Vicious Grace

“I’m sorry,” I said softly.



“Why?” Kim demanded. “Did you tell him to do it?”



“No, but—”



“You were off getting drunk at senior prom or something. You were taking your SATs. Do you know how old I am?”



“Thirty-seven.”



“Thirty-seven,” Kim said, pointing at me accusingly. “And I’ve published in goddamn Nature. So yeah, you’re sleeping with the man I love. So what? What do you want me to do about it?”



“Forgive me,” I said.



“I want you to forgive me.”



The rage drained out of her. She seemed to shrink into herself. She coughed out a last, empty laugh and drank the rest of her rum and Coke.



“You’re not Eric,” she said. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”



“My life got better because yours got ruined,” I said, “and I like you.”



She looked at her glass, the brown-stained ice rattling in it like stones. A gust of wind pressed at the windows, making the cheap curtains shudder and shift. Kim shook her head.



“You want another one?” she asked. Her voice was smaller.



“Probably not. I’m kind of a lightweight.”



“You don’t mind if I do,” she said, taking the three steps back to the kitchen. “I’m somewhat experienced. Does Aubrey make you laugh?”



I didn’t answer. Maybe she didn’t expect me to.



“He used to be the only one who could really get me going,” she said. “He’d do that Bill Clinton imitation, and I’d just start losing it. You know the one?”



“Yeah,” I said, even though I didn’t. “He’s great.”



“He is.”



Kim poured herself another rum and Coke. I watched how much rum she was putting in this time. I was amazed she had any left in the bottle. She drank it fast, and then looked at me solemnly.



“I’m drunk,” she said.



“Yeah, I know.”



“I didn’t mean to be.”



“Oh, I think you had it coming,” I said. “I’ll go. Let you rest up.”



“Okay.” And then, as I reached her door, “You don’t need my forgiveness.”



Outside, a soft rain glowed in the streetlights and darkened the sidewalks. I wondered where Aubrey had gone if not to Kim. On one hand, the relief that he hadn’t been there was like someone taking a stone off my belly. On the other hand, the clarity I’d been looking for was just as far away. Worse. Before, I’d had to figure out why Eric wanted the thing under Grace set free and what he wanted from it in exchange. Now I also had the option of muffling it again, taking back what I’d done. I could do anything, but I couldn’t do everything. And if I sat on my hands and waited, David would eventually be drawn to the hospital. The rider would get free, and I didn’t even know for sure whether that would be a bad thing.



The only thing the rider had done that I knew about was confuse David and give Oonishi’s dreamers their shared nightmare. But what if David had been right and the thing under the hospital really was just thrashing in its sleep? It might not have meant any harm. If the Invisible College had bound something good, something that we could work with to make the world safer or better, then maybe everything Eric had done made sense. Maybe Eric had been viciously ruthless, but not evil. What if the rider was really some kind of angel? Confusion and despair, and a weird anger for Aubrey and Kim and me swirled together like the weather. If there was just some way to know . . .



Standing at the curb, looking for a taxi to flag down, I surprised myself with a frustrated cry.



“Fine,” I heard myself say. “If that’s what it takes, then fine.”



With the same near-disembodied sense I had during a fight, I pulled my cell phone out of my pack, looked up my recent call history, and found the number I wanted. Standing in the rain, my hair getting slowly heavier, I listened to the distant ring. I didn’t know what I was going to say, but my body carried me forward.



“Hello?”



“Dr. Oonishi,” I said. “This is Jayné Heller.”



“Chogyi Jake’s assistant?”



I felt myself smile.



“Yes,” I said.



“I haven’t had a chance to finish the interviews you wanted,” he said.



“That’s fine. I was wondering if you were running your sleep study tonight?”



“No,” he said. “We have three sessions a week. But I could have you observe tomorrow night, if you’d like.”



“Actually,” I said, “I want you to let me in when there isn’t anyone around.”



Jesus, I thought, I do? And then, a heartbeat later, Wow. I really do.



“I suppose . . . I mean . . .” he said, and then sighed heavily. “Is this really necessary?”



“Yes,” I said. My voice sounded so convinced, I started believing it myself.



“Fine.”



“Can you meet me there?”



“It will take me half an hour,” he said. “We can meet at the emergency room waiting area. I’ll take you in from there.”



“Perfect,” I said. “Thank you.”



I dropped the connection, then stood staring at my own hand for almost a full minute. The sense of dislocation was gone, and in its place the warm glow of anticipation. I didn’t have David locked in the condo, but I knew where to find him. I was in as good a negotiating position as Eric would have been. From the time we’d left, part of me had wanted to go back to Grace Memorial and face this thing down. Eric had planned to do it, and apparently without help from Ex or Chogyi Jake or Aubrey. And if he could, so could I.



“Right. Enough screwing around,” I said, as if there was someone to agree with. Eric, maybe. The Eric I’d known and trusted. The part of me that was him. The one I’d aspired to be.



Rahabiel. Haugsvarmr. Daevanam Daeva. Leyiathan. Legion. I didn’t care anymore. Grace Memorial had already hurt my people and threatened my little created family. I wanted answers. I wanted to know what the rider could tell me. I wanted to kick some unreal ass and make the universe take back all the hurt that my coming to Chicago had done. And anyway, the fear felt like exhilaration.



I was going back to Grace.



SEVENTEEN



The taxi dropped me off across the street from the hospital. I wanted the rain to be a torrent, water pounding down on the streets like the assault of an atmospheric fire hose, but the tiny drops only drifted. The street shone wet-asphalt black and streetlight orange. Traffic hissed by in a cloud of car exhaust and ozone. My hair clung to my head, cold and damp without quite reaching soaked. Grace Memorial rose up toward the low, gray sky.



We stood for almost a minute, the hospital and I, looking at each other. I watched a man in pale green scrubs emerge from the dark front doors with a bicycle. An ambulance lumbered in under the emergency room’s long concrete canopy, its siren beating at my ears and its flasher blinding me for half seconds at a time. Above me, the hospital windows glowed in the bright gray night, emotionless as a boxer the moment before the bell. Darkness didn’t make the buildings any less awkward or ugly. I knew now that it had been designed as a prison, but that wasn’t what it looked like either. Instead of institutional, strong lines and threatening, solid walls, it looked like something half formed. A chrysalis cracked open too early.



I hitched my pack high on my back, waited for a break in the stream of cars, and crossed the street. Then under the canopy toward the greenish, bulletproof glass doors, and inside. I stopped in the entrance hallway. At an admission desk to my left, a professionally unimpressed nurse was asking formulaic questions from a gray-skinned old man. Two sets of double doors at the hall’s end had stern warnings against anyone besides hospital staff trying to pass through them; security bars and magnetic locks drove the point home. A thick-shouldered woman in a janitorial uniform mopped the pale linoleum, the water she left still pink with someone’s blood. The sounds of a television crept in from the waiting room to my right: animal screaming followed by a narrator’s somber and instructing voice. I wondered what genius had decided that Animal Planet was a good distraction for people in medical distress. Seemed like a lousy call to me.



I waited for the lights to dim or for nurse and janitor and patient to start breathing in time, turn toward me with murder in their eyes, but nothing happened. Only the sense of being watched. Even if none of the people knew me, the building itself seemed aware of who I was and what I had come here for. I felt a trickle of adrenaline in my bloodstream, tensing me and brightening everything.



It was easy to see how someone could get paranoid.



“Can I help you?”



The nurse was a wide-faced man, his hairline receding. He held a clipboard in his arm like it had grown there.



“Are you all right, miss?”



“Fine,” I said. “I’m meeting someone.”



“You have their name? I can look them up on the computer.”



“No,” I said, turning toward the waiting room. There were maybe a dozen people on plastic-upholstered couches. Two of them were thick, muscular men, but one of those was holding his elbow and tight-jawed with pain. If the hospital set them on me the way it had in the cardiac unit, I was pretty sure I could hold my own. As long as Eric’s protections held.



“No name?”



“Sorry,” I said. “It’s not a patient. I’m meeting a doctor. He knows I’m here.”



The nurse shrugged and walked past me to an older woman coming into the hall behind me.



“Can I help you?”



“Can’t . . . breathe . . .”



“Come right along here with me, ma’am. We’ll get you a seat.”



I went into the waiting room. Animal Planet broke to commercial and the bicyclist-killing mountain lion was replaced by a CGI-enhanced puppy asking for a particular brand of canned food. Dull eyes looked up at me. Some looked away, some just got glassy and distant. None seemed an immediate threat. The air smelled of old vomit and alcohol. I took a seat near the door, my back against the wall where no one could get behind me.