Aubrey was on the bed in a cheap hospital gown, his clothes cut away. The monitor showed his heartbeat at a slow fifty beats per minute, solid and unvarying. He had enough oxygen in his blood. He wasn’t dying.
He just wasn’t here.
The curtain rattled and slid aside. A man in a white lab coat with a stethoscope around his neck stepped in. He was bald, wide, and he looked almost as tired as I felt.
“You’re Jayné?” he asked, pronouncing it Janey. I didn’t correct him.
“Yes,” I said.
“And you’re his fiancée?”
“Yes,” I said, repeating the lie.
“Okay,” the doctor said. “Could you tell me what happened?”
I went over the story. We’d been going out shooting. Aubrey had said he felt a little weak, so we’d pulled over. When he stopped talking to me, I’d brought him here. It was simple, easy to remember, and as close to the truth as I was going to get. The doctor asked me a few questions about Aubrey’s medical history, whether he was on any medications, if there was anything he was allergic to. I didn’t know anything. I started crying while the doctor went through all the same preliminary tests that the nurse had. He explained that they were going to take Aubrey away to do some imaging. Aubrey’s heart stayed at fifty beats per minute.
I’d given up hope that they’d find anything.
I let a nurse direct me to the hospital cafeteria, where I sat looking at a cup of coffee. My knee throbbed. My stitches complained where I’d pulled at the wound sometime during my flight from the warehouse. My shoulder hurt too.
“Hey. You’ve got a call.”
It was the fourth time my phone had rung since I’d pulled into the ambulance-only zone and screamed until a couple of paramedics helped me pull Aubrey out. As far as I knew, the minivan was still parked out there. Illegally. I tried to care.
“Hey,” Eric said. “You’ve got a call.”
I pulled the cell phone out and answered more to keep from hearing his voice again than because I wanted to talk to anyone.
“Hello?”
“Where are you?” Ex said.
“Hospital. Aubrey’s in a coma or something. I don’t know. He’s…I don’t know.”
“You have to get back to the house. You have to get someplace warded.”
“Okay,” I said. “They took him off to get a CAT scan or an MRI or something, and as soon as—”
“Jayné!” he shouted. “You have to come here right now. You’re in danger.”
“Yeah,” I said. “All right.”
I dropped the call and made my way back to the emergency room. It turned out someone had moved the minivan to a parking space not far away, left it unlocked, and put the keys in the visor. I didn’t know who’d done it, but I figured this wasn’t the first time someone had blocked up the entrance. I was vaguely grateful that they hadn’t just towed it away.
I pulled out, found my way onto Speer heading northeast, and tuned the radio to a country station before I realized that I had forgotten my coffee at the cafeteria and also that I didn’t know how to get home from here. I just tried to keep my mind on driving until I reached Colfax, turned left, and passed the University of Colorado on my right. Then I knew more or less where I was. I did a U-turn at Eighth Street and headed home.
It was a little past noon now, the temperature rising up into the nineties. The air smelled like gasoline and tar. The traffic was thick but not slow, and it seemed to take all my attention just to keep up with it. My body seemed to know better than I did what needed to be done. I let reflex take over, and I was a little surprised under half an hour later to find myself pulling up to the brick house. Eric’s house. My house. The windowless van was on the street, the black sports car in the carport. The lawn looked thirsty. I wondered when I was supposed to have watered it.
I walked in the front door and dropped my keys on the side table. Ex came out from the kitchen, a shotgun held at half ready, like he didn’t know whether to expect a friend or an assault team. Which was probably reasonable. We stared at each other for a long moment. He seemed tired. His white-blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail tied with a strip of leather. His black shirt was torn at the cuffs. He looked angry, but not with me.
He looked haunted.
It happened on his watch, I thought to myself. He did his best, and this is what came of it. Poor little tomato.
I took his hand without realizing I was going to. He looked surprised for a second, then squeezed my hand gently. He started to say something, stopped, and looked down.
It’s all right, I wanted to say. Except that it wasn’t.
“How is he?” Ex asked.
“Stable,” I said. “Just not in there.”
“It’s the fucking Voice of the Abyss,” Midian rasped from behind Ex. “If he hadn’t done that bullshit with the dog, he’d have held it together. You know. Maybe.”
Midian sat at the table. His shirt was off, and a bandage wrapped his wasted belly. Blood dark as India ink was soaking through.
“I thought Coin was supposed to be vulnerable,” I said.
“He was,” Midian said with a grimace. “Fucker was barely able to ignore everything we threw at him and cripple us before he went back inside.”
“Is that supposed to be funny?” I asked.
“What do you want to hear, kid?” Midian said. The gravel and whiskey voice seemed almost compassionate. “We took our shot. It didn’t work out.”
“Where’s Chogyi Jake?” I asked, a sudden stab of panic hitting me.
“Meditating,” Ex said. “He’s okay. I think he’s okay.”
“So what the fuck happened?”
“We made some assumptions,” Ex said.
“And?”
“And it turned out Coin was a little more paranoid than we thought. He was protected. Personally protected, not just by the wards they had on-site,” Ex said. “From what we can tell, he was ready for exactly the forms we were using. He suckered us.”
“Meaning someone ratted us out,” Midian said. “My guess? Eric may have spilled a couple of beans on his way down.”
“And now their initiation rite’s done, so they aren’t tied up with that anymore. Coin has a couple hundred of his people free to act against us. And he’s not locked to any particular location, so we don’t know where he is,” Ex said. He sounded tired. “We knew it was a risk.”
My shock was starting to wear thin, numbness giving way to something less gentle.
“Actually,” I said, “I’m pretty sure ‘Oh, and we might all die’ wasn’t part of the discussion when I was in the room. I thought you guys knew what you were doing.”
“Well,” Midian said, his voice sharp and grating, “maybe you should have spent a little more time planning and a little less playing at the mall and getting your ashes hauled.”
“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.”