Vicious Grace

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 to you because whatever was broken in me would still be just as broken. Do you see?”



Ex looked between Kim and Aubrey, his face a mask of confusion and distress. Chogyi Jake leaned close to him and murmured something that made Ex’s eyes go wide. Tears were finally starting to gather in Kim’s eyes. I didn’t want to watch this. Carefully, Kim put the file down on the coffee table, half covering the blueprints of Grace. She walked down the hallway, into the secret bedroom, coming out a moment later with her purse in her hand. No one moved as she walked out the door. The sound of the latch clicking home was deep and final. Ex cleared his throat.



“Shouldn’t someone go after—”



“Leave her alone,” Aubrey said, and that closed the issue. He leaned forward and picked up the file. His face was empty. “I need to look at this.”



“Aubrey,” I said, but he didn’t look at me. He put the file in his lap, smoothed the pages, licked the tip of his index finger, and opened to the first page. Ex, Chogyi Jake, and I sat in silence for a few seconds. Aubrey turned the page. The hiss of the paper seemed unnaturally loud. I stood up quietly and walked to the kitchen like Aubrey was my father in a foul mood, and anything might set him off. Chogyi Jake and Ex followed me a few seconds later. Chogyi Jake brewed tea, and Ex stared out at the moon and the stars, the lights of the city and the darkness of the lake, with blank amazement.



“He didn’t do it,” I said. “Whatever Kim thinks she saw, she’s wrong. Eric was a good man.”



“I always thought so too,” Chogyi Jake said, and I wanted to yell at him for being so diplomatic. It wouldn’t have killed him to just say yes, that Kim was wrong.



“Still,” Ex said softly, “I would like a look at that file.”



“Hey,” Eric said from my bedroom. “You’ve got a call.”



With a thin, whispered string of obscenities, I walked to the bedroom, scooped up the cell phone, and turned off the ringer. It was David’s number, and I couldn’t talk to him right now. I let it roll to voice mail, promising myself I’d call him back if the message sounded too freaky. When I took the chance of peeking around the door frame and looking at Aubrey, he hadn’t moved from his high-backed chair. He turned another page. The air felt thick as a thunderstorm. I stepped back into the kitchen just as the voice mail icon appeared on the phone.



“Jayné,” David’s recorded voice said. “I wanted to see how things were going. You know, if you’d found something. If there’s anything I can do. I know you said I shouldn’t go to the hospital, but I really think we should talk about that some more. So if you could give me a call back. Anytime. Don’t worry about waking me up. Okay. Thanks.”



I deleted the message. If he wasn’t on the highway south to Chicago at that moment, he wasn’t my top priority. Chogyi Jake passed me a cup of green tea still hot enough to scald my tongue. The steam smelled like cut grass. I stopped drinking it. Out on the lake, a huge yacht made its slow way across the water, its hull outlined in white and yellow lights brighter than stars.



“I can’t stand this,” I said, and went back into the front room.



Aubrey didn’t look up until I took the pile of papers he’d already read out of the left side of the file. Rage bubbled just under the surface of his expression, but I kept myself from looking away. For a heartbeat, a breath, we were like two wolves fighting for dominance. I didn’t like the feeling. Aubrey looked away. I sat.



The first five pages were a background report on Kim, but not the one I knew. It was who she had been when Eric met her. Born in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. Moved to Reno when she was four, and then to Oakland when she was eight. Her parents were divorced. Her mother died of an accidental overdose of prescription painkillers the year Kim went to college. Her father and sister lived in Houston, but didn’t appear to be close. There was a reported sexual assault during her second year as an undergraduate, but no charges had been filed, and whoever had put the file together hadn’t been able to get a copy of the original campus police report. Her medical records showed evidence of a broken arm in childhood, a slightly enlarged left ovary, and extensive adolescent orthodontic work, but no major health conditions. The report did note that Kim had admitted to occasional bouts of bulimia when she was a graduate student, but there was no other mention of eating disorders. It outlined her work at the Medical Center, listed Aubrey as her husband, and gave both their salaries as a joint household income. The section ended with a blank page.



It wasn’t the first of its kind I’d ever seen. I’d had my lawyer build things like it several times before. On Randolph Coin, the head of the Invisible College, shortly before I killed him. On Karen Black, when I first started working with her. Never on someone I knew. Never on someone I liked. Knowing that Karen Black had been treated for chlamydia or that Coin suffered gastric reflux hadn’t made me uncomfortable. Now, in five pages, I knew about Kim’s mother, a possible rape, eating disorders. I knew about her ovaries. This time felt different. This time I felt like I was violating something, and it made me wonder a little about all the times before when it hadn’t troubled me at all.