Vicious Grace

“You know your problem?” he said.

“I think you’re going to tell me.”

“You and Aubrey and Kim,” he said as if I hadn’t spoken. “Even Chogyi Jake? Do you know why all of you can’t quite make sense of all this? You live in a morally neutral world. You don’t like the idea of evil, and so you don’t look for the patterns. Riders are just another kind of insect or amoeba to you. Parasites.”

“And for you?” I said.

“They’re demons,” he said. “The Second World War was a battle between a flawed, struggling human resistance and a force of pure evil. It’s the same struggle that’s going on right now. Whether you choose to acknowledge it or not, it’s the job you’ve taken on. It doesn’t matter whether you think of Hitler and Goering and all the rest as evil men or evil spirits in human form. They’re still evil, so they’re the enemy. Whether they’re nosferatu or noppera-bo or haugtrold only matter when we start planning tactics.”

“What about angels?”

“Never met one.”

The way he said it closed the subject. I backtracked.

“But the Nazis knew about this? Riders. Magic.”

Ex relaxed a little, back on safe ground. I made a mental note to ask Aubrey why angels were one of Ex’s buttons.

“There’s still a lot of debate about what exactly Himmler was up to when he founded the Ahnenehrbe,” Ex said with a shrug, “but we know for a fact that he was deeply into riders. We know that part of what happened at Dachau was ritual death magic.”

“You’re talking about Indiana Jones digging up the Ark of the Covenant?” I said, trying to make a joke out of it.

“Well, all right,” Ex said and grinned. “That they made up. But more generally, yes, Nazi occultism isn’t a big secret. Part of the national policy from 1939 on was to harness riders for the cause. Karl Wiligut spent most of the war in a project to make pacts with the riders, and enslave the ones that wouldn’t play. They certainly bound Wotan Irisi and the Black Sun. They worked with the Graveyard Child, but it’s not clear whether that was a free pact or a binding. There were dozens of asatro in the hierarchy of the German military, and more loupine than you could count.”

“Loupine,” I said.

“There was a reason the Nazi resistance to Allied occupation were called werewolves,” Ex said. “Whatever’s happened at Grace Memorial, it’s involved with the sort of thing the Nazis were looking at. Or the kind of thing that was looking at them, depending whether you think Hitler was the chicken or the egg. And”—he tapped the book in his hands twice, hard, sharp sounds—“a haugsvarmr. Probably a leyiathan.”

I knew I wasn’t thinking straight. It had been a hard, long, exhausting day that had involved four hours’ driving and being shot at in the middle part. I could feel that I was missing something here, some question or piece of information that would reframe the whole thing. Pull everything into focus. The best I could manage was a protest.

“But Eric was looking to get it loose,” I said. “His whole project was to free it.”

“And if we knew why, we’d know a lot more,” Ex said.

“Could he need it for an ally?” I said. “The Invisible College was part of tying it down. Maybe he was looking for something that would help him against them, and—”

“Eric planned to break the Invisible College as part of digging this thing loose,” Ex said. “Not as something to do afterward. No, I’ve been looking at that angle, and I don’t know what ends Eric could have been aiming at. Haugsvarmr aren’t usually aware of individual humans, at least not in the way we’re used to. They need a reason to care that we even exist. Eric would have needed a plan for getting its attention. Something that would make it notice him in the first place.”

“Any idea what?”

“Best guess? Access to David. If Eric could make himself a middleman between those two, he’d have been in a good position to bargain.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know. I assume he wasn’t looking to recreate the Nazi Party, though.”

“Are we a hundred percent that the hog-swarmer was what got bound? Could it have something else?”

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,