Vicious Grace

I got another latte with a slice of pound cake this time, and tried to put the situation in order. I knew that I needed to deal with the haugsvarmr one way or the other. I also knew that I couldn’t do it while I freaked out about all my friends leaving me, so I needed to find Aubrey. And after him Chogyi Jake and Ex. If I was on my own, it would crush me. But Chogyi Jake was right; I’d been crushed before. Hadn’t killed me. The ache in my chest came back, just to remind me how bad it had been. How bad it would be this time. It didn’t matter. Before I could do anything else, I had to know where I stood.



I tried calling Aubrey’s cell and got voice mail. Either something was up with his cell phone or he wasn’t taking my calls. That was all right. He’d just found out that his marriage had ended because of something about a thousand times more complex than he’d thought. With that kind of unfinished business hanging loose, I figured I knew where to find him. On my way out the door, I waved to the blond guy behind the counter and bowed my head a little. Thank you. He rolled his eyes and waved back. It was nothing. The small complicity was nice, and I tried to hold the feeling as I hailed a cab and gave the driver Kim’s address.



A stiff wind had picked up by the time I reached Kim’s place. The air was heavy and muggy, with the ozone smell of impending rain. The blue skies were gone; the storms were coming back. I pulled my jacket tight around my shoulders. Steel and concrete stairs rang under my footsteps. I kept telling myself it would be okay and at the same time imagined ringing the bell and having Aubrey open it wearing a sheet. The fake iron apartment numbers were cracked. The pale door had a long scratch in it. Clouds had muffled the late afternoon light. I waited for what seemed a long time to see if I would press the doorbell. Then I did.



Kim answered the door wearing old gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt. Her hair hung in limp, sweaty lines, and her eyes were bloodshot and rimmed red from crying or sleeplessness or both. Her gaze tracked up and down slowly, judging me.



“You look like shit,” she said.



“Is he here?”



“Did you expect him to be?”



“Kind of, yeah.”



“I don’t know if that makes you an optimist or a pessimist,” Kim said. She walked into the apartment, leaving the door open as if she expected me to follow, so I did.



For a moment, I thought the little apartment’s disarray came from yesterday’s revelation, but the clutter was too deep for one day’s work. Piles of magazines lurked at the edge of a patterned beige couch. An exercise bike lurked in the corner, dry cleaning bags hanging from its handles. Cobwebs haunted the corners of ceiling and wall. A plastic laundry basket commanded the dining room table, and I couldn’t tell if the clothes in it were dirty or clean. The air smelled like old pizza. It was the kind of place I might have lived in without the windfall of Eric’s fortune. Kim glanced around, seeing it because I was there. She shrugged.



“It’s home,” she said, almost apologetically. “You want a drink?”



“I don’t want to intrude,” I said.



“Stop being so fucking formal. How about rum and Coke? I don’t have the vodka for screwdrivers.”



“Um. Sure.”



I had never seen her like this. The aggressive intelligence was still there, but not so tightly controlled. Her hypercompetence had slipped, and the despair behind it showed. I sat on the arm of her couch and watched her over the breakfast bar. The kitchen was tiny, so she just spun slowly in place, reaching up for a glass, turning to pluck a bottle of Captain Morgan out of a cabinet, and then opening the refrigerator for a red and silver can. She didn’t have to move her feet.



“Aubrey took off, then?” she asked.



“Most of last night. And again this morning,” I said. “I figured he’d come here.”



“Haven’t heard a word from him. Why would he be here anyway? I just told him I’d been sleeping around on him. I don’t think men usually find that endearing.” She pushed a glass across the bar, the soda still fizzing, and started another one for herself.



“But the Mark of Naxos. The love spell . . .”



Kim waved her hand, pushing the words away.



“So what if he used magic to get me into bed? I’m still the one who chose not to tell Aubrey about it. I’m still the one who chose to take off instead of trying to figure things through. Did you think sleeping with Eric was the only way I betrayed Aubrey?”



“But . . .” I started. My head felt like it was full of cotton ticking. I felt like I’d tricked myself into arguing against Eric, and I wasn’t sure exactly how it had happened. Kim drank half her rum and Coke in two swallows, then coughed. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.



“I think I owe you an apology,” she said.



I had imagined a thousand scenarios in coming to Kim’s apartment. Aubrey absent, Kim apologetic, and rum and Coke hadn’t figured into them.



“I threw a fit,” she said. “I was embarrassed and . . . No. I was humiliated. I am humiliated. I don’t like my private business being thrown around in front of everyone. When I saw that file, and how he had played me, and that all of you were going to have to know too . . .” She paused. Her chuckle dripped with self-loathing.



She took a sip from her glass, and I mirrored her, then looked down at the drink. She mixed them strong. I wondered how many she’d already had. How many it would take to wipe away what had been in that file. She shook her head.



“Anyway,” she said. “I could have done that better. Sorry. For what it’s worth, I’ve been looking at it, and I think we can put something like the Invisible College’s spells back in place.”



She must have seen the confusion in my expression. She put up a hand, palm out, in a gesture that asked for my silence.



“I’m not saying it’s easy,” she said. She walked out from the kitchen to lean against the dining room table. “They’re riders. What they did was one big thing. Poof. Done. Using dinky little human spells and cantrips, it’ll take maybe six months. A year. And the haugsvarmr will probably be pushing back pretty hard that whole time.”



“Okay,” I said. “Hold on. You’ve been figuring out how to put the lid back on Grace Memorial?”



Now it was her turn to look surprised.



“Well, yes,” she said. “You aren’t still thinking about letting it loose, are you?”



“I don’t know,” I said. “I hadn’t exactly been thinking about it at all.”



“What have you been thinking about?”



“Whether Eric’s having”—I stumbled a little, and then recovered—“done what he did to you and Aubrey meant that all my friends would ditch me. If Aubrey is going to break up with me and go back to you. If Chogyi Jake and Ex would decide that anything Eric touched is too tainted to be around. Whether doing one deeply shitty thing really means Eric was a bad person, or just that he did one really shitty thing. Like that. Oh, and talking David Souder out of going to Grace Memorial.”



“He was going to the hospital?” she asked sharply. “Why?”



“It’s calling him,” I said. “He thinks his grandfather’s still alive in that coffin and wants out.”



“We have to keep him away from there,” Kim said sharply. “Between being inside the labyrinth and the connection to his grandfather, he probably wouldn’t be able to resist it. Even if he didn’t want to, it could force him to break the interment. What did you tell him?”



I recounted David’s call, our meeting, the outlines of our conversation. But even while I looked for the right words, I was amazed by how totally she’d ignored everything else I’d said. Aubrey, Chogyi Jake, Ex. Even Eric. It was eerie, and then it was perfectly clear. Eric’s file on her had pulled the rug out from under both of us. I was obsessing over my fears and grabbing for anything consistent and solid in my life. Kim was focusing on the things she could control and ignoring anything that she couldn’t. She was pretending that everything she’d lost didn’t matter. Seen from that perspective, it wasn’t so weird.



But it wasn’t what I needed.



“That’s got to be why Eric had the secret rooms fitted out with the cell,” Kim said. “If he was going to have Souder as a negotiating point, he’d need to control him.”



“Kim. Stop it. Okay?”



The light from the kitchen put half her face in dim shadow. Annoyance tightened the corners of her eyes. She crossed her arms.



“Stop what?”



“Can we just put the riders and magic and all that away for a minute? We need to talk. About Aubrey.”



“No we don’t,” Kim said. “What would we say about him?”



I blinked. He was my lover and her husband. Their marriage had been torpedoed by my guardian angel. Of course Aubrey was the axis that everything turned on. At least, I’d thought he was. And yet standing there under Kim’s gaze, I couldn’t think what exactly I’d intended to say. I took a stab at it.



“You love him,” I said.



“So what?” Kim said, a rattle in her voice like a car engine going bad. “You think Aubrey’s the worst thing Eric did to me? Do you know what it would have meant to get the position at LSU? Or, God, the England job? I would have been working with the best people in my field. I would have had the money and resources to do real work. Something basic. Something the field could really build on.”



“You aren’t doing real work here?”



Her cheeks flushed red and her nostrils flared. A line of bloodless white appeared around her lips.



“I am third researcher behind two people I helped train,” Kim said, her voice getting louder. “I am teaching undergraduate cell biology. I’m a PhD in a medical center. All these MDs look at me like I’m some kind of trained chimp. Eric Heller didn’t just take away my marriage. He sabotaged my career. He ate my life.”