Sixteen

I left the house in the best outfit to survive the shopping fiasco: a deep blue blouse with black slacks and a jacket. With my hair up and a little tasteful eyeliner and lipstick, I thought I looked the consummate professional. Right up until I reached my destination.

I drove carefully, one eye on the road, one on the rearview. Every time I stepped out of the house I felt like a field mouse watching for hawks. Every driver on the road might be one of Coin's people. Every kid on the street could be watching for me. I hated it, but I didn't let it stop me. I didn't feel even vaguely safe until I got to my lawyer's office.

It was as intimidating as anyplace I'd ever been. Stained walnut walls had the sense of solid wood. The receptionist dressed like she was running for president. The waiting area was discreetly away from the front door so that I wouldn't have to suffer the indignity of breathing the same air as the UPS guy. The couch was upholstered in raw silk and the coffee was served in a French press with almond cookies. The time-killing magazines on the table were no older than two weeks, and I counted six different languages and three alphabets. None of them had a "Best and Worst Dressed" feature on the front. I wondered whether the Economist ever had a fashion issue.

I felt like an impostor.

I'd been waiting twenty minutes, each one more nerve-racking than the one before, when my lawyer came in. She wore a gray suit with a shell-pink blouse and a smile that could have been genuine.

"Jayn¨¦!" she said, pronouncing it Jane. "I'm sorry to keep you waiting. I was in a meeting."

"It's my fault," I said, standing up. "I should have gotten an appointment. It was just-"

"Nonsense. You're always welcome. Come back to my office and tell me what I can do for you."

Her office straddled the line between reassuring softness and a level of intimidation that bordered on class warfare. Her desk was carved wood, her carpeting was soft and lush in a way that made me think of tapestries, the north wall was an apparently seamless sheet of glass that looked out over Denver only because there wasn't anyplace grander nearby. There was no computer on her desk. She was apparently too important for things like that. The receptionist, or someone so like her I couldn't tell the difference, put my coffee and cookies on the corner of the desk for me and vanished.

"I've been meaning to call you," the lawyer said, sitting at her desk. "There are a few things I'll need your signature for. Nothing pressing, you understand. We just want to have everything in place before the quarterly statements are due."

"Anything I can do to help," I said.

If my fairy godmother had been a shark, she'd have smiled like the lawyer did then.

"Is everything going well, then?"

"Actually," I said, "there's something I wanted to talk to you about."

She leaned forward, her expression calm and interested. I had the impression that if I'd read off the phone book, she could have quoted it back to me. My mouth felt dry.

"What we talk about," I said. "What I say to you? It's protected, right? Confidentiality and all that?"

"Yes," she said. "So long as you weren't actually planning to commit a crime. In the good old days, that was absolutely confidential as well, but rights erode, dear. It's their nature."

"Okay." I took a deep breath. "I think I know who killed my uncle. It was a guy named Randolph Coin. And I need to find out everything I can about him. The thing is...the thing is he runs some kind of cult called the Invisible College. I don't want to take anything to the police, and I don't want anyone to know that I'm looking into his stuff. Does that make sense?"

"Coin is spelled like nickels and dimes?" the lawyer asked.

"Yes. Just like it sounds."

"Do we know anything else about him?"

"He was at a warehouse in Commerce City this weekend," I said. "He has a lot of tattoos on his face, but..."

But he can hide them using magical spells, and he has a bunch of wizard-ninjas who do his bidding, and he's not really human at all, because this evil spirit has actually taken over his body. I wondered if the lawyer could have me declared insane and take away all the money.

"...but he's really good at covering them up," I finished lamely.

The lawyer made a noncommittal sound in the back of her throat before she spoke.

"All right. I'll see what we can do. In the meantime, how's everything else working out?"

"I was thinking that we could find out who rented the warehouse," I said. "Even if it's not him, it's got to be someone connected to him. And I don't know if it's legal to track down what kind of plane tickets he's bought, or if he's even..."

She was looking at me with the kind of amused indulgence I was used to seeing on grandmothers watching puppies gambol on the lawn. I took a sip of my coffee. It was really good.

She tapped the top of her desk gently with her fingertips and mispronounced my name. I corrected her, and she didn't miss a beat.

"Jayn¨¦," she said correctly. "I don't know how much you remember about Ronald Reagan's tenure in the presidency?"

"I was four," I said. "When he left office, I was four."

Her brows rose about a millimeter.

"You make me feel old, dear. The phrase you need to know is plausible deniability. You've told me what you need. I'll find it for you. The less you concern yourself with precisely how the information was gathered, the simpler it will be."

"Um," I said.

"I know some very talented people," she said. "And really, I'm sure you're much too busy to micromanage every step of something as menial as this?"

I suppressed a grin.

"Of course," I said. "I'm sorry. I just got enthusiastic."

"Enthusiasm is a wonderful thing," she said as if she was agreeing. "As soon as I have anything that might be useful, I'll have a report drawn up. I assume sooner is better than later."

"Yes, please."

"Excellent. And, since I have you here, could I put upon you to sign a few little things for us? Once we have these out of the way, I can move ahead on the property transfers with much less bother for you."

If she'd pulled out a scroll of human skin covered with Latin and asked me to sign in blood, I probably would have done it. Everything was paper and ink, though, and there was only a little Latin.

I GOT back to the house feeling a bit high. With the front door closed behind me, I took a silent bow and Chogyi Jake and Midian applauded. Afterward, I sat on the couch and gave them the blow-by-blow of the meeting. Chogyi Jake looked pleased, but the circles under his eyes were getting darker. He didn't make a point of it, but I knew he was pouring himself into keeping the wards around the house strong. I wondered how many times he had saved us already without my even knowing about it.

While the pair of them cooked, I went to the back bedroom and turned on the laptop. I had a list of things I wanted to look up-what exactly a vârkolak was being near the top of the list. I waited while a metric assload of spam downloaded to my inbox. Nothing for me. Nothing personal. I checked my brother's blog, but he hadn't posted anything in months. I thought about checking back with my former friends again, but the more I turned the idea over, the more pathetic it seemed. The world had moved on. Several times. There wasn't any point.

A vârkolak turned out to be something about halfway between a vampire and a werewolf, or a vampire without any sign of its bestial nature, or a werewolf that doesn't change shapes. There was a whole lot of information, and no way to know whether any of it was more reliable than going out to Midian and asking him. And that was the same problem I had with the bigger issue of Coin too.

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.