Instead, I'd sent e-mail to my brother Curt. I didn't say much, just hi, and I was doing fine and traveling a little. How were things at the homestead? In all the time I'd been hopping across the globe, I hadn't talked to my family. I hadn't even told them what Eric had left me. Writing to Curt was a step so small as to almost not exist, and still it was a big deal for me.
Somewhere along the line, I felt like I'd taken a big hit too, and that I was still standing back up. I promised myself again that tonight I'd do my homework. No more putting it off. Time to be professional. Maybe even after we were done with coffee.
We got a table, and an older Asian waitress took our order. Five minutes later, I was eating deep-fried dough in a thick coat of powdered sugar and drinking chicory coffee.
"I was thinking," I said. "The whole thing with Marinette?"
"How is Aubrey doing?" Karen asked.
"He's fine. Well... no, he's really not," I said. "But he's going to be. You know?"
Aubrey. Another one for the list of hard knocks.
"I understand," she said, sipping her own coffee. She took it with cream. I drank it black. "I'm sorry that happened. It's... scarring. If there's anything I can do to help. Even if he just needs someone to talk to."
"I'll let him know," I said. "Thanks."
"I feel responsible," she said. "I was the one who led you in there. Even when you expressed concerns, I just pushed on ahead. I'm not used to working with people. Not anymore. I think I forgot what it's like, risking someone besides myself."
"We're grown-ups," I said. "We could have said no."
Karen smirked into her coffee cup. Her eyes stayed sad.
"Fair enough," she said.
"What I wanted to talk about, though," I said. "That thing where the locals are still looking to kick Legba's ass for whatever got it exiled in the first place?"
Karen sat forward, her brow furrowed, and nodded to me to go on.
"I don't know if you knew this," I said. "Eric... sometimes he worked with riders. Pitted the little ones against the big ones."
"No," she said.
"It was hard for me to get my head around too," I said. "But there is a certain 'the enemy of my enemy' thing going on. And if we could find a way to use them. Something that would weaken Glapion, or even just distract her-"
"I said no. That's the end of it. There aren't any of them that will side with us. If Marinette proved anything, it was that."
I sipped my coffee, frowning. That actually hadn't been the message I'd taken from Aubrey's possession, but Karen seemed sure of herself, and she'd been doing this longer than I had. We sat quietly eating our heart attack of a breakfast. My fingers played idly in the fallen powdered sugar, drawing a snake in the shape of a question mark and dotting it with a drop of coffee.
"I'm sorry," Karen said after two or three minutes. "I didn't mean to snap."
"Didn't notice that you had," I lied.
"You're kind," she said. It wasn't the first time someone had called me that, and I still didn't know what they were talking about. "I don't trust riders. Not any of them. I know Eric used to play with fire. I was more conservative."
Who wants to live forever, right? Karen said in my memory. If that was more safety-conscious and conservative, then Uncle Eric must have juggled running chainsaws. But maybe he had taken terrible risks on a regular basis. Maybe that was why he was dead now, and Karen was still alive. If my mother had indulged in a marriage-threatening affair, then literally anything was possible.
"He will heal, you know," Karen said. It took me a second to figure out she meant Aubrey. "It will take time, and he won't be the same. It's even possible that he'll be better than he was before. Right now, he's... damaged. Badly. But he's not out of the game."
"Like the city," I said.
"I talked with Ex yesterday after we left the safe house," she said.
"Did he tell you that it was all his fault that Aubrey and I got hurt?"
"Yes," she said, laughing. "Among other things."
"Ex is a good guy," I said. "But he can be kind of a dick sometimes."
"He's a good man," Karen said. "Confused, maybe. But at heart, I think he's a very good person."