Vicious Grace (24 page)

When I was about twelve, I had a long run of nightmares. The recurring dreams didn’t have the same action or even the same people or things, but they did share locations. An abandoned factory with Hell underneath it was one. A flooded school building. A network of tiny little crawlways underground so cramped and tight that my legs would get caught sometimes when I tried to squirm around a corner.

And then there was the desert.

Seeing it again now was like going back to my old grade school: familiar and foreign at the same time. The wide, dark horizon, the pale hardpack of stones and pebbles, the drifts of sand. A gritty wind pressed against my skin, hot as breath. I’d been here before, and it had always been with a sense of awe and fear that I’d called a visit from the devil. I was naked, and sitting down. The stones were smooth and hard against my legs. I wanted badly to stand up. I tried, strained, but the effort was infinite, and even though I felt myself moving, I never rose up. The other me (my childhood nightmares often involved having two copies of myself) wanted to sit, and no matter what I thought, it was going to sit.

Above me, or possibly us, thin clouds skittered past something that wasn’t the sun or the moon: a pale disk that radiated something besides heat or light. Purification. The desert was pure. That was what made it terrible. It was also my home. I was waiting for something, holding the line. I was insisting that the devil visit me. With the logic of dream, I could also see myself as if from a great distance. A girl not more than thirteen with my black hair, but a serene expression that properly belonged to the other me. I tried to call to her, to tell her to run, that it was coming, but my voice didn’t carry over the susurrus of wind and sand.

Something happened, deep and resonant as a church organ striking a chord. I didn’t hear it as much as feel it, and the panic started me scampering. The body sitting on the sand didn’t move, and I willed myself back into it, even though I’d also never left. The dark, luminous sky peeled back, and something inconceivably huge looked down at me. The enemy. The thing I’d been waiting for. I was standing now, and it was before me. It was two things at the same time. On one hand, it was a good-looking young man with razor-cut hair and dark eyes. He wore a suit cut like something from a forties movie and a fedora, and I knew that the fabric was made from raw silk and the dreams of mad children. His expression was amused and kind. And on the other hand, it was a monstrosity, translucent, vast, constantly in motion, and made up of millions of evil-looking beasts like those deep-sea fish that unlucky sailors sometimes pull up in their nets. These two different aspects of the thing didn’t compete with each other; it was just both things at the same time. I knew when it smiled that I hated it. And what was more, I knew it hated me.

The desert was a vast, dark ocean now. The water pressed against me, crushing and cold. The rider smiled toward but not at me, its eyes unfocused. Slowly, it spread its long, weirdly jointed hands, as if it was asking me something. I wanted to answer, but I knew like I was remembering something that I couldn’t speak first. It was a trap. I waited. The school of monstrous fish shuddered and spun in its cold ocean, annoyed that the trick had failed.

“I can’t see you,” it said. “But I know you’re here. I can smell your skin. You were my slave once.” It took off its fedora, combed back a lock of hair with its strange fingers, and put the hat back on. “You know what happens to bad slaves.”

“We haven’t met,” both of my selves said together. It started at the sound of my voices, its fish-school body glittering silver and spinning wildly. It was trying to find me.
You’re hard to see
, I told myself.
That’s your protection. Try not to touch it
.

“Who are you?” it asked.

“I am my mother’s daughter,” I said, but I meant that I was Eric’s niece. The rider understood.

“Why are you here?” it asked. “You wanted to see me now that the tables have turned? Is that it? You want to gloat?”

“I can set you free,” I said, and my voice seemed small and singular. The man looked at me, his gaze passing through me like a blind man’s. The icy water surged invisibly around me, stroking my skin like an unwanted caress. “I know where the blood is that will open the box. I am the only one who can release you. Or I can leave you where you are forever.”

“I’m listening,” it said.

“What can you offer me?” my small voice said. I sounded like a child pretending to negotiate with a pack of wolves.

“I can give you the world,” it said, as if the world were something it owned already and was willing to part with.

“Not enough,” I said.

Its laughter was the chittering of a million fish teeth.

“I can kill for you,” it said. “I can bind for you. Enter into pact with me, daughter-thing, and I will bring you the Graveyard Child in a box and a bow. I will bring you the Angel Chesed. I will do again what once I did to your mother, and place you on the throne where I sat.”

Some part of me was tempted. I didn’t know what its words meant, but I wanted what it offered like I wanted air and love and petty revenge against everyone who’d ever pissed me off. I almost reached out to it. I almost took its hand, but at the last moment, I pulled back.

“Who are you,” I said, “to offer me these things?”

“I am the Beast Rahab.” Its voice was growing louder, deeper, ringing around me like a church bell and buzzing like a swarm of wasps. “I am Legion, Ravens of the Burning God.”

The words were meaningless to me, but images rode on the syllables. A huge bull lying on its side in a barren field, screwfly maggots eating its living flesh. A blue-skinned baby held to a wailing mother’s breast. A line of naked men with machetes and guns driving their powerless victims over a cliff. All temptation was gone, and in its place, a vast and intimate grief. Here was the thing I’d come to see, to talk with. Here was my unspoken question, answered.

If something was tempted by the rider, it wasn’t me. The thing trapped under Grace Memorial was raw evil, and there was no cause noble enough to justify giving it freedom. My world collapsed quietly, no one aware of the fact except the two of me. My uncle Eric, whom I loved, who watched out for me, who gave me everything, couldn’t have been negotiating with this thing and been the man I thought he was. The man I wanted him to have been.

And as soon as that was clear, everything else shifted. Oonishi said we see what we expect. The other thing is we ignore what we don’t expect. Eric had worked with Midian Clark, the vampire. Mait Carrefour, the body-hopping serial killer. He’d hidden who he really was and what he really did from everyone I trusted. He’d used magic to get Kim into bed. I’d pushed it aside or pretended it didn’t matter because it didn’t fit with what I expected to see, and I’d talked Aubrey, Chogyi Jake, and Ex into digging in to do Eric’s work with me.

We were the bad guys.

“I,” the rider said, “am Daevanam Daeva, Angel of Shells!”

“Yeah?” I said. “Well, I’m Jayné Heller, and I think you
suck
.”

In an instant, all pretense of negotiation vanished. With a roar, the rider’s fish-school body scattered, expanding out in all directions. Its human body, face distorted with rage, swung at me blindly. I drew back, my dream body moving with inhuman grace, but the rider’s outstretched fingers brushed my arm. It knew where I was. I tried to push it away, but the long-fingered hands wrapped around me, pushing me back. I felt myself stumble. The pale, gape-mouthed fish were all around me, their collective mass hanging above me like a mountain. I pulled into myself, folding into fetal position while phantom teeth ripped at my back and shoulders, legs and thighs. The rider’s will pushed at me, crushing me. Fear and grief and the terrible presentiment of my own death swirled in my mind. I started to scream, and the rider forced itself in, flooding my mouth and nose, filling my lungs. I was drowning in it. I tried to dig it out of my mouth with my fingers.

And then, in the middle of my panic, I became calm. I didn’t try to breathe. Instead, I found my belly and concentrated on the feeling of warmth there. I drew my qi—the energy of life and magic—up my spine and into a burning sphere. I felt the rider shudder around me and pressed out, the dark sphere within me widening as I gave up my body. I became perfect, impenetrable. My qi boiled the dark water. The rider surrounded me, scrabbled teeth and claws against me, but found no purchase.

“You’re weak,” I said. “You have been cast into darkness, betrayer, as you deserve.”

I pushed out, and it screamed. For a moment, I saw something. A dark room, deep underground with a shut steel door. The vision retreated, snatched away.

It hadn’t wanted me to see that. I chased after the other thing’s thoughts, shoving myself into the soft, viscous body. It flailed at me, bit, strangled. I caught another glimpse of something. A storage locker, maybe, with an ancient-looking tank of compressed gas, green paint bubbled and flaking off. The word
cyclopropane
popped into my mind, surreal and inappropriate as a pigeon in a fish bowl. The rider pulled away again. We were in the desert.
My
desert. The rider’s silk-and-madness suit was ripped, and seawater blood poured from a cut in his forehead. He grinned, and his mouth was filled with pale, cruel dagger-teeth. His eyes were the empty silver-and-black of fish.

“I am weak,” it said, “but you are young, and I will be strong before you’re old. I am already half free, and you cannot stop me.”

The despair, the grief, the fear and panic and even the calm all shifted. Rage leaped up in their place, and hatred for the thing lying on the desert floor before me. The thing that had taken Eric from me. The thing that had taken Aubrey and broken my little family. Even before I spoke, the rider’s eyes widened, and it jerked its head from side to side as if it was hearing something vast and threatening that it couldn’t quite locate.

“You think I can’t take you?” I screamed. I could actually feel the air rattling in my throat. “You think I can’t
break
you?”

I leaped for it, my hands bent like burning claws. It shrieked and pulled back when I touched it, but I was in my place now. No more frigid oceans for me. Oh no. I cut into it, and a dozen demonic fish shattered into luminous bone and blood. I swung my fist, rolling through the shoulder, and felt the bridge of its nose shatter under my knuckles. It screamed, and there were words in the cry.

Hurry, she’s killing me
.

I hesitated, and in that moment, the rider lashed out, stinging me across the eyes. I yelled, pulled back. I was on the ground, something soft constricting me like a web. My balance was off, and the desert around me suddenly small. I had the hazy sense that the rider was pulling me into its coffin. I smelled something wet, but not oceanic. I pushed myself up, the web ripping. I swung out at it and connected. I heard a gasp of expelled breath, but I was already on my feet and turning fast. My heel hit something with a sound like breaking glass.

A light flared, blinding me. I dropped low and went still. There were shapes in the light, beings moving slowly toward me. A storm raged under my skin, violence and the joy of violence on a hair trigger. I could feel myself grinning so hard it ached. My breath was pumping in and out, roaring in my ears as loud as music.

“Jayné?”

I turned my head toward the voice, ready to attack until something small in the back of my head said
That was Aubrey
. One of the hulking shapes moved toward me, and keeping myself from reaching out and snapping its neck was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. Aubrey swam into focus. His hair was wet, slicked against his scalp. His wide eyes shifted back and forth, and his hands were out before him in a placating gesture. I tried to understand what he was doing in my dream as my eyes adjusted to the light. Kim was behind him, one hand to her mouth like a caricature of surprise. Chogyi Jake stood behind Aubrey, his side toward me and carefully still. Oonishi was beside him, his mouth tight. I looked around me and found all the details of Oonishi’s office in the sleep study unit. The filing cabinet I’d used for a barricade was on its side where the forced door had toppled it. The blanket I’d pulled over me hung in tatters across my shoulders. The huge flat-screen monitor on the wall was shattered, a single impact site radiating cracks to all edges. My backpack chirped, the cell phone letting me know I’d missed a call. Ex lay on the floor, his hands pressed to his solar plexus. He seemed to be having some trouble breathing.

“Um. Are you okay?” I asked Ex, still crouched and ready for a fight.

He rolled onto his side and wheezed softly.

“Jayné?” Aubrey said. “Do you know where you are?”

I nodded. The traces of dream were still around my mind, but they were burning off quickly. I put down my hands.

“In the hospital,” I said. “What . . . what are you doing here?”

“You started shouting,” Oonishi said, his voice tight with poorly concealed outrage. “I couldn’t get into the office, and I didn’t want to explain you to security, so I called your boss.”

I squinted at him. I felt like I ought to know what he was talking about, but
my boss
? Chogyi Jake raised his hand and I remembered. I squatted down beside Ex. His breath was regular, and I thought it was getting deeper. It was hard to be sure. The rage that had filled me in the dream was draining away fast, leaving a shaky near-nausea in its wake. I felt like I’d swum a mile and swallowed too much salt water in the process.

“I tried to call you. When I couldn’t, I got the others,” Chogyi Jake said. “We all came as quickly as we could.”

I looked at the file cabinet. One side was visibly bent in. My idea that it would wake me had been optimistic.

“Sorry,” I said, mostly to Ex and Oonishi, but also to everyone. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“I’m pleased to know it wasn’t the plan,” Oonishi said.

I nodded toward the ruined monitor.

“I can replace that,” I said.

“What were you doing?” Chogyi Jake asked.