Full Blooded (43 page)

‘I was afraid of that,’ he said. ‘Explains a lot. The little rat fuckers must have sussed him out.’

The skeletal, awkward hand rubbed his chin like it was checking for stubble. When he looked at me, his eyes were the yellow of old ivory. In motion, he didn’t look like a corpse, only a badly damaged man.

‘Hey,’ he said, ‘where are my manners, eh? You want a drink?’

‘Um,’ I said. And then, ‘Yes.’

He led the way back to the kitchen. I perched on one of the stools while he poured two generous fingers of brandy into a water glass. I’d seen pictures of people who survived horrific burns, and while he didn’t bear those scars, the effect was much the same. I could see it when his joints—shoulder, hip, elbow—didn’t quite bend the way they were meant to. He walked carefully. I wanted to ask what had happened to him, but I couldn’t think of a way to phrase it that didn’t seem excruciatingly rude. I tried not to stare, the way you try not to look at people with harelips or missing hands, but my eyes just kept going back.

Guilt started pulling at me. Even if it was officially my place, coming in the way I had was rude. Clearly Uncle Eric had been letting the guy crash here. He poured a glass for himself, then took a wood cutting board from the cabinet beside the refrigerator and a knife from its holder.

‘So,’ he said. ‘He didn’t tell you a goddamn thing about all this, did he?’

‘Not really,’ I said, and sipped the brandy. I never drank much, but I could tell that the liquor was better than I’d ever had.

‘Yeah. Like him,’ the man said, and put a cast-iron skillet on the burner. ‘Well. Shit, I don’t know where to start. My name’s Midian. Midian Clark. Your uncle and I were working together.’

If I pretended I was listening to Tom Waits, his voice wasn’t so bad.

‘What on?’

A scoop of butter thick enough to make a dietitian weep dropped onto the skillet and started to quietly melt.

‘That’s a long story,’ Midian said.

‘Was it why he got killed?’

‘Yeah, it was.’

‘So you know who killed him.’

Midian shifted his head to the side, his ragged lips pressed thin. He sighed.

‘Yes. If he got killed, I know who killed him.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Spill it.’

He frowned quietly as he took a yellow onion, half a red bell pepper, and an egg carton out of the refrigerator. I drank more brandy, the warm feeling in my throat spreading to my cheeks. I cleared my throat.

‘I’m not blowing you off. I just think better when I’m cooking,’ he said. ‘Okay. So. There’s a guy calls himself Randolph Coin. He came to Denver about a year ago. He heads up a bunch of fellas call themselves the Invisible College, okay? They think that all the ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties you’ve ever heard of really exist. Vampires, werewolves, zombies. People doing magic. You name it. You like onions?’

‘Not really.’

‘Not even grilled? Tell you what, just try this. If you don’t like it, I’ll make another one. So the Invisible College, they also think they know
why
all these things exist. It’s about possession. Something coming out of this abstract spiritual world that’s right next to ours and worming its way inside people and animals. Hell, sometimes even things. Knives.’ He held up the cutting blade. ‘Whatever.’

‘Demons taking people over,’ I said. He looked up, smiling at the skepticism in my voice, as he sliced the onion in neat halves, peeled away the skin, and started dicing the pale flesh.

‘Well, yeah, a lot of it is about demons. Or spirits or loa or whatever you want to call them. Seelie Court, Unseelie Court, Radha, Petro, Ghede. Ifrit. Hungry ghosts. All kinds of them. The generic term’s riders. They get inside a person, and they change them. Make them do things, make them
want
to do things. Give them freaky powers. Normal people who’ve got a feel for it and the right training—call ’em wizards or witches or cunning men or whatever—they can do some pretty weird shit, but
nothing
compared to what riders are capable of.’

‘So not just demons, but magic too,’ I said. He dropped the onion into the spreading pool of butter, where it sizzled angrily. The pepper was next for the block.

‘Thing is, kid, the folks that believe that shit? They’re absolutely right. That’s exactly how the world is. Let me give you a fer instance. I know you’re wondering what the fuck happened to me, right? Well, how old do you think I am?’

‘I … I don’t …’

‘I was born the year they stormed the Bastille. The year of our Lord seventeen hundred and eighty motherfucking nine.’ His voice had taken on an angry buzz. The blade in his hand flickered over the cutting board. ‘I crossed the Invisible College, and they cursed me. I’ve been wandering around ever since. Coin is direct apostolic line from the pig fucker who did this to me. He’s the only one who can take it back.’

He put the peppers in with the browning onions. Wisps of smoke and steam rose from the black metal.

‘I came to Eric because he’s the kind of guy who knows things. Helps people. I needed help.’

‘You’re telling me that a bunch of evil wizards killed my uncle?’ I could hear the raw disbelief in my own voice.

His yellowed eyes locked on me. He took an egg from the carton and cracked it deliberately on the countertop.

‘I’m telling you the world’s more complicated than you thought,’ he said. ‘And I’m not wrong about that.’

While he whipped eggs in a tiny steel mixing bowl, I sat hunched over the breakfast bar, brandy in my hands. I felt like I’d been on an amusement park ride one too many times. Confused and dizzy and a little sick. We both knew he was giving me time to think. Time, specifically, to decide he was a nut or a liar. My first guess was both. But he was the only thread I had that might lead to Uncle Eric and whoever had killed him.

‘Okay,’ I said as he poured the yellow-white froth over the peppers and onions, ‘let’s say I buy it. What were you two going to do? Track this Coin guy down and give him a good talking to?’

‘The Invisible College is here for a reason. Every few years, they have to come together to induct new people into the club. They have to call up a rider, open the poor sucker who’s signing up for the horror show, and infect them with it. Things start moving just outside the world like sharks coming up for chum. When you get too many riders bumping around, the barrier between the physical world and the abstract gets … well, not thin exactly, but
weird
. That started in April. While that’s happening, the Invisible College has its hands full. Eric and I were planning to disrupt things before they could eat the new crop of people. And while we were at it, kill Coin.’

‘You were going to murder someone?’

He put his hand on the handle of the skillet, flinched back from the heat, and reached for a dishcloth to protect himself.

‘Coin’s dead, kid,’ he said. ‘Coin’s been dead since the day they made him Invisible. We were looking to kill the thing that’s living in his body.’

He lifted the skillet, and a flick of his wrist spun the omelet in the air, folded it, and caught it. The ragged lips twisted into a satisfied smile. He waited a few seconds, then flipped it to the other side.

‘That’s how it works with them,’ he said. ‘You take the unclean spirit inside, and it devours you. It’s not always like that. Other kinds of rider, you maybe don’t need a ceremony. You get bitten, you pick up the wrong guy at the bar. You get assaulted. Maybe it kicks you out of your body, puts you someplace else. Or it just hangs out in the back of your mind, making suggestions or taking over in little ways so you won’t even notice.’

‘That’s …’ I didn’t know whether I was going to say horrible or gross or implausible. Midian shrugged.

‘Yeah, well,’ he said. ‘Thing is, the Invisible College bastards? They’re strong, and they’re smart, and they’re organized. Every one of them that penetrates into the world makes Coin stronger, and the stronger he gets, the more he can protect his own. Think Amway, but for demonic possession.’

‘And killing the thing inside Coin would fix you?’

‘Killing that fucker would undo everything it’s done in the physical world. Me and a whole lot of other things besides. He’s the center of the whole damn infection. Here, lemme get you a fork. Blow on it a little, it’s still hot.’

The taste was more than a few eggs, onions, and peppers seemed to justify. It was lush and hot and rich. He smiled at my reaction and slid the rest onto a plate for me.

‘That’s really good,’ I said through my mouthful.

‘There’s a secret to it. Always drink some brandy first. There. Enjoy. So, yeah, we were looking to break the Invisible College’s back. Get rid of Coin, disrupt the induction. It’d be just like penicillin taking out a case of the clap. We both knew it was dangerous. I don’t know how they got to Eric, but I’m dead sure they did. Your average mugger would have been out of his depth with him. Guys like Eric don’t die at random. He got hit.’

I took another bite of the omelet, chewing slowly to give myself time to think. On the one hand, everything Midian said was clearly insane. A two-hundred-year-old man cursed by demons. A cabal of evil wizards planning to engineer the demonic possession of a new batch of cultists. And my uncle in the middle of it all, dead because someone caught wind of his plan.

On the other hand, if anyone had asked me a week before what my uncle did, I would have guessed wrong. And even if every word coming out of Midian’s mouth was crap, it seemed to be crap he believed. And so maybe this Coin guy believed it too. I’d had enough experience with the kind of atrocities that blind faith can lead to that I couldn’t discount anything just because it was crazy. If Coin and the Invisible College believed that they were demon-possessed wizards and that Eric was out to stop them, that could have been reason enough to kill him. Things don’t have to exist to have consequences.

I was lost in bitter memories for a moment. The flare of a match brought me back. The deathly face was considering me as he lit a cigarette.

‘I’d think it was bullshit too if I was you,’ he said. ‘You doubt. I respect that. Doubt’s important stuff.’

He took a long drag, the coal of his cigarette going bright and then dark. Long, blue smoke slid out of his mouth and nostrils as he spoke. It didn’t smell like tobacco. It was sweeter and more acrid.

‘Thing is, kid, you gotta doubt the stuff that
isn’t
true. You go around doubting whether pickup trucks exist, you’ll wind up on the curb with a lot of broken bits.’

I put my fork against the side of the plate and looked up at him.

‘I’m taking this to the police, you know,’ I said.

‘Won’t do you any good. They’re just going to think you’re nuts. They have an explanation that suits them just fine.’

‘All the same—’

A hard tap came from the front room. Both of us turned to look. The little glass ball that hung over the door had fallen. It rolled uneasily along the unseen slope of the floor-boards. While we watched, the ones over the windows fell too, one-two-three. Midian grunted.

‘When you came in,’ he said, ‘you didn’t drop something behind you? Ashes or salt, something like that?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Nothing.’

Midian nodded and took another drag of his cigarette.

‘That’s too bad,’ he said.

With a bang like a car wreck, the front door burst in.