Vicious Grace (29 page)

Something loud happened, and for half a second I thought they’d shot me. The guard standing to my left crumpled, black blood spilling down his legs, and his eyes flickering white to blue to black. The guard standing to my right whirled just as the explosion came again. He went down in a heap. A new voice rang out in the hallway, familiar and unexpected and obvious.

“I’ve got enough ammunition to take down every one you put up, y’bastard!” David Souder yelled. “I don’t want to, but push me and you know I will.” He racked another round in his shotgun and stepped forward. Resting the barrel on the shoulder of the shaved-headed patient who had my right arm in a lock.

“You let them go or I will,” he said.

The room was silent. David’s eyes were bright and glassy and brimming with a fear that I recognized. He didn’t know whether he was bluffing either. I took two deep, fast breaths, gathering my will into a ball of invisible power, and pressed it out through my right hand. I could feel the rider inside the patient’s flesh, a cold pressure pushing back at me.

“Kill them, then,” the mob said at once, and each of them smiled. David’s face went pale.

“Let go,” I said, and the man holding me shuddered. The eerie glow went out of his eyes and he dropped my hand, stumbling back.

“What the hell, man,” he said, his hands out toward David’s shotgun as if his fingers would stop the round. “What the
hell
?”

I felt a short rush of pleasure. I could still break the rider’s hold on these people the way I had with Kim that first time. I could take back what it had stolen. It wasn’t strong enough to keep them. Not yet.

The television screamed in frustration, then popped, scattering sparks like a firework. The pressure on my other arm faltered, and I pulled myself free. Three men lay at my feet. The two security guards; one bleeding badly from the side, the other curled up in a fetal ball in a spreading pool of blood. The nurse I’d punched was fighting hard to draw breath, a white foam at the corner of his mouth. Their eyes were human. Their pain was human. When I looked back over my shoulder, the glow had gone from the back rank of the mob too. And the walls were painted again. The rider’s influence had been withdrawn. Kim had blood on her mouth. Chogyi Jake was on his hands and knees, standing up slowly. The woman who’d been kicking him stepped forward to help him up.

“We need to get these three to the ER,” I said. “Ex, can you—”

“Jayné,” Aubrey said. “We have to go.”

I pointed to the fallen security guards.

“They’ve been shotgunned,” I yelled. “They could die!”

“They could,” Ex said, coming toward me. “But we have someplace we need to be, and the rider’s getting reinforcements.”

I looked around, a sense of powerlessness washing through me. Chogyi Jake looked stunned, Ex grim. Aubrey and Kim stood with their backs together, unconsciously preparing for another wave of attacks. I turned to the shaved-headed man, pointing a finger at his chest.

“You,” I said. “Get them help. You understand? You get them help, or I will track you down and finish the job!”

“Yeah, all right, lady,” the man said. He had a low growl of a voice, a bear that had been punched in the throat too many times. “Whatever you say.”

I turned to David.

“You just can’t follow simple directions, can you?” I said.

“Apparently not,” he said. His voice was shaky, his face pale. Chances were good he’d just killed two men. The first time I’d seen anyone killed, I couldn’t stop vomiting. He was holding together better than that, at least.

“Okay, then,” I said. “Come with us.”

I couldn’t fight the rider if every swing I took hurt someone innocent. I couldn’t stand against the Beast Rahab without becoming a little bit like it. The good guys were the ones who protected the innocent, who stood on principle, who thought that failing in a just cause was better than championing a moral compromise. And it turned out that wasn’t me.

I was the lesser evil.

TWENTY-TWO

One of the first cantrips I’d learned was how to bring my qi up to my eyes, brushing aside all illusion and sharpening my sight. My head ached from it now. The hospital around us seethed with malice. We had navigated the second subbasement without another encounter with the rider’s victims, but at the cost of moving slowly through longer, harder routes. Ex had brought us to dead ends twice now, forcing us back along our path. The frustration of being lost in the maze made me want to scream. The fear that another ambush might be around the next corner. I’d given my paper talisman to David on the theory that the wards and protections Eric had put on me would give me some cover, and I didn’t want the guy with the shotgun getting all glowy around the eyelids.

I wasn’t the only nervous one.

“But how did you find us?” Ex said.

“I don’t know,” David said. “I mean, I knew you were going back to the place. With the coffin. I just started going there too, and then . . .”

“There are choke points,” Aubrey said. “Any complex route is going to have places where the number of possible paths narrows down and places where it opens up again. The rider knew that too.”

“The rider headed us off at the pass?” Ex said.

“It could be at all the passes,” Kim said. “All of them at once. And the chances are always pretty good of running into someone when you’re going to the same place.”

Only Chogyi Jake didn’t talk. Since the fight, his face had grayed, and he kept a hand pressed to his belly. I knew he was hurt and hurting. That I couldn’t do anything about it only added to my frustration.

“But if there’s a connection,” Ex said. “If David and the rider are still in communication somehow—”

“Then every hallway between us and that coffin would be standing-room only with people trying to kill us,” I said. “They aren’t, so they aren’t. Let it go.”

It took almost an hour, scuttling like rats, darting from shadow to shadow, to reach the thick steel doors with the faded trefoil on them. Fallout Shelter. The remnant of the good old days when the Russians were going to drop nukes on us at any moment and the worst thing you could be was a commie. It wasn’t even my parents’ generation. These were my grandparents’ nightmares in fossil form, concrete and steel to keep what happened in Nagasaki and Hiroshima from happening here, built less than a decade after Truman had given the go-ahead to drop the bombs. The lock had been forced, and the air within smelled like burned cheese.

Inside, the shelter was like a dorm room writ large. Narrow bunk platforms on steel frames rose from the floor to the low ceiling. If there had ever been mattresses on them, they were gone now, leaving only a slightly rusted webwork behind. Eight sleepers to a bunk, eight sets of bunks in a row, fifteen rows to the end of the room. Dim lightbulbs glowed in cages hanging from the ceiling. It was submarine-tight, but almost a thousand people could have been packed in here, breathing one another’s air as the nuclear slag that had been Chicago cooled four stories above them. Men and women and children, half of them sick or dying, buried alive.

Storage rooms lurked off to the sides. I wondered whether they still had palettes of food there, waiting since before my father was born. We walked through the tomb of the Pharaoh Doris Day, avatar of the 1950s. Dread curdled at the back of my tongue. A stairway at the end of the bunks led down. It was wide enough to carry a gurney down it. A faded sign had a blue circle inscribed with a white triangle and the letters CD—Civil Defense—and a bent arrow pointing down.

“That’s where it is,” David said, pointing down the stairs. “That’s where I found it.”

“Okay,” I said, and gestured back at the open steel door. “What can we do about getting that door closed and locked? I don’t know how long this is going to take, but I don’t want fifty pissed-off orderlies breaking in on us when the thing figures out what we’re doing.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Aubrey said.

“Are there lights down there?” Ex said, squinting down into the gloom.

“There were,” David said. “They didn’t do too well when I broke the concrete, though. I had a lamp and a couple cans of fuel from one of these rooms, though.”

Ex motioned roughly that David should follow him and stalked away toward the storage rooms. Chogyi Jake sat at the top of the stairway, looking down. He was pale and wan. I had the urge to kiss his head, but instead I took out my cell phone and let it complain that it couldn’t connect to the satellite. I went down the stairs by the electric candlelight of its display. Kim followed close behind, her footsteps soft and careful.

The ward was in ruins. Smoke clung to the walls like it was afraid to let go. Old boxes—wood, not cardboard—lay shattered on the ground, ancient rolls of yellowed gauze spilling out of the remains. A tangle of metal and wire bore a Profexray placard. Chunks of concrete were piled up among the boxes. A shovel leaned against the wall. The air smelled like overheated metal and fresh clay. I’d expected something richer. More like soil.

“Lot of work,” Kim said.

“He was motivated,” I said.

“And how are you doing?”

I turned and stared at her. In the dim light of my cell phone, she looked like her own ghost. There was no color to her face or hair or clothes. The cut on her lip where the rider’s minions had beaten her looked black, the bruise around it gray. Her eyes glowed, but only with reflected light. I didn’t know if the flood rising up in me was anger or laughter or raw disbelief.

“Sorry,” she said. “Stupid question.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, turning away.

“I meant to say I’m sorry. All of this is my fault. I was drunk and shooting my mouth off. I should have known better.”

“Don’t sweat it,” I said stepping forward. The shadows twisted and danced every time I moved. A yawning mouth of earth, a thick pile of pale dirt. Crushed limestone at a guess. And only a couple of feet below the floor of the shattered concrete and twisted rebar, the box. The coffin. Its black lid was off, a collection of scattered bones catching the light; rib and skull, vertebrae and femur. The mortal remains of the architect. Part of me had hoped to see it in splinters, unusable. No such luck. Or maybe it wasn’t luck. Maybe the Invisible College had built the coffin to withstand the worst they could imagine. A coffin to last until Judgment Day.

I squatted at the edge of the hole. It was too much work. Even if David had known exactly where to go, exactly how to generate an explosion that would shatter the floor, getting through the steel and concrete rubble would have been the work of days, not hours. The reinforcing steel bars alone would have . . .

I put my hand on one, and it snapped like a twig. The metal was brittle. Fragile. Rotten from being too close to the rider for too many years. I took a chunk of concrete and rubbed it between my fingers, feeling it come apart in my grip. The ward was more than destroyed, it was inflamed. The ground itself had been festering for half a century, rejecting the rider, pushing it out like flesh rejecting a splinter. The thought left me a little nauseated.

“We need to clear the air,” Kim said, and for a few seconds I thought she meant that the smell of smoke was overpowering. Then I understood.

“We really don’t,” I said.

“We’re about to get into a very dangerous piece of magic,” Kim said. “Group work. All of us together. If we’re going in fractured and conflicted, it
will
break the circle. You wanted me to forgive you, and I . . . well, I didn’t exactly get around to it. So here. You didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t hold anything that happened against you, and I really, sincerely want you to succeed and be happy. I don’t think you need it, but if you still want my forgiveness, you’ve got it.”

She nodded once, more to herself than to me. She’d gotten through the words. I wondered when she’d started rehearsing them. I held up my hand to her. She hesitated for a moment, then took it. Her fingers were cold and thinner than I expected. I drew her down to sit next to me. Just beneath us, the coffin seemed to suck away the light.
Nomen mihi Legio est, quia multi sumus
shone on its side.

“I broke up with him,” I said.

“This isn’t about Aubrey,” she said.

“No, really,” I said. “I broke up with him. Upstairs. Before the rider even got out.”

“Jayné,” Kim said. Her voice was taking on a tone of real annoyance. “This isn’t. About. Aubrey. Okay?”

“Then what?”

She shook her head, a tiny movement that meant exhaustion and morbid amusement and sadness all at the same time.

“It’s about me letting go of all the things that I could have done with my life and didn’t,” she said. “Aubrey’s only one entry on that list.”

I nodded. Ex’s voice came from above, a bark of pleasure and triumph. At a guess, he’d gotten a lantern working.

“It’s very strange, thinking about what happened as rape,” Kim said. I was amazed that she could sound so calm. So clinical. “I mean, I understand that it was. No consent means no consent, and it explains . . . how it felt. Not knowing that until years after the fact makes it strange. I wonder if it would have been easier if I’d been aware of it at the time.”