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.
We lay in the near darkness, and I traced my fingers along his flank. My mind felt clear and calm. Nothing was going to break into my little corner of peace and contentment. Whatever was under the hospital, it wasn’t here. I yawned, stretching my arms out above my head, and the joint in my spine cracked.
“The thing is,” I said, resting my head on Aubrey’s side, “I want to go back.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“Back to Montana?” he asked.
“Back to Grace,” I said. “I hate the idea of waiting and reading and poking around. What I want to do is head back in, find where this whatever it is lives, and face it down. I don’t know if I could, or if that’s what Eric would have done, or anything, really. But I want to go. I want to
“Fight it out,” Aubrey said. The amusement in his voice told me he’d understood.
“There are no problems that can’t be solved by enough duct tape and a hammer,” I said.
“What a wonderful world it would be,” he half sang.
Classical conditioning. That’s what Chogyi Jake had called it. It was true, everything I’d faced since Uncle Eric had passed his legacy on to me had eventually come down to violence. And even when I’d had the crap kicked out of me—and oh, I had had the crap kicked out of me—I’d wound up on top at the end. Evil vanquished, peace restored, nothing wrong that a few stitches, a couple handfuls of Tylenol, and a week’s rest wouldn’t cure. Something in my hindbrain had learned from that. Maybe not the right lessons.
I heard Ex’s footsteps in the kitchen, the clink and gurgle of coffee being poured into a cup. Aubrey snuggled into the bed, his breath growing deeper and slow. The red numbers on the clock said it was almost two in the morning. Sleep seemed like a distant rumor to me. My mind kept going back to Grace Memorial: the strange angles of its walls, the windows staring out into the street like they were looking for something. The maze of corridors and rooms, twisting in and back on each other. Stairways that skipped whole floors or led to nowhere. It reminded me of something I’d heard about when I was a kid. A mansion built by a rich, crazy woman with false halls, stairways that went up to nothing and ended blind. She lived in a labyrinth so that the evil spirits would get confused. Grace
