“Hello to you too,” Vivian says. “Catch you at a bad time?”

I look at my phone. I’ve got full bars. You get a signal in a hotel room on the other side of the universe in the realm of Nyarlathotep. Who knew?

“No, just unexpected. It’s almost 4 a.m. What’s wrong?”

“Good news for once,” she says. “Gabriela’s conscious. Woke up about half an hour ago. I figured you’d want to know, and you were never much of a sleeper, so I figured now’s as good a time as any. She’s not crazy about the spell you cast but she gets that it saved her life. She’ll yell at you a lot, but she really means thank you.”

“Conscious is good. How is she otherwise?”

“Not well enough to go out and fight an Aztec god, I can tell you that much.”

“Good. The fewer people stuck in the middle of this shit, the better. Too many people getting fucked up as it is. Hey, now’s probably not the time but I think these might be the most words we’ve spoken to each other in over a year, so . . . Are you doing all right?”

Silence. I’m the one who breaks it. “You know, forget it. That wasn’t cool. None of my business, it’s 4 a.m. and that was an ambush. Unintentional, but still. I’m sorry.”

“I need out,” she says. I’m about to say something but in a rare moment of my-head-out-of-my-ass, I don’t.

“I’ve always known our world’s fucked up,” she says. “But I thought things were a tolerable kind of fucked up. And then Lucy got murdered. And you came back. And Alex died. And Tabitha . . . I’m still not entirely sure what the deal was with Tabitha.”

Her voice is getting shaky. She pauses. I can hear her take a drag on a cigarette. “I threw myself into the cleanup. Wrapping up Alex’s business, liquidating assets, handling the will, leftovers from Lucy’s death. When I gave you all that paperwork about the inheritance, that was the end of it. I was done. I was about to leave. Had a job offer at a hospital in Seattle, picked out an apartment. I was one foot out the door.”

She says nothing for a long time and finally I say, “What changed?”