Part 24 (1/2)

When I was still living at home, back even before I'd broken the news to my parents about going to a secular college, I found a picture in the back of an old book. I still remembered it now. Two boys in front of a wide, white fence. The color was off; all red and yellow and hardly any blue. They were both wearing pea coats and haircuts that made me think of the late 1960s. The taller boy grinned at the camera. He might have been seven or eight years old, and the rictus grin of his false smile looked charming. I could see where the cheeks would thicken, the flesh fill out, and a small, well-intentioned mustache grow in. I could see my father in the boy.

The smaller one wasn't aware of the camera. He was pointing at something off to his right, his eyes wide with wonder and joy. He would grow up to be, in Ex's words, at minimum a sociopath and a rapist.

There had to be a moment. Somewhere in the path between that little boy discovering the world with an innocent delight so powerful it could impress itself onto a fold of paper and a little light-sensitive chemistry and the man who wrote f.u.c.ked her. There had to be something that made it all go wrong. Not just a lost innocence. Something worse than that.

Becoming soulless, maybe.

”THEY TELL me that spleens are, for the most part, optional,” Chogyi Jake said. A television across the hall burst into authoritative news-on-the-hour music.

”I'd heard that,” I said.

As soon after the operation as he'd been stable enough to move, I'd had him transferred out of Grace. Without my being his wife or his kid, it hadn't been as straightforward as I'd hoped. I wound up playing the employer card and throwing a lot of money at it, and the problem eventually went away.

The first time I'd walked into Northwestern Hospital, coming to see him even if it only meant watching him sleep, I'd had a flash of panic. The complexity of halls and elevators brought up a bone-deep terror that didn't have anything to do with the place. After a couple visits, I got a better handle on the new s.p.a.ce. Coming to see him today, I hadn't had anything more than a little mild anxiety.

”I hear they had to put six units of blood into me,” he said.

”That's what they tell me.”

”I don't actually know how much that is.”

”The word ma.s.sive came up,” I said. ”They were apparently fairly angry at Kim and Aubrey for not getting you in sooner.”

Chogyi Jake smiled. He'd been in the hospital for three days, and he looked a million times better. The gray tone of his skin was gone. His hair was growing out. His smile seemed to carry a meaning behind it instead of just being a habit of the flesh. Even the gown he wore looked less sickly. I didn't know whether it was because he wore it like a meditation robe or he'd been sucking up to the nursing staff for a better cla.s.s of patient-wear.

”You explained that you were saving the world?”

”Not really,” I said.

”Well, there's the mistake,” he said. ”If they'd just told the surgeon more about the circ.u.mstances . . .”

”They'd all be in for psych evaluations, even as we speak,” I said. Chogyi Jake nodded and laughed, then twitched and lay back, a hand pressed to the incision site on his belly.

”Only hurts when I laugh,” he said.

”Really?”

”Well, that and when I take a dump, but I was being polite,” he said. ”How are things at Grace?”

”Weird,” I said. ”Go figure. Kim said there's going to be a bunch of new policy announcements in the next couple weeks, but I don't have any idea what they are. I would have thought invoking evil spirits was already considered inappropriate workplace behavior.”

”There's nothing else they can do,” Chogyi Jake said.

”Yeah. One weird night, no explanations. I'm not sure what I expected of them.”

”And the rider?”

”It's in there. There's still weird stuff going on. Oonis.h.i.+'s screwed. He's shutting down his study until Kim can re-create the Invisible College's spell that I broke. Quiet it down a little.”

”I'm sorry to hear that,” Chogyi Jake said. ”He's doing interesting work.”

”Yeah, well. He can try again next year.”

Chogyi Jake nodded and lay back on his pillow. Outside his window, the high air was a hazy white.

”Seems like a long time,” I said.

”It can be,” he said, and from his tone of voice, I knew we'd changed subjects. I heard Kim again, from when we'd first arrived. What a difference a year makes. Or a day. Or a moment, if you pick the right one.

”How are you?” he asked.

”We're leaving the country. Me and Ex. Aubrey's staying here. You heard about that, right?” I was talking too fast.

”I did,” he said. And then, gently, ”It might be awkward, you and Ex being alone together for an extended period.”

I chuckled. It was cute, Chogyi Jake treating me gently, not pus.h.i.+ng me, with him being the one in the hospital bed. He knew we were both hurt.

”Yeah, I can handle it. Anyway, Ex thought it would be a good idea to be a little hard to reach for a while. Burying someone alive as a ritual sacrifice is still a felony last I checked. There are going to be a lot of phone records between him and my cell, and I don't really want to explain to the judge why this time it was different. My lawyer said that forcing any inquiries to be international would give her enough time to make it all disappear. If we need it to. You can catch up with us when you're okay to fly. I mean, if that's all right?”

”Absolutely. But, Jayne. How are you?”

I was having nightmares every night, and sometimes during the day. I could still hear David shrieking. Anything that hissed like the lantern in the civil defense ward or had the weird burned-cheese smell of cyclopropane residue sent me into a tailspin. I was having trouble keeping food down. Sometimes I woke up thinking I was still going to have to kill a friend of mine, and when the dream faded, I still felt grateful it was David trapped down in the dark.

David, who had been a lot like me.

”I'm fine,” I said.

WHEN I was born, Eric would have been in his early twenties. Was he already corrupted by then? Had his soulless moment pa.s.sed? When I turned sixteen and suffered my lost weekend, had he helped me hide it from my father out of affection, or was there another file out there like Kim's, only with my name on it, that told a different story?

But my mind kept going back to the picture. The little boy.

I suspected that Eric had started as someone not so different from me. Well intentioned, so far as he really knew his own intentions. A little lonely, maybe. On his own. He'd discovered the occult world of riders and magic. He'd been caught up, and it had broken him.

I imagined there was a moment when the boy had stopped and the man begun, but that was probably wrong. More likely, it was a series of things. Small steps that added up to something terrible. Maybe he'd been tempted by something. Wealth, since he'd clearly managed that part pretty well. Or love. Or power.