Free Unclean Spirits by M. L. N. Hanover Page A

soul, or whatever you want to call it…”
    I pointed at the dog. Charlie whined again. Candace didn’t kneel down so much as melt. Her spun, emptied expression was perfectly familiar. I’d felt exactly like that since my first visit with Eric’s lawyer.
    “Aaron?” she said.
    The dog—Charlie or Aaron or some combination of the two—stood up and walked over to her. The movement had a dignity that spoke as eloquently as words. I would never have done this to you. Candace started crying in earnest now, confusion and fear and relief. Aubrey already had his cell phone out. His face was gray and serious. I motioned him to come out to the front room with me.
    Candace and her dog needed a moment alone.
    Aubrey sat on the couch, explaining the situation in fast, telegraphic sentences. I could hear Ex’s voice compressed to a thin, synthesized version of itself coming from the phone. I stood with my arms crossed, looked out the window intothe hot August night, and tried to make sense of my own heart.
    My sense of doubt and confusion was gone, and in its place, something richer and stranger was growing. The tattooed assassins, Midian’s curse, Eric’s death. My alleged powers. None of those had been as convincing as the expression in the dog’s eyes.
    So, okay, riders existed. Aubrey and Chogyi Jake and Ex and Midian weren’t suffering a group delusion. They were telling the truth. I’d seen the evidence now, and so at last I could really believe.
    And Eric. I was standing now where he would have been, doing—however poorly, however uncertainly, with my near total ignorance intact—what he would have done. I was proud of him, and sad beyond words that I hadn’t known what he was when I could still have asked him about it.
    There had to be a reason he hadn’t told me. All the things he’d done for me over the years, all the little intercessions that kept me out of trouble with my dad. He’d been watching out for me then, and so maybe he’d been watching out for me in this too. One thing was certain: there were more kinds of danger in this than I had ever imagined.
    But he’d also left it to me. He’d left me the keys to the kingdom. So he hadn’t thought there were more kinds of danger than I could handle.
    And that, oddly, was the answer I’d been looking for. The warmth in my heart was pride that he’d chosen me to takeup his work. To step into lives like Candace’s. It beat the crap out of being a college dropout with a bad reputation and no family. And maybe he’d known that too.
    Still lost in speculation, I didn’t notice the police cruiser slowing down until it pulled in behind Aubrey’s minivan. I watched the cop get out, consider the house and the back of the minivan, then turn on the flashing lights and mutter into a radio strapped to his lapel. Aubrey cut the connection with Ex and looked out with me. He muttered something obscene.
    “He must have seen the shotgun. We can’t have this guy around when Ex shows up,” Aubrey said. “Let me go see what’s the trouble.”
    He’d started walking past me toward the door, then stopped, his weight tugging at me. He turned to look at me, and I realized that I’d grabbed his arm. I hadn’t meant to, but having done it, I knew why I had.
    “Don’t. Don’t go,” I said. Then, louder, “Candace? Hey, Candace. Your fiancé wouldn’t be a cop, would he?”

Seven
     
     
    H

e came up the same path I’d walked with Aubrey half an hour before, the palm of his hand resting on the butt of his pistol. The flashing lights silhouetted him and hid his face. At my side, Candace was staring out the window and murmuring a constant string of syllables equal parts prayer and vulgarity. The dog stood between her and the door, still and silent and thoroughly undoglike.
    From my glimpses through the window, I guessed the man was around two hundred pounds. He had a Taser, Mace, a pistol. He had a badge. For all I knewhis murmured conversation on his lapel radio