Any Port in a Storm (7 page)

"Not all the Mediators agree with you. Carson was awfully quick with his sword Saturday night."

She doesn't deny it. "What do you suggest?"

My, my, but she's full of surprises today. "Have you identified the Mediators who are trying to go around your edict not to hunt shades?"

She nods, as usual taking a moment before she speaks again. "We are aware."

I notice that she doesn't say it's under control. Either she knows me well enough now to know I wouldn't believe her, or she just doesn't plan to bullshit me. Interesting.

I also notice she doesn't tell me what happened Saturday won't happen again. Then again, promises and promises you can't keep are synonymous in our business.

"Why did you want to see me?" I ask. Her office is very quiet, except for the dull ticking of a clock on her bookshelf and the ever-so-slight whooshing of the wind outside.

"How do you think it's going?"

"The shades?"

She nods.
 

"They work well together. They respect one another, and they don't want to die." I think of all things, their self-preservation is what motivates them at this point. Every shade I know touches my shoulder when he greets me because he needs to know he's safe with me. Well, every shade but one. They are strangers in a hostile world.

"Do you think they will turn on us again?"
 

"To be candid, Alamea, I don't think they ever turned on us at all. They were born in blood and bone, spurred by instinct alone at first. They knew nothing, and why should they? We're fortunate their memories come soon after their birth."
 

A seed of irritation germinates, worming around in me like it's seeking light. Shades begin remembering their mothers when they are new to this world. That's where they all seem to find their names, seeking inward to understand themselves. We're the ones who called them monsters. Some of them were, to be sure, but most of them just want what we all do — life.

"And when they fought us later, they saw us only as aggressors." Alamea's words come out in a soft sigh, and I look up from the floor, my forehead taut with tension.
 

Is she agreeing with me?

Alamea's own face is creased and tight at once.
 

It's then I understand why she called me here, why she is asking me and not Gregor about the state of our plan. She knows he can convince them, but I understand them. And she has taken a huge, huge gamble.

On me.
 

She's betting on me.

I stay a while longer, talking to Alamea about tactics and letting her know about the grouping of hellkin we found at the Opry. I also tell her about the jeeling that fled, and with her peace medal hovering behind her chair, part of me wonders if fewer norms are dying because we're better about stopping the demons — or if the demons are somehow biding their time.

The drive home takes too long — I hit the witch and morph traffic hours and end up stuck waiting for a railroad crossing a mile from home — and I run through a drive thru on the way home just because cooking is the last thing I want to do.

I should go out and hunt some hellkin, but I'm almost overcome by the strange sensation of feeling exhaustion in my bones. I'm tired. I remember this old granny Mediator when I was a Mitten; she'd come down, daggers still on her belt and dirt from her garden under her fingernails, and she'd tell us that's how she knew it was time for her to retire. Not all Mediators get to a ripe old age, but this lady had just about fallen from the tree. She told me she felt the years in her bones at the end, and it bothers me that I'm feeling something like that now.

The end is nowhere in sight for me.
 

My drive thru bag smells like grease and cholesterol, and I drop it on the kitchen counter, going to pour a cup of water.
 

Something moves on my balcony.
 

It's a testament to how used to shades I am that I don't spill my water everywhere from surprise. Instead, I put one hand on the hilt of my belt knife and peer out through the glass door.

Miles's face appears as he approaches.

Unlatching the sliding door, I gesture him in, my fingers finding his dark shoulder covered in a thin layer of dust. He returns the touch, and I motion at him to follow me into the kitchen.

"Aren't you supposed to be with Carrick?" I pull out my phone — sure enough, there's a text from Carrick saying that he's taking the group to the east side of the city to do some drills in an abandoned football field.

"I had to come talk to you." Miles has a voice like a lion's purr, and he speaks precisely, forming each of his words with deliberation that makes me think he'd be a good politician under other circumstances.

Though I wouldn't wish that fate on a rakath.

"What happened?" I sit down at my table and unwrap my burger, ignoring the way Miles wrinkles his nose at the smell of cooked meat.

"Jax did not meet me where he was supposed to."

My burger suddenly tastes like cardboard.

"Where was he supposed to meet you?"
 

"Buena Vista Park."

"Is that where he lives?"

Miles gives me a tired look and shakes his head. "He lives farther west. He was going to meet me at the park, and we were going to travel together to meet with Carrick. I waited for a long time, but he didn't come."

A long time to shades could be an hour or it could be five. Judging by the time now — half past ten — and when Carrick was supposed to gather everyone — half past six — Jax has now been missing for about four hours.

"Fuck." I finish my burger in three large bites and glug down my soda past the lump of barely-chewed sandwich. I feel like I've swallowed an egg whole, but I ignore it.

"Yes," Miles agrees.

Jax. Jax is smart, risk-averse. He keeps to himself and avoids all the areas I told him Mediators frequent.
 

"Can you sense him at all?"

I hate asking that question, because it reminds me of Mason. But it's useful nonetheless. Shades can sense one another. Some more than others. It's not like telepathy, per se, but it is sort of like those stories you hear about a parent knowing their child is in danger and then being right. Or feeling someone walk up behind you. When shades are close to one another like friends or family, that sense grows stronger. Sometimes I almost feel it with Miles and Jax and, to a lesser extent, Carrick. I could just be blowing smoke up my own ass.

Miles gives a slight head shake.
 

Even though that head shake might not mean Jax is dead, it's definitely not a good sign.

"You know where he lives?" I ask.

"Yes."

"Then let's go."

CHAPTER SEVEN

Beaman Park is just off Old Hickory Boulevard northwest of town, and on a map it looks like a diagram of a woman's reproductive system, complete with ovaries. The eastern ovary is crisscrossed with streams and hiking trails, so I'm not surprised when Miles leads me to the western chunk of the park.
 

The creek in this part of the park is called Little Marrowbone.

Charmingly apt.

Miles has me circle around to the north and come into the park off Little Marrowbone Road, and we leave my car parked by the side of the road. I'm always glad for my Mediator plates, which have a yin yang symbol next to the ID number. One perk of the job is that you don't get parking tickets, and you don't have to pay to register your vehicle.

There aren't any official trails on this side of the park, but Miles leads me on a deer track that I keep trying not to think of as a fallopian tube. Hey, once you see it, you can't unsee it.

The park is alive with the sounds of nature's nightlife. Good. No demons nearby.
 

I follow Miles, keeping a short distance behind him. He moves almost silently through the underbrush, his bare feet rolling over roots and pats of bare ground where deer hooves have worn away the grasses. I keep to his footsteps, glad for the supple leather of my boots but envious of his callouses.

A small rivulet trickles in a crease of land to our right, melding its burble with the Little Marrowbone. It's there Miles turns upstream, away from the creek's tributary. The crease of land widens into a gully. The south slope is dotted with tupelo and black oaks, and the canopy above us would be aflame with autumn foliage if the sun were up.

Miles leads me to an outcropping of land, then ducks behind it. There's a small cave, little more than a hollow. Jax must have added the crude thatching of branches; he's constructed almost a lean-to. Jax isn't there.
 

I crouch to enter the dwelling. He's got a burlap sack stuffed with leaves for a pillow, and a low table of bark pulled from a dead snag. On the table is a line of trinkets. A worm-carved branch of ash, swirls decorating the length. A small brass box containing 50s-style jacks that make my breath hitch. And at the end, a black plastic gadget I know all too well.
 

About the diameter of a quarter, it's shaped like a gumdrop. Put it on a tree trunk and press it, and it'll stick into the wood and emit a signal and a ring of light around the base. I've used them hundreds of times; they call Mediators. Usually for body pickups. Sometimes for backup. There's always a team of nearly-trained Mittens available to dispatch from the Summit if a Mediator gets too far into a fray to get out.
 

I pick up the beacon and turn it over. There's a dusty layer on the bottom side, like fine sawdust. I know the things are reusable, and looking closer at the beacon, I think Jax pulled it from a tree and took it home.

Recently, if I had to hazard a guess.
 

"Footprints," Miles says.

I duck out of the lean-to, tucking the beacon in my pocket. They have serial numbers on them, and I can find out from Alamea when this one was last used — and by whom.

I look where Miles is pointing, and I see them. Bare feet left the prints, leading across the gully. In the mud at the edge of the stream, they're deeper.
 

"He went up the hill instead of back down the gully," I say.
 

Miles looks back over his shoulder at me and nods. I can't help but glance to my left, downstream. If Jax left this way instead of going back the other way, maybe he thought someone would be waiting for him at the gully's mouth.
 

I'm not the best tracker in the world, but I'm no slouch either. Miles and I head up the hill, looking for the traces of displaced soil and grass and the occasional depression of the ball of a foot or a toe.
 

In the dark, it's slow going even with both of us having above average night vision. I don't want to light the way with my phone, especially now that it looks like Jax was running from someone.
 

Everything in his little shelter was very deliberate. Tidy. If he put this beacon there in plain sight, he either was trying to look like he wasn't in a hurry or he wanted someone else to find it.

Sickness sinks into my stomach like a stone.
 

Miles and I make it down the other side of the hill, continuing south with the tracks until we hit the Little Marrowbone again. The tracks go straight into the water.
 

"Jax is not stupid," Miles says. "He would travel downstream for a time before coming out."

"Or upstream." The Little Marrowbone is a healthy creek, its levels a bit lower than they would be in spring or early summer, but still deep enough in the center to come up to knee height or so. Wisps of fog have begun to form in the autumn night, and by sunup they'll have made a mist over the entire park, spreading outward from the creek.

I look at Miles. "What do you want to do?"

He thinks for a long moment.
 

"If Jax is okay, he will come to you or me. If he's not…"

Miles doesn't have to finish his sentence.
 

Fuck.