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  Vicious Grace

  ( Black Sun's Daughter - 3 )

  M.L.N. Hanover

  When you're staring evil in the eye, don't forget to watch your back . . .

  For the first time in forever, Jayné Heller's life is making sense. Even if she routinely risks her life to destroy demonic parasites that prey on mortals, she now has friends, colleagues, a trusted lover, and newfound confidence in the mission she inherited from her wealthy, mysterious uncle. Her next job might just rob her of all of them. At Grace Memorial Hospital in Chicago, something is stirring. Patients are going AWOL and research subjects share the same sinister dreams. Half a century ago, something was buried under Grace in a terrible ritual, and it's straining to be free. Jayné is primed to take on whatever's about to be let loose. Yet the greatest danger now may not be the huge, unseen force lurking below, but the evil that has been hiding in plain sight all along — taking her ever closer to losing her body, her mind, and her soul. . . .

  Vicious Grace

  (The third book in the Black Sun's Daughter series)

  A novel by M L N Hanover

  To Sigrid Drusse

  Acknowledgments

  I would once again like to thank Jayné Franck for the use of her name; my editor, Jennifer Heddle, for her attention and support; and my agents, Shawna McCarthy and Danny Baror, for making this project possible. And also Carrie Vaughn, whose friendship and intellectual company have made this a more interesting book.

  PROLOGUE

  Kim arrived at the fMRI suite twenty minutes later than she’d intended. It was in a wing of the hospital she rarely passed through, and late at night, there were few people to ask for directions. As she swiped her card through the passkey protection, she had a sense of being tardy for class. The doors opened silently onto a long, empty corridor. Only one in three lights glowed, giving the space a sense of twilight and darkness. The smell of antiseptic and electricity seemed to cover something deep and earthy. The closed doors of the individual rooms couldn’t quite shut out the clanks and thumps of the machines. A man in a white coat much like her own leaned out of a door halfway down the hall, his eyebrows raised and his mouth set in a scowl.

  “I’m here for Dr. Oonishi,” she said, and his scowl shifted into something odd—relief, perhaps? Anticipation?

  “You must be Kim,” the man said, waving her forward. “I’m Mohammed. He’s in his office. He said to send you back as soon as you came.”

  Kim forced a tight smile and nodded curtly. She knew her reputation in the hospital and at the university, and she more than half expected this all to be a prank. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had seen fit to make fun of the kook, and Kichirou Oonishi had a reputation of his own. Media appearances, popular books, combative letters in the journals, appearances before Congress. Large grants for flashy, headline-grabbing research. He had a lot of pull in the academic hierarchy, and his sense of humor wasn’t to be trusted.

  But even if she was walking into her own private Punk’d moment, she would see the research in progress. That was worth something. And she trusted that she could maintain her dignity. God knew she had enough practice at that.

  Oonishi’s office could have belonged to an accountant. Desk, filing cabinet, worn carpet with old stains, the smell of stale coffee. Only the sixty-inch touch-screen monitor on the wall hinted at the grant money behind the project. Oonishi leaned on the desk, his gaze flickering over the computer screen. Six individual panes were open on it, each showing confused jumbles of grainy black-and-white images. A seventh pane spooled green characters on a black background too quickly for her to process. The wallpaper image behind it all was Oonishi shaking hands with a former president.

  He glanced up at her and then back to the screen. His face wasn’t rugged so much as cragged, and the white at his temples made Kim feel younger than she was. Or at least less qualified.

  “So,” Oonishi said, without preamble, “you understand how all this works?”

  Kim crossed her arms.

  “It isn’t in my area of expertise, but I imagine that I understand the theory. At least as well as you understand parasites,” she said.

  He blinked at her. The light from the monitor blued his skin and deadened his eyes.

  “I don’t know shit about parasites,” he said. The matter-of-fact tone might have meant anything: that her work was beneath him, that she wasn’t expected to understand his experiments, or that even a mind as broad and deep as his own had its limits. Kim took a deep breath. If it was all a joke, the best thing she could do was be gracious. Kill him with kindness and let him look like the asshole.

  “Fair enough,” she said. “I know a little about what you’re doing here. I read your article about the Miywaki study. Computational neuroimaging. Using blood flow to specific parts of the early visual cortex to reconstruct observed images.”

  “Yeah,” Oonishi said, his gaze shifting back to the flickering screens. “The bitch of it is the neo-cortex isn’t all one-way streets, you know? There’s more neurons feeding up to it from the deeper parts of the brain than there are coming in from the eyes. We don’t have a baseline for that feedback, so that’s what I’m looking at. What visual activity you get when there’s no conscious direction or sensory input.”

  “Watching people’s dreams,” Kim said.

  Oonishi shifted his shoulders, an impatient expression ghosting across his face. It wasn’t, apparently, a description he liked. Never mind that it was accurate.

  “It’s not as hard as it sounds. We spent a few months with the subjects doing standardizing studies. Seeing which regions fired when the subject saw particular lines in particular parts of their visual fields. Building up functional maps. Then when they’re asleep, we see what’s firing, and use the maps to put the puzzle back together. Simple. Worst part was finding people who can sleep in an fMRI machine. Bastards are loud. And the subjects can’t move. But . . .”

  He pointed to the screen. The gray, grainy images on the monitor flickered and danced. For a moment, a face appeared in one, openmouthed and distinctly feminine despite image resolution so blocky as to approach the abstract. Another showed something that might have been a house with a wide staircase rising up to the door. The image flickered, replaced by something that was clearly a moving object, but too blurred for Kim to make out.

  A little thrill passed through her at peeking into another person’s private world. The theory was interesting enough, but the experience had a dose of voyeurism more powerful than she’d expected. And more than that, the sense of witnessing something . . . not miraculous. Better than miraculous. Something unexpected and reproducible. Standing witness as the limits of human knowledge changed. If it had been in her own field, she might have fought with a little professional jealousy. As it was, she started running down how Oonishi’s machines could be adapted for measuring parasitic behavioral modifications. She’d almost forgotten the man was in the room with her when he spoke again.

  “You’re looking at five years of my life. I’ve got twenty graduate students who have put their hearts and souls into this research. They’re betting their careers on this.”

  “It’s good work,” Kim said. “Very impressive.”

  Oonishi shook his head. He pressed his lips so tight, they all but vanished. The silence in the room was fragile. Kim felt a little clench in her belly. If this was a joke, the setup would begin here. She had to stay on her guard. Oonishi tapped on the huge screen, closing the dusty windows into the sleepers’ minds.

  “Look at this,” he said, tapping an icon and resizing the resulting window with a sweep of his fingers. Again, six windows flickered. The time stamp in the corner said September 4. A little more than a week earlier. A bare breast app
eared in one of the screens, almost startling in its detail.

  “Subject three,” Oonishi said, smiling at her reaction. “We can always tell when he’s been watching porn.”

  “Tell me that isn’t why you asked me here.”

  “It’s not,” Oonishi said. “Here. Now. Watch.”

  The six screens shifted. A cooling fan within the computer kicked on, as much hiss as hum. Kim’s neck began to ache, just at the base of her skull. All six images shuddered at once, and then synchronized. Not perfectly, but almost so, like six cameras trained on the same object. In the blocky gray scale, it could have been anything roughly rectilinear—a box, a machine, a coffin—set into a lighter gray. Black, with strong lines. In each screen, the thing cracked, arcs of whiteness pouring out. The lighter gray around the opening lid shifted like soil. Dark earth. Kim’s breath was suddenly ragged, her heartbeat faster than it should have been.

  The box burst open, light pouring out of it. What color was it, she wondered. Had they dreamed this as the clarifying yellow-blue of dawn? The red and gold of sunset? There was something inside the light. She had the impression of a forest of glasslike teeth, an eye, a hand with fingers splayed and proportions out of true. The screens fluttered, shifted, and fell out of sync. A moment later, they were all different again, each mind on its own, individual journey. Oonishi stopped the playback.

  It was a trick. She couldn’t let herself fall for it.

  “Interesting,” Kim said. “Data corruption?”

  “I’ve been through the data streams. They’re all fine.”

  “Well, it’s clearly some kind of equipment failure,” Kim said. “Unless you mean to suggest that all your subjects magically started sharing the same dream.”

  She let it hang in the air between them. Even if all of his research assistants were secretly recording the exchange, an upload link to YouTube standing by, Kim was not going to come off looking like the idiot. Let him come to her.

  “You have,” Oonishi began, “something of a reputation for—”

  “I got drunk at a Christmas party four years ago,” Kim said. “I said some things that have been wildly misinterpreted.”

  “Do you believe in spirits?”

  “I am a research scientist. Maybe not in a field with as much respect and clout as yours, but I’m not some kind of crystal-humping, incense-burning new age fake. No matter what you may have heard.” Her face felt hot, her throat thick with an anger she hadn’t expected. She swallowed, cursing herself for rising to the bait, even that much.

  “Then you don’t believe,” Oonishi said.

  Kim gave herself a moment before she spoke. She had to keep better control.

  “I believe there are many, many things we haven’t figured out yet,” she said, pushing back a stray lock of hair. “If no one ever came across evidence that didn’t fit theory, I wouldn’t have a job.”

  The concession softened Oonishi’s expression. He sat on his desk, leaning over his own knees. His feet didn’t reach the floor, and his heels tapped against the side of the desk. Kim had a brief, powerful image of what the man would have looked like as a young boy sitting in a chair too big for him. When he spoke, his voice was low, almost a whisper.

  “If I have . . . artifacts like that when I publish, the best thing that will happen is Boaris and Estrahaus at Stanford will accuse me of faking the data. My career will be destroyed. And not just mine. Every coresearcher on the project will be guilty by association. Their careers will be over before they’ve begun,” he said. And then, slowly, as if each word cost him, “I’m in trouble here.”

  Cold and dread filled Kim’s belly. He looked lost. He looked empty.

  It wasn’t a prank.

  “Show me again,” she said.

  Oonishi rose, tabbed back the playback, and they watched again. The dark box, more than half buried. The uncovering. The flashing, pouring light. Teeth. That misshapen hand. Kim found she’d pressed her fingers to her mouth without realizing she’d done so. Oonishi stopped the flow of images.

  “I know you’ve caught some hell for talking about this kind of thing,” he said, his voice very careful, preemptively apologetic. “But can you help me?”

  “I can’t,” Kim said. And a moment later, “But I know someone.”

  ONE

  I lay as flat as I could on the carpet of old pine needles, my rifle hugged close against my cheek. The world smelled of soil and gun oil and sweat. I kept my breath soft, my hands steady. In the crosshairs, Chogyi Jake crouched beside a huge pine tree, one hand on the rough bark to steady himself. He had a rifle of his own, held low against one hip. The sun was setting behind me. If he looked in my direction, the light would dazzle him. From my perspective, it was like God was shining a spotlight on him. The targeting site magnified his familiar face. To someone who didn’t know him, who hadn’t spent over a year day-in, day-out in his company, he might have looked fine. To me, he radiated the same physical exhaustion I felt. I let the crosshairs drift down to his body. Shoot for the center of mass, I told myself. Go for the biggest target.

  Gently, I put my finger on the trigger. I breathed out as I squeezed. My rifle coughed, and a wide swath of bark two feet above Chogyi Jake’s head bloomed neon green. He looked up at it, and then out toward me with an expression that said Really? That was your best shot? just as three sharp impacts drilled into my side. Baby blue splotches marked my autumn-leaves camouflage fatigues. Aubrey’s color. I rolled onto my back and said something crude.

  “Okay, Miss Heller,” Trevor said in my earpiece. He always called me Miss Heller instead of Jayné. I had the impression that even after he’d heard it pronounced correctly—zha-nay—he was afraid he’d refer to me as Jane or Janie. “I think we’re calling it a day.”

  I fumbled with the mic. Somewhere in the exercise, I’d pushed it down around my collarbone.

  “Got it,” I said. “I’ll see you back at the cabin.”

  I lay there for a moment, the wide Montana sky looking down at me through the trees. The setting sun turned a few stray wisps of cloud rose and gold. The ground under me felt soft, and the sting of the paintballs faded. A breeze set the pines rippling with a sound like something immense talking very gently. I thought that if I closed my eyes, I could fall asleep right there and dream until the bears woke up next spring. My muscles felt like putty.

  I felt wonderful.

  I’d gotten Trevor Donnagan’s name from a cop friend of mine in Boulder. He’d said that Trevor was hands-down the best place to go if you absolutely, positively had to train yourself into a killing machine in the minimum possible time. A former Green Beret and five or six different kinds of black belt, Trevor had spent the better part of his life meditating on how to dislocate joints, shatter bones, and immobilize bad guys without having the same happen to him. His cabin sat on eight square miles of fenced-off woodland, and he was charging me enough for a month of private, intensive training to pay for eight more. Considering the shape my life had taken in the last year, it was cheap.

  I’d been coming up on my twenty-third birthday when my uncle Eric died. I went to Denver knowing that I’d been named his executor. I didn’t know that I was also his sole heir, or that he had more money than some small countries. Or that he’d made his fortune as a kind of spiritual fixer, dealing with any number of parasitic things from just outside reality that could take over people’s minds and bodies and do magic a thousand times more powerful than a normal person could manage. Vampires, werewolves, shape-shifting demons. The generic term was rider.

  Now I was almost a month into twenty-four, and several times in the past year, my learning curve had approached vertical.

  Aubrey walked up from my left. I knew from the sound of his footsteps that he was at least as tired as I was. I turned my head. His camouflage was smeared with Day-Glo yellow over his right shoulder and left hip, meaning that Ex had gotten the drop on him at least once during the day. His sandy hair stood at ten different angles, and a smear of
mud darkened one cheek. I raised my left hand. He took it and hauled me up to my feet. I followed through, collapsing against him a little, my forehead resting in the comfortable curve where his shoulder met his neck. I felt his chuckle as much as heard it.

  “I have never been this tired in my life,” he said, threading his arm around me. “I’m getting too old for this.”

  “Poor ancient man,” I said. “Can’t keep up with his bouncing baby girlfriend.”

  “My poor childlike sweetie looks like she could use some rest too.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, leaning against him a little more. “Just lulling you into a sense of safety.”

  “Besides, I’m not that old.”

  “Men’s physical peak is, like, twenty-five,” I said. “You’re ten years past that. Your teeth should start falling out any minute now.”

  “You keep me young,” he said with a mock sourness, and spun me back toward the east and our walk to Trevor’s cabin. The sun blazed on the horizon, glowing like a fire among the trees. The shadows of the low, rolling hills splashed against the landscape, and the green and yellow of the cottonwood trees nearest the cabin standing out against the evergreen pine. It was at least a half-mile walk, down a long, gentle slope to the path that curled around to the north. We walked together, our rifles slung over our shoulders, our paint-stained uniforms glowing in the twilight like we were veterans of the battle of Playskool Ridge. The wind cooled. The sky faded from blue to gray, darkness creeping up the eastern sky. Missoula was an hour-and-a-half drive away, and not even a smudge of backsplash on the nighttime clouds.

  The cabin itself was two stories of stained wood and black iron with a wide, flat expanse on one end like a military parade ground and a barn in the back that was really a gym and dojo unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Our rented minivan squatted beside a dusty three-quarter-ton pickup truck. His bumper stickers suggested Trevor was unlikely to vote for a Democrat. Inside, warm, thick air carried the scents of curry and fry bread. A sudden near-raging hunger hollowed my stomach. Trevor stood in the doorway to the kitchen, nearly blocking out the light behind him. The man was built like a refrigerator.