M.L.N. Hanover: Vicious Grace

“Okay,” I said. “We have to get him back upstairs.”

“No,” Ex said. “We have to go on without him. If we go back, it’s going to find us, and then it’s over. As long as we’re in here, there’s a chance.”

“What chance?” I said. “What chance do we have? Because the way it looks from here, we’re screwed.”

Kim murmured something too quietly for me to here. Aubrey, standing at her side, turned to look at her.

“I say we go up and let the thing out,” I went on. “Break the prison. I know it’s a risk, but someone tracked it down and bound it before. We can do that again, but after we get Chogyi Jake to a doctor. After we find a different binding. After—”

“I said I’ll do it,” Kim said. “I’ll go in. I’ll . . . I’ll take his place.”

“You can’t,” Aubrey said.

Kim met his gaze. The darkness under her eyes was almost purple. The bruise on her face had darkened, and the cut lip was scabbed black. Her hair was a collection of greasy strings. She gave him a faint, weary smile, and for a moment, she was beautiful.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I can do this.”

If I hadn’t known before, the anguish on Aubrey’s face would have been enough to show me how much the thought of losing Kim broke him. Even with everything else, I found there was a small part of my heart that ached seeing him feel that strongly for a woman that wasn’t me.

“Actually, you can’t,” Ex said. “You know how to channel your will. You’ve worked puts like this before. This isn’t something I can do without experienced people at all four points on the circle.”

He was looking at me. His eyes were blue as gas flame. I could feel him wanting me to understand something, and if I hadn’t been up all night, if I hadn’t been wrung out four times in the course of a single day, if there had been any neurotransmitter left in my brain, I might have gotten it on my own. As it was, I needed a prompt.

“Ah. What exactly did you need this guy to do?” David asked.

I looked at him. Eager, worried, guilty over the part he’d played, and frightened of the beast he’d set loose. He was the only one here without any experience. He was the only one who could take Declan Souder’s place. All I had to do was talk him into it. Now. Before Chogyi Jake died.

Lie to him, I thought. Tell him something that puts him in the box. Tell him we need a focus for our energy, that we need someone to hold the bones just right, something. Anything. Just put him in the place and get this done. An emotion I didn’t recognize was rushing through me. I felt light. Unmoored. My chest was widening from inside, and it was wrapped around Chogyi Jake and the chance of getting him upstairs. I thought for a moment this was some new kind of panic, and then I recognized it. It was hope. It was relief. As sure as kittens in springtime, I was about to kill David Souder, and I was grateful.

I felt something spiritual give way with an almost physical click. I knew something in me was broken, that it was going to be broken for a very long time. And I knew I wasn’t going to lie to David.

“He was going to go into the coffin,” I said. “We were going to drive the rider into him, then seal the coffin and bury it again. Put it back where it was before.”

David rocked back on his heels like I’d struck him. His gaze went to each of us in turn. He tightened his grip on the shotgun.

“It was what your grandfather did,” I said. “It was his life’s work. You saw the thing that came out of that hole. You’ve been living with it in your head for over a year now. You know what it’s capable of.”

“You were going to kill him?”

“Bury him alive,” I said. “It’s called an interment binding. And it might be the only chance we have of stopping this thing.”

“But—”

“David,” I said. My voice was soft, but I could hear the steel in it. “If there were another way, I swear I’d take it. But you let this thing out. You’re the only one who can put it back. I need you to be as strong as Grandpa Del was. I need you to be as brave.”

He looked at me, his eyes filling with horror and panic.

“Please,” I said. “We don’t have much time.”

“What . . .” He swallowed and tried again. “What would I need to do?”

“Lie back,” Ex said. “Close your eyes. We do the rest. But you don’t come out alive, and it won’t be peaceful.”

David snorted, a deep sound, like a bull facing the toreador. His jaw slid forward a degree and his eyes narrowed.

“You can make this right,” I said. “We’ll help you make this right.”

He was quiet for a few seconds that lasted days. When he spoke, his voice belonged to a smaller man.

“Good thing I never had kids,” he said and tried a smile.

“Give me the gun,” I said.

He looked down at his hand like he was surprised to see it there. For a moment, I didn’t know what he was going to do. Then he took it by the barrel and held the stock out to me. It was heavier than I’d expected.

“Grandpa Del could do it, right?” he said. “I can’t see doing less.”

“Thank you, David,” I said.

He nodded, but he wouldn’t meet my gaze. I took his hand, and he let me lead him down into the darkness.

THE OPEN coffin lay in its shallow grave, the lid ready at its side. Ex set up the ancient-looking, hissing lanterns around the ruined ward, their filaments glowing a perfect white, too bright to look at. The shadows they cast on the walls didn’t flicker. Grandpa Del’s bones lay just to one side among the rotten concrete and fragile rebar. Ex murmured words that might have been Latin or something older over his handful of salvaged nails. His improvised hammer was a nine-inch length of galvanized pipe. Aubrey and Kim let bits of pale dirt fall from their hands, creating the circle like they were making a sand drawing. The broken boxes and twisted machinery stood in mute witness as David lowered himself carefully to stand in the coffin. It looked too narrow for him until he lay down to try it. Then it only looked almost too narrow.

He saw me watching him and grinned.

“I’m used to it,” he said. “My first car was a VW Bug.”

I laughed. Chogyi Jake was at the top of the stairs, still unconscious. Still breathing. We were moving as quickly as we could.

“It’s not so bad,” he said. “Chances are pretty good I’d have killed myself anyway. If you hadn’t come, I’d still be back at my place, thinking I was crazy, right?”

“Probably,” I said.

“So at least this way, it’s not like nothing good comes out of it, right?”

Tell yourself that, I thought. For ten more minutes, tell yourself this is something besides hellishly unfair.

“You’re a good man,” I said.

“Hey. Jayné. Could you do me a favor?”

“Anything.”

He sat up, his arms wrapping his knees. He looked like he was in a rowboat too small to reach the shore.

“Alexis. My ex. Tell her I did something real. Tell her I made a difference.”

There was a history in those words. A boy who’d met a girl, fallen in love or at least in bed. A wedding that was supposed to end with happily ever after and wound up in divorce court instead. Those were the bones of it, but they carried the flesh of a life on them. There had been a first time they’d met, a first kiss, a first fight. Maybe he was thinking right now of the moment when everything might have gone one way but instead fishtailed into another, or of the one thing he’d said that he regretted. The last kiss. The last thing he’d said to her.

All of those details that made it his life, his history, were about to be wiped away.

“I’ll tell her,” I said. “Promise.”