“Seems like,” I said, tapping the walls absently as I walked through the empty space.
Ex, Aubrey, and Chogyi Jake had apparently given up all pretense of keeping order in the condo. The couch and coffee table had been pulled back from the bedroom and were now pale with dust. A pile of photographs and maps sat on one corner, a fragile-looking roll of blueprints lay open in the center, and five leather-bound books were on top of them. A glance was enough to show me that the blueprints were of Grace Memorial, and that the extra markings and symbols on it weren’t from the general contractor.
“What have we got?” I asked.
“A lot of what, and very little why,” Chogyi Jake said. “But we haven’t had time to go through it yet.”
“Two boxes of surveillance and background on someone named David Souder,” Aubrey said. “Runs a roofing company in Waukegan and seems totally innocuous.”
“Name rings a bell, though,” I said. “Is he in the wiki?”
Aubrey shook his head.
“All right,” I said. “Anything that does make sense?”
“There was a very serious binding on the winter solstice, 1951,” Ex said, holding up a weathered-looking three-ring binder stuffed with handwritten pages. I recognized my uncle’s script. “So, not quite sixty years ago.”
“I’m shocked, shocked,” I said dryly. “And it happened at the hospital, right?”
“That’s not as clear as you’d think,” Aubrey said. A patch of white dust smeared his temple like badly applied stage makeup. “Eric was trying to find the site when he died. He’d narrowed it down to a few likely suspects. Grace Memorial was one of them, but he wasn’t certain. All this? He put it here just in case Grace turned out to be the site.”
I sat on the floor, legs crossed and elbows on the table. The top photograph on the pile shifted with a hiss as soft as whispering.
“Do we know what got bound?” I asked.
“Working on that,” Aubrey said. “Eric’s notes refer to it as Rahabiel and Daevanam Daeva, but until we can dig out some actual details, we might as well call it Shirley. But I haven’t even started looking at the books yet.”
“We also may be able to infer something about it from the manner in which it was bound,” Chogyi Jake said. “We do have an outline of that, and it was fairly impressive. Interment, just as the dreams suggested, but there were at least two more layers on top of that. One that kept the site obscured and the residual effects of the rider difficult to recognize, and then another secondary containment.”
“Okay,” I said.
Chogyi Jake shook his head.
“Too technical?” he asked.
“A little jargony,” I said. “Retry?”
Kim, behind me, was the one to answer. She stood in the doorway, her arms crossed and a flush in her cheeks. She looked excited and engaged. Almost happy. I remembered what she’d said about having no one to talk to about things like this.
“They buried it first,” she said. “And then they did something that would keep anyone from hearing it pounding on the coffin. And then they built a prison around it, so that even if it got out, it wouldn’t get free.”
“Yes,” Chogyi Jake said.
“And the prison?” Ex said. “It’s Grace Memorial.”
“Any idea why it would want to jump on my head?” I asked.
“We don’t even know that it did,” Ex said. “The attack could have been whatever was bound trying to reach out, or it might have been a particularly vicious kind of aversion built into the binding.”
“Might have been the prisoner, might have been the prison,” Aubrey said.
“How do you bury a rider?” I asked at the same moment Kim said “Why the uptick in activity?”
“Interment bindings traditionally involve a sacrifice,” Chogyi Jake said, answering me first. “It’s not unlike normal possession, only instead of the rider taking control of a person through its own will, the spirit is driven into someone. Usually someone who has offered themselves up, but unwilling sacrifices have also been made. And then, the horse and rider are—”
He gestured apologetically.
“Buried alive,” I said.
“It’s not a popular technique,” Chogyi Jake said. “But why the activity increased in the last year turns out to be a very interesting question. Of course, there hasn’t actually been an increase in the thing’s reach. It’s pounding on the coffin just as loud. Only now people can hear it.”
“You’re saying things like that mob attack have been happening at Grace for the past fifty-odd years, and just no one noticed?” I said.
“Yes,” Chogyi Jake said. “Until last year, when the second layer of the binding was broken. After that, it became psychologically possible for people to be aware that something odd was going on.”
“Even people like Oonishi,” Ex said. He could really pack contempt in his voice when he tried.
“The increase in people leaving the hospital against medical advice,” Kim said. “They see things. They get scared.”
“That’s the assumption we’re working with,” Chogyi Jake said.
“All right. That’s better than something’s eating them, right?” I said. “And what broke that keep-it-quiet spell?”
“Us,” Aubrey said. “Or, specifically, you. Back in Denver.”
I didn’t get it. And then I did.
“The Invisible College?” I said. “They did this?”
“Thought you’d find that interesting,” Ex said.
NINE
For a split second, I wanted to punch Ex hard enough to break something. His nose, my hand. Whatever. I tried to take a deep breath and force myself to calm down, but the best I could manage was to slow my panting a little. My body felt like a high-voltage wire. I started pacing because I couldn’t be still and I didn’t want to start shrieking. Aubrey’s eyebrows had the little angle to them that meant he was worried. He was right to be.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. Then I repeated it under my breath twenty or thirty times, just for the sensation of speaking.
“This is what Eric was doing in Denver,” Kim said. She at least sounded rational. “He wanted to find this Rahabiel, whatever it is, and breaking the Invisible College was how he could do it.”
“Only they found out what he was up to,” Aubrey said, “and . . . well, stopped him.”
“Why?” I said, a little too loudly. “Why did he want to know? What was he going to do with it? This is crap. This is just crap. What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”
“We’ve only been looking for half an hour,” Aubrey said. Ex looked up as if seeing me for the first time.
“Is there a problem?” he said.
I laughed, but there wasn’t any mirth in it.
“Yes, there’s a problem,” I said. “The people who killed Eric are behind whatever the hell is going on in Grace Memorial.”
“And?”
“And we don’t know what they did or why Eric was trying to find this buried rider thing or generally speaking what the hell we’re in the middle of.”
Ex’s gaze was steady and impatient and a little amused. The first trickle of embarrassment started to ooze past my panic and rage.
“That’s all true,” Ex said. “And?”
“And that’s a problem,” I said. “That’s a real first-class, industrial-grade problem.”
“And we’re investigating it,” Ex said. “Is there any action you’d like to take differently from what we’re already doing?”
I wasn’t sure what it said about Ex that he was enjoying the moment quite so much. Maybe his father had been the stern sarcastic type and he was getting off on the opportunity to revisit his childhood. Maybe six months of Aubrey and me in the same shower had bothered him more than any of us admitted. Whatever the impulse behind it, it pulled the plug on my outrage. I crossed my arms, scowling so hard my cheeks ached a little, but the monkey bouncing around in my brain got a little quieter. Ex nodded once, then turned
back to the notebook.
“All right, then,” he said.
“Why is it still bound?” Kim said. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Why not?” Aubrey asked.
“When Jayné broke the Invisible College’s power, it lifted all the spells,” Kim said. “We know for certain it lifted this don’t-notice-me thing at Grace. But the interment is still holding.”
“So it follows that someone else must have done the actual interment ceremony,” Chogyi Jake said.
“Who?” I asked. “And why?”
“I don’t know,” Chogyi Jake said. “But it may be in here. Somewhere.”
Kim shrugged in my peripheral vision.
“Okay,” I said. “What should I start looking through?”
“Your pile’s there, right behind Kim’s,” Aubrey said.
In the year I’d spent doing weird occult work, I’d come to think of it as being a lot like crime. I spent time finding guns and getaway motorcycles. I bought a house in New Orleans in part because the storage shed out back could be turned into a prison strong enough to hold a kidnapped teenage girl. I’d gotten a policeman to steal a car in order to cover my tracks. I’d killed . . . not a man, but the thing living in his body.
As I sat at the dining room table and watched the high-rise shadows creep out across the water, everything seemed different. I had thought all this time—weeks, months—that Chogyi Jake and Ex and Aubrey and I had been investigating. Going from property to property, place to place, gathering information. As I read through articles my uncle had clipped from newspapers and magazines, I got a glimpse of how wrong I’d been. Jetting across the world to add new entries into the wiki, to list more obscure book titles, to inventory arcane objects and magic items hadn’t been investigating. It had been cataloging. We had put together a tremendous wealth of data, but I’d never had time to make any real knowledge from it.
It was the student nightmare. I’d spent all semester studying the wrong things, and now the test was here. I held a note in fading ink on brittle, yellowed paper. Eric’s handwriting. HH biter or bit? Ask Rosental next Wednesday. If bit, need to find ally groups before Red Rite. I stared at it, despair and panic growing in the back of my head like the thickening of air before a storm. I didn’t know if it was the clue that would crack every mystery open or a random bit of gibberish, Eric’s version of doodling. I spread the notes and pages out on the table, my gaze skipping from one to another, waiting for a pattern to emerge. Nothing came. An article about German artists immigrating to America in the thirties. A street map of the area around Grace Memorial. A detailed woodcut of a double-bladed axe. It was all supposed to mean something. It had all been important enough for Eric to keep. To hide. And it meant nothing to me.
When I’d planned things before, there had been an objective. Kill someone. Abduct someone. Steal something. This time there was only the weight of figuring out what I was supposed to do. What Eric had been doing. It was detective work, and behind it lurked the terrible thought that whatever the answer was, my uncle had died for it. And now it was mine to screw up.
All the others were going through papers and boxes and books too. I moved to the couch for a while until Ex and Aubrey started talking about a file of papers in Hebrew they’d found and the relationship between the Sephirot and fractal geometry. Every time one of them said something I didn’t quite follow, I felt stupider and more thoroughly out of my depth. The wind picked up just after sunset, muttering and thumping on the glass. Our reflections bounced and deformed as the air bent the windows. Aubrey and Kim ordered pizza. When it arrived, the smell of hot grease and garlic actually overpowered the dust. Chogyi Jake disappeared into the secret rooms, coming back half an hour later with all the books from the shelves arranged by language. I watched him place the stacks on the coffee table, one next to the other. I’d taken three semesters of French in high school. I could talk about my aunt’s pen and closing the window. I had no business being here.
When he was done, I looked back down at the notebook I’d been reading. I couldn’t remember anything from the last four pages. I set it down, went to the master bathroom, and sat on the toilet with my head in my hands for twenty solid minutes. Just before midnight, Kim asked for a ride back to her place. I jumped at the chance to get out of the condo and away from the books and files. Going down the elevator to the parking level, she looked as tired as I felt—gaunt at the cheek, her skin with an undertone of ash gray. Her lips were thin and bloodless.
“Fun night,” I said as the doors opened. She grunted in reply.
The wind was still blowing hard. On the expressway heading south, I could feel it in the steering wheel, urging me off to the left. When I glanced over at my passenger, she was pinching the bridge of her nose, her eyes closed.
“You okay?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” she said, but the weariness in her voice was unmistakable. “It’s just that being back in the middle of all this may be a little harder than I thought. I keep being reminded of the bad old days.”
Her apartment building was less impressive than I’d expected. Three stories of crenellated architecture that gave each apartment its own tiny patio, its own square foot of yard, and a few windows. I let her out on the street, then watched to make sure she got all the way to her door. It didn’t seem like a neighborhood where a lot of women walked alone on the street at midnight. I pulled away wondering why I’d expected something grander.
Back at the condo, Ex had moved into the newly discovered study, the lamplight spilling down the hallway like a promise not to sleep until the world was made right. Chogyi Jake was putting the pizza boxes into wide black trash bags along with the detritus of the day’s demolition efforts. His smile was as genuine and constant as ever, but his eyes seemed focused on something else, lost in thought or contemplation. I waved my good night and slipped into the bedroom.
Aubrey lay on the bed, his hands laced behind his head, staring at the ceiling. The bedside lamp gave the room a soft, golden glow without being quite bright enough to read by. I sat down on my side of the bed, looking down at him. In the warm light, he looked younger. Softer.
“Yes?” he said, encouraging me as if I’d spoken.
“Yeah, well,” I said with a sigh. I rolled down onto the bed beside him, belly down, my head turned toward his. “Did we figure anything out?”
“Some,” he said. “There’s still a lot left. Things that Eric knew, so why bother writing them down anywhere.”
“Great.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“No,” I said. I closed my eyes. My head felt thick and heavy against the pillow. Gravity had been turned up a notch, and the world itself and everything in it was pulling me into the mattress. I wanted to sleep not particularly because I was tired, but because it meant forgetting for a few hours. I felt ready to forget.
Aubrey shifted, the mattress bending toward him as he moved. His leg slid over me, his weight coming to rest not quite on my ass, but where you couldn’t really call it thigh anymore. His hands rested on my shoulders, fingers pressing into the muscles. I didn’t moan. It was more an appreciative grunt.
“You were looking pretty freaked out there,” he said. He pressed the heels of his palm along my spine, shifting gently. I could feel where a joint in my back wanted to crack, but I was still too tense for it to go. “Feeling any better?”
“Yeah,” I said. And then, as my throat seemed to thicken, “No.”
“You want to talk about it?” he asked again. His voice was softer this time.
“I just . . . I don’t know. When it’s just the four of us, it feels like I have a handle on things, you know? At least enough to fake it. And then something comes up that I feel like I ought to know, and I’m at sea again.”
He pulled up the bottom of my shirt, his hands against my skin now as he worked his way down my back. I felt the tightness in my muscles, the combination of tension and pressure that he kept just below the threshold
of pain. I started to relax.
“I mean would a to-do list be too much to ask for?” I said.
“Yeah. Do the laundry. Take the car in for a tune-up. Defeat evil.”
“Maybe a little more detail than that.”
“Maybe a little,” he said. He’d gotten down to my sacrum and started his way back up. It felt wonderful. “What about you? Doing all right?”
“Just as far out of my depth, but less worried about it. I’ve got an advantage. I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on at Grace Memorial. I don’t have to be Eric while I’m at it.”
“And I do?”
“You seem to think so,” he said.
I shrugged.
“What if the Invisible College was just one cult he was fighting against? Am I going to know that, or will it just be me walking along the street one day, and boom, someone shoots me?”
“I don’t think they will.”
“Or you,” I said. I was rolling now, and it was hard to stop. “Or Ex or Chogyi Jake. Or Kim. What if something had happened at the hospital? What if my protections had given out?”
“They didn’t,” he said.
“If we don’t figure out how to prop them up, they will. Eventually.”
He got back up to the middle of my back, paused for a moment. The funny thing about a really good bra is that you don’t really even notice it’s there until your boyfriend unhooks it. He pressed his hands into me. I felt his splayed fingers all along the inner edges of my shoulder blades. His weight against me felt a little more intentional.
“Are you coming on to me?”
“Would that be a problem?”
“No,” I said.
A few minutes later, I was on my back, Aubrey’s weight still on me. Then his shirt was gone. And then all our clothes. In the gold lamplight, our skins looked exactly the same color, like we were carved from the same stone. Between the feeling of his skin and the rush of blood under mine, I lost myself for a while, and I didn’t miss me. Sometimes—the best times—sex with Aubrey felt like I was swimming in a wide, warm sea. He was bearing me up, carrying me, until I reached the shore spent. I never could figure out quite how he did that, but I loved it.
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