Any Port in a Storm (3 page)

Turns out, it's a cat.

From five feet away I can see the cat's tail dangling from between the jeeling's glowing fingers, and that just pisses me off. Poor kitty. I wish people would keep their critters indoors. Jeelings are big, strong, and mean as the hells they come from, but they get really into their food.
 

This one doesn't see me coming.

I take it off guard, hamstringing it with a flick of my sword.
 

The demon drops the cat and screams a grating roar into the woods, stumbling to the side. A dog starts barking in the distance, but I ignore it, darting back a couple yards until I can see what this nasty glow-worm-from-hell is going to do.
 

I stand on the balls of my feet, knees just bent, swords held like extensions of my arms. It's going to attack.

I wait.

Seconds tick by, and the jeeling rights itself, turning toward me.

Here it comes
. I brace myself.

The jeeling runs in the other direction.
 

Well, sort of runs.

Its bum leg drags, but it still manages a steady clip of speed, high-tailing it away from me.

For a moment, I freeze, wondering if somehow my reputation has started inspiring fear in demonkind. Am I the thing the demon parental units warn their little spawn about? The thought is ridiculous, and a breeze from the direction the jeeling fled in knocks the thought right out of me. It also brings the smell of eau de dead cat to my nostrils.
 

I take off running after the jeeling. Its pink glow can't be difficult to follow at night, but even with its injury, it's fast, and after a couple hundred yards I feel like I'm chasing fog.

After a couple hundred more, I realize I lost the damn thing.

I retrace my steps, wondering if it went back for the cat, but it's not there.
 

More importantly, at the site of the hellkin's gruesome dinner, crickets start to chirp.

What in the hells is happening?

CHAPTER THREE

Belle Meade is eerily quiet after my non-encounter with the jeeling, so I go to Mira's. It's not even midnight when I arrive, and the early hour feels strange. Mira's house is a compact ranch, and she's already decorated the porch with orange and red lights for Samhain. I didn't know she celebrated that. I usually leave it to the witches, except for the annual Mediator Samhain gala, which is pretty much just an excuse for all of us to get drunk and go kill shit.

Wane meets me at the door in scrubs with sushi rolls on them, confirming my earlier suspicion. She sticks out her hand as I shut the front door of Mira's house. I grasp Wane's hand and shake. Her grip is oddly light for the firm strength in her hands.

"Wane Trujillo," she says.

"Ayala Storme."

"I know."

I nod at her scrubs. "Night shift?"

She returns my nod. "I'm an OB." She hesitates for a minute, then, "I delivered a Mediator baby yesterday."

The announcement catches me by surprise, and my heart gives a ribbit in my chest. "Oh?"

The syllable comes out with admirable nonchalance, but I hate the reminder of how we happen.

Mediators are born to happy, expectant parents. Open their eyes. If they're that dark, grayish baby blue? You're good to go. Violet? Congrats. You just spent nine months incubating and caring for and trying to name a baby you'll never see again. Mazel Tov.

Maybe that's the real reason norms don't like us. We remind them of a hundred thousand hijacked maybe-babies. We remind them that without hellkin, we could come into the world like the bouncing baby bundles everyone hopes for. We remind them that the night isn't safe.

Wane seems to sense she hit a nerve, and she coughs, picking up a leather messenger bag and a meticulously folded white jacket. "Tell Mira I should be off by noon. I'll bring by lunch."

"Are they in her room?"

"Guest room. Second door on the right."

Wane leaves, and I take off my shoes, placing them on a mat next to Mira's combat boots, wondering how an OB-GYN ended up in the middle of Forest Hills with a Mediator, saving a shade's life. I unbuckle my scabbard belts and lay them on the coffee table. Mira's home is all hardwoods and ocher walls. Small shelves make little stair-steps against the ocher paint, holding thick-based candles that give off a smell of vanilla and spice.

I make my way down the hall, my feet making the floorboards creak. Lining the corridor are framed pictures of Tenochtitlan. Some are pictures of the pyramid, the Aztec ruins, nestled by lush green hills. Others depict the city as it might once have been when it was a city on a lake, thriving and organized, ringed in the deep blue of Texcoco's waters. An entire civilization there in a frame.
 

We Mediators all have our places we'll never visit.

I find the guest room and knock.

"Come in," Mira's voice says.

Saturn's sleeping, it seems. They got the blood cleaned off him, and he's covered to the ribcage with a white sheet. That's it — even with the hum of the air conditioner, shades run hot.
 

Mira stretches, twisting her back left and right. I hear a crack that sounds too loud in the quiet room. Her black angular bob shows the first hints of grease, and she has it tucked behind her ears. It makes her look weirdly vulnerable.

"Wane said she'd be back at noon tomorrow with lunch," I say, perching on the end of the bed. "How is he?"

"Better. He was able to rasp a little when he woke up." Anger lights Mira's features like a current traveling the length of a live wire. "You know what this looks like, right?"

I nod. I've been purposely avoiding the thoughts, but they're there. Keen blade to the neck screams Mediator. And whoever it was really didn't want to get caught. Which means they know of Saturn's connection to me and either know me personally or are just scared shitless of my reputation.

I mean, I'll take it. But I don't like the thought that someone whose face I've seen is trying to kill my people.

"Any ideas who?" I ask.

"No. Could have been any of those fuckers at the Summit."

I know which fuckers she means. Since what happened a few months ago, there's been some…unrest in the Summit. Even though Alamea, resident head honcho, just got a medal for having the lowest norm mortality rate in all the US Mediator territories, there are some who think all shades are plain evil. The Summit has hairline cracks through its people, and that makes me almost as nervous as what happened to Saturn.
 

"Do you think it could have been Ben?" Mira says after a beat.

"If it was, I'll personally put him in bite sized chunks and feed him to Saturn."
 

If my vehemence surprises Mira, she doesn't let on. The mere mention of Ben Wheedle makes me want to shred Mira's hardwood floors with my fingernails. A low growl escapes my throat, and I swallow it.
 

We're both silent for a moment, and I watch the quiet rise and fall of Saturn's chest.
 

"How was hunting tonight?" Mira asks.

I consider blowing off her question, but sitting here with her is a reminder that she is one of the only Mediators who took a stand when shit hit the demon horde a few months ago, and if I can trust any of these violet-eyed freaks, it's her.

I tell her about the jeeling and the cat and what happened.

"It ran away?" A lock of black hair falls over her face, and she absently pushes it back. She still has blood under her fingernails, crescents of rusty color.

"Turned tail and fled."

We're silent again.

"Shit, Ayala. Between that and Saturn, I don't like this. What's changed?"

I shrug automatically, then freeze.

I know what's changed. Same thing I've been dealing with since summer. This all started with the shades. We're all adapting to this new dynamic. Humans, Mediators, witches, morphs, psychics — we all coexisted just fine, and the Mediators took care of the hell-front. Then shades happened, and no one knows what the fuck to do with them. I didn't know what the fuck to do with them. Until Mason.
 

Looking at Saturn's still form, that familiar pang twinges at my heart again.

Why do I get the feeling I'm the one who's going to have to figure this all out?

Saturn doesn't wake up while I'm there. As much as I will him to open his eyes and talk to me, his body must be exhausted from healing an arterial death-wound, because at three in the morning, Mira and I have covered all the finer points of our favorite Arnold Schwarzenegger movies and Saturn hasn't woken up to tell us to shut up.

I make my way home and walk through the door to find Carrick sprawled out on my sofa.

He's wearing shorts — a prerequisite of living with me — and he gives me a nod of acknowledgement.
 

His auburn hair is in a messy bun at the back of his head. He's taken to stealing my hair ties. He's as bad as a cat.

When I enter the living room after hanging my swords on the hook in my foyer, he moves his leg aside and pats the sofa next to him. I sit, leaning back. The day feels as though it was fifty hours long, and even though four in the morning is still pretty early for me, I feel heavy with exhaustion, my eyes sandy and my head buzzing and dizzy.

"How was your day?" he asks. His voice is deep and rich, like Bela Lugosi as Dracula. Sometimes I think Carrick wishes vampires were real so he could pretend to be one. He's the type I could imagine swishing around and sweeping swoon-prone young women into a world of lust and blood.

Have I mentioned how sexy that's not? I've been around things that look at me as lunch. No, thank you.

"My day was long," I say.
 

I tell him what happened to Saturn, and his laconic slouch perks up into an attentive, upright position on the couch.
 

"But he'll live?" To his credit, Carrick manages to sound like he cares. He and Saturn have a weird relationship. It probably has to do with the fact that Carrick just up and decided to live with me, and Saturn thinks I'm going to sleep with Carrick or something.
 

Again, I say no, thank you.

"He'll live. Won't be winning any reality show singing competitions any time soon most likely, but he'll live."

My apartment feels strangely chill and empty. The air conditioning is still on, but the outside air is cooler with the onset of autumn, and I can't shake the hollow feeling of my home.
 

Instead of dwelling on it, I change the subject.
 

"Have you heard from Gregor?" I ask.

Carrick nods at that. "He would like us to take them out hunting tomorrow night."

I rub my palm over my face, which carries a sheen of end-of-day grease. We've been running little hunting expeditions with the shades for a while now, taking them out to take out hellkin and learn how they move together to hone their training. Nothing new there.

It's been almost three months since Carrick moved in here, and I still don't know what to do with him. "Do you really think all this will help?" I ask.

"Help what?"

I gesture toward my balcony, feeling a pang again at the memory of how Mason used to sit out there, dangling his legs over the edge from seven stories up. "Help them. The shades. Help the Mediators or the norms or whatever."

Instead of a flippant dismissal, Carrick turns my words over in his head. I can see him considering and wonder if he really feels connected to these Tennessean shades at all. He's the only one left of his batch of shades from four hundred years ago, and while the shades we work with have formed their own circles and groups, Carrick seems like he's just punching the clock most of the time.

"I think having purpose is helpful," he says finally.

"For the shades?"

"For everyone. You have it, with the Mediators. Gregor has it."
 

"Fair enough."

I notice he leaves himself off that list, but I don't push.
 

I even think I agree with him. The shades we work with seem to want to work with us. There's a nebulous sort of relief I see in Miles and Rade and Jax and Hanu and all the others, that whatever it is we're doing is somehow legitimizing their existence so the Mediators won't just kill them.