Vicious Grace

Chogyi Jake lifted his head. His eyes were calm and bright. His smile could have meant anything.

“I can go in,” he said. “I will be the sacrifice.”

TWENTY-ONE

“No,” I said. “Not going to happen. Find another way.”

My mouth had the penny-taste of fear. Aubrey’s eyes went wide, and his lips thin and tight. The light behind me dimmed, Ex standing in the office doorway. Kim looked down. In context of the chapel, she might almost have been praying.

“There are no other bindings,” Chogyi Jake said. “And even if there were, there isn’t time.”

“It’s not an option,” I said. “Think of something else.”

“There must be . . .” Aubrey began.

Chogyi Jake turned up his hands, as if offering me something.

“We have very little time,” Chogyi Jake said. “We have very little to work with, and no way to safely get other supplies. If we fail, many, many people will die. The longer we wait, the more likely that the rider will find us and kill us all. It’s the right thing.”

“You’re talking about dying. We’re not doing that. We’re just not.”

Chogyi Jake only lifted his eyebrows a little. Then what? We had to stop the rider before it broke out. We didn’t have any other way to bind it. The stakes were as high as I could imagine. If the haugsvarmr got out and took over, one man’s death was going to look like pretty small beer. But this was Chogyi Jake. This one was mine, and the world couldn’t have him.

Only it wasn’t really my call.

“If not me, who?” he said. He meant We’ve all lost families and lovers and things that were precious to us, and we’ve all survived. He meant You can lose me.

I felt like I was looking down from a sickening height. Vertigo, nausea, shock. Over my shoulder, Ex looked gray. His hand was on the door frame as if he needed it to stay standing. His gaze flickered down to mine, and I saw that all the same thoughts were running behind his eyes. And the same conclusions too.

“I can go,” Ex said. “You stay out, and I’ll go in.”

“And who performs the interment?” Chogyi Jake asked. “You have the most experience with exorcism, and that’s close to what we’re doing here. You need to be on the outside, not trying to sacrifice yourself to save me. This is my own choice. Of all of us, you should respect that.”

The words seemed to have some reference I didn’t understand, because Ex only hesitated, nodded, and stepped back into the office. I stood up, and the chapel seemed odd. I could see everything: the wood grain in the pews and walls, the subtle pattern in the carpet, the fold of cloth where Aubrey’s collar wasn’t quite down. It was the slow moment of perfect clarity in the middle of the car wreck; it was time going slow because my mind was running too fast.

I can’t do this, I thought. And then, I have to do this.

“We’ll go down,” I said. “To where the coffin was. We might not even be able to. If it’s broken or something.”

“That’s fair,” Chogyi Jake said, standing up, and I realized I’d just tacitly agreed that if it could be done, we’d do it. I noticed he was only an inch or two taller than me. I’d always imagined him as bigger than that. A tiny dark mole perched at his collarbone. Surely I’d noticed that before. Sometime in the last year, I must have seen it the way I was seeing it now. I felt like someone was pressing a balled fist up under my rib cage. I couldn’t afford to think about what that meant. This wasn’t the time to pay attention to my feelings. Not if I was going to keep functioning.

Ex came out of the office with a pile of small objects in his hand, little origami pockets made from printer paper. Words in a script I couldn’t read marked the center of each one, and something crackled against my palm as he pressed one into my hand. He closed his eyes, his fingers wrapping mine, and I felt a surge of warmth and energy from him. Magic. A little cantrip. When he opened his eyes, he looked tired and ill. And determined.

“Wear it against your skin,” he said. “It’ll make it harder for the rider to take you once we’re outside the chapel.”

I nodded, and he moved on to the others. A little improvised talisman. The kind of thing we’d played at in school, writing the name of the boy we wanted to like us in the form of a cross so that God would notice it. We were storming Normandy Beach with BB guns and bottle rockets. We were doomed. I took the little cantrip and tucked it into the band of my jeans where my belt would keep it pressed against me. The others were doing things that were very much the same. Except for Oonishi.

“I’m not going out there,” he said. “I don’t know anything about this crap. I meant what I said. I’m staying here.”

Rage boiled up in me, raw and vicious and ready to kill out of hand. He had brought us here. All of it was his fault as much as anyone’s. And now he wanted to step back from it and let everyone else suffer while he stayed safe. Well, screw that. We could tie him up, carry him down, and put him in the coffin. It would serve the bastard right and save Chogyi Jake besides. Aubrey pretended to cough. Oonishi looked at him, and then at me, and then flinched back.

Yes, I thought. I could do that. I could kill him. I could kill an innocent man because he was too much a coward to face down a rider. I wondered if that was what Eric would have done.

“Leave him,” I said. The contempt in my voice could have stripped paint. “Let’s go.”

Walking back into Grace felt like stepping into a septic tank. The air didn’t have a smell to it besides the usual industrial freshener and the hint of rain still falling in some other world, but it felt filthy. The lights were dim and unsteady. Something huge rumbled far above us. Thunder or a collapsing girder. Or the rider’s unreal fists beating at the physical walls of its prison. Its presence lay over us, pressing down. Smothering. I dreaded the moment it turned its attention toward me.

“Keep to the middle of the building,” Ex said. “It’s the part that should have changed the least. If we can get underground, it may not have changed much at all. No reason to switch the physical configuration if there’s not a physical exit, right?”

“Fine,” I said. I wanted him to quit talking. I wanted it all over, quick before I could think about it too much.

We fell into a pattern; I scouted ahead, Ex following close, Aubrey and Kim behind him, then Chogyi Jake as rear guard. We turned a corner into a wide hallway. A gurney lay on top of an IV drip stand. A widening pool of blood and fluid meant that someone had been in it before it fell. A dark-skinned woman in a doctor’s white lab coat and a thick-shouldered man with a gray-blond crew cut stepped out of a doorway, watching us all pass. Their eyes were wide and uncomprehending, but they didn’t glow.

“It’s all right,” I told them. “We’re taking care of it.”

“What is this?” the doctor asked, tears in her voice if not her eyes. She had a beautiful accent. Indian, maybe.

“It’s the devil,” I said. “But we’re taking care of it.”

At the end of the hall, Ex stopped at a set of metal doors with a thin window in the side like something from a high school or low-security prison. A black plastic card reader was set into the wall level with the doorknob, glowering out with a single baleful red light. I could see a narrow stairway through the glass.

“Okay,” Ex said. “If I’m right, this will get us down to the first subbasement. We’ll need to go back toward the east to get down past that.”

His explanations were starting to annoy me, and I almost said so when my cell went off, Uncle Eric telling me from my pack that I had a call. Apparently the binding in the fifties hadn’t taken blocking cell traffic into account. I scrabbled for it. I knew the incoming number.

“What?” I said.

“Jayné?” David Souder said. His voice was shaking. “I’m in trouble. I think I’m in real trouble.”

“Where are you?”

“The hospital,” he said. “Grace Memorial. I was an idiot. I didn’t listen to you. I went back, and I thought I