M.L.N. Hanover - Vicious Grace

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?”