Vicious Grace Part 7

"I e-mailed Oonis.h.i.+ the questions," Kim said. "Honestly, though, I don't know how long it will be before we get the results. The others are right. He's starting to regret calling you in."

"Nothing like getting what you asked for," I said. "Where are you right now?"

"I'm on campus. I just finished my lecture."

"Lecture? You're taking cla.s.ses?"

"I'm teaching them. You don't think they'd pay a mere PhD to do full-time research, do you?" she said, and the bitterness in her voice made it clear that wasn't how it worked.

"Parasitology?"

"I wish. Cell biology. Introductory cell biology. There's only enough interest for a real parasites section every two years or so, and so far I've had to co-teach with an MD from infectious diseases. It's not really the same thing, but having a chaperone keeps me in my place. Why? Is something the matter?"

"No," I said. "I just thought you'd be at Grace."

"After yesterday? Not a chance. When we know what's going on, I'll consider it."

"Can you do that? I mean just stop showing up there and not get fired or something?"

"No, I'll get fired eventually. Unemployed is better than beaten to death."

I laughed. I didn't expect to, it just happened. Kim might have had the coldest, least sentimental mind I'd ever met. After a solid year of Ex's weird paternalism, Chogyi Jake's studied compa.s.sion, and my little romantic roller coaster with Aubrey, just talking to her was like seeing the world through new eyes. Of course she wasn't going in. I'd a.s.sumed she was because she wasn't at the condo. I didn't know why I'd fallen so easily into the idea that on one side there was Grace Memorial, and on the other there was me and the guys with room for nothing else.

"Well, if you're ditching work and have a few spare hours, I could use some help."

"Did something happen?" she asked.

"No. Well, yes actually. But what I really need is to get out from underfoot while the guys work through something. I'll tell you all about it when I pick you up. But the thing is I don't know the city. Where to get a vacuum cleaner. Like that. And anyway, I could use the company. If you're up to it."

"All right," she said. "Come get me."

She gave me the address of a coffee shop. I gave it to the GPS and told her it would take me fifteen minutes to get there. She told me to expect thirty with traffic. I started the car, turned up the ramp, and headed out onto the streets of Chicago with only a rea.s.suring, fake-British computer voice to guide me. Haze grayed the blue of the sky, softening the sunlight and bringing the infinite bowl of air a little closer. Traffic on the gentle left-then-right curves of the Kennedy Expressway was thick, but not as suicidally impolite as Los Angeles had been. Still, I found myself watching the other drivers carefully while the GPS told me where to go.

It almost worked. If it weren't for Bell Avenue ending about twenty feet before it hit Taylor Street and making my last turn impossible, it would have been twenty minutes. I parked on Bell and walked the rest of the way. All the buildings were brick, two stories at the least, three at the most, and crowded up against the sidewalk. A busker with a ukulele sang a Tom Waits tune as I walked past. The breeze that cooled my cheeks and brushed back my hair smelled like car exhaust.

The b.u.mp & Grind Cafe didn't live up to its lurid name; it was all fresh coffee and baking apples. A flat-screen television was showing an art film that I remembered having heard about but had never actually seen. A few computers sat around, apparently for the free use of anyone who bought a coffee and wasn't surfing for p.o.r.n. And Kim sat at a table by the window. Half of a latte rested in front of her, the film of milk on the gla.s.s matching the hazy sky. Her purse was tucked under the chair, her head bent over a book.

For the s.p.a.ce of a heartbeat, she didn't see me, and I caught a glimpse of who she was when she thought no one was watching. Her clothes belonged on an older woman, neat, professional earth tones. Her pale hair gave the impression of being touched by gray, though I was pretty sure it wasn't. Her gaze was focused, intent, closed. The softness at her jaw and the first, faint wrinkles at her neck reminded me of how my mother had looked when I was still a girl. And there was something else too; she had the same air of waiting for something she knew wasn't going to come.

She looked up and nodded, and the impression vanished. She was once again my familiar, hard-edged Kim.

"So what's happened and why do we need a vacuum cleaner?" she asked instead of saying h.e.l.lo.

While we walked back to the minivan, I brought her up to date, not just on the discovery of the secret rooms but on Los Angeles and the Lisbon notations-DC1 and YNTH-with our a.s.sumption that the first meant high security and the second being anyone's guess. She listened with her head canted forward, like she was leaning into my words.

"What about the image enhancement on Oonis.h.i.+'s data set?" she asked when I was done.

"Already uploaded."

"Do we have an estimate of the time it's going to take?"

"No," I said, pulling out onto Polk. "We'll know when we know."

She nodded once, but she didn't look pleased. I felt a little tightness at the back of my throat, like I'd gotten a bad grade on a paper that I'd been proud of. Maybe hanging out with her hadn't been a good idea.

"Problem?" I asked, my tone carefully neutral.

"We've got too many tests and not enough data," she said. "I wish we'd gotten into Eric's secret rooms before we did the work for Oonis.h.i.+. If there's anything useful in there at all, it's going to change the questionnaire."

"It isn't like Eric left us directions."

"G.o.d forbid," Kim said. "That man never let anything by if he could help it."

"Did you love him?" I asked. I hadn't meant to. I hadn't even wondered until I saw her there in the cafe, waiting for something. "I mean, I know you and Eric-"

Kim took a quick breath, shrugged, and answered just as if I'd had any business asking.

"No, I didn't. I don't know why I did what I did. At first, I thought it was only that we were confined in the same cabin for too long, and humans act like that. But then after, when it kept . . . happening. Well, I didn't love him. He didn't particularly like me. The s.e.x wasn't very pleasant. It was just something we did. I rationalize it now. I say that I was las.h.i.+ng out at Aubrey or I just don't have a very healthy att.i.tude toward men or it was a self-destructive moment, but I honestly don't know why I was with him."

"You never told Aubrey," I said.

"No."

I turned the minivan up onto the Eisenhower Expressway, gunning the engine to bring us to speed.

"I didn't either," I said.

"Thank you."

The traffic slowed, the first deadening congestion of the coming rush hour. Kim leaned forward, looking up into the empty sky.

"You still in love with him?" I asked.

"I miss him. But I know why we aren't together. I don't have to like it, but I'm all right. I'm glad the two of you are together."

"I'm sorry," I said.

Her smile was fast and genuine and sad.

"You are too kind, Jayne," she said. "Really. It's a vice."

"I'll try to be more of a s.h.i.+t," I said. "Any idea where we can find that vacuum?"

But before she could answer, Eric intruded.

"Hey. You've got a call."

Kim flinched at the voice, and I pretended not to notice. I rooted through my pack one-handed, keeping the minivan in its lane with the other, trying to answer the call before Eric spoke again. The call was from Aubrey's number. I took it.

"Jayne," he said. "Where are you?"

"Fifteen minutes from you, if the traffic would get moving," I said.

"Push them out of the way and get over here," he said. I could hear him grinning.

"You got through?"

"Chogyi Jake had this flash of freaking genius about the whole Enochian directionality thing. I'll tell you about it when you get here."

My heart raced. I bent toward the wheel, as if I could clear a path for us by force of will.

"The rooms," I said. "Did you get into the rooms? What's in there?"

"Come home, sweetheart," he said. "See for yourself."

THE HIDDEN rooms didn't look the way I expected. Secret rooms should be dark, with cobwebs and wrought iron fixtures and probably creepy organ music. And rats. These looked almost normal. Almost. The door on the east side of the hallway opened onto a simple officelike s.p.a.ce. A cheap desk with the wood-grain laminate starting to peel at the sides, a landline telephone in a style twenty years out of date, two four-drawer filing cabinets, and a bookshelf half-filled with folders, books, and boxes. The drapes were chocolate brown bleached almost beige by the sun. In fairness, there were a couple of cobwebs.

The western door opened to a smallish bedroom actually decked out to sleep in. A steel-frame single bed with a thin mattress, a little bedside table, and that was about it. It had its own stripped-down powder room with stainless steel fixtures and no towels. If I hadn't been walking in Eric's footsteps for the past year, I might not even have noticed that the light fixtures were of unbreakable security gla.s.s and mesh, that the bed and table were bolted down, or that the solid-core door was fitted with a double dead bolt and hung with industrial-grade hinges. A cell. So that was interesting. There weren't any restraints on the bed, but slapping on a couple of handcuffs would have been easy.

Kim, behind me, was drawing the same conclusion.

"He must have expected somebody to be possessed," she said. "And that it would take a fair amount of time to get the rider out of them."

"Seems like," I said, tapping the walls absently as I walked through the empty s.p.a.ce.

Ex, Aubrey, and Chogyi Jake had apparently given up all pretense of keeping order in the condo. The couch and coffee table had been pulled back from the bedroom and were now pale with dust. A pile of photographs and maps sat on one corner, a fragile-looking roll of blueprints lay open in the center, and five leather-bound books were on top of them. A glance was enough to show me that the blueprints were of Grace Memorial, and that the extra markings and symbols on it weren't from the general contractor.

"What have we got?" I asked.

"A lot of what, and very little why," Chogyi Jake said. "But we haven't had time to go through it yet."

"Two boxes of surveillance and background on someone named David Souder," Aubrey said. "Runs a roofing company in Waukegan and seems totally innocuous."

"Name rings a bell, though," I said. "Is he in the wiki?"

Aubrey shook his head.

"All right," I said. "Anything that does make sense?"

"There was a very serious binding on the winter solstice, 1951," Ex said, holding up a weathered-looking three-ring binder stuffed with handwritten pages. I recognized my uncle's script. "So, not quite sixty years ago."

"I'm shocked, shocked," I said dryly. "And it happened at the hospital, right?"

"That's not as clear as you'd think," Aubrey said. A patch of white dust smeared his temple like badly applied stage makeup. "Eric was trying to find the site when he died. He'd narrowed it down to a few likely suspects. Grace Memorial was one of them, but he wasn't certain. All this? He put it here just in case Grace turned out to be the site."

I sat on the floor, legs crossed and elbows on the table. The top photograph on the pile s.h.i.+fted with a hiss as soft as whispering.

"Do we know what got bound?" I asked.

"Working on that," Aubrey said. "Eric's notes refer to it as Rahabiel and Daevanam Daeva, but until we can dig out some actual details, we might as well call it s.h.i.+rley. But I haven't even started looking at the books yet."

"We also may be able to infer something about it from the manner in which it was bound," Chogyi Jake said. "We do have an outline of that, and it was fairly impressive. Interment, just as the dreams suggested, but there were at least two more layers on top of that. One that kept the site obscured and the residual effects of the rider difficult to recognize, and then another secondary containment."

"Okay," I said.

Chogyi Jake shook his head.

"Too technical?" he asked.

"A little jargony," I said. "Retry?"

Kim, behind me, was the one to answer. She stood in the doorway, her arms crossed and a flush in her cheeks. She looked excited and engaged. Almost happy. I remembered what she'd said about having no one to talk to about things like this.

"They buried it first," she said. "And then they did something that would keep anyone from hearing it pounding on the coffin. And then they built a prison around it, so that even if it got out, it wouldn't get free."

"Yes," Chogyi Jake said.

"And the prison?" Ex said. "It's Grace Memorial."

"Any idea why it would want to jump on my head?" I asked.

"We don't even know that it did," Ex said. "The attack could have been whatever was bound trying to reach out, or it might have been a particularly vicious kind of aversion built into the binding."

"Might have been the prisoner, might have been the prison," Aubrey said.

"How do you bury a rider?" I asked at the same moment Kim said "Why the uptick in activity?"

"Interment bindings traditionally involve a sacrifice," Chogyi Jake said, answering me first. "It's not unlike normal possession, only instead of the rider taking control of a person through its own will, the spirit is driven into someone. Usually someone who has offered themselves up, but unwilling sacrifices have also been made. And then, the horse and rider are-"

He gestured apologetically.

"Buried alive," I said.

"It's not a popular technique," Chogyi Jake said. "But why the activity increased in the last year turns out to be a very interesting question. Of course, there hasn't actually been an increase in the thing's reach. It's pounding on the coffin just as loud. Only now people can hear it."

"You're saying things like that mob attack have been happening at Grace for the past fifty-odd years, and just no one noticed?" I said.

"Yes," Chogyi Jake said. "Until last year, when the second layer of the binding was broken. After that, it became psychologically possible for people to be aware that something odd was going on."

"Even people like Oonis.h.i.+," Ex said. He could really pack contempt in his voice when he tried.

"The increase in people leaving the hospital against medical advice," Kim said. "They see things. They get scared."

"That's the a.s.sumption we're working with," Chogyi Jake said.

"All right. That's better than something's eating them, right?" I said. "And what broke that keep-it-quiet spell?"

"Us," Aubrey said. "Or, specifically, you. Back in Denver."