The pause was longer this time. I could guess pretty well at the debate she was going through. I gave her a hand.
"This is about riders, isn't it?" I asked.
"Yes," she said. "So you know about them?"
"Abstract spiritual parasites. Come in from Next Door or the Pleroma or whatever you want to call it," I said as I walked carefully back to the bed. "Take over people's bodies. Have weird-ass magical powers, kind of like the magic humans can do, but way more effective. Yeah, I've got the For Dummies book, at least."
"All right," she said. "Did Eric... did he even mention me?"
"No," I said. "Sorry."
The woman on the other end of the line took a breath as I got back under the covers and pulled the pillow behind my back. I heard Aubrey cough from one of the bedrooms down the hall.
"All right," she said. "My name is Karen Black. I used to be a special agent for the FBI. About ten years ago, I started tracking down what I thought was a fairly standard serial killer. It turned out to be a rider. We caught the horse, a man named Joseph Mfume, but the rider switched bodies."
"So not so easy to track," I said.
"No," she agreed. "My supervisors wanted me to stop. They didn't believe there was anything to it. And... well, X-Files was still popular back then. There were jokes. I was referred for psychiatric counseling and taken off active duty. I resigned and went on with the investigation myself. Eric and I crossed paths a few times over the years, and I was impressed with his efficiency. I've found where the rider is going to strike next, and I need help to stop it. I thought of Eric."
"Okay," I said.
"Can you help me?"
I rubbed my eyes with my free hand until little ghosts of false light danced in my vision.
"Hell if I know," I said. "Let me talk to my guys and call you back."
"Your guys?"
"I kind of have a staff," I said. "Experts."
I could hear her turning that over too. I wondered how much she'd known about Eric's financial situation. For a man with enough money to buy a small third-world nation, he hadn't flaunted it; I hadn't even known until he left me the whole thing. My guess was Karen hadn't expected Eric to have a staff.
"I don't know how much time I have," she said.
"I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Promise. We're in Athens right now, so it may take me a few days to get to New Orleans."
"I don't mean to be rude, but it's not that long a flight," Karen said, impatience in her tone. "You could drive it in eight hours or so."
It took me a second to process that.
"Not Georgia Athens," I said. "Athens Athens. Cradle of civilization."
"Oh," she said, and then, "Oh fuck. What time is it there?"
I snuggled down under my covers and looked at the bedside clock.
"One in the morning," I said.
"I woke you up," she said. "I am so sorry..."
Amid a flurry of apologies and promises to return calls, Karen and I let each other go. I dropped the phone next to the clock and stared at the ceiling.
The last six months had offered me a wide variety of bedroom ceilings. The first at Eric's house in Denver when I was first thrown into the world of riders and possession and magic. Then the dark wood and vigas of an old ranch outside Santa Fe, then a place in New Haven with honest-to-God mirrors over the bed and red silk sheets, followed by a gray-green retro-seventies number in a rentcontrolled apartment building in Manhattan that was so small I got hotel rooms for the guys. There had been a much more civilized beige with a little unprofessional plaster repair near the corner in a townhouse in London, and now the bare white with deep blue notes that said this Greek villa had been a full-on tourist trap rental before Eric bought it.
The guys had been with me the whole time, apart from a couple weeks when Aubrey had gone back to his former job at the University of Colorado to tie up some loose ends on his research. In the long, complex process of inventorying the property and resources Eric had left behind, we hadn't stayed anyplace more than two months running, and most considerably less. None of it seemed like home to me, and from