Vicious Grace Read Online Free PDF Page A

normal people. My focus was for crap.
    I tried crowd watching. And then giving my attention to the constant babble of news on the televisions in the concourse. And then going to the bathroom and washing my hands and face. When I got back out, Chogyi Jake was sitting in the plastic chair with one of those Mylar bags of Cracker Jacks. I plopped down at his side, and he tipped the bag toward me. I took a handful. The popcorn’s okay, but I’ve always been a sucker for the caramel peanuts. Something about the salty and the sweet together. The white noise of voices and rattling roll-away suitcases and incomprehensible, garbled PA announcements gave us a kind of privacy.
    “All well?” I said.
    “Well enough,” Chogyi Jake said. “You?”
    “Got a little too much extraneous stuff on my plate,” I said. “But I’ll pull it together. I’m fine.”
    The slightest of all possible frowns touched his brow as he popped another cluster of popcorn and sugar into his mouth.
    “I’m sorry that the training didn’t go better,” he said.
    “Yeah, well. It was worth a shot,” I said. “We can go back later, maybe. For you guys, at least.”
    “I’m not particularly concerned with us,” he said.
    “You’re worried about me? I’m the one who flipped Trevor the Ninja King into his own wall. I appear to be fine.”
    “That’s what concerns me,” he said. “After all we’ve done, there’s still nothing that tells us what protections Eric placed on you. What the parameters were.”
    “How to change the oil. When to rotate the tires,” I said.
    This was a conversation we’d had before. Magic fades. If we didn’t figure out what exactly Uncle Eric had done, sooner or later it would go away. Probably when it was under stress. Like in the middle of a fight when something was trying to kill me.
    “I don’t know what else to do,” I said. “We’re looking, right? We’ve found a lot of stuff. We’ll find more. Maybe we’ll get the part that tells us what’s the right kind of juju. Maybe we won’t. But—”
    “But you took us to Trevor so that you could build defenses of your own,” Chogyi Jake said. “Something you understood and controlled. Only the attempt failed.”
    From anyone else, it would have stung. If Chogyi Jake had a superpower, it was that he could say things that should have hurt and make them seem like they were just more information. He would have made someone an excellent mother.
    “It did,” I said. “I don’t know that it was a bad idea, though.”
    “It wasn’t. It seems absolutely the right impulse.”
    “And yet,” I said, rooting through his bag for another peanut, “here I am going into fieldwork without actually following through on it.”
    “Yes.”
    “I don’t think I have an option,” I said. “Even if it wasn’t Kim, I don’t see how I can wait until I’m ready for everything before I try doing anything.”
    “I understand that.”
    “Then what are you telling me?”
    “Be aware of what you are. Of what your limitations are. Respect them.”
    “You know, that’s really vague.”
    Chogyi Jake took a deep breath, letting it out slowly through his teeth. He let his head fall back until he was staring at the ceiling. Behind us, an older woman was scolding a little boy in a loud, grating voice. A pack of five Japanese kids in matching black outfits hurried past, staring at the gate numbers. I took another handful of popcorn and sugar, and I waited.
    “I do know,” he said.
    “I can try not to count on things I don’t understand, but it isn’t like I’ve been swaggering around looking for trouble. I don’t think of myself as the badass warrior princess whatever.”
    He nodded, but I could tell he didn’t quite mean it.
    “When I was eighteen,” he said, “I was living in a two-bedroom apartment in South Carolina with five other people. We were taking a lot of drugs, so we were very hesitant to call the landlord if something was wrong. For instance, there