Vicious Grace bsd-3 Read online

  “There’s a comforting thought,” I said.

  Chogyi Jake leaned forward in his chair. His fingers laced his knee, and when he spoke, his voice was thoughtful.

  “We’re missing something. What did it feel like?” he asked. I was on the edge of telling him it felt like being the soccer ball at the World Cup when I realized he wasn’t talking to me. Kim brushed back her hair with one hand.

  “Like dreaming,” she said. “I didn’t have the sense of being ridden or out of control. But my logic and reality sort of fell out from under me. Jayné was Jayné, but she was also . . . an outsider? Foreign? Something like that.”

  “A threat,” Chogyi Jake said.

  “Yes, definitely. And one that I recognized,” she said, then frowned and looked down.

  “What is it?” Aubrey asked. Kim looked up at him. I couldn’t read her expression.

  “I can remember it from other perspectives,” she said. “The shift nurse at the station? If I think about it, I know what we looked like through her eyes, Jayné and I both. The big guy who started the trouble? I remember Jayné bumping into me as if I had been him. I can remember it from any perspective until she woke me up.”

  “Even Jayné’s?” Aubrey asked.

  “No. Not hers.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So what does that mean?”

  “It means we don’t know what we’re dealing with,” Ex said.

  The big debate after lunch was how—and whether—to go back for the car. On the one hand, we didn’t know what was going on at the hospital or how far out the danger extended. On the other, it was a rental and it had Kim’s parking permit and some of Ex’s stuff in it. There was the option of hiring a tow truck, but sending a civilian to spring a trap meant for us had some ethical problems.

  Once we agreed to go back, there was the question of whether I should go on the return trip because Eric’s wards and protections would help fight off any assaults or stay behind out of fear that they might be drawing some kind of spiritual attention. In the end, Aubrey and I went for the car, the others staying at the café drinking the muddy coffee and eating baklava. The walk back was shorter than I’d expected. Escaping from Grace into the still-unknown streets of Chicago had given every block an exaggerated distance. I was surprised by how quickly the hospital’s awkward, looming bulk came into view. I kept scanning the other people on the sidewalks, waiting for them to start moving together or breathing in sync.

  A taxi driver to our right leaned hard on his horn, shouting obscenities at the truck that had cut him off. The air smelled of exhaust. Grace Memorial loomed across the street, hundreds of windows catching the light like an insect’s compound eye as we walked briskly past it toward the parking structure. A little shiver crawled up my spine, and I walked faster.

  Aubrey walked with his hands in his pockets and his brow in furrows. I’d seen him like this before—worried, but trying not to talk about it for fear of worrying me. It was a deeply ineffective strategy.

  “Spit it out,” I said. We were stopped at a traffic light, waiting for the signal to cross.

  “It’s nothing. I just wish I’d known Eric better,” he said. “I worked with him on and off for years, and I always . . . I don’t know. Respected his boundaries? Gave him his space? I never pushed to find out things he didn’t want to tell me about. He would have known what this was. Just from what we’ve got now, he’d have known. And I don’t.”

  “Neither does anyone else.”

  “Yeah,” Aubrey said with a rueful smile. “But I’m not responsible for them.”

  “It’ll be fine. We’ll be careful,” I said. And then, “How are you doing with seeing Kim again?”

  “Fine. She’s . . . just the same.”

  “No return of old feelings? Regret about signing the divorce papers?”

  Aubrey’s eyebrows rose, and a small, amused smile tweaked the corners of his mouth.

  “How are you doing seeing Kim again?” he said.

  “Standard insecurity,” I said.

  “You could stop that.”

  “Nope. Don’t think I can. I’m aiming for having a good sense of humor about it.”

  He leaned in, his fingers twining around mine.

  “Jayné,” he said. “You’re great. And I love you. And if you and I weren’t together, I still wouldn’t be with Kim. I think she’s a good person. I enjoy her company, and I admire her intelligence. We have a lot of history, but we broke up for a reason. I’m pretty sure she was seeing someone else, even before she left Denver.”

  A totally different kind of fear bloomed in my chest. It was stupid. Kim’s affair with Eric wasn’t even my secret, except that I knew about it. And still, at that moment I wished I’d spilled her beans a year ago.

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t,” he said. “Not really. It was just the feeling I got. Some unexpected long nights. Some inexplicable crying jags. I knew she was unhappy, and when she decided to leave, I told her it was the right decision.”

  I stopped in the concrete archway. Rows of tightly packed cars stood in the shadows. Aubrey paused, looking back at me.

  “Would you want to know now?” I asked, trying to make it sound hypothetical. “I mean if you could know now what was really going on with her back then, would you want to?”

  “What would the point be? We did what we did,” he said. “And I think we’ve got enough to worry about without hauling all that back from the dead.”

  In the parking garage proper, we had a moment’s panic that the minivan was gone, but as soon as we figured out we were on the wrong level, everything went smoothly. We were back on the streets in a few minutes, and if Aubrey chose a longer, looping route back to the café rather than drive past Grace, I didn’t object.

  I leaned against the door, watching out the window as we drove. Men and women stood or walked along the gray, urban streetscape. It wasn’t as gray and overwhelming as Manhattan had been, but had almost more of a sense of being a living, human city. A black man in a neatly pressed suit drove a sports car alongside us, his eyes on the street ahead even as he talked with a lighter-colored child in the car seat behind him. A painfully thin Asian woman sat at a bus stop, her arms crossed, her mouth set in a scowl. A pack of teenagers in matching black-and-orange uniforms that said Leo Catholic High School held up traffic by running through the crosswalk as the lights changed, bubbling with laughter and shrieking with delight at their danger.

  The city was alive. Almost three million people with lives as complex and intersecting as my own, navigating the daily pulse of rush hour on the 90, the 94, the 290. Riding the elevated trains. Every day, they were eating their dinners and talking with their friends and cheating on their lovers. And in the middle of all this normal, rich, oddly beautiful human life, something was happening. Something at Grace Memorial. And the more I let my mind wander, the more a growing knot in my belly told me it was something very, very bad.

  SIX

  Looking back at my childhood, I couldn’t say my father had done me many favors. The lessons he’d tried to instill in me—things like “never wear a skirt that goes above the ankle” and “Jesus died because kids sneak into movie theaters”—never really took. But that’s not the same as saying I never learned anything from him. Throughout the weird, judgmental, just-barely-repressed Christian rage-fest that was my childhood home, I’d picked up quite a bit about how the world works. Not all of it had immediately applied, but some bits still came in handy.

  For instance, when I was ten years old, the doctors found a suspicious lump on my big brother Jay’s spinal column. My mother called from the doctor’s office in hysterics, saying that no one was telling her anything, and they were running tests she didn’t understand. I could hear every word she said, even though my father had the telephone handset to his ear. He sat at the kitchen table, scowling and fighting to interrupt my mother’s litany of fear and confusion. He was in a white T-shirt and the battered canvas work pants he always
wore on his days off. In the end, he told my mother to sit down, be quiet, and wait. Then he told me to find my little brother, Curtis, and get him in the car. That I was too young to stay by myself, and he didn’t have time to find someone to watch us. His tone of voice left no room for disagreement.

  By the time I’d done what he said, little Curt squirming in his car seat and demanding cartoons, my father had transformed himself. His hair was combed back. He had a good gray suit on with a deep red tie. He smelled of cologne, and he looked like a movie star or a president. I’d never seen him this way, even for church.

  When we got to the doctor’s office, he dropped Curtis and me in the waiting room with my mother, and went back to speak to the doctors and nurses. Five minutes later, he came out with answers to every question Mom had asked him. My mother drank all the information in—yes, Jay was going to be admitted overnight; yes, cancer was a possibility, but it wasn’t the best suspect; no, there wasn’t cause for immediate alarm. I watched relief pour over her like cool water on a burn. But I didn’t miss my father’s little smile or my mother’s near-subliminal frown. The gray-suited man had been given a level of courtesy and respect that a woman couldn’t get.

  Lesson learned.

  Truth was, Chogyi Jake looked amazing in the right outfit. Brown linen so light it was almost blond, a black linen vest of matching cut, pin-striped shirt and tie that coordinated like a symphony perfectly in tune. He’d let the stubble of hair grow out just enough for the scattering of gray at the temples to show. When he chose not to smile, he could look seriously dangerous. By comparison, Aubrey, even in his best suit, never quite gave off the air of command, and Ex’s long hair wasn’t quite overcome by his quasiclerical black and humorless attitude. And me? Yes, I was the money behind everything. Yes, I was the one Kim called. Yes, I was Eric’s heir and successor with the weird supernatural powers and protections. I was also twenty-four and a woman, and even in my best clothes and most understated makeup, I looked more like Jennifer Connelly than an international demon hunter and occult expert. So by common agreement, Chogyi Jake took point.

  “Thank you for joining us, Dr. Oonishi. I’m sorry we couldn’t come to your office.”

  “Thank you,” the man said. “It’s probably good if we don’t meet at Grace.”

  “There are reputations to protect,” Kim said, only a little bitterness in her voice. Her dress was sherbet green and didn’t suit her. She wore it like a smock.

  The restaurant sat on the river, broad windows looking out over water glowing gold with sunset. A yacht had tied up while we were being seated, and now a young man had climbed up one of the deck ladders and was paying for his to-go order. The skyscrapers of downtown rose up around us like trees above rabbits, and the cool evening breeze mixed the smells of water and freshly grilled steak. Oonishi sat forward with his elbows on the table. His gaze shifted between us, restless and uneasy.

  “I take it,” he said to Chogyi Jake, “you understand why I need help with this problem?”

  “Of course,” Chogyi Jake said. “And I understand why discretion is important. We have experience with this kind of issue. You don’t have anything to worry about.”

  He delivered the lines with a conviction that almost had me forgetting that we’d had a small riot on the Cardiac Care Unit earlier in the day. Oonishi either hadn’t heard about it or hadn’t put it together with our arrival, because he looked reassured.

  “What can you tell us about the problem?” Ex asked.

  “You’ve seen the data sets?” Oonishi asked, turning his head almost imperceptibly toward Kim. When Chogyi Jake nodded, he continued, “We’ve been running the tertiary tests for almost three months now. Three nights a week, the subjects come to the lab. There are anomalies as early as the second session.”

  “Can you give me the date on that?” I asked. It was a safe question. The kind of thing that even a jumped-up secretary might ask.

  “I’ve brought a copy of the study logs,” he said. “Everything’s there. Dates, names, times.”

  “Great,” I said, keeping the annoyance out of my voice. I’d asked him for a piece of information, not where I could go to look it up. But I let it slide.

  “At first, it wasn’t simultaneous. It was only a common set of images. I thought it was day residue.”

  “I don’t follow,” Ex said.

  Watching Oonishi shift from embarrassed client to popular scientist was like watching the playback of myself in Trevor’s dojo. He didn’t exactly move, his expression didn’t quite change, but he was suddenly more grounded than he’d been before. His nervous half-smile vanished.

  “What we’re learning about perception,” he said, “is that it’s very dependent on priming. The actual experience of vision, of seeing, is associated with activity in the V1 and V2 layers of your visual cortex. What the neuroanatomists have found is more neurons enter V1 and V2 from the deeper parts of the brain than from the optic nerve.”

  “Implying what?” Ex asked.

  “That your conceptual and emotional knowledge affects not just your interpretation of what you see, but what you actually see,” Oonishi said. “Five years ago, a man in Madison, Wisconsin, had a heart attack. Fell over in the street. An off-duty paramedic happened to be there. He started administering CPR.”

  “They shot him,” Aubrey said. “I heard about that.”

  “Yes,” Oonishi said. “The paramedic was black. One of the passersby saw a young black man straddling an older white man and shot him. When the police arrested the shooter, she swore the paramedic had been stabbing the man. She’d seen the blood. She’d seen the knife. There had been no blood. No knife. But she was adamant she’d seen it.”

  “And you say she did?” Aubrey asked.

  “I say she did. Not because it was there, but because she expected it to be. There are any number of simple experiments that prove your knowledge and emotion affect your actual perception. If you look at a sign just at the edge of your visual range, you can experience the letters becoming sharper when someone tells you what they are. This isn’t even controversial.”

  “Okay, but back to the data,” I said. “The thing in the dreams. Day residue?”

  Oonishi glanced his annoyance at me. I wasn’t doing a great job of letting Chogyi take point, but the further we veered from the issue at hand, the more impatient I got. I saw Kim nodding as if in agreement. Someone at the table behind us laughed at something, a high, masculine sound.

  “If there was something,” Oonishi said, “that all the subjects had seen—a movie or a popular commercial—I would have had an explanation of the image’s recurrence. They would all have seen it recently, and so when they lost the input from their optic nerves, they would be primed to impose that image on the visual cortex from below, as it were.”

  “Didn’t work out,” Chogyi Jake said.

  “No. It didn’t. I talked to the subjects after that session. None of them identified the images. They didn’t even remember having dreamed them. And then, when the images started coming at the same time . . .”

  “So it began two months ago,” Ex said.

  “This did,” Oonishi said. “My study did. But I wasn’t looking before then. It might be something that’s been happening for years. Decades.”

  Kim didn’t bring up the anecdotal evidence she’d heard—the walk-aways or the people coming up from anesthetic saying foreign phrases. She was paging through Oonishi’s study logs. Her mouth pressed thin, and her eyebrows drew in toward each other.

  “Do your subjects have any recollection of the dreams now?” Chogyi Jake asked.

  “I haven’t asked,” Oonishi said, and then, pronouncing each word very carefully, “I have been afraid to.”

  “We may need to explore it,” Chogyi Jake said.

  In the uncomfortable silence, our waiter appeared with our meals. I’d gotten the fourteen-dollar BLT. I took a bite as the waiter passed the other plates around and asked if he could get any of us anything. My
tomatoes tasted a little like cardboard, but the bacon was good. Oonishi was quiet until the waiter had gone, and even then spoke in a low voice.

  “I would rather that we kept this among ourselves,” he said. “I haven’t even spoken to the other researchers.”

  “They must know something’s up,” Kim said. “Unless you invite parasitologists to your lab at midnight on a regular basis, they’ll wonder why I was there.”

  “They think I’m trying to bang you,” Oonishi said. Kim’s eyes went a degree wider, and I felt some of her shock. My cough meant I was offended on her behalf, but Oonishi only gave a surprisingly boyish smile and shrugged. I found myself liking him less.

  “We can be discreet,” Aubrey said coolly, “but we can’t work without evidence. Would you prefer that we address the subject outside your study, or would you like to present it as part of the research?”

  Oonishi looked to Chogyi Jake in appeal, but he only got an enigmatic smile in return. After a long moment’s silence, he gave in.

  “I can interview them about the dreams,” Oonishi said. “You’ll need to tell me what to ask.”

  “One of us should be there,” I said, and Ex scowled at me. Having one of us present at the interviews would probably mean going back into Grace.

  “We’ll discuss that,” Chogyi Jake said. “But we should also address the price.”

  “Price?” Oonishi said.

  Chogyi Jake spread his hands toward the plates before us.

  “We have to eat somehow, Doctor,” he said.

  Over the next fifteen minutes, Chogyi Jake and Oonishi haggled quietly while the rest of us ate. I didn’t care what the answer was. My attention was on the others. Kim chewed slowly, her face a blank, but her eyes kept moving to Oonishi. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Aubrey was watching her too, and the anger on his face was like the perception experiments Oonishi had told us about. Even though it was subtle, I could see it clearly because I was prepared to see it. What I couldn’t say was what it meant.