Vicious Grace

TWO

When, fifteen minutes later, I dropped the call, Ex had gone upstairs to his room. I sat for a while with my phone in my hand. The windows looked out over the moonlit night, trees and scrub in monochrome and about a thousand times more stars than I was used to. I could call her back. I could say that something had come up. Hell, I could even tell her that I just wasn’t comfortable. What was she going to say? That I had to get comfortable? I had the choice, so I had the power.

Aubrey’s room was even smaller than mine, his bed little more than a cot. I always thought of sleep as making people look younger, but it only changed the shape of his face a little. Softened his eyes and let his lips relax. His breath was deep and regular. I sat next to him, willing my gaze alone to wake him. After about a minute, I put my hand on his shoulder. He took one breath that was almost a sigh and opened his eyes. A few months sleeping together and he didn’t even startle when I touched him.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey. Rough night?”

“Sort of. Kim called.”

He frowned. Even in the faint moonlight, I knew that the softness had left his eyes.

“What’s the deal?” he asked. Which, oddly, was better than either is she okay or What did she want, though I couldn’t quite have said why.

“High weirdness in Chicago. Something about a sleep study with funky results. A lot about blood flow and visual cortex layers. Upshot is she wants to call in the troops, see if we can make sense of it.”

Aubrey sat up and I slid in next to him. With a bed that small, it felt like we were sitting on a bench together.

“Do you want to?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, yes. Of course. It’s Kim. She came through for me when I called her for help. We should absolutely return the favor.”

“But,” he said. He didn’t have to say the rest. But he was her ex-husband. But the divorce hadn’t been finalized until about six months ago. And add to that the things I knew that Aubrey didn’t. That she’d been having an affair with Uncle Eric when she’d still been with Aubrey. That the reason she’d left Colorado was to get away from both of them. That she’d still had feelings for him as recently as last year. I scooped his hand up in my own. He had a scar on his thumb, right below the nail bed. I’d noticed it before, but I’d never asked where it came from. I bet Kim knew.

“I think the Miss Manners center of my brain is having a little seizure over it,” I said.

“Would it help if I reminded you that she and I have been separated for almost four years, and that she was seeing other men a long time before you and I fell into bed together?”

“It couldn’t hurt.”

“We’ve been separated for almost four—”

I nudged against him, feigning annoyance. Then I smiled.

“Look,” he said. “If it’s too awkward, we don’t have to go.”

“Of course we have to go,” I said.

“Whatever you pick, I’ll back your play,” he said.

I leaned into him with a sigh. He smelled of soap and clean hair and the small, elusive scent that was just him.

“You break the news to the troops?” I asked.

“Now or in the morning.”

“It’ll wait,” I said.

“All right, then.”

One of the nice things about dating men who are past their twenties: snuggling for the sake of snuggling becomes an option. Even on a cot.

In the morning, I told Trevor we were going to cut things short and popped up my travel-site bookmarks. The way I saw it, we had three options: a direct flight in coach that lasted around five hours, a first-class flight that went seven hours with a twenty-minute layover in Denver, or wait until next week. My own mental calculus said that this week was better than next, and big seats at the front of the plane beat tiny little seats in the back.

The big drawback was my irrational unease about Denver itself. I hadn’t been back, even just to pass through the airport, since Uncle Eric had been murdered by a rider cult called the Invisible College. And while we had finished Eric’s work—killing the cult leader, breaking his magical influence, and scattering the Invisible College to the winds—it had nearly killed me at least twice. Aubrey had had to use the Oath of the Abyss, a magic so raw and destructive it had taken a year off his life, just to get me through my first brush with a rider. Ex and Kim had barely managed to keep an evil wizard from pitching me off a skyscraper. Just breathing Colorado air seemed risky. They say that lightning never strikes the same place twice, but I had the feeling that was because no place survives being struck. Leaning against lightning rods seemed dangerous, even if the sky looked blue.

But living in a world of possessing spirits, magic, wizards and werewolves, and vampires didn’t make me a superstitious nut. I booked the flight to Chicago through Denver, leaving Missoula just after noon, and put it on my nifty American Express black card just as Aubrey and Chogyi Jake came down the stairs, packed bags in hand. We loaded into the rented minivan, said our last good-byes to Trevor, and started back to civilization.

I rode shotgun, Chogyi Jake and Ex in the backseat, Aubrey driving. The same configuration as always. Behind us, Trevor’s private boot camp turned into just another swath of trees preparing themselves for an autumn that wasn’t quite here yet. The winding gravel road that led out to state highway 83 shuddered under our wheels and left a low cloud of white dust behind us.

“Well,” Chogyi Jake said, not looking up from his laptop and our still-in-progress wiki. “According to the lawyer’s documents, you have a condominium in Chicago.”

“You’re sounding tentative,” I said.

“It has two of Eric’s annotations.”

“What kind?” Ex asked.

“It was listed in the Lisbon papers with YNTH and DC1,” Chogyi Jake said.

“And do we know what he meant by those?” Aubrey asked.

“No, we don’t. Except that the only other DC1 entry was the place in Los Angeles.”

I groaned. The Los Angeles property with the DC1 annotation had been a royal pain. A converted warehouse in a bad section of the city, it had undocumented locks on every gate, extra dead bolts on the steel doors, and a system of wards and countermeasures that would have made the place impossible to get into at all if they’d been at full strength. But since Eric’s death, no one had been around to do the upkeep, and so working together, Chogyi Jake, Ex, and Aubrey had been able to untangle that knot in six twelve-hour days. And I’d spent a small fortune on locksmiths.

“There are four other YNTH entries,” Chogyi Jake said, “but we haven’t been to any of them yet.”

Since I’d put the three guys on my payroll a year ago, most of our time had gone into trying to make sense of Eric’s world. The list of properties he owned—that I owned—was pages long even if you single-spaced it. After we’d left Denver, we’d gone to Santa Fe; New Haven; New York; London; Athens (the one in Greece, not the one in Georgia); New Orleans; Savannah (but only briefly); Eugene, Oregon; Los Angeles; Barstow, California; Tulsa; Lisbon, Portugal; Gdansk, Poland (for a day and a half); Shiprock, New Mexico; and Bangor, Maine. We’d also taken a two-week vacation in Portland, Oregon, specifically because my uncle hadn’t had anything there that we needed to explore, catalog, or decipher. All in all, it made for seventeen locations in thirteen months, with the contents of each place cataloged—books, objects, the contents of storage facilities, the names of people we found who had known or worked with him. We’d made a good dent, I thought, but even once we got the whole list of things, there would be years of work after that making sense of it all.

Half the time it felt like a permanent occult Christmas with new surprises every day. The other half, I was just overwhelmed.

“I’ll call my lawyer as soon as we get to Missoula,” I said. “She’ll probably have keys and information.”

“Not that they helped in Los Angeles,” Ex said.

“If it’s another high-security site, that’ll be a good thing, right?” Aubrey said. “I mean, then we’ll know what DC1 means.”

“By small steps, we achieve wisdom,” Ex said in a voice that made me think he was quoting someone. Probably ironically.

AS IF the universe knew that Denver made me uncomfortable, the layover took two hours longer than it was supposed to, the second leg of the flight delayed by bad weather in Missouri. The four of us ate a long lunch of pizza and salads at the Wolfgang Puck Express, then scattered to kill time in the shops. Retail therapy—usually one of my first resorts—wasn’t working; I felt like a cat that smelled pit bull. After fifteen minutes, I gave up, headed back to our gate, and fidgeted there instead. I tried meditating, focusing the vital energy called qi in my belly and slowly pulling it up my body. But as I did, my mind kept wandering back to the reasons Chogyi Jake and Ex had taught me this kind of little magic. Like being hunted by cults of evil wizards who could disguise themselves with cantrips or fighting spiritual parasites hidden inside apparently normal people. My focus was for crap.

I tried crowd watching. And then giving my attention to the constant babble of news on the televisions in the concourse. And then going to the bathroom and washing my hands and face. When I got back out, Chogyi Jake was sitting in the plastic chair with one of those Mylar bags of Cracker Jacks. I plopped down at his side, and he tipped the bag toward me. I took a handful. The popcorn’s okay, but I’ve always been a sucker for the caramel peanuts. Something about the salty and the sweet together. The white noise of voices and rattling roll-away suitcases and incomprehensible, garbled PA announcements gave us a kind of privacy.

“All well?” I said.

“Well enough,” Chogyi Jake said. “You?”

“Got a little too much extraneous stuff on my plate,” I said. “But I’ll pull it together. I’m fine.”

The slightest of all possible frowns touched his brow as he popped another cluster of popcorn and sugar into his mouth.

“I’m sorry that the training didn’t go better,” he said.

“Yeah, well. It was worth a shot,” I said. “We can go back later, maybe. For you guys, at least.”

“I’m not particularly concerned with us,” he said.

“You’re worried about me? I’m the one who flipped Trevor the Ninja King into his own wall. I appear to be fine.”

“That’s what concerns me,” he said. “After all we’ve done, there’s still nothing that tells us what protections Eric placed on you. What the parameters were.”

“How to change the oil. When to rotate the tires,” I said.

This was a conversation we’d had before. Magic fades. If we didn’t figure out what exactly Uncle Eric had done, sooner or later it would go away. Probably when it was under stress. Like in the middle of a fight when something was trying to kill me.

“I don’t know what else to do,” I said. “We’re looking, right? We’ve found a lot of stuff. We’ll find more. Maybe we’ll get the part that tells us what’s the right kind of juju. Maybe we won’t. But—”

“But you took us to Trevor so that you could build defenses of your own,” Chogyi Jake said. “Something you understood and controlled. Only the attempt failed.”

From anyone else, it would have stung. If Chogyi Jake had a superpower, it was that he could say things that should have hurt and make them seem like they were just more information. He would have made someone an excellent mother.

“It did,” I said. “I don’t know that it was a bad idea, though.”

“It wasn’t. It seems absolutely the right impulse.”

“And yet,” I said, rooting through his bag for another peanut, “here I am going into fieldwork without actually following through on it.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think I have an option,” I said. “Even if it wasn’t Kim, I don’t see how I can wait until I’m ready for everything before I try doing anything.”

“I understand that.”

“Then what are you telling me?”

“Be aware of what you are. Of what your limitations are. Respect them.”

“You know, that’s really vague.”

Chogyi Jake took a deep breath, letting it out slowly through his teeth. He let his head fall back until he was staring at the ceiling. Behind us, an older woman was scolding a little boy in a loud, grating voice. A pack of five Japanese kids in matching black outfits hurried past, staring at the gate numbers. I took another handful of popcorn and sugar, and I waited.

“I do know,” he said.

“I can try not to count on things I don’t understand, but it isn’t like I’ve been swaggering around looking for trouble. I don’t think of myself as the badass warrior princess whatever.”

He nodded, but I could tell he didn’t quite mean it.

“When I was eighteen,” he said, “I was living in a two-bedroom apartment in South Carolina with five other people. We were taking a lot of drugs, so we were very hesitant to call the landlord if something was wrong. For instance, there was a raised patio outside with a split in the railing. We all knew about it. We respected it. But we were junkies. It wasn’t something we cared about. And it was solid enough. Strong enough. Reliable enough. I knew it was untrustworthy, but every time I leaned against it, it supported me. Every time I put something heavy on the rail—just for a moment, of course, because I knew it was broken—it held.”

“Until it didn’t, right?”

“But by then, I trusted it. Yes, I knew better, but all my experience had trained me to believe otherwise. It was classical conditioning,” he said. “You have won every fight you’ve been in. Even when it ended with you in the hospital, you’ve won. Those successes have an effect. They teach you that you can succeed, and that Eric’s protections are reliable. And you’ll be right. Until you aren’t.”

A man got on the speakers, announcing with mushy consonants that our flight would be boarding in half an hour and thanking us for our patience. Chogyi Jake ate the last of his snack, crumpled the bag, and tossed it neatly into a garbage can four seats down.

“What happened?” I asked.

He shook his head, asking a question with the gesture.

“When the rail broke,” I said. “What happened?”

“I fell over. The patio was only raised by a few inches, and we had a lawn. I didn’t get hurt.”

I laughed. I didn’t know why I’d expected something dark and tragic, but I had. Chogyi Jake’s constant smile took on a rueful cast. Far down the concourse, I caught sight of Ex and Aubrey walking together. Ex was moving his hands in short, sharp gestures while he spoke. Aubrey’s head was canted toward him, listening intently. Despite the fact that Aubrey was my acknowledged lover and Ex his unacknowledged rival, the two of them got along well. Or maybe not despite. Maybe it was because we all recognized the tension but didn’t talk about it that they both made the extra effort. Whatever it was, it worked.

“Look,” I said, “I can try to be careful. Not push my limits. But since I don’t know exactly where my limits are, the only way I can find out for sure is to go too far.”

“That’s what Eric did,” Chogyi Jake said. “He went to the limit of his ability, and past it, and the Invisible College killed him.”

My stomach went a little tighter.

“Yeah, okay,” I said. “So I shouldn’t do that.”

“Not if you can help it.”

THE FLIGHT into O’Hare was ugly. The storm front that had delayed our flight in the first place left enough turbulence behind it to shake the airplane like a terrier. The sun set behind us, and the clouds far below glittered and flashed with lightning. Even in the first-class cabin, people were feeling testy and miserable, myself included. Aubrey, beside me, seemed to be asleep, but there was a green cast to his skin and his hands were balled into fists. My own stomach was unsteady, and I turned away the meal the flight attendants offered.

I knew I had a style. A set of habits that I fell into, time after time. I rushed in where angels feared to tread as a matter of course. I’d done it when I burned my bridges at home and gone to a secular university. I’d done it when I’d gotten involved with my first real lover and his friends, and again when I left for Denver after that all fell apart. I hadn’t known what I was doing when I went against the Invisible College. When we’d gotten into the mess that had been New Orleans, it had been me in the lead, charging ahead without knowing what I was charging into.

But this was different. It was Kim, who knew a lot about riders and possession to begin with. Ex and Aubrey and Chogyi Jake were all with me. And if I didn’t have a set plan, it was only because the idea was to go there first, and then see what the situation was. This time, it was different.

The captain’s voice blatted through the airplane. The flight attendants scurried.

We began our descent.