Vicious Grace (8 page)

It took us ten minutes to find someplace in the hospital with cell reception, but we got through to Aubrey and Ex on our first calls, and after that, it was like a fire drill. No running. No questions. We all walked quickly and deliberately out of the buildings, to the street, and away. In the full light of the sun, I felt the first tremors of my coming adrenaline crash. Mentally, I felt fine. Emotionally, I had no problems. It was just that my hands were shaking and I was a little nauseated. It would get worse before it got better, and I’d do my level best to ignore it then too.

As we walked, I brought the others up to speed. What had happened, how we’d dealt with it. We’d covered three long city blocks before I could bring myself to stop at a sidewalk café and sit for a while. It was Greek food, and the blue-and-white sign promised real Greek coffee. We took a wide, steel-mesh table set back in a patio of cracking cement that might have been a basketball court, once upon a time. The fading blue umbrella stood in the center of it like the mast of a sailboat, but it was thin enough that we could all still see one another. When Kim sat and started rubbing her feet, I remembered that she’d ditched her shoes. Three city blocks was a long way for bare feet on concrete. If she’d said something, I would have stopped sooner.

“It wasn’t possession,” Ex said after a thin, olive-skinned boy who looked about thirteen took our orders. “If they’d had riders, Jayné wouldn’t have been able to snap Kim out of it with an improvised cantrip.”

“So magic, then,” I said. “Someone with a rider who could throw some kind of mass mind-control mojo? And who knew we were there?”

They were all silent for a moment.

“There’s some holes in that,” Aubrey said.

“Like?” I asked. It came across sharper than I’d meant it to, but he didn’t take offense.

“Well, for instance, how did he know you were there? Eric’s wards are supposed to keep you from being found, right?”

“What if he wasn’t using magic to find me?” I said. “It’s not like you can’t take a picture of me. Or see me if you look across the room. The villagers didn’t pull out their pitchforks and come after you guys. Kim’s been there for years without anything taking a swing at her. I have to think he was after me specifically.”

Kim shook her head.

“That doesn’t scan either,” she said. “If someone’s using mundane strategies to find you, why use some kind of proxy magic to attack you? Why not just shoot you? And for that matter, why shoot
you
in the first place? Unless that was supposed to be some kind of warning.”

“Maybe it was reacting to Eric’s wards and protections,” Aubrey said. “You know. Watching for someone with the most armor and figuring they’re the one that poses the biggest threat?”

“Or an autoimmune response,” Kim said. “Magic that saw other magic as not-self?”

“There’s a comforting thought,” I said.

Chogyi Jake leaned forward in his chair. His fingers laced his knee, and when he spoke, his voice was thoughtful.

“We’re missing something. What did it feel like?” he asked. I was on the edge of telling him it felt like being the soccer ball at the World Cup when I realized he wasn’t talking to me. Kim brushed back her hair with one hand.

“Like dreaming,” she said. “I didn’t have the sense of being ridden or out of control. But my logic and reality sort of fell out from under me. Jayné was Jayné, but she was also . . . an outsider? Foreign? Something like that.”

“A threat,” Chogyi Jake said.

“Yes, definitely. And one that I recognized,” she said, then frowned and looked down.

“What is it?” Aubrey asked. Kim looked up at him. I couldn’t read her expression.

“I can remember it from other perspectives,” she said. “The shift nurse at the station? If I think about it, I know what we looked like through her eyes, Jayné and I both. The big guy who started the trouble? I remember Jayné bumping into me as if I had been him. I can remember it from any perspective until she woke me up.”

“Even Jayné’s?” Aubrey asked.

“No. Not hers.”

“Okay,” I said. “So what does that mean?”

“It means we don’t know what we’re dealing with,” Ex said.

The big debate after lunch was how—and whether—to go back for the car. On the one hand, we didn’t know what was going on at the hospital or how far out the danger extended. On the other, it was a rental and it had Kim’s parking permit and some of Ex’s stuff in it. There was the option of hiring a tow truck, but sending a civilian to spring a trap meant for us had some ethical problems.

Once we agreed to go back, there was the question of whether I should go on the return trip because Eric’s wards and protections would help fight off any assaults or stay behind out of fear that they might be drawing some kind of spiritual attention. In the end, Aubrey and I went for the car, the others staying at the café drinking the muddy coffee and eating baklava. The walk back was shorter than I’d expected. Escaping from Grace into the still-unknown streets of Chicago had given every block an exaggerated distance. I was surprised by how quickly the hospital’s awkward, looming bulk came into view. I kept scanning the other people on the sidewalks, waiting for them to start moving together or breathing in sync.

A taxi driver to our right leaned hard on his horn, shouting obscenities at the truck that had cut him off. The air smelled of exhaust. Grace Memorial loomed across the street, hundreds of windows catching the light like an insect’s compound eye as we walked briskly past it toward the parking structure. A little shiver crawled up my spine, and I walked faster.

Aubrey walked with his hands in his pockets and his brow in furrows. I’d seen him like this before—worried, but trying not to talk about it for fear of worrying me. It was a deeply ineffective strategy.

“Spit it out,” I said. We were stopped at a traffic light, waiting for the signal to cross.

“It’s nothing. I just wish I’d known Eric better,” he said. “I worked with him on and off for years, and I always . . . I don’t know. Respected his boundaries? Gave him his space? I never pushed to find out things he didn’t want to tell me about. He would have known what this was. Just from what we’ve got now, he’d have known. And I don’t.”

“Neither does anyone else.”

“Yeah,” Aubrey said with a rueful smile. “But I’m not responsible for them.”

“It’ll be fine. We’ll be careful,” I said. And then, “How are you doing with seeing Kim again?”

“Fine. She’s . . . just the same.”

“No return of old feelings? Regret about signing the divorce papers?”

Aubrey’s eyebrows rose, and a small, amused smile tweaked the corners of his mouth.

“How are
you
doing seeing Kim again?” he said.

“Standard insecurity,” I said.

“You could stop that.”

“Nope. Don’t think I can. I’m aiming for having a good sense of humor about it.”

He leaned in, his fingers twining around mine.

“Jayné,” he said. “You’re great. And I love you. And if you and I weren’t together, I still wouldn’t be with Kim. I think she’s a good person. I enjoy her company, and I admire her intelligence. We have a lot of history, but we broke up for a reason. I’m pretty sure she was seeing someone else, even before she left Denver.”

A totally different kind of fear bloomed in my chest. It was stupid. Kim’s affair with Eric wasn’t even my secret, except that I knew about it. And still, at that moment I wished I’d spilled her beans a year ago.

“How do you know?”

“I don’t,” he said. “Not really. It was just the feeling I got. Some unexpected long nights. Some inexplicable crying jags. I knew she was unhappy, and when she decided to leave, I told her it was the right decision.”

I stopped in the concrete archway. Rows of tightly packed cars stood in the shadows. Aubrey paused, looking back at me.

“Would you want to know now?” I asked, trying to make it sound hypothetical. “I mean if you could know now what was really going on with her back then, would you want to?”

“What would the point be? We did what we did,” he said. “And I think we’ve got enough to worry about without hauling all that back from the dead.”

In the parking garage proper, we had a moment’s panic that the minivan was gone, but as soon as we figured out we were on the wrong level, everything went smoothly. We were back on the streets in a few minutes, and if Aubrey chose a longer, looping route back to the café rather than drive past Grace, I didn’t object.

I leaned against the door, watching out the window as we drove. Men and women stood or walked along the gray, urban streetscape. It wasn’t as gray and overwhelming as Manhattan had been, but had almost more of a sense of being a living, human city. A black man in a neatly pressed suit drove a sports car alongside us, his eyes on the street ahead even as he talked with a lighter-colored child in the car seat behind him. A painfully thin Asian woman sat at a bus stop, her arms crossed, her mouth set in a scowl. A pack of teenagers in matching black-and-orange uniforms that said Leo Catholic High School held up traffic by running through the crosswalk as the lights changed, bubbling with laughter and shrieking with delight at their danger.

The city was alive. Almost three million people with lives as complex and intersecting as my own, navigating the daily pulse of rush hour on the 90, the 94, the 290. Riding the elevated trains. Every day, they were eating their dinners and talking with their friends and cheating on their lovers. And in the middle of all this normal, rich, oddly beautiful human life,
something
was happening. Something at Grace Memorial. And the more I let my mind wander, the more a growing knot in my belly told me it was something very, very bad.

SIX

Looking back at my childhood, I couldn’t say my father had done me many favors. The lessons he’d tried to instill in me—things like “never wear a skirt that goes above the ankle” and “Jesus died because kids sneak into movie theaters”—never really took. But that’s not the same as saying I never learned anything from him. Throughout the weird, judgmental, just-barely-repressed Christian rage-fest that was my childhood home, I’d picked up quite a bit about how the world works. Not all of it had immediately applied, but some bits still came in handy.

For instance, when I was ten years old, the doctors found a suspicious lump on my big brother Jay’s spinal column. My mother called from the doctor’s office in hysterics, saying that no one was telling her anything, and they were running tests she didn’t understand. I could hear every word she said, even though my father had the telephone handset to his ear. He sat at the kitchen table, scowling and fighting to interrupt my mother’s litany of fear and confusion. He was in a white T-shirt and the battered canvas work pants he always wore on his days off. In the end, he told my mother to sit down, be quiet, and wait. Then he told me to find my little brother, Curtis, and get him in the car. That I was too young to stay by myself, and he didn’t have time to find someone to watch us. His tone of voice left no room for disagreement.

By the time I’d done what he said, little Curt squirming in his car seat and demanding cartoons, my father had transformed himself. His hair was combed back. He had a good gray suit on with a deep red tie. He smelled of cologne, and he looked like a movie star or a president. I’d never seen him this way, even for church.

When we got to the doctor’s office, he dropped Curtis and me in the waiting room with my mother, and went back to speak to the doctors and nurses. Five minutes later, he came out with answers to every question Mom had asked him. My mother drank all the information in—yes, Jay was going to be admitted overnight; yes, cancer was a possibility, but it wasn’t the best suspect; no, there wasn’t cause for immediate alarm. I watched relief pour over her like cool water on a burn. But I didn’t miss my father’s little smile or my mother’s near-subliminal frown. The gray-suited man had been given a level of courtesy and respect that a woman couldn’t get.

Lesson learned.

Truth was, Chogyi Jake looked amazing in the right outfit. Brown linen so light it was almost blond, a black linen vest of matching cut, pin-striped shirt and tie that coordinated like a symphony perfectly in tune. He’d let the stubble of hair grow out just enough for the scattering of gray at the temples to show. When he chose not to smile, he could look seriously dangerous. By comparison, Aubrey, even in his best suit, never quite gave off the air of command, and Ex’s long hair wasn’t quite overcome by his quasiclerical black and humorless attitude. And me? Yes, I was the money behind everything. Yes, I was the one Kim called. Yes, I was Eric’s heir and successor with the weird supernatural powers and protections. I was also twenty-four and a woman, and even in my best clothes and most understated makeup, I looked more like Jennifer Connelly than an international demon hunter and occult expert. So by common agreement, Chogyi Jake took point.

“Thank you for joining us, Dr. Oonishi. I’m sorry we couldn’t come to your office.”

“Thank you,” the man said. “It’s probably good if we don’t meet at Grace.”

“There are reputations to protect,” Kim said, only a little bitterness in her voice. Her dress was sherbet green and didn’t suit her. She wore it like a smock.