Vicious Grace

Page 5

“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.
THREE
There had been a time not that long ago when MapQuest printouts had been part of my routine. The GPS was better. Rain was still coming down hard, and traffic on the highway was thicker and faster than I liked. The cheerful little map glowed in the dashboard, encouraging us on, making the city around us seem like a known quantity. The skyscrapers of Chicago glittered and glowed through the storm, towers of gold and darkness. We got off at Division Street, heading east. The low brick buildings seemed to crowd the street, leaning in toward us, and gray-white rain flowed angrily in the gutters. We followed the GPS directions, and the buildings we passed grew taller, the bars more like places college kids went when they wanted to be edgy. Then banks and restaurants. A Starbucks. My head had been filled with the stories I knew about Chicago—Al Capone and Millennium Field, Buddy Guy and deep-dish pizza. I’d never been here before, and looking out at the same corporate coffee joint I’d been to in every city I’d seen, I felt like I’d driven through someplace—some real, genuine Chicago—and wound up at a convention center. I half wanted to turn back.
And then, the city ended. Between rain, darkness, and the four intervening lanes of I-41, I couldn’t see Lake Michigan itself, but the darkness was sudden and extreme. Aubrey turned us north at the GPS’s gentle, vaguely British suggestion, and the world on our right was towering electric light, glass, and concrete and on our left, blackness. I’d never lived on the water, and the contrast made me jumpy. Or maybe I was already jumpy, and it was just something to latch on to.
The building we wanted looked like a hotel. Pale stone rose over twenty stories above us, lights glowing in over half the windows. Black-barked trees rose up the sides, their canopy covering the street and making the bulk of the building behind them seem even larger. The GPS announced that we had arrived. From the backseat, Ex whistled low.
“We’re sure this is the right place?” I asked.
“I think so,” Aubrey said, squinting past a parked FedEx truck as he drove. “Anyone see an address?”
“This thing’s half the block,” Ex said. “Let’s park and find a security guard to ask.”
“Right,” Aubrey said. “Anyone see where we park?”
We circled the block twice, pulling in at a locked loading dock and then back out again before a figure darted out from the sidewalk. A brown-haired man in a suit and tie waved tentatively, and Aubrey paused, rolling down the window. The blast of air smelled of rain and cold.
“Jayné Heller?” the man asked, pronouncing it Jane.
I raised my hand.
“I’m Harlan. Harlan Jeffers. I work for the building management,” he said with a smile, as the rain dripped down his cheek. “Your lawyer wanted me to meet you. Sorry if I’m late.”
“Where do we park?” Aubrey asked. Harlan pointed him to a bush-camouflaged ramp and handed us a radio passkey before stepping back and promising to meet us inside. We turned the car down the ramp and around a sharp corner. A wide steel gate slid open before us, and we went in.
The lobby of the building belonged in an architectural magazine. Gentle archways of butter-colored marble rose and fell all along a wide central court, and a fountain of black basalt in the center had water sheeting down the stone as if spouting up in the air would be too nouveau riche. Classical music played through hidden speakers like Muzak’s grown-up, sophisticated sister. The smell of rain wasn’t completely gone, but it was lessened. I more than half expected the security guard to stop us and ask for our papers. My traveling T-shirt and jeans seemed about as appropriate as an evening gown in a mosh pit. But Harlan appeared again, his hair slicked by the rain and his smile almost painfully eager to please. I wondered how much he knew about us, or if my lawyer had just put the fear of God into him by implication. She had that knack.