Any Port in a Storm (6 page)

Carrick and I go home before first light and sleep, and though I know we're both completely exhausted, we both wake up before eleven and pass Sunday in a daze. I curl up on the couch with him and flick on the TV to a Bruce Willis marathon until three in the afternoon.
 

I think Carrick thinks the movies are ridiculous, but it's a mark of our growing camaraderie that for once he doesn't make fun of me for loving the Expendables.

I'm sure a shrink would have a field day with my love of that franchise considering the color of my eyes and what it means.

When Gregor pounds on my front door at thirteen minutes after three, the sound makes my head throb. I know it's Gregor because he might as well be the giant up Jack's beanstalk for the fee-fi-fo-fum of his fists on the door.

"Coming!" I bellow.

I slide off the sofa and kick Carrick's leg out of the way. He tries to trip me.

"Asshole."

"I have one of those. So do you."

"Thanks for that anatomy lesson."

Yes, shades poop too. Everybody poops. Their farts stink just about like you'd expect from a creature that only eats raw meat.

Ew.

I open the door, and Gregor nods at me without any other greeting and stumps into the house. He's got an iced green tea blended ice frappé thing in one hand and a wrapped box of tea in the other. He kicks off his shoes — bless him — and goes straight to the living room, tossing the box of tea onto my coffee table.

"Brought you a present," he says.

My cupboards are full of tea, and he knows it. "Thanks?"
 

Gregor flops down in my easy chair and slurps at his drink. "You two okay today?"

I nod, disgruntled that Gregor looks far more okay than either of us do. He's got a light bruise already yellowing on the left side of his blocky face, barely visible through his tan. His short, steel-and-sand hair makes him look like a Marine. Gregor's about my height and has bricks for bones, I think.
 

He slurps at his green tea thing some more.

"So what's up?" I ask.
 

"Alamea wants to see you tomorrow."

If my facial expression could flatline, it would.

Alamea Virgili is the head of the Nashville Summit. She's a six foot tall black woman with thin locs that hang almost to her waist. She wears heels. I've seen her run in them. She also almost sliced off my arm a couple months ago when I dived in front of her blade to save a shade.
 

Good times.

We've had a tentative sort of truce since Mason and Saturn and the other shades pretty much saved all Mediator asses from a horde of demons, and she's got her medal from the Summit thanking her for keeping norm mortality rates so low since the big blowout.

Something niggles at my mind, but it scuttles away when Gregor opens his mouth again.

"She just wants to talk to you about the project," he says.

The project. The whole army-of-shades thing. Better on our side than that other thing, I think the Summit decided. Or at least that's what Gregor told me. Knowing that there are splinter cells within the Mediators who still think the only good shade comes with its head sold separately, I'm not entirely sure they agree on Gregor and I working with Carrick and the others to train these natural-born fighters with martial skills. I'm also not entirely sure I give a gopher's gonads what the Summit thinks. I've been locked in their underground grey beehive of doom once. That's not happening again.

Anger flickers in me like tongues of licking flame, and I douse it. I might want to parboil Gryfflet Asberry's cabbage-y face for selling me out to the Summit, but I've got my own medals and enough clout to keep them from biting at my ankles. For now.

I stare at Gregor, willing his face to give me some sort of clue of what to expect, but he just benignly sips his gods damned green tea.

CHAPTER SIX

Monday arrives with a chill in the air enough to make Laura turn off the air conditioning in the office for the first time this fall.

My shoulder is mostly healed, but it still feels tight when I lift my left arm above waist level. My sleepy shade roommate is snoring in his room when I leave, and I send Mira a text asking if I can stop by at night to see Saturn. I hope he's okay, and not just because I want to hear whatever it is he said he needed to tell me. I also hope whatever that is ends up being important, and not that he tried a new kind of wild game or ran from Nashville to Franklin and back in an hour and a half or something.

I make it to the office by quarter of eleven, and these days the wasabi-green walls actually do soothe me, along with the nearly blank clock. What I said to Laura is truer maybe than even I realized — my job really is my safe space.

Parker, the temp receptionist we hired to replace Alice, greets me with a chipper smile that makes me feel certain he spent Sunday night wagging his tail by his front door just waiting for Monday to let him go back to work. He's not a morph, so he doesn't actually have a tail, but he should. It would suit him.

"Coffee's brewed," he says, running his hand through his dark wavy hair.

He looks sort of like a Bernese mountain dog to me, if they had the excitement levels of a cocker spaniel.
 

I miss Alice, with her bottle blonde hair sprayed within an inch of its life. The lipstick that made its home n her front tooth. I went from not knowing her at all to watching her nearly give up her life for the mere hope of seeing her only friend again. I held her near-naked body in my arms while she wept. I hope she's enjoying life in Tibet; if nothing else, the Summit there is peaceful, and I hope Alice has found some of that peace for herself.

I think I'll always regret not taking the time to get to know her better. Even so, I can't make myself talk to Parker for longer than five minutes.

The coffee he brews is fantastic, though. He gets that artisanal, organic stuff that probably costs him an hour of pay per bag, but he shares it with everyone every day. I never said he wasn't a nice person.

On my desk when I enter my office is a stack of papers with a bright blue sticky note attached that just reads "FYI."

Laura's left company info and what my partnership would entail. It makes me almost giddy again, reading through it. The raise alone would be welcome, though I don't even know what I'd do with it. Mediators can't exactly spend money on travel. We get too far from our home territory and our innards start to liquify — or at least that's how it feels. No, thank you. I could start saving up for a house. Now there's a thought.

The excitement of paging through the packet of information helps distract me from my impending meeting with Alamea. I leave work at seven thirty and drive over to the Summit.

Sitting across from Nashville's Parthenon, the Summit is a sleek, modern juxtaposition against the Classical pillarism of the Parthenon. Well, Classical ripoff, anyway.

The parking lot is more crowded with cars than it usually is on Monday nights, and I feel a wave of relief not to see too many familiar vehicles. Namely, Ben Wheedle's. I don't think the Summit would look too fondly on me disembowling him on their doorstep. I feel like there's an internal clock in my head, like you find in factories to measure time since last safety incidents. It has been sixty-one days since I last saw Ben. I'm in no hurry to reset that counter to zero.

Inside, the yin yang on the floor feels three dimensional rather than two when I step across it. The physical depiction of the balance we seek as Mediators. Part of me expected the pull of emotion it brings me to fade when my black and white world swirled into grey this year. The first time I visited the Summit after I got out of the hospital, I stood in the center of the yin yang and stared at it, let it surround me until a Mediator-in-Training walked by and asked me for my autograph.

Mediators aren't Daoist by default — though some follow that path — but after the events of the summer, the idea that attaching judgement to the two interflowing sides of this symbol is only a perceptual projection of our own, well. Let's just say that it resonates with me a bit more than I thought it ever would.
 

Dark and light are two sides of the same thing, and there is no solid line between them; there are always parts of one to be found in the other, and neither is inherently good or bad.

If anything, my feet slow on the floor more now than they did before. Today there are too many people around for me to stand here and ponder, though, so I force my feet to carry me faster into the lobby.

The MIT at the front desk looks up when I approach. These days they all know who I am. Sort of like running into Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban in Green Hills. I'm a weird sort of famous in Mediator circles these days.

"What's up, Mittens?" I say lightly. "I'm here to see Alamea. She's expecting me."

The MIT gives me a nervous grin, his gawky teenage frame muscular but untrained still. He's almost as pale as I am, with a smattering of reddish freckles that clash with his violet eyes.
 

Mine clash too; my yellow-orange hair doesn't look too good with purple. C'est la vie of the Mediator. Stuck with the same eye color, other coloring be damned.
 

"Sh-she's in her office!" The MIT points upward as if I need directions, which is kind of cute.

"How old are you, Mittens?"
 

"Fourteen."

Lordy. I try to remember myself at fourteen and fail. "What's your name?"

"Conroy."

"Well, Conroy, keep up the good work." I feel like Uncle Sam as I walk away, or a weird amalgamate of him and Smoky the Bear.
Only you can prevent total takeover of Nashville by the teeming hordes of the hells
. Wink wink.

Alamea's office is always messy, which I respect. She never gives me shit about my car. She's got swords on her walls, gorgeous, functional swords that I can tell she cares for. They shine in the austere white light of her office, edges honed and blades bright.
 

Alamea herself shows signs of care. She's old money, cotton plantation owners dating back to the seventeenth century in North Carolina. The Virgili's came from Africa and took over half the South. She's one of the few Mediators who has a lineage everyone knows, though she's like the rest of us and cut off from her family. Not the first Virgili to be born a Mediator, either.
 

She's a titan, a legend, a walking god. Her white linen shirt is perfectly tailored; her exposed dark brown arms give the same effect. I know the strength and control in those muscles. She's over six feet tall even flat footed, and her long locs are tied in a hefty knot over her right shoulder, shots of silver winding through them like little lightning bolts. She sits with both feet up on the corner of her desk, typing away on a laptop with her desktop computer monitor angled to the side. Every so often, she looks back and forth between the screens.
 

My arm gives a twinge when I see her, and again I'm thankful to her reflexes that she didn't chop it off. She could have. Any slower and she would have. I'm always just a bit in awe of her, and not a little bit afraid.

I know she sees me, but she doesn't acknowledge me until I hear her hitting the return key three times with her pinky, and then she looks up, dropping her feet to the floor and moving the laptop to the surface of her desk. She straightens a stack of papers as if it'll do anything to stem the overflowing mass of them that threaten to slide off the sides of the desk, and then she gives me a tight smile.

"Thanks for coming, Ayala."

"My pleasure. I think."

Her smile widens at that.
 

"I hear there was a misunderstanding this weekend."

"That's one way to put it. Carson and his buddies killed one of my friends." I don't want to think about Rade, even though I know that's why I'm here. I don't want to think about Thom and Sez. I also don't want to think of all the other names of shades we would lose if the Mediators went all out against them again.
 

Alamea's peace medal hangs behind her in a mahogany frame, ironically bearing a sword sculpted in silver, point down. Whatever honors we win, we pay for in blood.

I don't want to think about the names of the shades I helped blow up this summer and the blood that paid for my own medal.

Alamea seems to sense my thoughts, and she sits forward in her chair. She smells like lemon cake, sweet and citrusy, and she meets my eyes, silent for a long moment. "We were wrong this summer."

Of all the words I expected to hear out of her mouth,
we were wrong
were at the bottom of the list. Somewhere around
I've decided to marry a slummoth
.
 

I want to say that yes, we were. And include myself in it, because before I was right I was certainly wrong. Instead my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth, and I just wait for her to go on.

"What you're doing with Gregor is important," she says finally. "I'm glad that someone is there to give the shades purpose and direction, to show them that they can be our allies."