Vicious Grace

“I’m sorry,” I said.



Her smile was fast and genuine and sad.



“You are too kind, Jayné,” she said. “Really. It’s a vice.”



“I’ll try to be more of a shit,” I said. “Any idea where we can find that vacuum?”



But before she could answer, Eric intruded.



“Hey. You’ve got a call.”



Kim flinched at the voice, and I pretended not to notice. I rooted through my pack one-handed, keeping the minivan in its lane with the other, trying to answer the call before Eric spoke again. The call was from Aubrey’s number. I took it.



“Jayné,” he said. “Where are you?”



“Fifteen minutes from you, if the traffic would get moving,” I said.



“Push them out of the way and get over here,” he said. I could hear him grinning.



“You got through?”



“Chogyi Jake had this flash of freaking genius about the whole Enochian directionality thing. I’ll tell you about it when you get here.”



My heart raced. I bent toward the wheel, as if I could clear a path for us by force of will.



“The rooms,” I said. “Did you get into the rooms? What’s in there?”



“Come home, sweetheart,” he said. “See for yourself.”



THE HIDDEN rooms didn’t look the way I expected. Secret rooms should be dark, with cobwebs and wrought iron fixtures and probably creepy organ music. And rats. These looked almost normal. Almost. The door on the east side of the hallway opened onto a simple officelike space. A cheap desk with the wood-grain laminate starting to peel at the sides, a landline telephone in a style twenty years out of date, two four-drawer filing cabinets, and a bookshelf half-filled with folders, books, and boxes. The drapes were chocolate brown bleached almost beige by the sun. In fairness, there were a couple of cobwebs.



The western door opened to a smallish bedroom actually decked out to sleep in. A steel-frame single bed with a thin mattress, a little bedside table, and that was about it. It had its own stripped-down powder room with stainless steel fixtures and no towels. If I hadn’t been walking in Eric’s footsteps for the past year, I might not even have noticed that the light fixtures were of unbreakable security glass and mesh, that the bed and table were bolted down, or that the solid-core door was fitted with a double dead bolt and hung with industrial-grade hinges. A cell. So that was interesting. There weren’t any restraints on the bed, but slapping on a couple of handcuffs would have been easy.



Kim, behind me, was drawing the same conclusion.



“He must have expected somebody to be possessed,” she said. “And that it would take a fair amount of time to get the rider out of them.”



“Seems like,” I said, tapping the walls absently as I walked through the empty space.



Ex, Aubrey, and Chogyi Jake had apparently given up all pretense of keeping order in the condo. The couch and coffee table had been pulled back from the bedroom and were now pale with dust. A pile of photographs and maps sat on one corner, a fragile-looking roll of blueprints lay open in the center, and five leather-bound books were on top of them. A glance was enough to show me that the blueprints were of Grace Memorial, and that the extra markings and symbols on it weren’t from the general contractor.



“What have we got?” I asked.



“A lot of what, and very little why,” Chogyi Jake said. “But we haven’t had time to go through it yet.”



“Two boxes of surveillance and background on someone named David Souder,” Aubrey said. “Runs a roofing company in Waukegan and seems totally innocuous.”



“Name rings a bell, though,” I said. “Is he in the wiki?”



Aubrey shook his head.



“All right,” I said. “Anything that does make sense?”



“There was a very serious binding on the winter solstice, 1951,” Ex said, holding up a weathered-looking three-ring binder stuffed with handwritten pages. I recognized my uncle’s script. “So, not quite sixty years ago.”



“I’m shocked, shocked,” I said dryly. “And it happened at the hospital, right?”



“That’s not as clear as you’d think,” Aubrey said. A patch of white dust smeared his temple like badly applied stage makeup. “Eric was trying to find the site when he died. He’d narrowed it down to a few likely suspects. Grace Memorial was one of them, but he wasn’t certain. All this? He put it here just in case Grace turned out to be the site.”



I sat on the floor, legs crossed and elbows on the table. The top photograph on the pile shifted with a hiss as soft as whispering.



“Do we know what got bound?” I asked.



“Working on that,” Aubrey said. “Eric’s notes refer to it as Rahabiel and Daevanam Daeva, but until we can dig out some actual details, we might as well call it Shirley. But I haven’t even started looking at the books yet.”



“We also may be able to infer something about it from the manner in which it was bound,” Chogyi Jake said. “We do have an outline of that, and it was fairly impressive. Interment, just as the dreams suggested, but there were at least two more layers on top of that. One that kept the site obscured and the residual effects of the rider difficult to recognize, and then another secondary containment.”



“Okay,” I said.



Chogyi Jake shook his head.



“Too technical?” he asked.



“A little jargony,” I said. “Retry?”



Kim, behind me, was the one to answer. She stood in the doorway, her arms crossed and a flush in her cheeks. She looked excited and engaged. Almost happy. I remembered what she’d said about having no one to talk to about things like this.



“They buried it first,” she said. “And then they did something that would keep anyone from hearing it pounding on the coffin. And then they built a prison around it, so that even if it got out, it wouldn’t get free.”



“Yes,” Chogyi Jake said.



“And the prison?” Ex said. “It’s Grace Memorial.”



“Any idea why it would want to jump on my head?” I asked.



“We don’t even know that it did,” Ex said. “The attack could have been whatever was bound trying to reach out, or it might have been a particularly vicious kind of aversion built into the binding.”



“Might have been the prisoner, might have been the prison,” Aubrey said.



“How do you bury a rider?” I asked at the same moment Kim said “Why the uptick in activity?”



“Interment bindings traditionally involve a sacrifice,” Chogyi Jake said, answering me first. “It’s not unlike normal possession, only instead of the rider taking control of a person through its own will, the spirit is driven into someone. Usually someone who has offered themselves up, but unwilling sacrifices have also been made. And then, the horse and rider are—”



He gestured apologetically.



“Buried alive,” I said.



“It’s not a popular technique,” Chogyi Jake said. “But why the activity increased in the last year turns out to be a very interesting question. Of course, there hasn’t actually been an increase in the thing’s reach. It’s pounding on the coffin just as loud. Only now people can hear it.”



“You’re saying things like that mob attack have been happening at Grace for the past fifty-odd years, and just no one noticed?” I said.



“Yes,” Chogyi Jake said. “Until last year, when the second layer of the binding was broken. After that, it became psychologically possible for people to be aware that something odd was going on.”



“Even people like Oonishi,” Ex said. He could really pack contempt in his voice when he tried.



“The increase in people leaving the hospital against medical advice,” Kim said. “They see things. They get scared.”



“That’s the assumption we’re working with,” Chogyi Jake said.



“All right. That’s better than something’s eating them, right?” I said. “And what broke that keep-it-quiet spell?”



“Us,” Aubrey said. “Or, specifically, you. Back in Denver.”



I didn’t get it. And then I did.



“The Invisible College?” I said. “They did this?”



“Thought you’d find that interesting,” Ex said.



NINE



For a split second, I wanted to punch Ex hard enough to break something. His nose, my hand. Whatever. I tried to take a deep breath and force myself to calm down, but the best I could manage was to slow my panting a little. My body felt like a high-voltage wire. I started pacing because I couldn’t be still and I didn’t want to start shrieking. Aubrey’s eyebrows had the little angle to them that meant he was worried. He was right to be.



“Jesus Christ,” I said. Then I repeated it under my breath twenty or thirty times, just for the sensation of speaking.



“This is what Eric was doing in Denver,” Kim said. She at least sounded rational. “He wanted to find this Rahabiel, whatever it is, and breaking the Invisible College was how he could do it.”



“Only they found out what he was up to,” Aubrey said, “and . . . well, stopped him.”



“Why?” I said, a little too loudly. “Why did he want to know? What was he going to do with it? This is crap. This is just crap. What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”



“We’ve only been looking for half an hour,” Aubrey said. Ex looked up as if seeing me for the first time.



“Is there a problem?” he said.



I laughed, but there wasn’t any mirth in it.



“Yes, there’s a problem,” I said. “The people who killed Eric are behind whatever the hell is going on in Grace Memorial.”



“And?”



“And we don’t know what they did or why Eric was trying to find this buried rider thing or generally speaking what the hell we’re in the middle of.”