Vicious Grace by M. L. N. Hanover Page B

sex wasn’t very pleasant. It was just something we did. I rationalize it now. I say that I was lashing out at Aubrey or I just don’t have a very healthy attitude toward men or it was a self-destructive moment, but I honestly don’t know why I was with him.”
    “You never told Aubrey,” I said.
    “No.”
    I turned the minivan up onto the Eisenhower Expressway, gunning the engine to bring us to speed.
    “I didn’t either,” I said.
    “Thank you.”
    The traffic slowed, the first deadening congestion of the coming rush hour. Kim leaned forward, looking up into the empty sky.
    “You still in love with him?” I asked.
    “I miss him. But I know why we aren’t together. I don’t have to like it, but I’m all right. I’m glad the two of you are together.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said.
    Her smile was fast and genuine and sad.
    “You are too kind, Jayné,” she said. “Really. It’s a vice.”
    “I’ll try to be more of a shit,” I said. “Any idea where we can find that vacuum?”
    But before she could answer, Eric intruded.
    “Hey. You’ve got a call.”
    Kim flinched at the voice, and I pretended not to notice. I rooted through my pack one-handed, keeping the minivan in its lane with the other, trying to answer the call before Eric spoke again. The call was from Aubrey’s number. I took it.
    “Jayné,” he said. “Where are you?”
    “Fifteen minutes from you, if the traffic would get moving,” I said.
    “Push them out of the way and get over here,” he said. I could hear him grinning.
    “You got through?”
    “Chogyi Jake had this flash of freaking genius about the whole Enochian directionality thing. I’ll tell you about it when you get here.”
    My heart raced. I bent toward the wheel, as if I could clear a path for us by force of will.
    “The rooms,” I said. “Did you get into the rooms? What’s in there?”
    “Come home, sweetheart,” he said. “See for yourself.”
    THE HIDDEN rooms didn’t look the way I expected. Secret rooms should be dark, with cobwebs and wrought iron fixtures and probably creepy organ music. And rats. These looked almost normal. Almost. The door on the east side of the hallway opened onto a simple officelike space. A cheap desk with the wood-grain laminate starting to peel at the sides, a landline telephone in a style twenty years out of date, two four-drawer filing cabinets, and a bookshelf half-filled with folders, books, and boxes. The drapes were chocolate brown bleached almost beige by the sun. In fairness, there were a couple of cobwebs.
    The western door opened to a smallish bedroom actually decked out to sleep in. A steel-frame single bed with a thin mattress, a little bedside table, and that was about it. It had its own stripped-down powder room with stainless steel fixtures and no towels. If I hadn’t been walking in Eric’s footsteps for the past year, I might not even have noticed that the light fixtures were of unbreakable security glass and mesh, that the bed and table were bolted down, or that the solid-core door was fitted with a double dead bolt and hung with industrial-grade hinges. A cell. So that was interesting. There weren’t any restraints on the bed, but slapping on a couple of handcuffs would have been easy.
    Kim, behind me, was drawing the same conclusion.
    “He must have expected somebody to be possessed,” she said. “And that it would take a fair amount of time to get the rider out of them.”
    “Seems like,” I said, tapping the walls absently as I walked through the empty space.
    Ex, Aubrey, and Chogyi Jake had apparently given up all pretense of keeping order in the condo. The couch and coffee table had been pulled back from the bedroom and were now pale with dust. A pile of photographs and maps sat on one corner, a fragile-looking roll of blueprints lay open in the center, and five leather-bound books were on top of them. A glance was enough to show me that the blueprints were of Grace Memorial, and that the extra