Vicious Grace

FIVE

We bolted.

Behind us, the mob roared with a single voice. Kim and I burst through the doors at the ward’s entrance hard enough that my arm stung. Kim took a sharp left, and, only skidding a little on the traffic-polished linoleum floor, I followed her. She ran like a sprinter, her body straight and aligned, her arms pumping along with her stride, her hands flat. She’d kicked off her shoes.

Just as we reached the wide, triangular space before a bank of brushed steel elevators, the red-haired man caught up. He surged up behind me, swung a wide arm, and pushed Kim’s racing body into the wall. The impact sounded like a slap, and she fought to keep her balance before she fell. Between one heartbeat and the next, I found myself quietly behind my eyes while my body took over. I ran toward the elevators, the red-haired man hard behind me. Like something out of a Hong Kong action flick, I ran up the closed metal door, pushed off, and flew for a second, backward and down. I landed on both feet and one hand, our opponent’s broad back in front of me. He tried to turn, but I jumped forward, driving the heel of my palm right about where his left kidney was.

He grunted once and went down like a sack of flour.

Kim was still getting to her feet. I tried to call out to her, to ask if she was all right, but my throat didn’t respond; the wards and protections were driving, and my body was not yet my own. It took half a second to understand why. The red-haired man had been the fastest, but the others were coming. The low rumble of their feet was like a small earthquake. From the opposite direction, an older man in a white lab coat walked toward the elevators, saw me, saw Kim and the groaning man on the floor. His eyes widened, and he backpedaled fast. Smart cookie. The mob rounded the corner.

Seven of them ran toward me, mouths in square gapes of rage. When they saw me, they started screaming together, one voice from all their throats. The blond woman who’d come out of the patient’s room leaped for Kim. I shifted forward to protect her, but the others were on me. I kicked hard into someone’s knee, feeling it give way. An elbow got me in the ribs, but not hard enough to break them. A man in a nurse’s uniform lifted me by my shirt and the waist of my jeans like he was going to throw me. I brought my knee up into his jaw and my palm down on the bridge of his nose. His blood spattered my belly, and he dropped me.

I caught a glimpse of Kim wrestled to her knees by the blond woman. A dark-skinned man with a salt-and-pepper beard drove his shoulder into my gut, pushing me back by main force. I dropped my elbow into his neck, and three new attackers rounded the corner. Watching from the still space behind my eyes, I was afraid for Kim, I was afraid for the men and women boiling out of the cardiac ward with murder in mind, but from the moment the red-haired man fell, I wasn’t worried about myself. I’d fought riders before, and they didn’t go down this easy.

A man threw a clipboard at my face, and I knocked it away as I dodged one of the new women’s kicks. I sank my foot into the soft of a fat man’s belly, his breath gusting out as he collapsed. Someone grabbed me from the back. When I dropped, turning into them, and brought my foot down on their instep hard enough to crunch, the grip at my neck went slack.

They were fighting, but they were fighting like people: fragile, untrained, inflamed with anger, but not technique or supernatural power. I put my faith in Eric’s protections, and my body danced around the blows as I worked my way toward Kim. More of the mob’s reinforcements came, but each group that arrived seemed weaker and slower than the last. The people who couldn’t run as well catching up. I started to wonder if the cardiac patients would show up too, throwing IV stands and catheter bags at me.

I got to Kim’s side as the elevator behind us chimed, a red down-pointing arrow glowing. My fist sank deep into the blond woman’s throat, and I lifted Kim up. Her hair was tangled, and a trickle of blood marked her hairline.

“I’m okay,” Kim said. The elevator doors slid open. An elderly woman in a wheelchair and a girl who must have been her granddaughter started to come out, then hesitated. There were a dozen bodies on the floor, either unconscious or incapacitated and groaning. I pushed Kim into the elevator car past the wheelchair and turned back. Five of the mob were struggling to their feet, chests rising and falling together, and none of them coming close enough to make a real attack.

As the doors closed, they screamed. Frustration, anger, despair. The sound of a predator whose prey has just made it down the rabbit hole. I sagged against the wall, my body my own again. I felt bruised and spent and jittery. Kim was on her feet, wiping at the trail of blood on her face, her efforts smearing the mess more than cleaning it. The elderly woman and the girl stared at us nervously.

“Insurance problem,” I said, my voice whiskey-rough. “No big deal.”

The old woman nodded and smiled like I’d made any sense at all. My knuckles ached where I’d skinned them on something. On someone. When Kim spoke, she sounded as calm and businesslike as ever.

“We need to get to the others,” she said. I nodded. If we were in danger, they were too. We had to get them out. I willed the car to go down faster. The numbers kept moving at the same, deliberate speed.

“I take it this hasn’t happened before,” I said.

She didn’t dignify me with an answer.

It took us ten minutes to find someplace in the hospital with cell reception, but we got through to Aubrey and Ex on our first calls, and after that, it was like a fire drill. No running. No questions. We all walked quickly and deliberately out of the buildings, to the street, and away. In the full light of the sun, I felt the first tremors of my coming adrenaline crash. Mentally, I felt fine. Emotionally, I had no problems. It was just that my hands were shaking and I was a little nauseated. It would get worse before it got better, and I’d do my level best to ignore it then too.

As we walked, I brought the others up to speed. What had happened, how we’d dealt with it. We’d covered three long city blocks before I could bring myself to stop at a sidewalk café and sit for a while. It was Greek food, and the blue-and-white sign promised real Greek coffee. We took a wide, steel-mesh table set back in a patio of cracking cement that might have been a basketball court, once upon a time. The fading blue umbrella stood in the center of it like the mast of a sailboat, but it was thin enough that we could all still see one another. When Kim sat and started rubbing her feet, I remembered that she’d ditched her shoes. Three city blocks was a long way for bare feet on concrete. If she’d said something, I would have stopped sooner.

“It wasn’t possession,” Ex said after a thin, olive-skinned boy who looked about thirteen took our orders. “If they’d had riders, Jayné wouldn’t have been able to snap Kim out of it with an improvised cantrip.”

“So magic, then,” I said. “Someone with a rider who could throw some kind of mass mind-control mojo? And who knew we were there?”

They were all silent for a moment.

“There’s some holes in that,” Aubrey said.

“Like?” I asked. It came across sharper than I’d meant it to, but he didn’t take offense.

“Well, for instance, how did he know you were there? Eric’s wards are supposed to keep you from being found, right?”

“What if he wasn’t using magic to find me?” I said. “It’s not like you can’t take a picture of me. Or see me if you look across the room. The villagers didn’t pull out their pitchforks and come after you guys. Kim’s been there for years without anything taking a swing at her. I have to think he was after me specifically.”

Kim shook her head.

“That doesn’t scan either,” she said. “If someone’s using mundane strategies to find you, why use some kind of proxy magic to attack you? Why not just shoot you? And for that matter, why shoot you in the first place? Unless that was supposed to be some kind of warning.”

“Maybe it was reacting to Eric’s wards and protections,” Aubrey said. “You know. Watching for someone with the most armor and figuring they’re the one that poses the biggest threat?”

“Or an autoimmune response,” Kim said. “Magic that saw other magic as not-self?”

“There’s a comforting thought,” I said.

Chogyi Jake leaned forward in his chair. His fingers laced his knee, and when he spoke, his voice was thoughtful.

“We’re missing something. What did it feel like?” he asked. I was on the edge of telling him it felt like being the soccer ball at the World Cup when I realized he wasn’t talking to me. Kim brushed back her hair with one hand.

“Like dreaming,” she said. “I didn’t have the sense of being ridden or out of control. But my logic and reality sort of fell out from under me. Jayné was Jayné, but she was also . . . an outsider? Foreign? Something like that.”

“A threat,” Chogyi Jake said.

“Yes, definitely. And one that I recognized,” she said, then frowned and looked down.

“What is it?” Aubrey asked. Kim looked up at him. I couldn’t read her expression.

“I can remember it from other perspectives,” she said. “The shift nurse at the station? If I think about it, I know what we looked like through her eyes, Jayné and I both. The big guy who started the trouble? I remember Jayné bumping into me as if I had been him. I can remember it from any perspective until she woke me up.”

“Even Jayné’s?” Aubrey asked.

“No. Not hers.”

“Okay,” I said. “So what does that mean?”

“It means we don’t know what we’re dealing with,” Ex said.

The big debate after lunch was how—and whether—to go back for the car. On the one hand, we didn’t know what was going on at the hospital or how far out the danger extended. On the other, it was a rental and it had Kim’s parking permit and some of Ex’s stuff in it. There was the option of hiring a tow truck, but sending a civilian to spring a trap meant for us had some ethical problems.

Once we agreed to go back, there was the question of whether I should go on the return trip because Eric’s wards and protections would help fight off any assaults or stay behind out of fear that they might be drawing some kind of spiritual attention. In the end, Aubrey and I went for the car, the others staying at the café drinking the muddy coffee and eating baklava. The walk back was shorter than I’d expected. Escaping from Grace into the still-unknown streets of Chicago had given every block an exaggerated distance. I was surprised by how quickly the hospital’s awkward, looming bulk came into view. I kept scanning the other people on the sidewalks, waiting for them to start moving together or breathing in sync.

A taxi driver to our right leaned hard on his horn, shouting obscenities at the truck that had cut him off. The air smelled of exhaust. Grace Memorial loomed across the street, hundreds of windows catching the light like an insect’s compound eye as we walked briskly past it toward the parking structure. A little shiver crawled up my spine, and I walked faster.

Aubrey walked with his hands in his pockets and his brow in furrows. I’d seen him like this before—worried, but trying not to talk about it for fear of worrying me. It was a deeply ineffective strategy.

“Spit it out,” I said. We were stopped at a traffic light, waiting for the signal to cross.

“It’s nothing. I just wish I’d known Eric better,” he said. “I worked with him on and off for years, and I always . . . I don’t know. Respected his boundaries? Gave him his space? I never pushed to find out things he didn’t want to tell me about. He would have known what this was. Just from what we’ve got now, he’d have known. And I don’t.”

“Neither does anyone else.”

“Yeah,” Aubrey said with a rueful smile. “But I’m not responsible for them.”

“It’ll be fine. We’ll be careful,” I said. And then, “How are you doing with seeing Kim again?”

“Fine. She’s . . . just the same.”

“No return of old feelings? Regret about signing the divorce papers?”

Aubrey’s eyebrows rose, and a small, amused smile tweaked the corners of his mouth.

“How are you doing seeing Kim again?” he said.

“Standard insecurity,” I said.

“You could stop that.”

“Nope. Don’t think I can. I’m aiming for having a good sense of humor about it.”

He leaned in, his fingers twining around mine.

“Jayné,” he said. “You’re great. And I love you. And if you and I weren’t together, I still wouldn’t be with Kim. I think she’s a good person. I enjoy her company, and I admire her intelligence. We have a lot of history, but we broke up for a reason. I’m pretty sure she was seeing someone else, even before she left Denver.”

A totally different kind of fear bloomed in my chest. It was stupid. Kim’s affair with Eric wasn’t even my secret, except that I knew about it. And still, at that moment I wished I’d spilled her beans a year ago.

“How do you know?”

“I don’t,” he said. “Not really. It was just the feeling I got. Some unexpected long nights. Some inexplicable crying jags. I knew she was unhappy, and when she decided to leave, I told her it was the right decision.”

I stopped in the concrete archway. Rows of tightly packed cars stood in the shadows. Aubrey paused, looking back at me.

“Would you want to know now?” I asked, trying to make it sound hypothetical. “I mean if you could know now what was really going on with her back then, would you want to?”

“What would the point be? We did what we did,” he said. “And I think we’ve got enough to worry about without hauling all that back from the dead.”

In the parking garage proper, we had a moment’s panic that the minivan was gone, but as soon as we figured out we were on the wrong level, everything went smoothly. We were back on the streets in a few minutes, and if Aubrey chose a longer, looping route back to the café rather than drive past Grace, I didn’t object.

I leaned against the door, watching out the window as we drove. Men and women stood or walked along the gray, urban streetscape. It wasn’t as gray and overwhelming as Manhattan had been, but had almost more of a sense of being a living, human city. A black man in a neatly pressed suit drove a sports car alongside us, his eyes on the street ahead even as he talked with a lighter-colored child in the car seat behind him. A painfully thin Asian woman sat at a bus stop, her arms crossed, her mouth set in a scowl. A pack of teenagers in matching black-and-orange uniforms that said Leo Catholic High School held up traffic by running through the crosswalk as the lights changed, bubbling with laughter and shrieking with delight at their danger.

The city was alive. Almost three million people with lives as complex and intersecting as my own, navigating the daily pulse of rush hour on the 90, the 94, the 290. Riding the elevated trains. Every day, they were eating their dinners and talking with their friends and cheating on their lovers. And in the middle of all this normal, rich, oddly beautiful human life, something was happening. Something at Grace Memorial. And the more I let my mind wander, the more a growing knot in my belly told me it was something very, very bad.