Vicious Grace

SEVENTEEN

The taxi dropped me off across the street from the hospital. I wanted the rain to be a torrent, water pounding down on the streets like the assault of an atmospheric fire hose, but the tiny drops only drifted. The street shone wet-asphalt black and streetlight orange. Traffic hissed by in a cloud of car exhaust and ozone. My hair clung to my head, cold and damp without quite reaching soaked. Grace Memorial rose up toward the low, gray sky.

We stood for almost a minute, the hospital and I, looking at each other. I watched a man in pale green scrubs emerge from the dark front doors with a bicycle. An ambulance lumbered in under the emergency room’s long concrete canopy, its siren beating at my ears and its flasher blinding me for half seconds at a time. Above me, the hospital windows glowed in the bright gray night, emotionless as a boxer the moment before the bell. Darkness didn’t make the buildings any less awkward or ugly. I knew now that it had been designed as a prison, but that wasn’t what it looked like either. Instead of institutional, strong lines and threatening, solid walls, it looked like something half formed. A chrysalis cracked open too early.

I hitched my pack high on my back, waited for a break in the stream of cars, and crossed the street. Then under the canopy toward the greenish, bulletproof glass doors, and inside. I stopped in the entrance hallway. At an admission desk to my left, a professionally unimpressed nurse was asking formulaic questions from a gray-skinned old man. Two sets of double doors at the hall’s end had stern warnings against anyone besides hospital staff trying to pass through them; security bars and magnetic locks drove the point home. A thick-shouldered woman in a janitorial uniform mopped the pale linoleum, the water she left still pink with someone’s blood. The sounds of a television crept in from the waiting room to my right: animal screaming followed by a narrator’s somber and instructing voice. I wondered what genius had decided that Animal Planet was a good distraction for people in medical distress. Seemed like a lousy call to me.

I waited for the lights to dim or for nurse and janitor and patient to start breathing in time, turn toward me with murder in their eyes, but nothing happened. Only the sense of being watched. Even if none of the people knew me, the building itself seemed aware of who I was and what I had come here for. I felt a trickle of adrenaline in my bloodstream, tensing me and brightening everything.

It was easy to see how someone could get paranoid.

“Can I help you?”

The nurse was a wide-faced man, his hairline receding. He held a clipboard in his arm like it had grown there.

“Are you all right, miss?”

“Fine,” I said. “I’m meeting someone.”

“You have their name? I can look them up on the computer.”

“No,” I said, turning toward the waiting room. There were maybe a dozen people on plastic-upholstered couches. Two of them were thick, muscular men, but one of those was holding his elbow and tight-jawed with pain. If the hospital set them on me the way it had in the cardiac unit, I was pretty sure I could hold my own. As long as Eric’s protections held.

“No name?”

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s not a patient. I’m meeting a doctor. He knows I’m here.”

The nurse shrugged and walked past me to an older woman coming into the hall behind me.

“Can I help you?”

“Can’t . . . breathe . . .”

“Come right along here with me, ma’am. We’ll get you a seat.”

I went into the waiting room. Animal Planet broke to commercial and the bicyclist-killing mountain lion was replaced by a CGI-enhanced puppy asking for a particular brand of canned food. Dull eyes looked up at me. Some looked away, some just got glassy and distant. None seemed an immediate threat. The air smelled of old vomit and alcohol. I took a seat near the door, my back against the wall where no one could get behind me.

I didn’t know when I’d started thinking tactically, but clearly I had. I spent a few minutes judging whether, in the event, the skinny guy in the Christian Academy Crusaders T-shirt was more likely to reach me before the red-haired girl with her head on her knees. In the hall, a stretcher came through the high-security double doors and a couple of large men lifted the can’t-breathe lady onto it. Animal Planet came back, promising more tales of mutilation and death. I thought about walking back out, but if I slipped now, I wasn’t sure I’d have the nerve to come back in. I gritted my teeth and waited. I checked the time, willing Oonishi to get there.

And then, as if I’d summoned him, he appeared. He saw me, nodding as I stood up. He wore a pale gray button-down shirt starched to within an inch of its life and black slacks. I wondered if I’d gotten him out of some late church service. He was dressed for Sunday. He came close, bending down toward me as if four fewer inches of air would give us some kind of privacy.

“Where’s Chogyi?” he asked.

“Not here,” I said. “He has other lines he’s investigating. I’m just doing a little legwork.”

Oonishi frowned. Over his shoulder, I could see Nurse Receding Hairline watching us with interest.

“If you’re going to be in my lab, I’d prefer that he come himself,” Oonishi said. “It looks a little strange, taking unaccompanied women in when there’s no actual work going on.”

I smiled.

“If they ask, I’ll tell ’em you’re trying to bang me, but you haven’t had any luck,” I said.

To give the man credit, he had the grace to look abashed. I pulled my backpack onto one shoulder.

“Okay,” I said, “let’s—”

“Hey.”

The voice was weak and miserable. I turned back. The red-haired girl was looking up at me. She was pale, and her skin had a yellow, waxy look to it. I was pretty sure there was vomit caked on the ends of her hair. Her focus seemed to come in and out, seeing me then looking past into nothing, and coming back again.

“Be careful,” she said. “It knows you’re here.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I know it’s here. Keeps us even.”

The girl nodded deliberately and let her head sink back to her knees. Oonishi stared at me, his mouth actually open.

“What?” I asked.

“You know her?”

“Never seen her in my life.”

“And you told her about this?”

“Of course not.”

“How does . . .” He stopped, looked around, bent in for another inch of false privacy. “How does she know, then?”

“Spirits,” I said. “You should take me to your lab now.”

On the television, a bear began savaging a bunch of campers as the waiting patients looked on, drifting in and out of their misery. Oonishi looked at them all. His pockmarked skin and carefully cut hair weren’t enough to keep him from seeming lost and out of his depth. Welcome to my world, I thought.

“I hate this,” Oonishi said, digging in his pocket. He came out with an ID tag clipped to a blue nylon lanyard like the ones Kim and Aubrey had. He pointed to a small blue door marked Staff Only. “This way.”

Leaving the emergency department for the hospital proper was like stepping into a different world. Dim corridors passed empty, darkened clinics. Our footsteps echoed back on us, leaving me with the sense that someone else was walking just ahead of us or else just behind. Instead of simple, straight passages, the hallway bent, looping back on itself like something grown instead of built. The walls stepped in closer to one another, squeezing us together until I was almost walking behind him, and then just as suddenly they spat us out into a huge courtyard with couches and tables and a clear roof three stories above us. I paused, watching the almost invisible waves of rain sluicing down the glass. I had the sudden, brief sensation of terrible pressure, like I was forty feet underwater and looking up toward the air.

“Over here,” Oonishi said. “It’s a little hard finding the way.”

I trotted after him. We passed the chapel: a length of wood-paneled wall with the holy symbols of half a dozen faiths worked in bronze. An empty cafeteria opened out behind five sets of lowered bars. A bank of darkened windows showed desks glowing with the blue almost-light of computer monitors that hadn’t turned off. Oonishi stopped at an alcove, swiped his ID card at a weirdly narrow elevator door, and gave me a polite, uncomfortable smile.

There had been years when the prospect of being alone in an elevator with a strange man—especially in territory I didn’t know and he did—would have scared me. My mother had always drilled into me that, my father excepted, men weren’t trustworthy; that just because you didn’t see the demons of lust and violence in a man’s eyes didn’t mean they weren’t there. In retrospect, it was a little surprising I’d ever risked kissing a boy. Getting into the narrow elevator with its white plastic walls and recessed fluorescent lights, I had only the vague echo of unease. Oonishi seemed to pick up my thoughts; I noticed him being careful not to stand too close to me or look at me for too long.

“The lab is actually on this first floor, but you can’t get there without going up one level or down two,” Oonishi said. “It’s a terrible design.”

The elevator’s panel buttons counted down from thirty to one, and then fell into letters. G. L. B. B2. SB1. SB2. SB3. R. It was like reading the legend off a map in an unknown language. I tried to remember how many floors there were underground. If I had the blueprints from the condo, I could look it up. A lot, anyway.I’ve got the boy, boy, boy, boy down in the dark Down in the dark, he’ll stay

The elevator chimed. The door slid open. We stepped out into a waiting area just wide enough to turn a gurney around in. Oonishi headed right. I followed him through a set of double doors that warned us only authorized personnel were allowed. The long, cool hallway had doors like a hotel. Some were open, the two beds beyond them occupied by men and women, curtains and flickering televisions with the sound turned down. In one, the patient was a young man with the darkest skin I’d ever seen and an open, bloodless belly wound with what looked like a clear plastic vacuum sucking at it. Another had a woman lying perfectly flat, not even a pillow under her head, and arms at her sides, palms up. An old man in a dark suit stood by her side and looked up as we passed without saying anything. Someone nearby was groaning and calling for help in the tired, doomed voice of someone who knew no help would come. The high desk of the nurses’ station glowed with the light of a little desk lamp, hidden away beneath it. It lit the night nurse’s thick face from below like she was the bartender from The Shining.

“How’s it going, Annie?” Oonishi asked as we walked by.

“Restless, Doc. No one’s sleeping here tonight.”

“Bad weather,” Oonishi said over his shoulder. The night nurse looked me up and down, her eyes dead as a fish on a slab. I smiled sweetly and kept moving.

The next unit was Cardiac Care. I braced myself, waiting for the red-haired man who’d headed the first attack to pop out of a closet or from behind a desk. I didn’t know if the growing feeling of being watched was the rider, the hospital, my own fear, or all three. After another set of double doors, the hallway split, Oonishi heading to the right and then left into a long hallway totally empty of doors or windows. Every fifth light was on, leaving long stretches of unrelieved darkness between the pools of gray. We turned a corner that wasn’t quite a right angle, and the corridor split again in an intersection so like the ones we’d passed, I felt a rush of déjà vu. Oonishi went left, past a green steel door with a red exit sign above it, through the pale door beyond it, and to a bank of elevators. While we waited, I tried to think how I’d retrace our steps back to the emergency department. I was pretty sure I couldn’t.

Oonishi’s lab was tucked in the back of a much larger sleep disorders center. The door took not only Oonishi’s card but also two separate keys in double dead bolt locks. He walked in and turned on the lights with the air of a man showing off a really nice bachelor’s apartment.

“Here you go,” he said. “Six separate imaging suites. One per subject. Once the study’s done, they’ll be available for other patients to use, but right now, they’re all mine.”

I looked into one of the rooms. The round, white-and-gray machine dominated the space: a huge donut shape that went from floor to ceiling, with a platform big enough to lie down on that could slide a body into the donut hole. Looking at it, I couldn’t imagine sleeping on the thing.

“It’s been a bitch of a study,” Oonishi said. “These things are really loud and uncomfortable. We have to strap the heads in tight. You can’t let them move around. And we didn’t want to sedate people if we could help it. It took us eight months to find six subjects. Got funding for all six machines, though.”

I had the feeling I was supposed to be impressed, but I didn’t have the spare attention. I leaned over, looking into the dark tube of the fMRI, and shuddered. Being fed into it would have been like being buried alive.

“There was one woman we got as far as training, but she developed heart trouble. The pacemaker they put in wasn’t MRI-safe.”

“Okay,” I said. “What else have you got?”

A monitoring room with a server rack to show the data streams from all six suites and a wide white board hatched in green marker with names and dates listed in black and red and blue. A couple bathrooms where the test subjects could change into pajamas or whatever. A closet filled with cheap hospital blankets and plastic-wrapped pillows. Oonishi’s own office. No couches, no cots. I sighed, dropping my backpack onto his desk.

“All right,” I said. “I’m good. You can go if you want.”

“Go? You’re staying here?”

“I’m sleeping here,” I said, walking back to the supply closet. If I laid out two or three of the blankets, it would be sort of like having a thin mattress.

“I’m not leaving anyone alone with my equipment,” he said. “I don’t care how much Kim and Chogyi trust you. This is my lab.”

“Then stay,” I said, “but be quiet.”

I picked a stretch of floor behind his desk. Oonishi stood in the doorway, caught between trying to kick me out or else staying all night in the lab. I put down a couple of the little pillows.

“Is this necessary?” he asked for the second time that night, and I knew he wasn’t going to give me any trouble.

“Is,” I said. “Don’t turn out the light when you go, okay?”

He closed the door, and I shoved the filing cabinet over to block it. It wouldn’t keep the door from opening if the hospital got a good mob going, but it would certainly make enough noise to wake me if the rider sent its influence into Oonishi or a night nurse or someone. I looked around the room one last time, then turned out the light.

The darkness almost made it impossible to navigate back to my little impromptu bed, but by the time I got there, my eyes had adjusted. The office door became a line of dim light. A soft, almost subliminal glow came from the screen on the wall. I lay down, took a deep breath, letting it out slowly, willing my shoulders to relax. The crackling of the pillow under my ear didn’t quite drown out Oonishi’s footsteps. Going to the monitoring room, I thought. The bulk of the hospital felt heavy above me, like an avalanche waiting for a single too-loud noise to start it, and me getting ready to shout.

I wanted to get up, to call Aubrey again. Or if not him, at least Chogyi Jake and Ex. Hell, even Kim. I wanted backup and friends and not to be alone in the darkness. I wanted someone to talk me out of being there. At this edge-of-the-diving-board moment, it wouldn’t have been hard. Instead, I closed my eyes.

I told myself all the reasons this was going to be okay. The rider was bound and couldn’t hurt me directly even if it wanted to. I was better protected than anyone else. Whatever had provoked the first attack, I’d beaten it once already. I had what the rider wanted safely tucked away in Waukegan. And most important, it had what Eric had been after: the power or knowledge or favor so critical that he’d betrayed Aubrey and Kim, that he’d risked death against the Invisible College and lost. Everything pointed toward this. A confrontation between human and haugsvarmr. A negotiation. A trade. I had to know what it could possibly offer that would justify all he’d done. Papers and notebooks, grimoires and files: they were just more puzzles. There was only one thing that could answer the questions I had.

“Come on,” I said to the dark air. “Talk to me. Whatever the hell you are, come talk to me.”

I forced myself to relax muscle by muscle. Feet, calf, knee, thigh, moving inch by inch up my body until all my attention was focused on my scalp. My mind started to fishtail under me. I felt certain that Aubrey had left me a message on the phone, if I could just remember what the access code was. It had to do with yachts and something Kim had said. I roused just enough to recognize the surreal patterns of dream, but the part of me that watched all the rest saw it wasn’t going to work. I was too anxious for a real, deep sleep; I could skate around in nothing more than a light doze until morning.

And then between one breath and the next, dream lifted a dark arm, took me by the throat, and pulled me down.