M.L.N. Hanover: Vicious Grace

“I’m not going to be okay after this,” I said.

“I know.”

“Do we have to do it?”

“Yes, dear,” Kim said. “We do.”

• • •

THE LOCK on the main door to the shelter was bent past repair, but Aubrey had managed a decent barricade, two of the bunks turned on their sides and stacked one on top of the other, then the spaces where bodies would have slept filled with boxes and crates, the overall mass growing past the point where the door could be forced. Hopefully. Ex and David had encountered less luck.

“We have lights,” Ex said. “The interment box is solid. It barely needed anything. And I salvaged enough straight nails from those boxes, I’m fairly sure we can seal the coffin at all the critical points.”

“That sounds good,” I said.

“But we don’t have a hammer.”

“What about a chunk of the concrete from down there?” David said. “There were some pretty decent-sized bits.”

“Check,” I said, “but be careful. A lot of it’s crumbling. It might crack the cement instead of driving the nail.”

Ex shook his head, but he said, “I’ll look.”

“There’s an old X-ray machine down there too,” I said. “It might have something heavy enough to use. A bar or something.”

Below us, Aubrey and Kim were clearing debris away from the bared earth so that we could stand at the cardinal points: Kim to the east, Aubrey to the north, Ex to the west, and I’d take south. Chogyi Jake would be in the middle, with David standing guard to see that nothing interrupted. I could hear their voices coming up the stairway. Chogyi Jake was still sitting at the head of the stairs, his eyes closed, his head resting against the handrail’s pole. He looked pale and sick and still, but his rib cage worked in hard, sudden bursts. Some meditation I’d never been taught. Something for warriors, maybe. For someone preparing to die.

I couldn’t imagine what was going on in his head, so I tried not to think about it. It would only wind up with me going over, intruding, talking to him. If I thought I had anything that might comfort him, I’d have done it, but I only would have been trying to make him comfort me. David looked from him to me and then down.

“What else can I do?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “We’ll start soon. It’ll be over.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s almost six o’clock.”

“Long night.”

“They’re coming in. Up there, the first bunch of people are probably coming in,” he said. “Nurses and doctors. The guys who work the coffee bars.”

“Probably are.”

“This is going to . . . I mean, this is going to blow things open,” he said. “Spirits. Possession. Magic. The whole thing.”

“No, it won’t,” I said. “They’re going to show up. It’ll be weird. Then we’ll lock that bastard thing back down, and it’ll go away. At most, it’ll make the Fortean Times . The world isn’t going to know what happened here, and it isn’t going to care.”

David was quiet for a minute.

“What if it gets out?” he said.

I thought of Kim and Eric, the magic he’d used to wreck her life.

“They won’t know it then either,” I said. “It’s just one of those secrets that keeps itself. Right up until you’re in the middle of it.”

“He knew, though. Grandpa Del knew.”

“He did.”

“I screwed up his life’s work.”

“Well, it’s not like he told you to be careful. And really, even if he had, what would you have done?”

David squinted down toward the stairway. His wide face tensed and relaxed, and tensed again.

“Seriously,” I said. “If he’d taken you aside when you were a kid or left you a letter or something. Told you that there were spirits from outside the world, and that he’d used his talents and abilities to lock one of the biggest and nastiest up by getting buried alive under a hospital, do you think you’d have been better prepared? Or would it just have been more evidence for a genetic component for your breakdown?”

“Yeah, probably that last one,” he said. “A secret that keeps itself, eh?”

“I had to have proof too. When I found out? I got my clock cleaned by a haugtrold that had taken over this cop’s body. Put the original guy into his girlfriend’s dog.”

“Really?”

Despite everything, his voice had a sense of amazement. Wonder. Had I been like that? Awed by the truth behind the world. Overwhelmed by the sudden unveiling of a bright, dangerous version of everything that had been walking beside me the whole time. I probably had, but I couldn’t quite imagine it now. I wondered what he’d make of it if I told him all my stories: the Invisible College in Denver. Mait Carrefour in New Orleans. Midian Clark, vampire chef. The thing with that guy in London. I’d almost forgotten that one myself. I could imagine mistaking it for glamorous.

And, I realized, that was how I’d seen Eric. He’d known more. He’d done more. And so I’d made him into the hero of my own private comic book. Eric Heller, gentleman adventurer. Force for good. Decent human being. It hadn’t had anything to do with the real man.

“Jayné.”

I looked up. Aubrey was on the stairs, hidden from the waist down by the drop. His hair was tousled from his work. He looked exhausted. We’d all been up for too long.

“We ready?” I asked.

“Ex says it’s time,” he said.

“I’ll hold the fort up here,” David said, hefting his shotgun. In his wide hands, it looked almost small.

I walked to Chogyi Jake, kneeling by his side for what I knew might be the last time. His eyes were still closed, lost in meditation. His face was pale, and his breath quick and shallow.

“Hey, guy,” I said softly. “You ready to do this thing?”

He didn’t answer. I put a hand on his shoulder, surprised by how cool his skin felt.

“Hey. Chogyi. It’s time. Are you—”

His body shifted, slouched, and spilled back onto the ground. His head made a hollow sound when it hit the floor. He didn’t try to catch himself. I wasn’t aware of screaming, but Aubrey, Kim, Ex, and David all appeared at my side. Aubrey gently moved me, kneeling by Chogyi Jake’s body, pressing fingers to his neck.

“That’s not good,” he said.

“What’s the matter?” Ex asked. He sounded as much annoyed as concerned.

“Those guys back in the subbasement? They kicked him harder than I thought,” Aubrey said. “He’s in shock. I think that means internal bleeding. I don’t know how long he’s been unconscious.”

“Well, get his legs up,” Kim said.

“But the ceremony,” I said. “The spell. Can we still . . . ?”

“No,” Ex said. “No, we have a problem.”

We stood over the body, looking at one another. Chogyi Jake lay on the floor, bleeding to death without spilling a drop, and I didn’t know if I was relieved or frightened. Somewhere far above us, in a different world, the sky over Lake Michigan would be a robin’s egg blue. The sun minutes from pouring down over the city. We were trapped in the dark. Weariness dragged at all their faces. It probably dragged at mine too. I wanted nothing more than to sleep for a day and a half and wake up to find out it had all been a bad dream. I couldn’t go on. I went on.

“Can we revive him?” I asked. “Just to get through the binding.”

“I don’t know,” Aubrey said. “If we had . . . smelling salts? Or something to up his blood pressure?”

“Kim?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“Not an MD,” she said. “All I know is we put his legs up, get a blanket over him, and get him to the ER.”

He might almost have been sleeping, except that his breath was so fast and so shallow. Now that he was lying flat, I thought there was a little more color in his face. I had almost talked myself into believing I could stand to watch him die if there was a reason. If something came out of it. This? I couldn’t do it.