"Officially, it's one out of seven," Ex said when I finished. "Or that's what Brother Ignatius said back when I was in seminary. A little under fifteen percent of serial killings are the result of possession."
"Creepy," I said.
Aubrey and Ex looked at each other across the table. I could tell there was some kind of subterranean masculine conversation going on, and it annoyed me that I was being left out.
"What?" I said. "It's creepy. What?"
"How are you feeling, Jayné?" Aubrey asked.
"Tired. It's..." I checked my watch. "Two in the morning."
"Three weeks ago in London, it would have been midnight," Ex said.
"True," I said. "Point being?"
Aubrey held up his hand.
"We've all been busting hump for... well, for months now. We've got six hundred books in the wiki and at least that many artifacts and items, most of which we don't have any kind of provenance for. And we're not a fifth of the way through the list of properties that Eric owned."
I knew all of that, but hearing it said out loud made me want to hang my head.
"I know it's a big project," I said. "But it's necessary. If we don't know what we have to work with..."
"I agree completely," Ex said. "The thing is, someone's come to you with a problem. Sounds like it might be a little hairy. Are you... are we in any condition to take it on? Or do you want to finish the full inventory before we dive back into fieldwork?"
What I wanted was firmly none of the above. I wanted to stop for a while. I wanted to find a lovely alpine village, read trashy romances, play video games, and watch the glaciers melt. And there was nothing to stop me from doing it. I had the money, I had the power.
But this was what Eric did, and he left it to me, and walking away from it meant walking away from him too. I sighed and finished my coffee.
"If this lady's on the level, she needs us. And if we wait until we're totally ready, we'll never do anything," I said. "And I think we could all use a break. So here's the plan. I'll get us tickets to New Orleans, we'll go save the world from abstract evil, and afterward we'll hang out in the French Quarter for a couple of weeks and blow off steam."
"If we've defeated abstract evil, I'm not sure how much of the French Quarter will still be there," Ex said.
"First things first, padre," I said, standing up and heading for the main rooms. In fairness, the padre part wasn't entirely true. Ex had, in fact, quit being a priest long before I met him. Thus the Ex. Padre was what a vampire we both knew had called him, and sometimes the nickname still stuck.
The main room of the villa looked like a dorm room a week before final exams. Books filled cheap metal shelves and covered the tables. Ancient texts with splitting leather bindings, paperbacks from the 1960s with bright colors and psychedelic designs, medical papers, collections of theological essays, books on game theory, chaos theory. Grimoires of all arcane subjects waiting to be examined, categorized, and entered in the wiki that the four of us were building to support our work as magical problem solvers. Our laptop computers were all closed, but plugged in and glowing.
I sat at mine and opened it. It took me about three minutes to dig up an old e-mail from my lawyer listing all the addresses of Eric's properties, and about thirty seconds from there to confirm that I did indeed own a house in New Orleans listed as being in the Lakeview neighborhood, and valued at eight hundred thousand dollars, so it probably had enough bedrooms for all of us. I wondered what it would look like.
I smiled to myself as I got on the travel site and started shopping for the most convenient and comfortable flights back to the States. The truth was, even as tired as I was, the prospect of going somewhere new, opening a new house or storage unit without having the first clue what we'd find gave me a covert thrill. Yes, it all flowed from the death of my beloved uncle, so there was an aspect of the macabre, but it was also a little like a permanent occult Christmas.
Well, except when evil spirits tried to kill me. I had some scars from those that kept me in one-piece bathing suits.