M.L.N. Hanover - Vicious Grace

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.

Looking back at my childhood, I couldn’t say my father had done me many favors. The lessons he’d tried to instill in me—things like “never wear a skirt that goes above the ankle” and “Jesus died because kids sneak into movie theaters”—never really took. But that’s not the same as saying I never learned anything from him. Throughout the weird, judgmental, just-barely-repressed Christian rage-fest that was my childhood home, I’d picked up quite a bit about how the world works. Not all of it had immediately applied, but some bits still came in handy.

For instance, when I was ten years old, the doctors found a suspicious lump on my big brother Jay’s spinal column. My mother called from the doctor’s office in hysterics, saying that no one was telling her anything, and they were running tests she didn’t understand. I could hear every word she said, even though my father had the telephone handset to his ear. He sat at the kitchen table, scowling and fighting to interrupt my mother’s litany of fear and confusion. He was in a white T-shirt and the battered canvas work pants he always wore on his days off. In the end, he told my mother to sit down, be quiet, and wait. Then he told me to find my little brother, Curtis, and get him in the car. That I was too young to stay by myself, and he didn’t have time to find someone to watch us. His tone of voice left no room for disagreement.

By the time I’d done what he said, little Curt squirming in his car seat and demanding cartoons, my father had transformed himself. His hair was combed back. He had a good gray suit on with a deep red tie. He smelled of cologne, and he looked like a movie star or a president. I’d never seen him this way, even for church.

When we got to the doctor’s office, he dropped Curtis and me in the waiting room with my mother, and went back to speak to the doctors and nurses. Five minutes later, he came out with answers to every question Mom had asked him. My mother drank all the information in—yes, Jay was going to be admitted overnight; yes, cancer was a possibility, but it wasn’t the best suspect; no, there wasn’t cause for immediate alarm. I watched relief pour over her like cool water on a burn. But I didn’t miss my father’s little smile or my mother’s near-subliminal frown. The gray-suited man had been given a level of courtesy and respect that a woman couldn’t get.

Lesson learned.

Truth was, Chogyi Jake looked amazing in the right outfit. Brown linen so light it was almost blond, a black linen vest of matching cut, pin-striped shirt and tie that coordinated like a symphony perfectly in tune. He’d let the stubble of hair grow out just enough for the scattering of gray at the temples to show. When he chose not to smile, he could look seriously dangerous. By comparison, Aubrey, even in his best suit, never quite gave off the air of command, and Ex’s long hair wasn’t quite overcome by his quasiclerical black and humorless attitude. And me? Yes, I was the money behind everything. Yes, I was the one Kim called. Yes, I was Eric’s heir and successor with the weird supernatural powers and protections. I was also twenty-four and a woman, and even in my best clothes and most understated makeup, I looked more like Jennifer Connelly than an international demon hunter and occult expert. So by common agreement, Chogyi Jake took point.

“Thank you for joining us, Dr. Oonishi. I’m sorry we couldn’t come to your office.”

“Thank you,” the man said. “It’s probably good if we don’t meet at Grace.”

“There are reputations to protect,” Kim said, only a little bitterness in her voice. Her dress was sherbet green and didn’t suit her. She wore it like a smock.

The restaurant sat on the river, broad windows looking out over water glowing gold with sunset. A yacht had tied up while we were being seated, and now a young man had climbed up one of the deck ladders and was paying for his to-go order. The skyscrapers of downtown rose up around us like trees above rabbits, and the cool evening breeze mixed the smells of water and freshly grilled steak. Oonishi sat forward with his elbows on the table. His gaze shifted between us, restless and uneasy.

“I take it,” he said to Chogyi Jake, “you understand why I need help with this problem?”

“Of course,” Chogyi Jake said. “And I understand why discretion is important. We have experience with this kind of issue. You don’t have anything to worry about.”

He delivered the lines with a conviction that almost had me forgetting that we’d had a small riot on the Cardiac Care Unit earlier in the day. Oonishi either hadn’t heard about it or hadn’t put it together with our arrival, because he looked reassured.