I could hear Ex’s voice, could see the concern in his face as he asked. It only made me angrier. No, I wanted to say, I’m getting a little sick of being betrayed by the people who I thought were my friends. No, you fucking thief. I cracked my knuckles and summoned up my best sarcasm before answering.

JAYNEHELLER: I’m great. Thanks.

EXTOJAYNE: Good. Is Midian with you?

JAYNEHELLER: He’s not in the room, if that’s what you mean. He’s off cooking. As always. Mind telling me where you are?

EXTOJAYNE: I’m all right. I’m worried about you.

JAYNEHELLER: You really show it. But it wasn’t the question I asked.

EXTOJAYNE: I can’t stay on long. I’m worried. The assassination attempt. I think the College’s blowback may have gone past Midian into the other one.

JAYNEHELLER: The other one? You mean Chogyi Jake?

EXTOJAYNE: Chogyi Jake. Has he been acting normal? Is he there too?

JAYNEHELLER: Yeah, we’re all here. What do you mean blowback? Where are you?

EXTOJAYNE: Don’t worry about me. Nothing’s changed. Give me a status report. I need to know where things stand.

I’d gotten as far as typing Who are you to demand anything of me when my fingers stopped. I felt the jaw-clenching anger shift in me like a car starting to fishtail on ice. I stared at the screen.

EXTOJAYNE: Jayne? Are you there?

My hand reached out and tapped the backspace key, cutting back my message word by word.

Who are you

I erased the whole thing and started over, my chest tight with fear.

JAYNEHELLER: Well, we’ve gotten the go-ahead from the guy with the rabbits. And your buddy from Texas should be here tomorrow about noon.

I hit send and waited. The icon showed that whoever was on the other end of the chat was typing. If it was Ex, he’d ask me what I was talking about.

Come on, I thought, ask me what I’m talking about.

EXTOJAYNE: Good. What else?

I stared at the screen for what seemed like hours but was only a few seconds. My hands shook so hard I could barely type.

JAYNEHELLER: Someone’s calling. Gotta go.

I turned off the computer and sat on the bed for a while with my hands trembling. It was them. I’d been talking to one of them. They knew that Ex had been working with me and that he wasn’t here, or else they wouldn’t have tried to pass themselves off under his name. I didn’t know how they’d figured that out.

They didn’t know he’d taken everything in an attempt to stop me from moving against Coin again; otherwise they wouldn’t have asked how things were going. I didn’t know why they hadn’t figured that out.

And they knew Chogyi Jake’s name and that he and Midian and I were all together because I’d just told them.

I wondered if it was possible to track an instant message back to where it had physically originated. Maybe it was all relayed through a server over at AOL, but I had the sense it was peer-to-peer, in which case they’d have the IP address of the network here. They wouldn’t be able to translate that into a street address without hacking the living snot out of Eric’s service provider. They were evil wizards. Getting into a router configuration might not be beyond them, but then again, Eric had done a pretty thorough job of keeping the house off their radar. Chances were good that the service record would keep the address obscured. I wished that Eric had left me some record of what exactly my defenses were.

I’d known that they were out there. I’d known they were looking for us. Actually catching sight of one of the hunters shook me more than I’d expected it to. I started to wonder how big a risk I’d been taking when I went to see the lawyer. How were Coin and his people going to come after us now? Would he go after my family? I tried to imagine my mother at the mercy of tattooed wizards possessed by evil parasites. It would pretty much confirm everything my parents thought about me, and that was the lowest reason on the list for keeping it from happening.

In the kitchen, Midian and Chogyi Jake were talking about different mythological loci and the relationship between choice and will. A couple hours ago, I’d have cared. Instead, I sat down at the table with my head in my hands until they both went silent.

“You okay, kid?” the vampire asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

Seventeen

I slept badly, every passing car or creaking wall startling me awake. At three in the morning, I came within two digits of calling home and telling my parents to take my brothers and get out of the house. The only thing that stopped me was knowing that they wouldn’t do it. I lay on the bed, drifting in and out of unpleasant dreams, and watched the curtains turn light again with the approaching dawn. At no point in the night did I even move toward turning on my laptop.

Midian and Chogyi Jake had been pretty quiet after I told them about the fake Ex, but neither had given me any grief for being taken in, even briefly. We agreed that the three of us would use the word elephant someplace in the first sentence or two if we were ever communicating across the net, and Midian made a joke about policy being the surest evidence that something had already been fucked up.

The doorbell rang at eleven in the morning, and the sound knotted my guts. Midian, watching television with the captioning on and the sound off, rose from the couch. Chogyi Jake came in from the kitchen. The doorbell rang again.

“You want me to get my Luger?” Midian asked.

“You two get back out of sight,” I said. Chogyi handed Midian a knife, nodded to me, and faded back into the kitchen. Midian stepped into the hallway where he couldn’t be seen from the door. I put my hand on the knob, took a breath, let it out, and pulled the door open.

The courier had already given up, the little red station wagon pulling away from the curb. A gray cardboard box squatted on the red bricks. I picked it up, still half expecting it to be a trap. The report inside was eighty pages long, professionally bound, with nothing on it to indicate that it was meant for me or produced by my lawyer. Everything about it was plausibly deniable. I went to the dining room table and sat down. After a couple minutes, I told Midian I’d read him the good parts if he’d stop hovering over my shoulder.

Randolph Eustace Coin was born in Vienna in 1954, son of a grocer. His family moved to America in 1962, taking up residence in an ethnically homogenous enclave in New York City. He attended public school without any particular sign of excellence, though he was supposed to have been a pretty good clarinet player.

I looked up.

“How does Coin put a curse on you in seventeen eighty whatever it was if he’s not born until the nineteen fifties?” I asked.

“He was in a different body at the time,” Midian replied with a shrug. “It’s not like your lawyer can track which flesh has who inside it.”

“Ah,” I said. “Right.”

In late summer of 1972, Coin disappeared.