Vicious Grace

“I’m not leaving anyone alone with my equipment,” he said. “I don’t care how much Kim and Chogyi trust you. This is my lab.”



“Then stay,” I said, “but be quiet.”



I picked a stretch of floor behind his desk. Oonishi stood in the doorway, caught between trying to kick me out or else staying all night in the lab. I put down a couple of the little pillows.



“Is this necessary?” he asked for the second time that night, and I knew he wasn’t going to give me any trouble.



“Is,” I said. “Don’t turn out the light when you go, okay?”



He closed the door, and I shoved the filing cabinet over to block it. It wouldn’t keep the door from opening if the hospital got a good mob going, but it would certainly make enough noise to wake me if the rider sent its influence into Oonishi or a night nurse or someone. I looked around the room one last time, then turned out the light.



The darkness almost made it impossible to navigate back to my little impromptu bed, but by the time I got there, my eyes had adjusted. The office door became a line of dim light. A soft, almost subliminal glow came from the screen on the wall. I lay down, took a deep breath, letting it out slowly, willing my shoulders to relax. The crackling of the pillow under my ear didn’t quite drown out Oonishi’s footsteps. Going to the monitoring room, I thought. The bulk of the hospital felt heavy above me, like an avalanche waiting for a single too-loud noise to start it, and me getting ready to shout.



I wanted to get up, to call Aubrey again. Or if not him, at least Chogyi Jake and Ex. Hell, even Kim. I wanted backup and friends and not to be alone in the darkness. I wanted someone to talk me out of being there. At this edge-of-the-diving-board moment, it wouldn’t have been hard. Instead, I closed my eyes.



I told myself all the reasons this was going to be okay. The rider was bound and couldn’t hurt me directly even if it wanted to. I was better protected than anyone else. Whatever had provoked the first attack, I’d beaten it once already. I had what the rider wanted safely tucked away in Waukegan. And most important, it had what Eric had been after: the power or knowledge or favor so critical that he’d betrayed Aubrey and Kim, that he’d risked death against the Invisible College and lost. Everything pointed toward this. A confrontation between human and haugsvarmr. A negotiation. A trade. I had to know what it could possibly offer that would justify all he’d done. Papers and notebooks, grimoires and files: they were just more puzzles. There was only one thing that could answer the questions I had.



“Come on,” I said to the dark air. “Talk to me. Whatever the hell you are, come talk to me.”



I forced myself to relax muscle by muscle. Feet, calf, knee, thigh, moving inch by inch up my body until all my attention was focused on my scalp. My mind started to fishtail under me. I felt certain that Aubrey had left me a message on the phone, if I could just remember what the access code was. It had to do with yachts and something Kim had said. I roused just enough to recognize the surreal patterns of dream, but the part of me that watched all the rest saw it wasn’t going to work. I was too anxious for a real, deep sleep; I could skate around in nothing more than a light doze until morning.



And then between one breath and the next, dream lifted a dark arm, took me by the throat, and pulled me down.



EIGHTEEN



When I was about twelve, I had a long run of nightmares. The recurring dreams didn’t have the same action or even the same people or things, but they did share locations. An abandoned factory with Hell underneath it was one. A flooded school building. A network of tiny little crawlways underground so cramped and tight that my legs would get caught sometimes when I tried to squirm around a corner.



And then there was the desert.



Seeing it again now was like going back to my old grade school: familiar and foreign at the same time. The wide, dark horizon, the pale hardpack of stones and pebbles, the drifts of sand. A gritty wind pressed against my skin, hot as breath. I’d been here before, and it had always been with a sense of awe and fear that I’d called a visit from the devil. I was naked, and sitting down. The stones were smooth and hard against my legs. I wanted badly to stand up. I tried, strained, but the effort was infinite, and even though I felt myself moving, I never rose up. The other me (my childhood nightmares often involved having two copies of myself) wanted to sit, and no matter what I thought, it was going to sit.



Above me, or possibly us, thin clouds skittered past something that wasn’t the sun or the moon: a pale disk that radiated something besides heat or light. Purification. The desert was pure. That was what made it terrible. It was also my home. I was waiting for something, holding the line. I was insisting that the devil visit me. With the logic of dream, I could also see myself as if from a great distance. A girl not more than thirteen with my black hair, but a serene expression that properly belonged to the other me. I tried to call to her, to tell her to run, that it was coming, but my voice didn’t carry over the susurrus of wind and sand.



Something happened, deep and resonant as a church organ striking a chord. I didn’t hear it as much as feel it, and the panic started me scampering. The body sitting on the sand didn’t move, and I willed myself back into it, even though I’d also never left. The dark, luminous sky peeled back, and something inconceivably huge looked down at me. The enemy. The thing I’d been waiting for. I was standing now, and it was before me. It was two things at the same time. On one hand, it was a good-looking young man with razor-cut hair and dark eyes. He wore a suit cut like something from a forties movie and a fedora, and I knew that the fabric was made from raw silk and the dreams of mad children. His expression was amused and kind. And on the other hand, it was a monstrosity, translucent, vast, constantly in motion, and made up of millions of evil-looking beasts like those deep-sea fish that unlucky sailors sometimes pull up in their nets. These two different aspects of the thing didn’t compete with each other; it was just both things at the same time. I knew when it smiled that I hated it. And what was more, I knew it hated me.



The desert was a vast, dark ocean now. The water pressed against me, crushing and cold. The rider smiled toward but not at me, its eyes unfocused. Slowly, it spread its long, weirdly jointed hands, as if it was asking me something. I wanted to answer, but I knew like I was remembering something that I couldn’t speak first. It was a trap. I waited. The school of monstrous fish shuddered and spun in its cold ocean, annoyed that the trick had failed.



“I can’t see you,” it said. “But I know you’re here. I can smell your skin. You were my slave once.” It took off its fedora, combed back a lock of hair with its strange fingers, and put the hat back on. “You know what happens to bad slaves.”



“We haven’t met,” both of my selves said together. It started at the sound of my voices, its fish-school body glittering silver and spinning wildly. It was trying to find me. You’re hard to see, I told myself. That’s your protection. Try not to touch it.



“Who are you?” it asked.



“I am my mother’s daughter,” I said, but I meant that I was Eric’s niece. The rider understood.



“Why are you here?” it asked. “You wanted to see me now that the tables have turned? Is that it? You want to gloat?”



“I can set you free,” I said, and my voice seemed small and singular. The man looked at me, his gaze passing through me like a blind man’s. The icy water surged invisibly around me, stroking my skin like an unwanted caress. “I know where the blood is that will open the box. I am the only one who can release you. Or I can leave you where you are forever.”



“I’m listening,” it said.



“What can you offer me?” my small voice said. I sounded like a child pretending to negotiate with a pack of wolves.



“I can give you the world,” it said, as if the world were something it owned already and was willing to part with.



“Not enough,” I said.



Its laughter was the chittering of a million fish teeth.



“I can kill for you,” it said. “I can bind for you. Enter into pact with me, daughter-thing, and I will bring you the Graveyard Child in a box and a bow. I will bring you the Angel Chesed. I will do again what once I did to your mother, and place you on the throne where I sat.”



Some part of me was tempted. I didn’t know what its words meant, but I wanted what it offered like I wanted air and love and petty revenge against everyone who’d ever pissed me off. I almost reached out to it. I almost took its hand, but at the last moment, I pulled back.



“Who are you,” I said, “to offer me these things?”



“I am the Beast Rahab.” Its voice was growing louder, deeper, ringing around me like a church bell and buzzing like a swarm of wasps. “I am Legion, Ravens of the Burning God.”



The words were meaningless to me, but images rode on the syllables. A huge bull lying on its side in a barren field, screwfly maggots eating its living flesh. A blue-skinned baby held to a wailing mother’s breast. A line of naked men with machetes and guns driving their powerless victims over a cliff. All temptation was gone, and in its place, a vast and intimate grief. Here was the thing I’d come to see, to talk with. Here was my unspoken question, answered.



If something was tempted by the rider, it wasn’t me. The thing trapped under Grace Memorial was raw evil, and there was no cause noble enough to justify giving it freedom. My world collapsed quietly, no one aware of the fact except the two of me. My uncle Eric, whom I loved, who watched out for me, who gave me everything, couldn’t have been negotiating with this thing and been the man I thought he was. The man I wanted him to have been.



And as soon as that was clear, everything else shifted. Oonishi said we see what we expect. The other thing is we ignore what we don’t expect. Eric had worked with Midian Clark, the vampire. Mait Carrefour, the body-hopping serial killer. He’d hidden who he really was and what he really did from everyone I trusted. He’d used magic to get Kim into bed. I’d pushed it aside or pretended it didn’t matter because it didn’t fit with what I expected to see, and I’d talked Aubrey, Chogyi Jake, and Ex into digging in to do Eric’s work with me.