Any Port in a Storm (15 page)

It's not just a no-no to go looking for your family as a Mediator. Those ties are severed. No contact. Nada. It's an edict from the World Summit. In some territories, they even change Mediator surnames, usually to some synonym or euphemism for hunter or fighter. Cazador. Jäger. Strijder. Mpiganaji.
 

But here's Mira with a blood-cousin, and her face is horrified when she looks at me, like she's been stripped naked in front of the Summit.
 

Wane stands, alarmed. She takes two steps toward us, as if she's afraid I'm going to ring a gong or page Alamea and get Mira beheaded.

Gods, I don't even know what the punishment is for this. I don't want to know. I realize both of these women are panicking. I almost trip over my words when I try to speak.

"It's okay," I say. "I'm not going to tattle on you."

Mira's breath rushes out, but Wane takes another step forward. "Mira," she says.

"She won't. She says she won't."

"But—" Wane's eyes are wide and frightened, and for the first time in the last few minutes, I consider how scary the Summit must look to an outsider. "Mira, she—"

"I trust her!" Mira almost yells it, and I jump.

Wane stops and goes still. After a moment where my breath feels stuck somewhere in my throat, Wane nods.
 

"Okay. Okay."

Something else strikes me. Wane is a morph. "Mira, are you a—"

She knows what I'm asking, and she shakes her head violently. "No, it doesn't work that way. Mediator genes."

"So how did you find out?"

"I deliver Mediator babies sometimes. I had to look through records for something or another, and I came across Mira's name. Gonzalez is a common enough name, but her dad's name is Ohtli. I had an Uncle Ohtli. I knew they'd lost a baby. Stillborn, we'd always been told in the family. I had to know. It's not like there's heaps of Ohtlis running around Tennessee."

"Stillborn my ass. Not so still after all," Mira snorts.
 

"Do your parents know?" A whole world seems to open up and spread out around me. I've never really considered what it would be like to have a family you're born into, to have parents and siblings and cousins and family reunions with red checkered picnic tablecloths and ants and more clichés than you could shake a truckload of sticks at.
 

But Mira shakes her head. "It would be too much," she says.

I don't ask if she means for her or for them.
 

"How long have you known?" I look back and forth between them again, and I see it. They have the same chin, the same slope of their brows. The same high cheekbones, the same gold-brown skin. Now that I know, I can't unsee it.

"Two years," Mira says quietly.

Two years they've kept this hidden from the Summit. Seeing them together and the way Mira has come through for me through all this makes me wonder if she's been as lonely as I've been. This life isn't easy at the best of times. Being a Mediator means a lot of sacrifices from birth until death. It's a long cycle of blood and guts and late nights, of getting a big middle finger from the majority of society. When we do our jobs well, they forget we exist. When we fail, we get to be the scapegoats. And now Mira's found someone, found a family. It may be small, but it's something.

There's a big old lump in my throat again.
 

"I promise that your secret is safe with me," I say, grabbing my popcorn again and throwing a handful in my mouth before I get misty.

"Thank you," she says, then adds belatedly, "Cunt-nugget."

"Love you too, Mira. Now can we watch these dudes blow shit up?"

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I conk out on the couch at two in the morning, and when I wake up at ten, I find myself tucked nicely in with a blanket, my popcorn bowl gone from my side, and a note on the end table that just says, "Bagels!"

There's a text from Alamea on my phone asking for me to come by the Summit after I get off work. At least I'm rested. I can't remember the last time I had eight whole hours of sleep when I wasn't bruised, battered, or otherwise maimed.

Nothing like a good ass whooping and painkillers to make you sleep like the demons you made dead.

I find Mira's bagels in the kitchen and slather one with cream cheese for the road.

Laura seems relieved when I arrive at work with no visible injuries, but she doesn't ask about why I had to leave early. I guess she knows I'd tell her if it were important. Alice stops by my office when she gets in, and I can't help marveling again at how much she's changed. She seems at home in her own skin. She almost glows in the doorway to my office.
 

I spend the day working through my backlog of emails from clients, some business-related, others simply congratulatory. Laura sent out an announcement the other day, and seeing the well-wishes pour into my inbox gives me another thrill of excitement to move forward as a partner.
 

Alice insists on taking me out to lunch, and Parker tags along. Between the two of them, they could talk a bullfrog off his lily pad, but their happy babbling restores a bit of my good mood. There's enough to fret about. I let them talk me into eating cannoli and tiramisu after a giant bowl of ravioli, and when we go back to the office, I'm pretty sure I witnessed the bonding of best friends for life.

After work, I go straight to the Summit. Between that and the text from Gregor asking me to meet him at his house later, I have a feeling it's going to be another late night.

When I get to the front desk at the Summit, the Mitten-in-Residence informs me that she's in a meeting on the far side of the building, but that I can go up and wait for her in her office.
 

Even though she's on the top floor, I take the stairs to kill time. There's a kitchenette and a set of vending machines in the lobby up there, and I buy a bottle of overpriced blood orange soda and a packet of mustard pretzels and settle down in the lobby to wait. Even with permission, I feel weird hanging out in Alamea's office alone.
 

Also, with my track record this year, someone would probably accuse me of sedition. The Summit has seven floors aboveground, but its the bits below the surface of the Earth that I want to avoid. I've been in that prison. I don't intend to go back. It's a honeycomb of identical cells, a labyrinth of grey walls that give off a slight shimmer. You need a special light to see the directions built into the paint, so escaping your cell doesn't even do you any good. And did I mention the doors on the cells are invisible? Yeah. Good luck.

Just the thought of it makes me squirm in my seat. The chair's comfortable enough, though, and I force myself to eat a few pretzels and think about something else.
 

It works for approximately two minutes. When a pair of men come around the corner of the corridor, suddenly I can think of nothing else, because they're both — one directly and the other indirectly — the reason I ended up in that honeycomb hell.

Gryfflet fucking Asberry and Ben "I'll kiss you if I want" Wheedle.
 

For a moment they're both so absorbed in their discussion that they don't see me, and I get to spend a snippet of time thinking of exactly how many demons it would take to splat them both.

I thought I'd worked through most of my rage at them. Spent a month or so picturing every slummoth and rakath and snorbit I fought with their stupid faces projected onto the hellkin slime. But seeing them face to face for the first time since they had the gall to visit me in the hospital after me and the shades helped the Mediators of Nashville not get massacred, well. They're not nearly as on fire as I would like them to be.

It's a good thing I don't kill norms, because these two are shoulder-deep in my shit list.

When I met Gryfflet, he was a schlubby sound witch at the Hole, one of Nashville's crappier hard rock dives. In spite of his average build, he had a face like a boiled cabbage and the spine to match — at least at first. He grew a spine over the next few weeks. Then he used it to drug me, poison me, and throw me in prison. After I saved his life a couple times, no less.

And Ben — after gods know how many years of me telling him I wasn't interested, he chose to stalk me in the name of "saving me," spy on me for the Summit, and picked a moment where I was yelling at him to try and kiss me. I punched him in the stomach.
 

Best. Guys. Ever.

Gryfflet sees me first. Even from where I sit, I can see his eyes go cloudy as he harnesses some witch magic, and I go with the urge to laugh.
 

"Aren't you precious," I say. "You really think I'm going to pick a fight with you outside Alamea's office?"

It takes a moment, but his eyes go clear again, and I see his Adam's apple bob. His face has firmed up a bit, and he's nicely dressed in a grey suit and thin tie the color of a rakath spine.
 

I turn to Ben, who, as usual, is in jeans and a plaid flannel that makes him look like he should be a cover boy for Wrangler. He actually takes a step back when my gaze falls on him.
 

"What are you doing here, Ayala?" Ben asks.

"Needed a snack," I say, gesturing to my mustard pretzels. I cross my legs, leaning back in my chair to look at them. "And in case you've forgotten—" I point to my eyeballs "— still a Mediator."

Though I don't usually pay a ton of attention to them, the Summit keeps running lists of our kill counts. I've been at the top of it for the past six months, and in the last couple weeks, I got a ping for having at least ten more kills per week than the next highest person on the list. I know Ben looks at those. I smile at him as winsomely as I can.
 

I sort of want to shred his face.

Gryfflet's breathing fast, and I can almost see gears in his head clackity-clack-clacking through things he could say to me. "You know, if you worked with us instead of avoiding us, you could do some real good."

"Oh, ho. That's adorable. Thanks, but no thanks. Been there, done that, got the total and complete fuckover."

His face goes blotchy, with red and white patches mottling his cheeks.

"We're helping people," Ben says, and for the first time I see a spark of anger in him. "You're not the only one who gets to play the hero."

"Ends justify the means, eh, Benny-boy?" I say. I can almost feel the nerve I've struck in him twang through the air.
 

He licks his lips and purses them so hard I think his mouth's in danger of turning inside out. "I was trying to protect you! That's what friends do!"

I can't help it. I start laughing. It pours out of me like it's had a pressure meter slowly ticking upward for weeks and weeks and weeks. Tears squeeze themselves from my eyes and drip down my face, which is how Alamea finds me, holding my stomach and shaking while Gryfflet and Ben stand by looking as affronted as a Victorian confronted with an uncovered table leg.

She raises one eyebrow at them and says with the calm of someone who has no dog in a fight, "Don't you two have an eight o'clock meeting?"

Then she beckons me into her office. I stand, hiccuping into my half-eaten packet of pretzels.

They scurry away and don't look back.

My eyes burn a bit from tearing up, and I dab at them as I sit in front of Alamea's desk.

"Are those two working on some sort of project?" I ask her. "Ben seemed to be wearing his self-righteous pants today."

That gets a small smirk from Alamea, and she settles into her chair, offering me a mint, which I decline in spite of the knowledge that it's a commentary on my pretzel breath. "They've been somewhat effective at organizing teams of Mediators to work together to eliminate threats at some of the more active area hotspots."

I like her use of
somewhat
. It fills me with an inappropriate amount of spiteful glee. I'm not usually this petty, but people who get me imprisoned piss me off ever-so-slightly. Maybe I should be mad at Alamea over that too — she gave the order. But I'm not. She was working with the information she had, and between the out-of-context snippets from both Gryfflet and Ben, I'm surprised she didn't have me executed.