Vicious Grace Part 4

"I think we have a plan," Aubrey said.

"We should set a solid meeting place and time," Kim said. "Cell phones are kind of tricky in the buildings."

We settled on half past twelve in the main lobby. Kim wrote detailed maps to get Ex, Chogyi Jake, and Aubrey where they were going, and then we headed off. It didn't take long before we were in the public parts of the hospital again. We pa.s.sed a waiting room where an oversized television was blasting SpongeBob SquarePants to a sh.e.l.l-shocked, unsmiling family. In the hallway, a guy who was just about my age hunched over his cell phone, saying something about lab results and trying not to cry. The air smelled like cleaning solution. Outside the windows, blue sky and fluffy white clouds hung high above the buildings, pretending there had never been a storm. The Sears Tower-now officially the Willis Tower-peeked out from behind smaller, closer structures, and I tried to pay more attention to it than to the thousand small human dramas we were walking past. It seemed polite.

"What a difference a year makes," Kim said. Her voice sounded tight. Clipped.

"You think?" It hung halfway between question and agreement, and it got a hint of a smile. She didn't elaborate, and I didn't press.

Thinking about it as Kim led me confidently down the corridors and wards, I realized there was something to what she said. It wasn't that the others wouldn't have listened to me before-well, except Ex, and that was more about his own weird paternalistic streak. But when Kim had first met me, I'd been younger. And it was more than just the months and weeks. It was the mileage.

Being Eric-taking over the work he'd left behind-had put me in harm's way more than once, but it had also given me chances to figure out who I was. To try being the sort of person I wanted to become. I was more confident than I'd been the first time she met me, more in control of myself and the people around me. I wondered if my parents would have recognized me as the same girl who'd hurried through the kitchen on her way to school and church, or if I'd become someone so alien to my own past that I'd be a stranger to them. I wasn't sure if the idea left me sad or proud.

I was still lost in thought when it happened.

We pa.s.sed through a set of automated swinging doors, a blue-and-white sign above them announcing the rooms within as the Cardiac Care Unit. The hallway marched out before us, the gla.s.s walls of patients' rooms arrayed around a wide, high nurses' station, the same panopticon architecture as a prison. Half a dozen men and women in hospital uniform and almost that many in civilian clothes stood behind the desk or before it, engaged in at least three separate conversations. I didn't see the man until I b.u.mped into him. It was like stumbling against a wall.

"Sorry," I said.

"You," he said, and then, "What the h.e.l.l is your problem?"

He was red-haired and freckled, his jaw wide and starting to sag a little at the jowls. He stood a head and a half taller than me, which put him on the large side, even for a guy. His scrubs were powder blue, and an ID tag much like Kim's hung from his neck. The rage in his eyes unsettled me.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I was thinking about some-"

He moved in front of me, blocking my way with an out-thrust chest. A red flush was climbing up his neck.

"You were thinking?" he said. "You've got to be s.h.i.tting me. That's you thinking?"

I looked at Kim looking back at me. I had hoped-expected, even-outrage and maybe an echo of my own sudden fear. Instead, she was considering me like I was an interesting bug. Everyone at the nurses' station had turned toward us. All the conversations had stopped. A nervous glance over my shoulder, and I saw the patients in the fishbowl rooms staring at me too. I lifted my hands and took a step back.

"Look, I said I was sorry. I just b.u.mped-"

"You piece of s.h.i.t."

His voice was low and shaking with rage. I felt the cold electricity of adrenaline hitting my bloodstream. Kim didn't say anything.

"You piece of s.h.i.t," he said again.

The fear didn't leave me-nothing simple as that-but an answering rage started to bubble up alongside it.

"Hey!" I said. "I don't know what your problem is, but I've had about as much-"

The red-haired man drew in a long, rough breath.

And so did everyone else.

Each nurse at the station. Patients watching us through the open doorways of their rooms. Breath is a small thing, a subtle thing, until it's coordinated, and then it's devastating. A moment ago, I'd been having a surreal encounter with the poster boy for steroid rage. Now, that soft, vast sound made me something very small in the middle of an unexpected battleground. I felt myself go suddenly, dangerously calm. It wasn't quite the I'm-not-driving experience of being in a fight, but I could feel myself leaning in toward that. The man's breath quickened, and the other people matched it. I took a step back. His hands were balled into huge fists.

"Kim?" I said, but her breath was keeping time with the sharp panting that rose up all around me. Whatever this was, it had taken her too. I licked my lips and pulled my qi-the vital energy that fuels magic and life-up from my belly and into my throat.

"Kim," I said, pushing the power out into my voice. "Wake up."

I didn't take my eyes off the red-haired man, but in my peripheral vision, I saw her fall out of the pattern. She put a hand to her head and looked around. The red-haired man was trembling now, shaking with barely restrained violence. Two of the nurses behind the station put down long gray folders and stepped out into the hallway behind him. A blond woman in a business suit came out of one of the patient care rooms, her hands at her sides like claws. King Mob, closing ranks. Their synchronized breath filled the s.p.a.ce: a single, huge, animal sound.

"Jayne?" Kim said.

"Just stay cool, and when I tell you to run, run," I said. And then, "Okay. Run!"

FIVE.

We bolted.

Behind us, the mob roared with a single voice. Kim and I burst through the doors at the ward's entrance hard enough that my arm stung. Kim took a sharp left, and, only skidding a little on the traffic-polished linoleum floor, I followed her. She ran like a sprinter, her body straight and aligned, her arms pumping along with her stride, her hands flat. She'd kicked off her shoes.

Just as we reached the wide, triangular s.p.a.ce before a bank of brushed steel elevators, the red-haired man caught up. He surged up behind me, swung a wide arm, and pushed Kim's racing body into the wall. The impact sounded like a slap, and she fought to keep her balance before she fell. Between one heartbeat and the next, I found myself quietly behind my eyes while my body took over. I ran toward the elevators, the red-haired man hard behind me. Like something out of a Hong Kong action flick, I ran up the closed metal door, pushed off, and flew for a second, backward and down. I landed on both feet and one hand, our opponent's broad back in front of me. He tried to turn, but I jumped forward, driving the heel of my palm right about where his left kidney was.

He grunted once and went down like a sack of flour.

Kim was still getting to her feet. I tried to call out to her, to ask if she was all right, but my throat didn't respond; the wards and protections were driving, and my body was not yet my own. It took half a second to understand why. The red-haired man had been the fastest, but the others were coming. The low rumble of their feet was like a small earthquake. From the opposite direction, an older man in a white lab coat walked toward the elevators, saw me, saw Kim and the groaning man on the floor. His eyes widened, and he backpedaled fast. Smart cookie. The mob rounded the corner.

Seven of them ran toward me, mouths in square gapes of rage. When they saw me, they started screaming together, one voice from all their throats. The blond woman who'd come out of the patient's room leaped for Kim. I shifted forward to protect her, but the others were on me. I kicked hard into someone's knee, feeling it give way. An elbow got me in the ribs, but not hard enough to break them. A man in a nurse's uniform lifted me by my shirt and the waist of my jeans like he was going to throw me. I brought my knee up into his jaw and my palm down on the bridge of his nose. His blood spattered my belly, and he dropped me.

I caught a glimpse of Kim wrestled to her knees by the blond woman. A dark-skinned man with a salt-and-pepper beard drove his shoulder into my gut, pushing me back by main force. I dropped my elbow into his neck, and three new attackers rounded the corner. Watching from the still s.p.a.ce behind my eyes, I was afraid for Kim, I was afraid for the men and women boiling out of the cardiac ward with murder in mind, but from the moment the red-haired man fell, I wasn't worried about myself. I'd fought riders before, and they didn't go down this easy.

A man threw a clipboard at my face, and I knocked it away as I dodged one of the new women's kicks. I sank my foot into the soft of a fat man's belly, his breath gusting out as he collapsed. Someone grabbed me from the back. When I dropped, turning into them, and brought my foot down on their instep hard enough to crunch, the grip at my neck went slack.

They were fighting, but they were fighting like people: fragile, untrained, inflamed with anger, but not technique or supernatural power. I put my faith in Eric's protections, and my body danced around the blows as I worked my way toward Kim. More of the mob's reinforcements came, but each group that arrived seemed weaker and slower than the last. The people who couldn't run as well catching up. I started to wonder if the cardiac patients would show up too, throwing IV stands and catheter bags at me.

I got to Kim's side as the elevator behind us chimed, a red down-pointing arrow glowing. My fist sank deep into the blond woman's throat, and I lifted Kim up. Her hair was tangled, and a trickle of blood marked her hairline.

"I'm okay," Kim said. The elevator doors slid open. An elderly woman in a wheelchair and a girl who must have been her granddaughter started to come out, then hesitated. There were a dozen bodies on the floor, either unconscious or incapacitated and groaning. I pushed Kim into the elevator car past the wheelchair and turned back. Five of the mob were struggling to their feet, chests rising and falling together, and none of them coming close enough to make a real attack.

As the doors closed, they screamed. Frustration, anger, despair. The sound of a predator whose prey has just made it down the rabbit hole. I sagged against the wall, my body my own again. I felt bruised and spent and jittery. Kim was on her feet, wiping at the trail of blood on her face, her efforts smearing the mess more than cleaning it. The elderly woman and the girl stared at us nervously.

"Insurance problem," I said, my voice whiskey-rough. "No big deal."

The old woman nodded and smiled like I'd made any sense at all. My knuckles ached where I'd skinned them on something. On someone. When Kim spoke, she sounded as calm and businesslike as ever.

"We need to get to the others," she said. I nodded. If we were in danger, they were too. We had to get them out. I willed the car to go down faster. The numbers kept moving at the same, deliberate speed.

"I take it this hasn't happened before," I said.

She didn't dignify me with an answer.

It took us ten minutes to find someplace in the hospital with cell reception, but we got through to Aubrey and Ex on our first calls, and after that, it was like a fire drill. No running. No questions. We all walked quickly and deliberately out of the buildings, to the street, and away. In the full light of the sun, I felt the first tremors of my coming adrenaline crash. Mentally, I felt fine. Emotionally, I had no problems. It was just that my hands were shaking and I was a little nauseated. It would get worse before it got better, and I'd do my level best to ignore it then too.

As we walked, I brought the others up to speed. What had happened, how we'd dealt with it. We'd covered three long city blocks before I could bring myself to stop at a sidewalk cafe and sit for a while. It was Greek food, and the blue-and-white sign promised real Greek coffee. We took a wide, steel-mesh table set back in a patio of cracking cement that might have been a basketball court, once upon a time. The fading blue umbrella stood in the center of it like the mast of a sailboat, but it was thin enough that we could all still see one another. When Kim sat and started rubbing her feet, I remembered that she'd ditched her shoes. Three city blocks was a long way for bare feet on concrete. If she'd said something, I would have stopped sooner.

"It wasn't possession," Ex said after a thin, olive-skinned boy who looked about thirteen took our orders. "If they'd had riders, Jayne wouldn't have been able to snap Kim out of it with an improvised cantrip."

"So magic, then," I said. "Someone with a rider who could throw some kind of ma.s.s mind-control mojo? And who knew we were there?"

They were all silent for a moment.

"There's some holes in that," Aubrey said.

"Like?" I asked. It came across sharper than I'd meant it to, but he didn't take offense.

"Well, for instance, how did he know you were there? Eric's wards are supposed to keep you from being found, right?"

"What if he wasn't using magic to find me?" I said. "It's not like you can't take a picture of me. Or see me if you look across the room. The villagers didn't pull out their pitchforks and come after you guys. Kim's been there for years without anything taking a swing at her. I have to think he was after me specifically."

Kim shook her head.

"That doesn't scan either," she said. "If someone's using mundane strategies to find you, why use some kind of proxy magic to attack you? Why not just shoot you? And for that matter, why shoot you in the first place? Unless that was supposed to be some kind of warning."

"Maybe it was reacting to Eric's wards and protections," Aubrey said. "You know. Watching for someone with the most armor and figuring they're the one that poses the biggest threat?"

"Or an autoimmune response," Kim said. "Magic that saw other magic as not-self?"

"There's a comforting thought," I said.

Chogyi Jake leaned forward in his chair. His fingers laced his knee, and when he spoke, his voice was thoughtful.

"We're missing something. What did it feel like?" he asked. I was on the edge of telling him it felt like being the soccer ball at the World Cup when I realized he wasn't talking to me. Kim brushed back her hair with one hand.

"Like dreaming," she said. "I didn't have the sense of being ridden or out of control. But my logic and reality sort of fell out from under me. Jayne was Jayne, but she was also . . . an outsider? Foreign? Something like that."

"A threat," Chogyi Jake said.

"Yes, definitely. And one that I recognized," she said, then frowned and looked down.

"What is it?" Aubrey asked. Kim looked up at him. I couldn't read her expression.

"I can remember it from other perspectives," she said. "The shift nurse at the station? If I think about it, I know what we looked like through her eyes, Jayne and I both. The big guy who started the trouble? I remember Jayne b.u.mping into me as if I had been him. I can remember it from any perspective until she woke me up."

"Even Jayne's?" Aubrey asked.

"No. Not hers."

"Okay," I said. "So what does that mean?"

"It means we don't know what we're dealing with," Ex said.

The big debate after lunch was how-and whether-to go back for the car. On the one hand, we didn't know what was going on at the hospital or how far out the danger extended. On the other, it was a rental and it had Kim's parking permit and some of Ex's stuff in it. There was the option of hiring a tow truck, but sending a civilian to spring a trap meant for us had some ethical problems.

Once we agreed to go back, there was the question of whether I should go on the return trip because Eric's wards and protections would help fight off any a.s.saults or stay behind out of fear that they might be drawing some kind of spiritual attention. In the end, Aubrey and I went for the car, the others staying at the cafe drinking the muddy coffee and eating baklava. The walk back was shorter than I'd expected. Escaping from Grace into the still-unknown streets of Chicago had given every block an exaggerated distance. I was surprised by how quickly the hospital's awkward, looming bulk came into view. I kept scanning the other people on the sidewalks, waiting for them to start moving together or breathing in sync.

A taxi driver to our right leaned hard on his horn, shouting obscenities at the truck that had cut him off. The air smelled of exhaust. Grace Memorial loomed across the street, hundreds of windows catching the light like an insect's compound eye as we walked briskly past it toward the parking structure. A little shiver crawled up my spine, and I walked faster.

Aubrey walked with his hands in his pockets and his brow in furrows. I'd seen him like this before-worried, but trying not to talk about it for fear of worrying me. It was a deeply ineffective strategy.

"Spit it out," I said. We were stopped at a traffic light, waiting for the signal to cross.

"It's nothing. I just wish I'd known Eric better," he said. "I worked with him on and off for years, and I always . . . I don't know. Respected his boundaries? Gave him his s.p.a.ce? I never pushed to find out things he didn't want to tell me about. He would have known what this was. Just from what we've got now, he'd have known. And I don't."

"Neither does anyone else."

"Yeah," Aubrey said with a rueful smile. "But I'm not responsible for them."

"It'll be fine. We'll be careful," I said. And then, "How are you doing with seeing Kim again?"

"Fine. She's . . . just the same."

"No return of old feelings? Regret about signing the divorce papers?"

Aubrey's eyebrows rose, and a small, amused smile tweaked the corners of his mouth.

"How are you doing seeing Kim again?" he said.

"Standard insecurity," I said.

"You could stop that."

"Nope. Don't think I can. I'm aiming for having a good sense of humor about it."

He leaned in, his fingers twining around mine.

"Jayne," he said. "You're great. And I love you. And if you and I weren't together, I still wouldn't be with Kim. I think she's a good person. I enjoy her company, and I admire her intelligence. We have a lot of history, but we broke up for a reason. I'm pretty sure she was seeing someone else, even before she left Denver."

A totally different kind of fear bloomed in my chest. It was stupid. Kim's affair with Eric wasn't even my secret, except that I knew about it. And still, at that moment I wished I'd spilled her beans a year ago.

"How do you know?"

"I don't," he said. "Not really. It was just the feeling I got. Some unexpected long nights. Some inexplicable crying jags. I knew she was unhappy, and when she decided to leave, I told her it was the right decision."

I stopped in the concrete archway. Rows of tightly packed cars stood in the shadows. Aubrey paused, looking back at me.

"Would you want to know now?" I asked, trying to make it sound hypothetical. "I mean if you could know now what was really going on with her back then, would you want to?"