Any Port in a Storm (18 page)

The room is quiet except for Nana's snuffling around on the bed. She hops over to me, and I put her on my lap, surprised when she stays, ears and nose twitching.

Carrick looks at me. "May I?"
 

He raises an arm as if to tell me what he's asking permission for, and I nod. He puts his arm around me and pulls me into a bear hug.
 

"All right? Between us?" he asks.

I poke him in the ribs. "I guess."

But I don't pull away for another minute.

Two hugs in one day. Did someone tattoo "fragile flower" on my forehead when I wasn't looking? Fuck this.
 

It's already eight thirty, and I have to go meet with Alamea at the Summit. I have no idea what she'll expect my hours to be, but the idea of changing up my schedule from my eleven to seven hours I'm used to makes me nervous. Carrick goes off to meet with the other shades — they're hunting the murdering shades around Nashville, and as much as I want to be with them, I'm about to be on the clock with the Summit.

The parking lot at the Summit is fairly full, and the sight of all the cars makes me nervous. I see Ripper's truck, which has a bashed tail light to go with the rest of its dull black piece-a-shit quality. Guess this is what he meant by being busy.

I don't stop at the front desk this time. Walking over the yin yang symbol on the floor gives me a strange surge of resentment. The lines on it are so clear, the black and white clearly delineated. Reality swirls much, much more into grey. Who's even to say which of those two colors is good and which is bad?
 

I think of Mason, and my steps waver as I walk toward the elevator.

For as full as the parking lot is, I barely see anyone on my way to Alamea's office. If factions in the Summit really are fracturing as much as Mira thinks they are, the thought of all of them here now, under one roof, makes me wonder if I've just walked into a volcano.

She's in there when I arrive, and she immediately beckons me in. "Shut the door."

Before my butt hits the chair, she hands me a folder. I open it to find my paperwork. Job title — Chief Mediator Operative of Summit Leader NTN0047 — and contract. The salary is posted on the contract as non-negotiable, and Alamea wasn't lying. It's twice what I was making working for Laura.
 

I read over the job description. Field work. Liaison for hybrid populations. Tracking hostile movements.
 

I can't help but notice she used the word "hostile" and not "hellkin."
 

I sign the damn thing anyway.
 

When I hand her the packet back after fifteen minutes of reading and trying to swallow my apprehension, she takes it, puts the whole thing through the copier behind her desk, and hands me back two copies for myself.
 

"Keep those somewhere safe. Make sure you look over them a bit more when you get home. I'll have your expense card to you by tomorrow."

"What are my hours?" I manage to get out, my mind stuck on the words expense card.
 

"You're salaried, so they may vary. But probably noon to nine."

I nod.
 

"You said you had the data I mentioned?" I ask. I'm not sure I really want to see it, but I have to. That's what I'm here for. I hope she asked me to do this because she does trust me, but at this point I'm not sure I can trust her. If it turns out I can't, breaching the contract I just signed will be pretty low on my list of worries, like getting taken out by an errant squirrel. It's more likely getting caught between the Summit and the shades again will pulp me.

Alamea again turns her computer so I can see it. At first the screen only displays the current map she showed me the other day. Then she hits a button, and it's overlaid with white dots that stand for Mediator deaths. There are nine for the last six months, which I know is high.

"I'm going to go back month by month this time."

I watch as the screen changes. This month only, no Mediator deaths. Month before, also none. Month before that, six. That's the bad month, July, the month all this shit started. At least at the time, that was my perception of it.

As she goes back, most months have no deaths or one. She goes back two years and stops.

"I want you to look at demon numbers when I go forward this time. I'm also going to add in kills of norms by hellkin —" a green circle with a white center "— and kills by shades."

The latter is an indigo circle with a white center.

As the screen ticks forward in time, the weight that I usually feel on my chest, the balance we seek to right as Mediators, grows heavier and heavier.
 

Sometimes I hate being right.

"Hellkin numbers are way up. Mediator and norm deaths are way down. The shades are the only erratic component of this," I say.
 

"Gregor says your shades are working on mitigating that influence." If Alamea's voice were any more neutral, it would be taupe.

"So they tell me."

Alamea gets up from her chair and goes to the door. From a bookshelf, she pulls a small pouch that looks like the kind climbers strap to their harnesses. The dust in it isn't white though, it's black with a shimmer. She dips a finger in it and runs it along the crack in the door, top to bottom, side to side. I can see small glints of light reflecting back at me, but the moment she completes the rectangle, the whole thing flashes once, and my ears pop.

Ooh. Shiny magic.

I'd bet an even shinier nickel that she just did that so no one could eavesdrop on us. Which means she's probably about to tell me something I'm not going to like.

She sits back down at her desk. "I looked into what happened in Mississippi," she says.

I wait for her to go on.
 

"Most of the Summit records were destroyed. It wasn't a huge takeover, and there wasn't a final battle for the territory, at least as far as I can tell. But there was one coordinated strike against the Summit at the end, and the hellkin seemed to know right where to hit." Alamea's knee jiggles, her heel bouncing against the floor. She sees me notice and stills it. "If I had to guess, I would say that we are facing the beginning of something very similar."

"What do we do? We have warning. We have to be able to do something."

"One would think that." She gives me a wry smile, and for the first time I notice a healing cut on the corner of her lip. "We have two variables that weren't present in Mississippi, however."

"The shades," I say. Then the other dawns on me. "You're afraid your power base is crumbling."

I don't mean to blurt it out that way, but she knows, and I know, and it's stupid for either of us to keep pretending we don't know what the other knows.

I also can't shake the uncertainty of why she's brought me in, aside from the pragmatic levels I bring to the table. I'm close with the shades. I understand them. They're one of the x factors in all of this.
 

Alamea looks at me, but doesn't say anything for a moment. When she speaks, her words are few and deliberate. "I am no longer sure that the Summit will heed me if I bring this threat to them."

That's about what I expected. "What do you really want from me?"

"I want you to keep doing what you're doing. When you leave here, I want you to go to Carrick and his shades, and I want you to continue as you have. Help them to do some good." She looks at her watch. "We've released a short news piece about them, about how they protected the citizens of Crossville and how they are working tirelessly to hunt down those of their kind who are threatening the people of Nashville. It should be airing at ten, eleven, and midnight. Also tomorrow."

"Propaganda."
 

She nods grimly. "If public opinion turns fully against the shades, we'll have a lot more on our hands than simply dying at the hands of hellkin."

It's a mark of being a Mediator that that's the simple option.

"Okay," I say. "I'll do that."

I think of Mississippi and the hundreds of miles of festering swampland under near-perpetual cloud cover that infest the Gulf states.
 

"Did the norms get out?" I ask suddenly. "Of Mississippi. The Mediators would have all died there, but did the norms at least escape?"

I was far too young to remember anything being on the news. I don't remember Mississippi being anything other than what it is. It may have even gone down before I was born, but Alamea is in her early fifties. She would have been my age.
 

She shakes her head after a moment, and her eyes go distant. "I went there," she says finally. "I was just out of training when the worst of it started, and we wanted to help. We drove down, as far as we could go. We stretched ourselves to the edge of our territory. I remember the nausea."
 

Alamea looks at me as she says it, and I know she recalls that I am well familiar with that nausea.
 

"The demons must have known. We had binoculars and scopes. We could see people fleeing, in cars, on foot. It was just after sunset, and the sky was overcast, and the hellkin swarmed them. Some of the Mediators with me tried to push on, but they collapsed a hundred yards from the fighting. One of them was comatose for a month afterward. He'd been born up near the Kentucky border, and he pushed all the way out of his territory." She presses her lips together and stops.

"None of them made it?"

"Not that I saw."

I think of Laura and Alice and the others at my office. Too easily I can picture them fleeing north into the Cincinnati territory, meeting with a line of slummoths and jeelings and rakaths ready to eat them.
 

"Alamea," I say quietly. "If it looks like it's getting that bad, we have to evacuate the city."

"Believe me," she says, "We will try."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

When I leave, I follow a text from Carrick to Percy Warner, where he and the other shades have gathered.
 

It's strange gathering here, in this place, without Saturn.

The canopy above us has shifted, now half-naked in the autumn.

Miles greets me first, and I'm thankful to see his face. I want to tell him about Jax, but Jax was frightened, and Jax was fleeing, and I hesitate with my mouth about to form the words, saying instead, "It's good to see you."

Carrick is talking to a few of the shades, and he doesn't seem to have seen me yet.

"Any updates on your murderous brethren?" I ask Miles.

"We caught one of them."

"Caught."

"Took care of."

I smile. "I see you're working on your euphemisms."

Miles' teeth are bright against the darkness of his skin when he grins back at me. "I've been reading."

"Anything good?"

"Carrick brought me a book."

I do my best to nod solemnly, when I'd rather laugh. Carrick's going to get them all hooked on 80s kilt flippers and bodice rippers.

"I'm going to buy you some good thrillers," I tell him, but he shakes his head at me. "Romance it is. I'll find you something good. And we'll try to get you guys library cards, but if you go in there naked, you'll get arrested."

This time Miles nods solemnly at me, and I'm not sure if it's in regards to the threat of arrest or the very serious occasion of having one's own library card.

I'll have to ask Alice and Parker if they have any ideas about making that happen. The idea of taking the shades on a field trip to the library is too precious to pass up.

The levity of the conversation makes me feel a little better, but when Gregor starts talking, the weight in my middle settles upon me again.

"Udo has told me that he discovered the number of the shades who are committing these crimes. Apart from the one we were able to find, there are three remaining," Gregor says.
 

His choice of words is strange to me. Crime. I suppose he's right, but for people who were born full-grown with transplanted memories and no knowledge of the legal system, the concept of criminality might be a little bit of a stretch. Even if most shades I know have their own moral code.
 

"Tonight, you will all spread out through the city and look for any sign of them. Any indication of their presence, any tickle behind your naked little ears. Find them." Gregor looks around, and part of me half expects him to slap somebody's bare butt as they trot off into the night, but he doesn't. I think he missed his calling as a football coach.

Carrick looks to me once before loping into the woods, and I give him a mock salute.

"Storme," Gregor says. "Pity you ain't a marathoner."

"No way I'm keeping up with them in a footrace," I agree.

We're quiet as the last of the shades vanish from sight.

"I hear you're out of a job."

"In a manner of speaking."

"I'm sorry, Storme."

I raise my eyebrows at him. "You've been trying to get me to work at the Summit for ages."

"Looks like Alamea offered you something a little more enticing."

Again I wonder what I've stumbled into. I don't like the idea of being the rope in an Alamea versus Gregor tug o' war. I shrug. "Why am I out in the woods with no one to fight?"