Vicious Grace

Ex came out of the office with a pile of small objects in his hand, little origami pockets made from printer paper. Words in a script I couldn’t read marked the center of each one, and something crackled against my palm as he pressed one into my hand. He closed his eyes, his fingers wrapping mine, and I felt a surge of warmth and energy from him. Magic. A little cantrip. When he opened his eyes, he looked tired and ill. And determined.



“Wear it against your skin,” he said. “It’ll make it harder for the rider to take you once we’re outside the chapel.”



I nodded, and he moved on to the others. A little improvised talisman. The kind of thing we’d played at in school, writing the name of the boy we wanted to like us in the form of a cross so that God would notice it. We were storming Normandy Beach with BB guns and bottle rockets. We were doomed. I took the little cantrip and tucked it into the band of my jeans where my belt would keep it pressed against me. The others were doing things that were very much the same. Except for Oonishi.



“I’m not going out there,” he said. “I don’t know anything about this crap. I meant what I said. I’m staying here.”



Rage boiled up in me, raw and vicious and ready to kill out of hand. He had brought us here. All of it was his fault as much as anyone’s. And now he wanted to step back from it and let everyone else suffer while he stayed safe. Well, screw that. We could tie him up, carry him down, and put him in the coffin. It would serve the bastard right and save Chogyi Jake besides. Aubrey pretended to cough. Oonishi looked at him, and then at me, and then flinched back.



Yes, I thought. I could do that. I could kill him. I could kill an innocent man because he was too much a coward to face down a rider. I wondered if that was what Eric would have done.



“Leave him,” I said. The contempt in my voice could have stripped paint. “Let’s go.”



Walking back into Grace felt like stepping into a septic tank. The air didn’t have a smell to it besides the usual industrial freshener and the hint of rain still falling in some other world, but it felt filthy. The lights were dim and unsteady. Something huge rumbled far above us. Thunder or a collapsing girder. Or the rider’s unreal fists beating at the physical walls of its prison. Its presence lay over us, pressing down. Smothering. I dreaded the moment it turned its attention toward me.



“Keep to the middle of the building,” Ex said. “It’s the part that should have changed the least. If we can get underground, it may not have changed much at all. No reason to switch the physical configuration if there’s not a physical exit, right?”



“Fine,” I said. I wanted him to quit talking. I wanted it all over, quick before I could think about it too much.



We fell into a pattern; I scouted ahead, Ex following close, Aubrey and Kim behind him, then Chogyi Jake as rear guard. We turned a corner into a wide hallway. A gurney lay on top of an IV drip stand. A widening pool of blood and fluid meant that someone had been in it before it fell. A dark-skinned woman in a doctor’s white lab coat and a thick-shouldered man with a gray-blond crew cut stepped out of a doorway, watching us all pass. Their eyes were wide and uncomprehending, but they didn’t glow.



“It’s all right,” I told them. “We’re taking care of it.”



“What is this?” the doctor asked, tears in her voice if not her eyes. She had a beautiful accent. Indian, maybe.



“It’s the devil,” I said. “But we’re taking care of it.”



At the end of the hall, Ex stopped at a set of metal doors with a thin window in the side like something from a high school or low-security prison. A black plastic card reader was set into the wall level with the doorknob, glowering out with a single baleful red light. I could see a narrow stairway through the glass.



“Okay,” Ex said. “If I’m right, this will get us down to the first subbasement. We’ll need to go back toward the east to get down past that.”



His explanations were starting to annoy me, and I almost said so when my cell went off, Uncle Eric telling me from my pack that I had a call. Apparently the binding in the fifties hadn’t taken blocking cell traffic into account. I scrabbled for it. I knew the incoming number.



“What?” I said.



“Jayné?” David Souder said. His voice was shaking. “I’m in trouble. I think I’m in real trouble.”



“Where are you?”



“The hospital,” he said. “Grace Memorial. I was an idiot. I didn’t listen to you. I went back, and I thought I was saving Grandpa Del, but the thing that came out of that box . . . it was evil. I don’t even know what it was. I ran. I just ran. I didn’t even remember that I had a phone on me until just now. I usually leave it at work, and—”



“The hospital’s all changed shape,” I said. I sounded bored and put-upon. I sounded bitchy. I didn’t care. “You’re trapped. You can’t get out.”



“And it’s free,” David said. “I can still feel it a little. It’s so angry.”



“Just stay where you are,” I said. “I’m in the hospital too. We’re going down to put the rider back where it belongs.”



“You’re here?”



“I’m here,” I said.



“Where?” he said. “I think I’m on the fifth floor. Maybe the third. I don’t know. But I can get to you. I can—”



“Stay where you are! Do you understand me? Don’t move. Go find a chair and just sit in it!” I was shouting now. Screaming into the phone. I was losing it. I didn’t care about that either.



The line was silent for three or four seconds. When David spoke again, he sounded like he’d stepped back a few feet.



“Right,” he said. “Got it.”



I dropped the connection and stuffed my phone back into the pack. The others were looking at me. Ex and Aubrey seemed shocked. Chogyi Jake, sympathetic. Kim turned away and wouldn’t meet my eyes. An inhumanly high-pitched scream came from somewhere behind us, like a bat being pressed to death, then stopped with a loud, electrical pop.



“We waiting for something?” I asked.



Kim swiped her card through the reader. The red glow turned green. We headed underground. Our footsteps echoed in the stairwell, and no one spoke. Each small, cramped flight brought us closer to the fallout shelter and the civil defense ward, and I walked down the steps like I was in a bad dream. I didn’t want to go, but I was going. I’d always thought of horror as the thing from the movies, the scary monster that jumps out from dark corners. I’d been wrong. Horror is doing something terrible because you have to. Killing your best friend, for instance. I kept walking, kept pressing myself forward. If I stopped, I didn’t think I’d be able to start again. I couldn’t stand to look back at Chogyi Jake—his graceful walk, the smile that always waited just at the edge of his mouth, the glitter of joy and amusement in his eyes. Even now, they were there. Muted, maybe. Dimmed. The idea that I would lose him here, tonight, was literally inconceivable; my mind kept skittering off it, defeated. He was so alive, so sure of himself. We’d go home after this, back to the condo, and he’d make green tea, the way he always had. He’d gently call me on my bullshit. I couldn’t imagine any other outcome.



Breaking up with Aubrey had been easy compared to this. It had been right. I’d been prepared, sure of myself, and in control. And anyway, he was just going back to his ex-wife. I was letting Aubrey go. He wasn’t dying.



I was going to kill Chogyi Jake.



Or maybe it wouldn’t work; maybe we’d get lucky and the coffin would have been blown to slivers. Maybe the ground itself would refuse to take the rider again. Chogyi Jake would be spared, and then . . .



And then.



When we reached the end of the last flight, I looked out the door. I’d expected it to be like places we’d been before, all storage and ducts and laundry services, but the subbasement looked a lot like the upper floors. Hallways twisted in nearly organic curves, the walls studded with signs directing us to Medical Records, Nuclear Medicine, Oncology, Pathology, or Facilities Management. The closed doors wore warnings against radiation and biohazards and intrusion by unauthorized personnel, along with the occasional taped-up Dilbert cartoon. Everything told us where we should go and where not to, the architecture itself pushing us like cattle in a slaughterhouse run. Just by looking, I couldn’t tell if the magic affecting the rest of the building had warped the nature of the spaces here, or if they’d always been like this.



“We should be okay,” Kim said. “There aren’t any patient care units down here. They try to keep the beds up where there’s some sunlight.”



I nodded. Ex set off down one corridor as if he knew where he was going. I followed. I didn’t notice particularly that Chogyi Jake had come to walk at my side. I didn’t know how he could radiate calm, but he did. I looked over at him, then away. I heard him take in a long, slow breath and then let it out. In anyone else, it would have been a sigh. From him, it was just an invitation to breathe with him. I found myself walking in step, our feet swinging in the same arcs, our arms shifting like we were twins. And some part of the peace he carried with him began to seep through my anguish and despair. I wanted to reach out, put my arm around him, rest my head on his shoulder, and beg him not to do this thing. I didn’t. I just tried to enjoy the walking.



I was so involved in myself, I didn’t see the trap until we were in it.



The waiting area outside Nuclear Medicine looked like it had been lifted out of an airport. Rows of plastic-upholstered seats joined together at the hips stared at a dead television screen. An intake desk lurked behind a set of vertical security bars, rolled down for the night like it was a street-front shop in the bad part of town. Everything smelled like carpet shampoo. Just beyond, a set of double doors in fake blond wood paneling warned that people with pacemakers should remain outside. Ex was walking in the front of the group, and so he was the first to stop when the door swung open.