Part 9 (1/2)

Ex rolled his eyes.

”It is suggestive, at least,” Chogyi Jake said. ”Declan died at the end of '51. Daedalus-as-sacrifice has some very strong resonances, and it would tie the two layers of imprisonment together.”

I took the last bite of bagel and raised my hand.

”Too jargony?” Chogyi Jake asked.

”Kind of, yeah.”

”Two of the three things they did in '51 are bindings,” Aubrey said. ”The buried-alive part being the first, and the . . . the maze. The hospital itself. That's the second. If this guy was the sacrifice that went into the coffin, it would help those two spells reinforce each other. There'd be a connection.”

”It's not proof,” Ex said. ”But as circ.u.mstantial evidence goes, it's not bad. And then there's the fact that Eric was interested in his bloodline.”

”Which he'd need,” I said, ”if the point was to break whatever's under Grace out, right? So we can start working with the a.s.sumption that Eric was looking to undo everything the Invisible College and their buddies did here. Crack the thing free.”

”Very good, gra.s.shopper,” Ex said, actually managing a smile. ”Soon you will be able to take the pebble from my hand.”

I looked at him blankly. Instead of explaining himself, he shook his head.

”We don't know why, though,” Aubrey said. ”Or even what exactly Rahabiel is. Why it would attack Jayne.”

”If it even did,” I said. ”I'm starting to like the idea that it was the hospital that got p.i.s.sed off at me. Allergic reaction to other magic, maybe.”

”I don't see what Eric planned to lock up in the cell he built,” Ex said.

I pulled back my shoulders and refused to be discouraged. I had a lead, by G.o.d, and one I'd figured out for myself. If it hadn't cracked the whole case open wide, that mattered less than the feeling of making some actual progress. That I could follow up on it without braving Grace Memorial itself only made it better.

”Okay,” I said. ”So what's the plan for the day?”

Ex spoke first.

”I have a meeting with the hospital chaplain at noon,” he said.

”You're going back there?”

”No,” Ex said. ”Meeting him at a bookstore well off the hospital property. I won't need backup.”

”I was going to read and organize more of Eric's notes,” Chogyi Jake said. ”We still have two drawers we haven't looked through. And I believe Kim was planning to call in sick and come help with that.”

”Cool,” I said.

”And you?” asked Aubrey.

”I was going to take you and the laptop up to Waukegan and meet David Souder,” I said.

”Saw that coming,” Ex said.

”But before we go,” I said, ”I want to make a couple phone calls.”

Aubrey hoisted an eyebrow.

”I want to see if they've cleaned up Oonis.h.i.+'s dream data yet,” I said. ”I'm wondering if there's something in there our man Souder might recognize.”

IT WAS a two-hour drive, and we didn't get on the road until almost ten. Aubrey drove, and I sat in the pa.s.senger's seat, my laptop open, replaying the cleaned-up dream file over and over. It wasn't, I'd been a.s.sured, the absolute final version, but it was pretty great compared with the originals. The six feeds of Oonis.h.i.+'s data had been put together, cleaned, sharpened, averaged, and then tweaked so that whichever one had the greatest level of detail in any single frame was given greater weight. The man I'd talked to was going through now and making the same adjustment within frames, so that if one subject had better resolution in the upper left and another in the lower right of any given frame, the relative weight of the image could be split between them.

All in all, it wasn't more than thirty seconds, but now I could see the soil sliding and s.h.i.+fting as the black coffin split open and the light poured out. The digital-imaging man had also sent an e-mail with four frames set apart from the flow of images. The details in the stills were as clear as photographs. The eye caught in a flash of light, clearly human only with an uncanny elongated pupil like a goat's. The splayed hand, its palm out toward me, the fingers just too long to be right. A detail (he'd noted that it was the clearest single image in all the data streams, and it had only been really clear in two of them) of thin, pointed teeth like some kind of deep-sea fish. And then one thing I hadn't noticed before; as the coffin split, in the instant between the fine-lined cracks and the whiteout of arcing light, there was a moment when the side of the coffin was lit and showed carved letters. In the moving image, they were just a moment of uneven texture. In the still image-captured, manipulated, sharpened-they were readable.

Nomen mihi Legio est, quia multi sumus.

The Bibles I grew up reading were all in English, but I didn't need to Google this one to place it. My name is Legion, for we are many. Seeing the words there made the hair on my arms stand up and a vague, electric sense of vertigo swim at the back of my head. Bible stories were what I grew up with instead of comic books. Jesus casting the unclean spirits into a herd of swine and driving them over the cliff was for me like the Kiefer Sutherland version of The Three Musketeers had been for my college boyfriend: something that had seemed thrilling and mysterious when you were eight and seriously cheesy when you were twenty.

It didn't seem as cheesy now.

”You okay?” Aubrey asked.

”Yeah,” I said, closing the laptop. ”Just ducky.”

The streets sliding by outside the car seemed too normal to be true. Pizza Hut and Burger King didn't belong in the same world with the thing I'd just been watching. When we stopped at the corner of Sunset and Northern, a blue Corvette with tinted windows pulled up next to us, pus.h.i.+ng out a ba.s.s line loud enough to sterilize anyone inside. An old man with skin the color of weathered wood and white hair as short as his beard crossed in front of us with an air of utter superiority. I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself down. It wasn't going to make things easier if I went into this freaking myself out.

Souder Roof and Tile was tucked between a Payless shoe store and a three-bay car service joint called Merlin's. The sign was jauntier and more optimistic than the building. There were only two cars in the parking lot, and neither of them had been made in the last ten years. Aubrey pulled into the s.p.a.ce nearest the gla.s.s-paneled office door as the faux-British GPS voice told us we had arrived. He killed the engine. We sat for a few seconds, looking at the place.

”Any idea what you're going to tell this guy?” Aubrey asked.

”Nope,” I said. ”Figured I'd wing it.”

”Sounds like a plan,” he said.

Sounds like one of my plans, I thought, but I popped open the car door, and we headed in. The interior wasn't much more inspiring than the outside had been. The cool air smelled a little bit like dampness and old fish. Carpet patterned in beige and brown almost hid a few old stains. The white walls were hung with pictures of houses sporting new roofs. The lone desk was topped with bright gla.s.s, an Apple computer, and a pile of three-ring binders advertising products like coal tar pitch, polyiso roof insulation, and waterproof caulk. The woman sitting at the desk looked up at us with bare surprise in her expression. The door closed behind us.

”Hi,” I said. ”I'm looking for David Souder. Is he . . . ?”

I pointed at a door behind the woman with a plastic Staff Only sign tacked to it and started walking toward it as if the sign clearly couldn't apply to me.

”Oh, I'm sorry,” the woman said, shaking her head. ”Big Dave's not in the office today. Was there something I could help you with?”

I smiled and tried to decide whether I believed her. Maybe forty-five, maybe fifty, she seemed like the kind of woman I'd grown up around: careful makeup lightly applied, bright blouse and skirt in a lemony yellow that didn't quite suit her. An empty cross hung from the silver chain around her neck. Her concerned and helpful expression was so practiced that I couldn't tell whether she was lying or not.

”I'm sorry,” I said. ”It's not a business thing. I just need to talk to him.”

Her hands gave her away. I'd just let her off the hook, told her that whatever this intrusion into her world was about, it at least wasn't her problem. Her hands should have relaxed, even if just a little.

They tensed.

”I'm really sorry,” she said. ”I can leave him a message if you want.”

”Cell phone number?” I said.

The woman laughed, but there wasn't much mirth in the sound. Instead there was something rueful. I glanced back at Aubrey. The slight pursing of his lips and the carefully blank expression told me he was seeing the same things I was.

”More than that. I've even got his cell phone,” she said. ”Big Dave leaves it in the office when he's not on-site somewhere.”