At night, I lay in the darkness wondering where Ex was, whether he’d found someplace safe or gotten killed. I thought about Aubrey and my family and my former friends back at ASU.

I had to take Coin out. Ex couldn’t help me. Eric couldn’t help me. Midian and Chogyi Jake could only draw off as many of the Invisible College’s wizards as would fall for their distraction. I could sneak into his mansion, except that I was pretty sure I couldn’t. I could stand on the street and call him out, except he’d beat me. I could lure him into an ambush, except that as long as he had a few minions left to send in his place, he wouldn’t come for the free cheese in any trap I could think of. The sheets knotted themselves around me as I shifted. The pillows grew hot and uncomfortable, each new configuration bringing only a few minutes’ relief.

I crawled out of bed Friday morning to a blasting dawn. Light pressed in at the blinds like water spilling into a submarine. I sat on the edge of the mattress feeling sticky with old sweat, bored, frightened, and bored with being frightened. My stitches itched, but the wound in my side was mostly closed up, deep pink flesh fusing back into some semblance of normalcy. My knee was a mottled green and yellow, my body struggling to clean out the old blood, but it didn’t hurt to move it anymore. I pulled on a bathrobe, put my hair back in a bun held in place by a couple pencils, and went out to the main room. Midian stood before the back window, looking out at the slowly browning grass of the yard.

“I can’t do it,” I said.

“Yeah, I know,” he said, not looking back. “If the two of us weren’t fucked six ways to Sunday, there’d be a chance. Taking someone out like this is at least a three-man job. Probably more.”

“Maybe we could find some way to hide you guys? A ritual cleansing or something?”

“Then you’ve got no way to draw off the minions, and we’re still screwed.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Where’s Chow Yun Fat when you need him.”

“Who?”

“Chow Yun Fat. You know. Hong Kong action film star. He was in The Replacement Killers and The Corruptor. And Hard-Boiled. That’s the one where he had the gunfight while holding a baby. It was thoroughly over the top, but it was great.”

“I thought you led a sheltered life. How’d you get into gun opera?”

“College,” I said. “I had a boyfriend. Cary. He was into it, so I was too.”

“Huh. Fair enough. So how does the baby figure in?”

“There’s this cop and he’s…”

Something in the back of my head fell in place with a click I could almost feel.

“And?” Midian said.

“Hang on a minute.”

I went back to my room for the cell phone, my head suddenly feeling like champagne. I felt too nervous to go at it straight so I started by calling the hospital to check up on Aubrey. There was no change, and I was both relieved that he was all right and worried that he was still incapacitated. Then I called my lawyer and left a message with her receptionist, asking for any updated information about Coin’s schedule in the next week or two. It was only after that that I went back through the list of incoming calls and found the number that Midian had reminded me of.

The voice-mail message was short, and Candace Dorn’s voice was pleasant. I waited for the beep.

“Candace. Hey, this is Jayné Heller? Look, I’m in a little trouble. I may be in pretty big trouble. I need to ask Aaron for a favor. Could you have him give me a call? Thanks.”

I dropped the connection with a sense of excitement that bordered on dread. I had money, and a few cantrips, and two magical bullets.

And a cop. I had at least one cop. Maybe more, if he had friends he trusted.

And I wasn’t finished yet.

I knew what I needed to do. The idea of calling Candace had opened up a whole new set of options, and no matter how much I hated them, I couldn’t afford to leave any unexplored. It was to keep my friends alive. When I put it that way, my feelings didn’t matter all that much.

It took me twenty minutes to find the number. I probably could have done it with two Google searches, but I still didn’t want to boot up the computer. Eventually I got through directory assistance the old way, a computer with a vague East Coast accent patching me through. I listened to the ringing, my heart beating fast. I was hoping for more voice mail. It didn’t work out.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice said.

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I swallowed down the knot in my throat.

“Hello? Is anyone there?” she said, preparing to hang up.

“Hi,” I said. “You don’t know me. My name’s Jayné. Jayné Heller. Eric Heller was my uncle. He died. Someone killed him, and…um…anyway. I need help. I need your help.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Aubrey’s in trouble,” I said. “He could die.”

There was a moment’s silence. I could hear her breathing. When she spoke again, her voice was grim.

“Where is he?”

“Denver,” I said. “He’s in the hospital.”

“I’ll be there tonight,” his wife said.

Eighteen

I met her at the airport just at sunset. In person, Kim looked a little less like Nicole Kidman. She wore gray slacks and a simple cream blouse that would have looked perfectly in place at a baseball game or a boardroom. Her eyes were a sharp blue, her mouth tight and a little angry. She came through baggage claim without pausing at the carousel, a generic black carry-on wheeling behind her and a tasteful black purse on her arm. She only looked around for a moment before homing in on me. When she stood before me, her head cocked to the left, her eyes clicking over me like a specimen she was trying to identify, I was surprised to see she was half a head shorter than me.

“You look like him,” she said. She spoke sharply, like she was trying to bite off the last letter of every word. “I mean, not like him like him. But the family resemblance is there.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“I didn’t like Eric. I always knew that something like this was going to happen.”

“Well, he’s dead now, so I guess it won’t happen twice,” I said, more harshly than I’d intended. “And he wasn’t the one who got Aubrey in trouble. I was.”

“Aubrey is always the one who gets Aubrey in trouble. It’s his superpower. Are we waiting on something? I don’t have any other luggage.”

I nodded and led the way back out to the minivan. Kim was silent, but her shoes tapping on the concrete behind me seemed to carry accusation and disapproval. I was probably overreacting. She didn’t say anything about my driving Aubrey’s car, so either she didn’t care or she didn’t know it was his. We’d known each other for ten minutes, and I was already certain she wasn’t the sort of person to hold back an opinion.

“We’re staying in Eric’s old house,” I said as we pulled out of the parking space. “It’s got protections on it, and the Invisible College is looking for us pretty hard, so I’m trying not to go out if I don’t have to.”

“I want to go to the hospital,” Kim said. “I need to see him.”

“Aubrey’s all right,” I said, fumbling with a parking stub and a few loose dollars to pay the charge. “I called the doctors again just before I came out here, and they said—”

“I need to see him,” she said again.

“I don’t think it’s safe.”

“I didn’t ask if it was.”

I clenched my teeth. I didn’t want to go back to the hospital. But she was here because I asked her. Because I needed her.

“Fine,” I said. “But we can’t stay long.”

The hospital was out of our way, and we didn’t talk. The few times I glanced over at her, her eyes were on the city sliding by. I wondered whether I should have told her about my night with Aubrey, whether her story about their marriage would match the one he’d given me. I parked on the street, and Kim was out of the car almost before the engine died. I had to trot to catch up with her.