Vicious Grace

TWENTY

Retracing our steps, we were all quiet. The walls around us seeped with the threat of violence and a sense of something vast and implacable. Even our footsteps were quiet. Careful. Frightened as mice in a cat’s bed. Chogyi Jake wasn’t smiling. Oonishi kept speeding up or slowing down, unconsciously keeping himself at the center of the herd. Kim and Aubrey were walking side by side, neither looking at the other but their strides matching perfectly. Around us, the hospital changed.

At first, I thought it was only the low light, fluorescents buzzing and flickering as we passed them. It was more than that. The floors got damper, and the air thickened. The salt smell was somewhere between ocean water and blood. When we passed back through the storage cells, I had the feeling that the old equipment had moved, that it was still moving whenever I wasn’t watching it. The pipes started dripping rust-brown water that burned a little when it hit the back of my hand. We got to the elevator faster than I’d expected, and paused there. There were five levels above us, just to reach the surface. I didn’t care about getting to the parking garage. Anyplace with a window I could break and crawl out of would do just fine. But when I reached out for the call button, I couldn’t quite do it. Somewhere in dim memory, there was a story about people getting into a haunted elevator and coming out as a thin, red soup.

Ex, at my side, saw me hesitate.

“Stairs?” he said.

“Stairs.”

We found the stairwell a few doors down, still marked by a glowing red exit sign. The door stuck when I tried to open it, but Ex and Aubrey pushed with me, and we got through. The railing was icy cold under my hand. I leaned in, looking up the central shaft. Two short flights to go up a story, twisting up for what looked like forever. Behind us, someone started shouting: a deep, angry sound. I started up.

I had felt the insectile press of riders pushing in against reality from the Pleroma or Next Door or whatever we called the abstract spiritual place they called home. At best, it had been like standing in a lake where fish sometimes blundered into me. At its worst, it was like being the egg in biology class videos about fertilization. This was different. Instead of the almost physical pressure, I felt like I was floating inside something, like if I pushed off from the concrete and steel landings, I could almost swim up into the air. Even the immediate solid touch of the railings and walls seemed unconvincing, and I heard voices talking just outside the range of hearing. Fighting. Weeping. Begging.

At the landing halfway to the ground floor, we paused. Oonishi looked winded, but he was the only one. He held up a hand, silently asking the rest of us to stop and let him catch his breath. I wondered for a moment what exactly we’d do if he had a heart attack or something right there. I didn’t think I’d be taking him to the ER or dropping him with the night nurse at the Cardiac Care Unit. The thought skipped ahead of me into unsafe territory.

“Kim,” I said. “How many people do you think are in the hospital right now?”

“We’ve got about five hundred beds,” Kim said. “With night staff? I don’t know. A little less than a thousand.”

A thousand men and women—kids, infants, newborns—who didn’t know what was going on, only that all the familiar things around them were changed and changing. Would they think they were going crazy? That the sense of the hospital shifting, rusting, cooling around them was a kind of hallucination? Something rumbled deep in the earth, then a sound like metal shrieking.

“Okay,” I said. “Anyone know what that was?”

“At a guess?” Ex said. “Our hive-mind is figuring out that it’s still trapped. May not be happy about it.”

“I can go on,” Oonishi said, still gasping. “Really. I’m fine.”

The door marked G for ground level was green-painted steel with a bright crash bar. The exit sign above it looked like a promise. I pushed through. The hallway wasn’t quite dark, but the lights were flickering and hissing. Something black was welling up through the paint and dripping down the walls, and the air smelled hot and close as breath. A heavy-set woman in pale green scrubs stood in the middle of the hall under a sign pointing us toward the Pediatric ICU. Her hair and clothes seemed to float, as if she were underwater. Her eyes glowed a cold, deepwater blue.

I didn’t think. My body leaped toward her almost without me, swinging through my shoulder, and sinking a stiff-fingered hand in her belly even before she screamed. Her breath went out of her in a gasp, and she folded over.

“Sorry,” I said, moving her to the side so the others could walk past her. “Really, really sorry.”

“You think you can hold me, Santur?” she spat, her gaze skittering across me like she couldn’t quite get me in focus. “I owned you once, and I will own you again.”

I gathered the vital energy of my qi, drawing the heat from the base of my spine, up through my belly and my heart, and into my throat.

“Sleep now,” I said, pressing the words into her. Her eyes closed with an audible click. She started breathing deep and slow.

“Nice trick,” Oonishi said.

“You should see me get droids through Imperial checkpoints,” I said. “Come on, let’s . . . Hey.”

I pointed to the sign. Pediatric ICU.

“Isn’t that on the third floor?” I said.

“It is,” Kim said.

“Aren’t we on the ground floor?”

“I thought so,” Kim said, her voice uncertain.

Something screamed off to our left, huge, inhuman, and soaked in rage.

“If we’re on the third, the walkway should be over here,” Oonishi said, gesturing down the corridor at a set of closed staff-only doors.

I followed him, the others close on our heels, but as soon as we were through the doors and into the passage beyond, Oonishi stopped, his eyes wide and staring. A T-intersection offered us the choice of Nuclear Imaging to the left and Gastroenterology Clinic to the right.

“It’s right here,” Oonishi said, putting his hand to the blank wall. “The walkway’s right here. GI and Imaging are on the second floor. They’re nowhere near Pediatric.”

I pushed the fear and rising panic away. My hands were shaking, but I could ignore them. I’d break down later, if there was a later.

“Guys?” I said. “Any thoughts? Is this the rider?”

“Could be,” Ex said, but he sounded unconvinced. “The haugsvarmr might be changing the physical connections in the hospital or controlling our perceptions. Not my first suspect, though.”

“No?”

“More likely, the hospital is working in its aspect as a prison. The trap’s sprung, so now it won’t let the rider out. Or us. Or anyone. It’s folded in on itself. There won’t be a way out.”

There was a rushing sound, and a searing anger that wasn’t mine washed over me. The others staggered under it too. And then just as suddenly, it was gone. Kim was weeping silently, but her expression was perfectly focused, and her voice didn’t shake when she spoke. It reminded me why I liked her.

“Is there someplace we can hole up and make new plans? A secure area?”

“There’s a locked ward in Children’s Psych,” Oonishi said.

I felt a little sting of impatience.

“Because being locked in a haunted asylum for insane children is just what we need right now,” I said. “Have you ever watched a horror movie? I mean, ever?”

“If we can get to the chapel, I think I can insulate us from the worst of this,” Ex said. “For a little while, at least.”

“Beats standing here,” Aubrey said. “Let’s move.”

The nightmare maze of Grace Memorial opened up before us, shifting like something alive. I moved carefully, peeking through the wire-glass windows before I passed through the doors, glancing around corners before I turned them. The others followed behind, quiet and careful, going from closet to closet, hiding in the empty rooms, and scuttling for the stairwells. We were a handful of mice in a box with a thousand cats. We passed by wards of the sick and the dying, their eyes panicky, the alarms of their monitors sounding and being ignored. Twice, a nurse or doctor with glowing blue eyes appeared far down a corridor, head shifting and swiveling as they swam through the air, searching for us. For me.

The new, dreamlike architecture seemed not to have a pattern: a door that should have led to the staff cafeteria opened into a suite of empty examining rooms; the corridor leading to the ER dead-ended with a red exit sign glowing over the bare brick wall; a stairway leading down to the ground floor didn’t have doors leading out. And with every turn we made, every new direction we set out in, the sense of the rider’s seething rage and our own aching panic threatened to overpower us. If I’d had any other plan, I’d have called the whole thing to a halt. Instead, I pushed on. And then we turned a corner that promised to lead us to Women’s Health and found ourselves facing the wood panels and metalwork holy symbols of the chapel. Ex actually whooped and jumped for the door.

He grunted.

“Locked,” he said. “But under the circumstances, I think God would forgive us for kicking it in.”

“Relativist,” I said. Ex looked at me, his eyes wide with surprise, and then he laughed.

“Wait,” Chogyi Jake said, stepping forward.

He looked at the lock and the door frame, shaking his head like a car mechanic surveying an unfamiliar engine. He took out his wallet, plucked the American Express black card out, and bent it neatly back and forth on its longer axis. The plastic turned white and broke, leaving a thin, slightly hooked length that he slid between the frame and the door. He rattled the handle for about ten seconds while the rest of us watched. The door swung open.

“Misspent youth,” he said with a small smile, and I followed him in.

The interior of the chapel was simple, spare, and beautiful. Four rows of pews stood at respectful angles along a center aisle. A carefully nondenomi-national altar commanded the front, unadorned and a little blocky. A discreet door off to one side was marked as the chaplain’s office. The ghost of incense touched the air, and the lights were warm and soft, without the sickly look the hallways had taken on. The whole place had a feeling of peace and calm and welcoming that didn’t seem to belong to the hospital-prison I’d just walked out of. Ex closed the door behind us, locking it again, then began walking through the room, his fingertips on the walls, murmuring to himself or possibly God. I couldn’t tell if his cantrips were making a difference or if it was just the sound of his voice and the calm of the architecture easing me back from the edge of panic. I walked down the center aisle, turned, and sat. The altar felt solid and sure against my back.

“Okay,” I said. “What are we looking at?”

“The first two protections have failed,” Chogyi Jake said. He sounded tired. “The haugsvarmr is still bound by the hospital, but it has much more freedom than it did before. More resources both in terms of people it can manipulate and objects it can control.”

“And when people try to come here?” I said. “Come to work, come to visit family?”

“I don’t think they’ll be able to,” Chogyi Jake said. “Grace is a different place now. It’s not related to the world the way it was yesterday. If this goes on for very long at all, people will notice.”

“What’s it going to look like from the outside?” I asked.

“The physical form of this hospital will still be there,” he said, “but I don’t think anyone will be able to get in, though it seems likely they’d try.”

“What about us? Can we get out?”

“Possibly,” he said. “We can find a place that we know is near an exit in the hospital’s usual configuration and then try to damp down the effects of the prison spells.”

“Calling Malkuth,” Kim said. “Like in Denver.”

“Does that let the rider out too?” I asked.

“Possibly,” Chogyi Jake said. “And if not immediately, it at least lessens the time during which the containment works. It’s a rider. After being locked away for decades, it may still be weak but it will get stronger. The prison aspect is a network of spells worked into the hospital itself. Very complex, very powerful, but only spells. They will degrade with time.”

“And then it still gets out,” I said.

“It does.”

I leaned back, my head thudding against the altar. Ex finished his circuit of the room and came to perch on the back of a pew, his feet on the seat. In his black shirt and pants, pale hair pulled back, he looked like an eagle. Kim and Aubrey sat together in the pew across from him. They weren’t quite touching, but they were closer than they would have been, I thought, if Aubrey and I hadn’t talked. Kim still didn’t know. It didn’t seem like the moment to get into that. Oonishi paced at the back of the room, looking like a wax dummy of himself brought to life. Only Chogyi Jake sat on a front bench, his hands clasped before him.

“Worst case,” I said. “What happens if it breaks free?”

Ex shrugged.

“It escapes, takes over a complex social structure. Political party, religious community, city. Maybe a country. Hard to say. Once it’s in, it uses its power to gain more control. Maybe go back to the Ahnenerbe’s plan. Yoke other riders either with mutual pacts or bindings fueled by death magic. So, five, ten years, you’re looking at a wave of American genocide, massive spiritual possession, and probably a rider with nuclear launch codes,” he said.

I said something vulgar.

“Well,” he said. “You said worst case. Being difficult to see magically gives you some protection, but you can’t count on it. If the rider has access to a thousand pairs of human eyes, it will find us. And as soon as it’s sure it can’t find a way to squirm out past being confined, that’s likely to be on its agenda.”

“Can it take control of us?” Aubrey asked.

“It already got me once,” Kim said. “And that was before it got out if its grave.”

“If it can find us, it probably will,” Ex said.

“But we can break that,” I said. “Just a little off-the-cuff cantrip did it before. Any of us should be able to do that, right? I mean, it’s not like they’re exactly being ridden. It doesn’t take an exorcism to pop them free.”

“That was before,” Ex said. “It’ll be harder now. If it finds us and takes someone over, we have to be prepared to incapacitate whoever got the fuzzy end of the lollipop.”

The silence didn’t last more than a few seconds, but it was soaked with dread. I hadn’t even considered that Aubrey or Kim or Chogyi Jake might start glowing blue about the eyes and come after me. I should have. If I’d been in the rider’s place, it’s what I’d have done.

“Let me see what I can do,” Ex said. “The ward I’ve got up should slow it down a little, but maybe there’s something I can use to give us some cover when we go back out.”

“I’m not going out there,” Oonishi said. “Are you insane? If we’re safer in here and we can’t get out of the hospital, why the hell would we set foot out that door? The police are going to get here.”

“They will,” Chogyi Jake said.

“Then I say we stay right where we are and wait for the rescue workers,” Oonishi said. He had his arms folded across his chest like an angry five-year-old. I could almost smell the fear underneath his anger.

“They will try to free the people trapped inside,” Chogyi Jake said, and even the slight reservation in his voice told me the rest. They may do more harm than good.

“Ex?” I said. “See what you can find. More protection’s better than less. What about binding it? We’re in here, we have some resources. Have we got enough to lock it back up?”

“It would be tricky, but maybe,” Ex said as he walked past me to the chaplain’s office door. “We’d need four people for the circle. And the coffin, assuming it’s still intact. If we could get to the site where the coffin is, we might be able to consecrate it again. There was a fairly detailed description of the rite in Eric’s papers.”

“I read that too,” Aubrey said. “There are some sketchy parts, but we could probably fill them in. There was a passage about the Mark of Edjidan that would be a problem.”

“That was just the initial invocation,” Chogyi Jake said. “With the rider trapped in the hospital, we might not need that layer at all. We could go directly to—”

“Who goes in the coffin?” Kim said. “It’s an interment. Someone would have to be buried with the rider.”

I’d forgotten that. We all had. Between the uncanny feeling of being trapped in Grace with the haugsvarmr and the natural urge to jump at any ray of hope, I’d been running five steps ahead and not paying attention to my assumptions. I lay my head back against the altar and let my eyes close for a moment. I had to stop this. If I hadn’t bulled ahead without thinking things through, I wouldn’t have been at Grace in the first place. Or at least I’d have had a babysitter on David Souder, and the rider would still be down in the dark where it belonged. Or if Aubrey, stuck in his confusion and hurt, hadn’t bailed instead of talking things out with me and Kim. Or if Kim hadn’t called us there in the first place. Or if Eric hadn’t put the whole damn thing into motion years ago . . .

There was too much blame to go around, too long a chain of circumstance that brought us all here. I couldn’t help blaming myself, if only because I wasn’t responsible for anybody else’s actions in quite the same way. But I had to stop now. I had to slow myself down, think things through, and not spend the thin sliver of time we had chasing after impossibilities.

I opened my eyes and sat forward.

“Okay,” I said. “So if that’s out, what else can we do?”

I looked from face to face, waiting for our eureka moment, the trick that would get us through in one piece. Something deep in the hospital bumped and shuddered like a submarine striking a reef. The light from the office behind me spilled out into the room. I heard Ex opening and closing drawers. Oonishi sat down at the pew farthest from me.

Chogyi Jake lifted his head. His eyes were calm and bright. His smile could have meant anything.

“I can go in,” he said. “I will be the sacrifice.”