get at me? I bent over the keyboard, my hair hanging down like blinders, blocking out everything but me and the screen.
CARYONANDON: J? I know ur not idle. C'mon. Don't be a dick. JAYNEHELLER: Hey. CARYONADNON: I knew you were there. I've been thinking about you a lot. JAYNEHELLER: Have you been drinking? CARYONANDON: A little. You want to get together? Talk?
Extojayne asked something and I told him to stand by. Then I told him I had to go, and I'd talk to him tomorrow. The last thing I did before I shut down the laptop for the night was answer Cary.
JAYNEHELLER: Actually, no.
Chapter 23
Twenty-three
It was just past midnight when the knock came at my bedroom door. I was pretty well asleep, deep in a dream that involved a huge mountain and a sunrise that projected purification instead of light, and only half woke at the sound. I'd almost convinced myself that I'd imagined it when the bedroom door eased open. I sat partway up. I wondered where my rifle was, more with annoyance than fear.
Kim was dressed in a bathrobe that had been Eric's. Her hair was down and messy from where it had lain against her pillow. She walked toward me, hands deep in the robe's pockets. Her expression was blank. I thought she was sleepwalking until she started to speak.
"Don't say anything," she said. "Just...just let me say this. All right?"
"Okay," I said. Sleep-soaked, my voice sounded almost as bad as Midian's.
"I didn't leave only because the riders made me uncomfortable. They did, but I wouldn't have left Aubrey in the middle of all this just because I didn't like it. If anything, my fear of them was a reason to stay."
Her chin rose a centimeter. Her eyebrows rose too. The expression made me think of old pictures of English queens. I half expected her to say We are not amused.
"I was having an affair with your uncle," she said. "I didn't plan it. I didn't even particularly enjoy it. It was just something that happened between us. We were on one of his covert actions, and the two of us were trapped in a cabin together for a day and a half while the wendigo outside dissipated. And..."
She sighed and sat on the edge of the bed. She shook her head.
"Eric wasn't a man I liked," she said. "He wasn't someone I trusted or admired. But there was something powerful about him, and I responded to it. I broke it off with him half a dozen times, but then a few weeks later, I'd be driving home and find myself turning right instead of left. Aubrey only saw that I was trying to pull away from Eric and the riders and the Pleroma. That whole secret world. We had the most ridiculous fights about the whole thing. And of course they never came to anything because I could never tell him what I really felt or the real reasons behind anything I did."
"Did Aubrey ever find out?"
Kim shook her head.
"Eric never told him," she said, "and I separated from my husband and left the state in order to stop. That's what happened. I thought that someday, if Eric moved away or he and Aubrey grew apart, I could come back. And then Eric died. When you called, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. It was finally safe for me to come back to Aubrey, and it was too late. And then I met you."
"I didn't know about you," I said. "I didn't know Aubrey was married."
"I know. But coming off that airplane...you're young, and you're beautiful, and you have Eric's sense of power about you. Charisma, I suppose you'd call it. I've been watching you put this all together. I think you've done all the things that he would have, but somehow you've done them gently. Kindly. You have a good heart. If you had been a shrieking bitch, it would have been simple. Well, simpler than it is, anyway."
I sat up and drew the sheets around me like a robe. The darkened house clicked to itself, cooling. The distant hum of traffic competed with the ticking of a clock. I could still smell the last fading scents of Midian's great feast, tainted by the smoke of his cigarette.
"I'm not getting between you," I said. "I didn't know he was married, or I would never have gone after him. When I found out he was married, I gave him raw hell over it. And