Vicious Grace Part 24

When I was still living at home, back even before I'd broken the news to my parents about going to a secular college, I found a picture in the back of an old book. I still remembered it now. Two boys in front of a wide, white fence. The color was off; all red and yellow and hardly any blue. They were both wearing pea coats and haircuts that made me think of the late 1960s. The taller boy grinned at the camera. He might have been seven or eight years old, and the rictus grin of his false smile looked charming. I could see where the cheeks would thicken, the flesh fill out, and a small, well-intentioned mustache grow in. I could see my father in the boy.

The smaller one wasn't aware of the camera. He was pointing at something off to his right, his eyes wide with wonder and joy. He would grow up to be, in Ex's words, at minimum a sociopath and a rapist.

There had to be a moment. Somewhere in the path between that little boy discovering the world with an innocent delight so powerful it could impress itself onto a fold of paper and a little light-sensitive chemistry and the man who wrote f.u.c.ked her. There had to be something that made it all go wrong. Not just a lost innocence. Something worse than that.

Becoming soulless, maybe.

"THEY TELL me that spleens are, for the most part, optional," Chogyi Jake said. A television across the hall burst into authoritative news-on-the-hour music.

"I'd heard that," I said.

As soon after the operation as he'd been stable enough to move, I'd had him transferred out of Grace. Without my being his wife or his kid, it hadn't been as straightforward as I'd hoped. I wound up playing the employer card and throwing a lot of money at it, and the problem eventually went away.

The first time I'd walked into Northwestern Hospital, coming to see him even if it only meant watching him sleep, I'd had a flash of panic. The complexity of halls and elevators brought up a bone-deep terror that didn't have anything to do with the place. After a couple visits, I got a better handle on the new s.p.a.ce. Coming to see him today, I hadn't had anything more than a little mild anxiety.

"I hear they had to put six units of blood into me," he said.

"That's what they tell me."

"I don't actually know how much that is."

"The word ma.s.sive came up," I said. "They were apparently fairly angry at Kim and Aubrey for not getting you in sooner."

Chogyi Jake smiled. He'd been in the hospital for three days, and he looked a million times better. The gray tone of his skin was gone. His hair was growing out. His smile seemed to carry a meaning behind it instead of just being a habit of the flesh. Even the gown he wore looked less sickly. I didn't know whether it was because he wore it like a meditation robe or he'd been sucking up to the nursing staff for a better cla.s.s of patient-wear.

"You explained that you were saving the world?"

"Not really," I said.

"Well, there's the mistake," he said. "If they'd just told the surgeon more about the circ.u.mstances . . ."

"They'd all be in for psych evaluations, even as we speak," I said. Chogyi Jake nodded and laughed, then twitched and lay back, a hand pressed to the incision site on his belly.

"Only hurts when I laugh," he said.

"Really?"

"Well, that and when I take a dump, but I was being polite," he said. "How are things at Grace?"

"Weird," I said. "Go figure. Kim said there's going to be a bunch of new policy announcements in the next couple weeks, but I don't have any idea what they are. I would have thought invoking evil spirits was already considered inappropriate workplace behavior."

"There's nothing else they can do," Chogyi Jake said.

"Yeah. One weird night, no explanations. I'm not sure what I expected of them."

"And the rider?"

"It's in there. There's still weird stuff going on. Oonishi's screwed. He's shutting down his study until Kim can re-create the Invisible College's spell that I broke. Quiet it down a little."

"I'm sorry to hear that," Chogyi Jake said. "He's doing interesting work."

"Yeah, well. He can try again next year."

Chogyi Jake nodded and lay back on his pillow. Outside his window, the high air was a hazy white.

"Seems like a long time," I said.

"It can be," he said, and from his tone of voice, I knew we'd changed subjects. I heard Kim again, from when we'd first arrived. What a difference a year makes. Or a day. Or a moment, if you pick the right one.

"How are you?" he asked.

"We're leaving the country. Me and Ex. Aubrey's staying here. You heard about that, right?" I was talking too fast.

"I did," he said. And then, gently, "It might be awkward, you and Ex being alone together for an extended period."

I chuckled. It was cute, Chogyi Jake treating me gently, not pushing me, with him being the one in the hospital bed. He knew we were both hurt.

"Yeah, I can handle it. Anyway, Ex thought it would be a good idea to be a little hard to reach for a while. Burying someone alive as a ritual sacrifice is still a felony last I checked. There are going to be a lot of phone records between him and my cell, and I don't really want to explain to the judge why this time it was different. My lawyer said that forcing any inquiries to be international would give her enough time to make it all disappear. If we need it to. You can catch up with us when you're okay to fly. I mean, if that's all right?"

"Absolutely. But, Jayne. How are you?"

I was having nightmares every night, and sometimes during the day. I could still hear David shrieking. Anything that hissed like the lantern in the civil defense ward or had the weird burned-cheese smell of cyclopropane residue sent me into a tailspin. I was having trouble keeping food down. Sometimes I woke up thinking I was still going to have to kill a friend of mine, and when the dream faded, I still felt grateful it was David trapped down in the dark.

David, who had been a lot like me.

"I'm fine," I said.

WHEN I was born, Eric would have been in his early twenties. Was he already corrupted by then? Had his soulless moment pa.s.sed? When I turned sixteen and suffered my lost weekend, had he helped me hide it from my father out of affection, or was there another file out there like Kim's, only with my name on it, that told a different story?

But my mind kept going back to the picture. The little boy.

I suspected that Eric had started as someone not so different from me. Well intentioned, so far as he really knew his own intentions. A little lonely, maybe. On his own. He'd discovered the occult world of riders and magic. He'd been caught up, and it had broken him.

I imagined there was a moment when the boy had stopped and the man begun, but that was probably wrong. More likely, it was a series of things. Small steps that added up to something terrible. Maybe he'd been tempted by something. Wealth, since he'd clearly managed that part pretty well. Or love. Or power.

Or maybe he'd had to do terrible things that he'd believed were right until they didn't seem terrible anymore. Maybe he'd compromised himself until being the lesser evil seemed like being second place. I could imagine that happening.

"HM," KIM said. Even her little, nonverbal interjections were clipped and controlled. She looked at the papers with all the pa.s.sion of someone reading a phone bill. If I hadn't known better, I wouldn't have guessed that she was holding the key to a new life.

"You don't have to do this," Aubrey said for what must have been the hundredth time. He still didn't look good. The Oath of the Abyss showed in his face and the way he moved. He was less connected to his body than he'd once been. It would be easier for him to get sick, even harder to recover. He'd die younger, from something he'd have been able to fight off, except for me and Eric. I wondered, if it had gone another way, if I'd have kept him with me, even knowing that he'd hurt himself if it meant protecting me. If I would have let him.

The condo was, if anything, more stripped down than when we'd arrived. Lake Michigan floated outside, the water stretching to an obscure horizon until it turned into sky. I liked it better during the daytime. At night, the lake was too dark.

"It's nothing," I said. "And by nothing, I mean it's not one percent of what I'm working with. Or a millionth of what Eric owes you guys."

"And yet enough to live on for the rest of our lives," Kim said. She put the papers back down on the table and stroked her chin like she might have started growing a beard.

"Or to fund your own study," I said. "Something real. You know. Basic."

Kim's smile was so small and so brief, it was easy to think it hadn't been there.

"Alepski and Namkung are going to wet themselves," she said.

"But you're rebuilding the Invisible College's make-it-shut-up spell first, right?" I said. "So that anyone else who goes looking for the rider won't find it."

"That's first priority," Kim said. "But if I've got my own funding, there's no reason I can't do a little work of my own on the side."

I smiled. We were almost done. Aubrey looked at me, and I raised an eyebrow. It was almost fun to watch him not know what to do. He'd been so sure of himself for so long. A week ago, I'd thought that losing him would be the worst thing ever. Now that the time had finally come, it wasn't. I was sad. I was going to miss his constant company. I wished things had gone differently.

I had bigger problems.

"I told Harlan that you two would both be taking care of the condo," I said. "He's still pretty much sloppy happy to do anything we want. He knows you're legit. If you want it repainted or anything, he's probably good for it."

"I'm not sure I can live in your house," Kim said. "Taking money from Eric's estate is one thing. I deserve that. Being kept by my ex-husband's ex-girlfriend is too strange."

"Until you find someplace better, then," I said with a shrug. "Or you stay at your place, and Aubrey can stay here. Or whatever. Up to you. I'm not using the place. You can stay here or not. Whatever you want."

"But if you come back here-" Kim said.

"I won't."

THE TRICKY thing about innocence is you don't know you've got it until you've lost it. You think that you're worldly and experienced and maybe a little jaded, but you're not. You find out something about the world or about yourself, and it changes everything. Puts everything up for grabs again.

I had a year as the luckiest girl in the world. From my twenty-third birthday to just after my twenty-fourth, I was the heir to the magic kingdom. Sure, there were monsters in it. Sure, it was dangerous. But it came with a ready-built set of friends and allies, and my wise old uncle before me had left bread crumbs for me to follow, right? I just had to figure out what he'd have wanted me to do, follow directions, and everything would work out right. Looking back on it, the idea seemed frail and naive and I wanted it back. I really wanted it back.

Eric fell from grace with the world, and along with everything else, he'd left me the chance to do the same thing. I could follow his path and become the person he'd been. I'd wanted to, until I saw where the path ended. I felt older. I felt hurt and lessened and more frightened. And more alone. I'd lost my faith in my uncle, and losing faith in G.o.d had been easier. If G.o.d wasn't what I'd thought, then He was just a story people told themselves to get through the night. If Eric wasn't what I thought, then anything was possible.

Eric wasn't what I thought. Anything was possible.

I'd spent what seemed like a lifetime living the question What would Eric do? That was gone, and all that was left were What am I going to do? and What will it cost me? I left something in the darkness under Grace. Part of my innocence. Part of my soul. Which word I chose didn't really matter. It was gone, and I would never get it back.

And even that wasn't my biggest problem.

GOING BACK to London felt strange. It didn't seem like going home so much as going back to a friend's place. There wasn't the sense of exploration, of discovering something new. I'd been in these rooms before, slept in this bed, woken up to the same neighbor with a kink for bhangra music. The weather was gray and cool. The leaves had already changed color. Living with just Ex was strange too. I kept expecting him to be Aubrey or Chogyi Jake. But he drank coffee instead of green tea, and none of his stories were about exotic wasp larvae. It wasn't unfamiliar, just strangely small.

We were sitting on the couch watching TV. The rain pattered against the back windows. A British police car with its two-tones siren pa.s.sed by like something out of a BBC murder mystery. I wondered what Helen Mirren was doing these days. And between one breath and the next, I knew I was going to tell him.

"I shouldn't have won," I said.

Ex looked over at me. He frowned. He always frowned.

"The fight with the haugsvarmr. I shouldn't have won."

"The guilt's hard. I know that, but-"

"Ex. The circle broke. I didn't have you three to help me. Even with Aubrey pulling the Oath of the Abyss. I shouldn't have been able to win."

"The wards that Eric put on you-"

"You mean the ones we can't find? The ones we haven't reinforced in the last year and who knows how long before that? Those wards?"

Ex crossed his arms.

"Those wards," he said.

"Spells are magic," I said. "And magic fades. You told me that. Magic fades, and I'm getting stronger."

"All right," Ex said.

There should have been a flash of lightning, a crack of thunder. The rain just kept dripping. The TV show went to commercial. I felt Ex's gaze on me like I was a puzzle he couldn't quite fathom. I took a deep breath, sighing it out slowly. When I spoke, my voice sounded weirdly calm and matter-of-fact. You know. All things considered.

"I think I have a rider."

Also by M.L.N. Hanover.

UNCLEAN SPIRITS.

DARKER ANGELS.