Vicious Grace

“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 little 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.”

“I’m not. He stage-managed all of it. My job interview. The research projects. All of it.”

“He couldn’t have known you’d be leaving Denver,” Aubrey said. “We weren’t even having trouble back then.”

I closed my eyes. This wasn’t how he should find out. I should have told him a year ago, just so that it wouldn’t happen this way and now. I forced myself to breathe, to look. Kim had gone gray. Less than gray. Colorless. Her shoulders slumped forward, her body turning in on itself like she was bracing for a blow.

“Eric was the trouble between us. After him, it was impossible for me to stay there. In Denver. In my life. He ruined us.”

“Kim—”

“I was sleeping with Eric, Aubrey. Before I left. Almost before we were having trouble. I didn’t even really know why until . . .”

She lifted the papers in her hand. I watched Aubrey understand, like I was seeing something delicate fall just too far away for me to catch it. Ex and Chogyi Jake and I weren’t even in the room with him.

“I thought there was something wrong with me,” Kim said. “Even after he died, I knew I couldn’t come back