Vicious Grace bsd-3

by M. L. N. Hanover

Ex shrugged.

  “Not a hundred, but high nineties.”

  “Any chance they could have been working with a hog-swarmer to tie something else down? A common enemy?”

  “Possible,” Ex allowed. “Politics in the Pleroma aren’t something any of us understand.”

  A tapping sound caught my attention; it was my own fingers dancing nervously on the file with Kim’s name. I forced myself to stop. Ex watched me, his pale eyes gentle and challenging at the same time.

  “Well, I don’t know either,” I said.

  “We’ll find it,” Ex said. “There’s a plan in here somewhere. All we need to do is find it.”

  The tone of his voice was ambiguous, but I was pretty sure he was talking about God as much as Eric. I’d lost faith in religion before I’d ever met Ex or Aubrey, but whether God had a plan for all things or not didn’t matter. Ex was still right. There was a plan, because Eric had made it. I could tell myself that the hard part was done. Once I knew what to do, doing it was easy. The thought was almost enough for me.

  Almost.

  “Hey,” I said. “Once we figure what Eric was up to, we’re going to have to talk to this thing. Strike some kind of deal.”

  “Looks like, yeah.”

  “So it’s probably not all that bad, right? You’re not scared of it?”

  Ex actually grinned. I waited for him to say No or We can do anything or even just God is with us. Something motivational and upbeat that I could half believe.

  “Petrified,” he said.

  THIRTEEN

  I expected that, when I finally did fall asleep a little after three in the morning, I would be troubled by nightmares. Or at least disturbing, unpleasant dreams. As it happened, the only dream I could remember involved trying to get the right dog out of an Italian groomer’s that was also a public library. I kept getting the wrong dog and having to go back in and try to explain the mistake in Italian without raising my voice. I woke up late and tense. Aubrey had already gotten up, but the bed had a small depression where his body had been. My back felt tight, wounded muscles bracing themselves as if bunching up would keep the pain away. I checked the clock—nine thirty—and made my way to the bathroom and a long, hot shower.

  The whine of the pipes and the splash of the water drowned out any other sounds, and for the few minutes I stayed there, I could almost pretend I was alone in the condo. My mind unfocused, I wondered what it would be like to live by myself the way David Souder did. The way Kim did.

  I’d never tried it, going from home and the family to the dorms to my traveling occult circus without any real gaps in between. I couldn’t quite imagine waking up without having anyone to wake up to. I thought of David going quietly insane in his house. Would that still have happened if there’d been someone there to see it? Not even a lover, necessarily. A roommate. A friend. That was an extreme example, maybe, but other things could happen. Slip in the shower. Get a really bad round of the flu. Being alone that way didn’t make the chances of something bad happening any better or worse, but it made recovering from them harder. More dangerous.

  When I finally did kill the water, I could hear Kim laughing out in the kitchen. I patted myself dry with a big, fluffy white towel, the cut on my back leaving a little red on the nap. I put a fresh bandage over the little puncture where the nail had gone in. The flesh around it didn’t look red or feel hot. I was going to get away with my little IKEA vaccination after all. My seared palm didn’t hurt as much as I’d expected either. By the time I was dressed and my hair mostly dry, it was after ten.

  “Hey, boss,” Aubrey said as I came out into the kitchen.

  “Hey,” I said. “There’s still some coffee, right?”

  Kim poured a fresh mug for me. She was swimming in one of Chogyi Jake’s shirts. I always forgot that I was taller than her. Ex was in the living room, almost in the same place he’d been when I went to sleep. His skin had a waxy look and there were dark smudges under his eyes, but he looked content as he read, so maybe the abuse made him happy. Chogyi Jake himself sat at the table between Aubrey and Kim, fresh as if he’d just woken up too, though he’d probably been up for hours.

  “Calling in sick again?” I asked Kim as I took the coffee from her.

  “It’s Saturday,” she said. “They do let me off for the weekends.”

  “Guess days kind of run together when you don’t have that work structure thing,” I said. “Do we have a plan?”

  “David called for you,” Chogyi Jake said. “We told him you’d call back after you woke up.”

  “Did he sound all right?” I asked.

  “He did to me,” Aubrey said. “Better than yesterday, anyhow.”

  “Right,” I said. “Besides that?”

  “We are going to get through these files,” Ex said, making it sound like a death march.

  “I’ve tracked down a couple of the walk-aways,” Kim said. “Huge privacy violation, but they’ve agreed to be interviewed, so a couple of us should do that. And I was trying to find someone else who had heard one of the people coming up post-op speaking in tongues. A recording’s too much to hope, but the hospital’s a pretty cosmopolitan place. Lots of multilingual staff. Someone might have recognized something.”

  “Good thought,” I said.

  “Declan Souder left his personal papers to the Illinois Institute of Technology,” Aubrey said. “I was going to go take a peek at them. See if there was anything useful.”

  “More obscure books of German magic?” I said.

  “For instance.”

  “So two interviews, a research visit, and everything Eric left,” I said. “Doesn’t leave much time for shopping?”

  “Doesn’t,” Ex said, failing to appreciate the joke.

  “How about we split up, then,” I said. “Kim and I can take the walk-aways. Aubrey does the Souder recon. Ex and Chogyi plow through as much of the local stuff as possible. Plan?”

  “I can drop Aubrey at the institute,” Kim said. “I know where it is, and one of the people who agreed to talk lives in Bronzeville.”

  That shouldn’t have given me pause, so I hid it.

  “Great,” I said. “Gimme the other guy’s address, and we’ll hit it.”

  “Don’t forget to call David,” Chogyi Jake said, which was good since he’d already slipped my mind. I took my phone to the new room to keep the background chatter of the other four planning to a minimum. While the phone rang, I wrote my name in the dust on the window.

  “Jayné!” he said. “Thank you. Thank you for calling. I slept last night. I really slept.”

  “No dreams?”

  “Nothing like before,” he said, “but I was thinking. Maybe I should go down there. To the hospital you were talking about. That’s where this is all coming from. If I go down close to it, knowing what I know now, maybe I can find out something more.”

  “Bad idea right now,” I said. “We’re making some real progress, but you shouldn’t jump the gun until we have a better idea what we’re looking at. Just hang tight, and I swear I’ll let you know as soon as we’ve got something solid.”

  “I want to be part of it,” he said, and the happy tone of voice seemed a little strained. “I mean, you’re not just breezing in here and then I never hear from you again, right? This was my Grandpa Del. Whatever’s going on, I’m part of it.”

  I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. I wanted to tell him to sit tight, stay quiet, and hope that whatever we needed wouldn’t require him to do more than let us draw a little blood with a nice sterile needle someplace as far away from Grace Memorial as possible. There was no point. When I’d stumbled into the secret world of riders and magic, that wouldn’t have worked for me. No reason to think it would work on David now.

  “You’re absolutely part of it,” I said. “What we’re doing now is background work. The stuff you gave us was really useful. I think we’re on the edge of cracking it open, but for right now, just hang tight.”

  “Okay. All
right. But if there’s anything I can do—”

  “You’ll be the first to know,” I said. “Promise.”

  I dropped the call. Kim, beside me, spoke.

  “Are you really going to get him involved?”

  “He is involved,” I said. “I’m just going to try to keep him out of trouble.”

  We broke up a little before noon. As I pulled the minivan up out of the parking structure, it occurred to me again that I still didn’t have an actual vacuum cleaner apart from the borrowed Shop-Vac or a good idea where to get one. Just another little loose end to bug me while I worked on the big stuff, I supposed.

  I’d heard songs and stories all my life about the south side of Chicago, starting with “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and ending up with Moby singing about having weapons in hand as he went for a ride. I was ready for a war zone, but it wasn’t bad at all. There were plenty of soccer-mom minivans parked on the street. Leticia Cook answered the door. At a guess, she was in her early fifties, graying hair pulled back from her face. She wore clean blue sweats that made me think of what my own mom would have worn on a quiet day.

  “You’re the girl who wanted to talk about that hospital?” she said after I introduced myself.

  “I am.”

  She raised her eyebrows, looking me quickly up and down, then motioned me in. The town house was neatly kept. A couch with understated floral upholstery dominated the front room without being particularly large. The walls were filled with pictures of her and her family. Three children, two boys and a girl, getting older and then younger again, depending on where I looked. Leticia leaned up a narrow stairway and shouted.

  “We’ve got company down here. Make yourself decent before you come down.”

  A muffled “Yes dear” was answer enough. She waved me into the front room and onto the couch. She pointed to another picture on the living room wall. A tall black man with a sly expression beamed out at us.

  “That’s my son, Jimmy. He’s a lawyer. Works out in San Francisco. Made partner last year.”

  “Really?” I said. “He looks young for that.”

  Leticia laughed, and at first I wasn’t sure if it was with me or at me.

  “Keep that up and we’ll get along just fine. Now, what was it you wanted to know about that place?”

  I started carefully, asking how she wound up at Grace Memorial, what her doctors had told her about the hospital, things like that. She’d been in after she’d fainted at the grocery store. When she came to, she was in Grace with eighteen kinds of monitors glued to her skin and a saline drip feeding into her arm. Heart attack, and from the test results, not her first one.

  “Now they’ve got me sucking down Lipitor and aspirin every day. Walking.” She shrugged. “I should have been exercising my whole life, but who has time?”

  “You left before they released you,” I said. “What can you tell me about that?”

  The warmth in her eyes drained away as if it hadn’t been there.

  “You probably don’t believe in God,” she said.

  “I don’t,” I said. Maybe I should have lied, but this didn’t seem like the place for it. I had the feeling she would have known. “If it helps, though, I believe that I don’t know much.”

  That got a half smile out of her.

  “I believe in our Lord and Savior, Christ Jesus. And that’s the reason I left that place even though the cardiologists told me not to. I was in more danger staying.”

  “Did you see something? Hear something?”

  “Felt it,” she said. “I felt it moving in the air and the walls of that place.”

  I leaned forward, the couch shifting under my weight.

  “Have you sensed spirits before?” I asked.

  “Is this a psychological evaluation?” she asked. “Because we can skip to the end, and I’ll tell you I don’t hear voices.”

  “It’s not. I just want to understand what’s happening at Grace.”

  “Nothing good,” she said.

  I stayed for another half hour, but she’d become evasive. I supposed I should have been glad I got as much of her time as I did. Before I left, she went upstairs and came back with a small silver cross hanging from a delicate chain. As I stood on her doorstep, she pressed it into my hands.

  “If you’re going back there, you should have this,” she said. “The devil is in that place.”

  I looked at it. Two bits of metal set at right angles. The primary symbol of most of my life. From the time I was old enough to understand it I’d gone to sleep with a cross above my bed, saying my prayers at mealtime, asking God what His will was for me. Part of me resented the years when the cross had been more than two bits of metal at right angles. Part of me missed it. I handed it back to Leticia, shaking my head.

  “If you’ve got it in your heart, you don’t need it,” I said. “If you don’t, it’s not going to help.”

  Back at the apartment, Ex and Chogyi Jake had spread their maps and notes and documents across the floor, and were locked in a serious debate over the relationship of architecture to sigil work. I dropped my backpack on the cow-skin couch and lay back, letting their voices wash over me. I didn’t realize I was falling asleep until it was an hour later, and Kim and Aubrey came in with three plastic shopping bags filled with five kinds of Thai food.

  After the dinner plates were cleared—my turn this time—and water set to boil for coffee and tea, we all retired to the living room. Aubrey and Chogyi Jake sat on straight-backed wooden chairs taken from the living room. Kim sat on the couch, looking through a small stack of files with a scowl, and Ex sat beside her. To my surprise, he had a beer in his hand. I sat cross-legged on the floor, the coffee table before me and the Post-it notes on the wall behind my left shoulder.

  “Well,” I said. “I guess I call the meeting to order. I talked to one of the walk-aways, but I didn’t get much. How about you guys?”

  Ex started.

  “I think we can take as a given that we’re looking at a leyiathan. All the circumstantial evidence points there. It also seems safe to say Eric was searching for it and for the way to free it, but with strings attached. He wanted something in return.”

  “What kinds of things could you get from it?” I said. “And specifically what could you get from it that you couldn’t get someplace else?”

  We were all silent for a moment. Ex took a drink of his beer.

  “What if there’s another one already loose,” Aubrey said. “We know Eric allied with riders when there was a common enemy that made them the lesser evil.”

  “Doesn’t wash,” Ex said. “It’s like allying yourself with a nuclear bomb because someone else has one.”

  “Perhaps,” Chogyi Jake said, “it isn’t something here. If there was something he wanted to happen in the Pleroma . . .”

  “Next Door?” Aubrey said.

  “Sure,” I said. “That’s good. The interment doesn’t just keep the thing out of our world, it keeps it out of the riders’ world too, right? It’s stuck in the box. Physically and spiritually cut off.”

  I’ve got the boy, boy, boy, boy down in the dark, my head muttered. Down in the dark he’ll stay.

  “That seems more plausible than trying to use it for something in the human world,” Chogyi Jake said.

  “New theory,” I said. “Are we sure it’s a bad guy?”

  There was a moment’s silence. I saw Kim stiffen, as if she was about to speak, but her eyes were on the file in her hands. Aubrey was frowning, Chogyi Jake waiting patiently, and Ex slowly shook his head. I put my hands flat on the table before me.

  “Maybe we’re looking at this the wrong way,” I said. “I know that we always think of riders as being bad by definition, but whatever’s down there, Eric was going to set it free. And the Invisible College tied it down. If the thing in the box is the good guy, then it’s Grace Memorial that we need to be fighting, right?”

  Ex steepled his fingers.

  “What if it’s an angel?” I said, a litt
le surprised by the hesitance in my own voice.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  The change in Kim’s face convinced me for a moment that Grace had somehow reached out and taken her over again. Her skin was bloodless white except for two bright splotches on her cheeks, like she’d been slapped. She rose up from the couch with a fluidity borne of violence. She had a file in her hand. It was the one with her name on it. The one I’d put in her stack for her.

  “Did you see this?” she shouted. Her eyes were locked on mine. “Did you read it?”

  “No,” I said. “Kim? What’s—”

  Rage buzzed in her body so loud I could hear it. Her breath came in a shaking staccato. Aubrey was on his feet, looking from Kim to me and back like he didn’t know whether he was about to break up a fight. Her head trembled. Her whole body trembled.

  “Kim,” Chogyi Jake said. “I’m seeing that you’re angry. But I don’t understand why, and I feel alarmed by it.”

  Her laugh came short and hard and deeper than a bark, like something that was being torn out of her.

  “If you knew about this, Jayné . . . if you were part of this—”

  “Part of what?” I said.

  “He put me here. Eric put me at Grace Memorial. I was part of his plan.”

  FOURTEEN

  “Kim,” Aubrey said. “Take a breath.”

  She stopped like her shoes had been nailed to the floor. Her gaze locked on Aubrey, and her mouth opened a little, then shut. The desolation in her eyes went past tears into something else. I felt something at the back of my neck pulling my skin tighter. My rib cage might have been empty, except for the sparrow-sized heart beating itself to death against my bones. Kim held up the file.

  “He put me here,” she said, and her voice had lost its frenzy. “He wanted a canary for his coal mine. Someone who would see things getting strange and call him for help. He planned to have me working at Grace Memorial. From before the wendigo. Almost from the first time we met him.”

  “That doesn’t work,” Aubrey said gently. “You’re reading it wrong.”