Vicious Grace bsd-3

by M. L. N. Hanover

  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.

  We were the bad guys.

  “I,” the rider said, “am Daevanam Daeva, Angel of Shells!”

  “Yeah?” I said. “Well, I’m Jayné Heller, and I think you suck.”

  In an instant, all pretense of negotiation vanished. With a roar, the rider’s fish-school body scattered, expanding out in all directions. Its human body, face distorted with rage, swung at me blindly. I drew back, my dream body moving with inhuman grace, but the rider’s outstretched fingers brushed my arm. It knew where I was. I tried to push it away, but the long-fingered hands wrapped around me, pushing me back. I felt myself stumble. The pale, gape-mouthed fish were all around me, their collective mass hanging above me like a mountain. I pulled into myself, folding into fetal position while phantom teeth ripped at my back and shoulders, legs and thighs. The rider’s will pushed at me, crushing me. Fear and grief and the terrible presentiment of my own death swirled in my mind. I started to scream, and the rider forced itself in, flooding my mouth and nose, filling my lungs. I was drowning in it. I tried to dig it out of my mouth with my fingers.

  And then, in the middle of my panic, I became calm. I didn’t try to breathe. Instead, I found my belly and concentrated on the feeling of warmth there. I drew my qi—the energy of life and magic—up my spine and into a burning sphere. I felt the rider shudder around me and pressed out, the dark sphere within me widening as I gave up my body. I became perfect, impenetrable. My qi boiled the dark water. The rider surrounded me, scrabbled teeth and claws against me, but found no purchase.

  “You’re weak,” I said. “You have been cast into darkness, betrayer, as you deserve.”

  I pushed out, and it screamed. For a moment, I saw something. A dark room, deep underground with a shut steel door. The vision retreated, snatched away.

  It hadn’t wanted me to see that. I chased after the other thing’s thoughts, shoving myself into the soft, viscous body. It flailed at me, bit, strangled. I caught another glimpse of something. A storage locker, maybe, with an ancient-looking tank of compressed gas, green paint bubbled and flaking off. The word cyclopropane popped into my mind, surreal and inappropriate as a pigeon in a fish bowl. The rider pulled away again. We were in the desert. My desert. The rider’s silk-and-madness suit was ripped, and seawater blood poured from a cut in his forehead. He grinned, and his mouth was filled with pale, cruel dagger-teeth. His eyes were the empty silver-and-black of fish.

  “I am weak,” it said, “but you are young, and I will be strong before you’re old. I am already half free, and you cannot stop me.”

  The despair, the grief, the fear and panic and even the calm all shifted. Rage leaped up in their place, and hatred for the thing lying on the desert floor before me. The thing that had taken Eric from me. The thing that had taken Aubrey and broken my little family. Even before I spoke, the rider’s eyes widened, and it jerked its head from side to side as if it was hearing something vast and threatening that it couldn’t quite locate.

  “You think I can’t take you?” I screamed. I could actually feel the air rattling in my throat. “You think I can’t break you?”

  I leaped for it, my hands bent like burning claws. It shrieked and pulled back when I touched it, but I was in my place now. No more frigid oceans for me. Oh no. I cut into it, and a dozen demonic fish shattered into luminous bone and blood. I swung my fist, rolling through the shoulder, and felt the bridge of its nose shatter under my knuckles. It screamed, and there were words in the cry.

  Hurry, she’s killing me.

  I hesitated, and in that moment, the rider lashed out, stinging me across the eyes. I yelled, pulled back. I was on the ground, something soft constricting me like a web. My balance was off, and the desert around me suddenly small. I had the hazy sense that the rider was pulling me into its coffin. I smelled something wet, but not oceanic. I pushed myself up, the web ripping. I swung out at it and connected. I heard a gasp of expe
lled breath, but I was already on my feet and turning fast. My heel hit something with a sound like breaking glass.

  A light flared, blinding me. I dropped low and went still. There were shapes in the light, beings moving slowly toward me. A storm raged under my skin, violence and the joy of violence on a hair trigger. I could feel myself grinning so hard it ached. My breath was pumping in and out, roaring in my ears as loud as music.

  “Jayné?”

  I turned my head toward the voice, ready to attack until something small in the back of my head said That was Aubrey. One of the hulking shapes moved toward me, and keeping myself from reaching out and snapping its neck was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. Aubrey swam into focus. His hair was wet, slicked against his scalp. His wide eyes shifted back and forth, and his hands were out before him in a placating gesture. I tried to understand what he was doing in my dream as my eyes adjusted to the light. Kim was behind him, one hand to her mouth like a caricature of surprise. Chogyi Jake stood behind Aubrey, his side toward me and carefully still. Oonishi was beside him, his mouth tight. I looked around me and found all the details of Oonishi’s office in the sleep study unit. The filing cabinet I’d used for a barricade was on its side where the forced door had toppled it. The blanket I’d pulled over me hung in tatters across my shoulders. The huge flat-screen monitor on the wall was shattered, a single impact site radiating cracks to all edges. My backpack chirped, the cell phone letting me know I’d missed a call. Ex lay on the floor, his hands pressed to his solar plexus. He seemed to be having some trouble breathing.

  “Um. Are you okay?” I asked Ex, still crouched and ready for a fight.

  He rolled onto his side and wheezed softly.

  “Jayné?” Aubrey said. “Do you know where you are?”

  I nodded. The traces of dream were still around my mind, but they were burning off quickly. I put down my hands.

  “In the hospital,” I said. “What . . . what are you doing here?”

  “You started shouting,” Oonishi said, his voice tight with poorly concealed outrage. “I couldn’t get into the office, and I didn’t want to explain you to security, so I called your boss.”

  I squinted at him. I felt like I ought to know what he was talking about, but my boss? Chogyi Jake raised his hand and I remembered. I squatted down beside Ex. His breath was regular, and I thought it was getting deeper. It was hard to be sure. The rage that had filled me in the dream was draining away fast, leaving a shaky near-nausea in its wake. I felt like I’d swum a mile and swallowed too much salt water in the process.

  “I tried to call you. When I couldn’t, I got the others,” Chogyi Jake said. “We all came as quickly as we could.”

  I looked at the file cabinet. One side was visibly bent in. My idea that it would wake me had been optimistic.

  “Sorry,” I said, mostly to Ex and Oonishi, but also to everyone. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  “I’m pleased to know it wasn’t the plan,” Oonishi said.

  I nodded toward the ruined monitor.

  “I can replace that,” I said.

  “What were you doing?” Chogyi Jake asked.

  I sat back. The others came in closer, except for Oonishi. I swallowed to loosen my throat. I felt like an idiot.

  “I needed to see it,” I said. “The rider. The haugsvarmr. I thought maybe if I could talk to it, I’d be able to find out what Eric wanted from it. Even just a hint, you know? Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe it would be an angel, and so things with Eric wouldn’t be what it looked like after all.”

  “And?” Kim said.

  I shook my head. “It’s not an angel,” I said.

  With a grunt and a little help from Aubrey, Ex sat up. Even apart from the pain, he looked annoyed.

  “Point—” he began, then gulped air and started again. “Point of clarification? Eric used the Mark of Naxos to force Kim into a sexual relationship that wrecked her marriage. At minimum, that makes him a sociopath and a rapist.”

  I blinked. Oonishi’s eyebrows tried to join up with his hairline. Kim went a little paler as the word sank in. Rapist.

  Of course, that was right.

  “I mean I’m as disappointed as anyone,” Ex went on. “But is there really room for debate over whether he was good or evil?”

  “There’s not,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking straight.”

  “And coming here by yourself?” Ex said. “I mean, yes, the thing’s still bound by the interment, but that’s like saying the tiger’s in the cage. Still not what I’d call safe.”

  “I get your point,” I said.

  “If you want to work out your private life,” he said, “maybe you could—”

  “She got the point, Ex,” Kim said. “Let it go.”

  He leaned against the desk and muttered something about moral relativism I didn’t quite catch. I stood up, plucking the ruined blanket off my shoulders and letting it drop to the ground. My backpack chirped again. The last threads of dream were gone, and my confusion vanished with them. A little wisp of my normal strength was coming back.

  The hope I had been grasping at was an illusion, and knowing that—seeing the last vestiges of the life I’d known fall away past redemption—was actually a relief. I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t at peace. The bedrock I’d rebuilt my life on had turned to sand, but at least I knew that now. I didn’t have to try to save it. There was nothing I could do to get it back.

  “I think this is partly my fault,” Chogyi Jake said. “When we spoke, back at the condo—”

  “I know what you were saying,” I said. We’ve all lost families and lovers and things that were precious to us, and we’ve all survived. He hadn’t meant us. He’d meant Eric.

  He went quiet, his smile reading to me like a vote of confidence. Encouragement. Oonishi’s gaze went from me to him and back again. I probably wasn’t acting enough like an employee who’d just screwed up. That was fine. Oonishi’s dreams had started us down the path, but his good opinion was so far down my list of things to clean up, I could barely make it out. This was my show now.

  And I knew where I needed to start.

  “Guys,” I said. “Could you give us the room for a minute? Aubrey and I need to have a talk.”

  NINETEEN

  They walked out quietly, Ex with a little help from Chogyi Jake. Kim hovered at the threshold for a moment, her gaze equal parts anxiety and exhaustion. When she closed the door, Aubrey and I were alone. He sat on the desk, his arms crossed. He looked older. I always knew there were threads of gray in his hair, but I saw them now. Sure, he looked tired, but more than that, he looked weary. I could still remember the first time I’d seen him, in the Denver airport holding up a sign with my name on it, spelled almost right. I remembered his empty eyes after our first, failed attempt on the Invisible College and the joy of seeing him come to after we’d taken them out. Holding him while he wept in the warm New Orleans night. Funny how many of our good times involved people dying.

  “I should have called you,” he said. “Or at least I should have told you why I wasn’t calling you.”

  “I get it,” I said.

  “I didn’t mean to be a shitheel. And I certainly didn’t mean to drive you to this.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I was confused,” he said. “Honestly, I still am. What Eric did . . . it reframes a whole part of my life.”

  “You know what?” I said. “I actually totally know how that feels.”

  He smiled and laughed.

  “Yeah. You do, don’t you,” he said. Then, “Kim said you went to her place. Looking for me.”

  “It seemed like a good bet,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t do that to you. I know I said some things in the heat of the moment, but I wouldn’t run off to Kim and ignore you. I was very angry and confused and hurt, but I hope I wasn’t a total jerk.”

  “You weren’t,” I said. “Just a normal, garden-variety jerk. Still far from total. I
’ve done worse myself.”

  The air conditioner clacked and muttered. A computer hummed. My cell phone chirped again. The moment seemed slow and airless and over too quickly.

  “You’re not Eric,” he said. “You’re not like him. You didn’t do the things he did. You shouldn’t have to pay for his sins.”

  “Yeah, but I do,” I said, trying to make it sound light. “Ain’t fair, but there you go. I know why you didn’t go to Kim. And why you didn’t stay at the condo with me. You’re screwed, right? If you get involved with Kim again, try to make sense of what actually happened between you two and see who you are to each other, you’re breaking up with me for something that’s not my fault. And if you stay with me and go on like we’ve been doing? Well, that’s not fair to Kim, right? Walking away from her knowing what happened means this time you’re choosing to leave her. And it turns out for something that’s not entirely her fault. You want to be fair, but you can’t.”

  “I don’t think anyone’s psychic well-being is really determined by whether I’m sleeping—”

  “Aubrey. I love you. And Kim loves you. And you’re in a position where you have to pick between us, but you can’t do it. So after long and sober reflection, you’re going to leave both of us and strike out on your own. It’s not great, but at least it’s evenhanded. Am I right?”

  He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Deep, unhappy lines etched themselves in his mouth and the corners of his eyes. The situation was unsalvageable. Even now, some part of me hoped that he’d say no, that he’d find some other alternative and make everything okay.

  “It was that or a three-way,” he said.

  Okay. That wasn’t the kind of alternative I’d been thinking of.

  “You’re joking,” I said.