Eye of the Storm (19 page)

"You don't mean that."

"I kind of do." I lean back in the chair, my hands raising to my face, fingers massaging my temples. "I don't know if any of the things we're doing mean anything. We might all be making soap in the face of apocalypse."

"You really do mean that." Gryfflet stops what he's doing and stretches, cringing as his back cracks in four places.

"Yeah." Moodily, I look out the window, at the grey daylight outside. I think of Eldron's final words,
I'd hoped to see the sun one last time.

"Look, Storme. I don't know why you came up here, but if it was for a pep talk, you're in the wrong place. I'm not the best person to talk to about futility right now."

"Well, tell me what you've got at least. Maybe a fresh brain will help give you a direction to point yourself in."

He gives me a dubious sort of look that says my input will be as helpful as a line chef giving advice to a theoretical mathematician, but he shrugs after a moment. "I'm mostly working off theory here, and even that's incomplete. Asher's been a huge help clarifying some things from the research she did with your mother." Gryfflet says those words without weight, then breezes right past them. "For the past several thousand years, there's been a sort of balance."

"The balance," I say, nodding. That's basic Mediator 101. We keep the balance, the demons don't eat all the little norm babies in their bassinets, we all go home happy and hopefully alive.

"No, not
the
balance. Just a sort of general balance. Numbers of Mediator deaths, norm deaths, everything — it's sort of been even. Steady. A few blips here and there, but nothing extreme. Something's shifted in the past year. Something big enough to allow this to happen." Gryfflet gestures at the window.
 

"The shades," I say.

Gryfflet shakes his head. "They're a variable, for sure. But they're not a new one. There have been batches of shades cropping up for thousands of years. If that was as simple as it was, we'd have lost this war eons ago."

"I'm listening."

"There are a number of other things that could be playing into it. Number of hells-zealots seems to be way up. No idea why. Could be cultural, a sort of response to the economy, post modernism, whatever you want to say. And there's the fact that for the first time maybe ever, Mediators have left their territories." Gryfflet looks at me as he says it, and I feel my lips press together.
 

"Gregor did it first," I say gruffly.

"I'm not saying this is your fault."

"But it's possible."

"It's also possible that tattoo on your back did it, but I don't really think so." He sits down in a chair a few down from me at the side of the table. "There are a lot of things going on here, and probably a lot we don't know about, too. I'm trying to take all of that and make sense of it, to weigh the options of what could have tipped us into this doomed tailspin we're in."

"Using magic." I sit up in my chair again, leaning forward. I'm so tired my head feels huge, and the movement makes me dizzy.
 

"That's just the theory aspect I'm working from. Magic requires both a direction and a catalyst, and I'm trying to figure out a way around the direction bit. I've tried some basic divination, but it doesn't work, not when everything's this fuzzy. I can turn loose a thousand little seekers of magic, but if they don't know where to go, they'll just get confused and swarm."

"Maybe we're just straight doomed," I say. "Fuck, we didn't even realize Mississippi was a warning. Or the Opry. Or gods know what else. We just watched those places fall and moved on with our lives. Alamea made me think the Summit paid some sort of attention to those things, but —"

Gryfflet's face has gone whiter than usual.
 

"What'd I say?"

"You said Mississippi was a warning."
 

"Well, maybe not a big flashing sign that says
we're coming for you
, but we lost almost three states only a few years back and nothing changed in the interim." I peer at him. He looks like he's about to choke on his own tongue. "Gryfflet. Spill."

"I've been looking in the wrong place."

I don't like the sound of that. "Explain."

"I've been looking around for recent things. I should have been looking at history."

A slow understanding creeps over me. "Correlations."

He nods. "I need to find out how much territory we've lost, and when."

I stand up. "Want help?"

Gryfflet jumps to his feet, already bustling around one of the open, blank walls of the conference room with a red permanent marker. He scrawls one long horizontal line across it.

I don't have to ask what that is. It's a timeline.

He doesn't answer me. I leave the room, my head swimming.
 

Strangely, when I get to a small, empty office down the hall that has a bean bag chair in the corner, I curl up in it and immediately fall asleep.

I wake up to the strange sound of snuffling and Jax's face directly in front of mine.

I peer at him through one half-open eye. It's a joke of his. He likes to wake me up like this. The snuffling I hear is Nana, and a moment later, Jax deposits her on my lap. She settles there for a few seconds, allowing me to pet her velvety red fur, but then she hops off my lap and back onto the floor.
 

"I thought you'd like to see her, and she wanted out of her cage."

It's not worth asking how Jax knew she wanted out of her cage. I leave that to him and Nana.
 

"Thank you," I tell him. We both watch Nana hop around the office for a short while, both of us silent.

Jax and I never talk much, but his companionship has been welcome all this time.
 

At the thought, I feel something in his mind glow.
 

"I mean it, you know," I tell him aloud. For some reason I need to say it.

"I know. I like you too."

Someone knocks at the door not long later, and I can tell it's Evis. He opens the door, careful not to let Nana scuttle through the crack, and he closes it behind him.
 

"Breakfast," he says.
 

It's more like lunch time — late lunch — but I don't care. I'm ravenous.
 

Evis hands me a heaping plate of still-hot scrambled eggs and sausage from the Summit kitchen. I guess they're not worried about rationing. I devour the contents of the plate, grateful for a hot meal. I don't remember the last time I ate. When I polish off the food in mere minutes, Evis hands me an apple.
 

"Thank you," I say.
 

"I told Alamea she had to let you sleep," my brother says. "You were tired. We could all feel it."

Nope, not getting less creepy.
 

"Thank you," I repeat. And I mean it.
 

My phone buzzes. It feels so suddenly foreign that it makes me jump, startling Nana.

Go figure. She can deal with demons and screaming, but the second I make a sudden move, she panics.
 

My phone's battery is almost to the dire level. I fumble in my pockets for the charger and plug it in. The text is from Mira.
 

Devon's here
. That's all it says.

My heart gives a thud. Devon. I've been wondering where he was. I haven't seen him since our semi-triumphant reentry into Nashville, and when after that we had to return to Kentucky to get Nana and collect the rest of our belongings, he wasn't here when we returned.
 

I don't know how many days it's been since then. They all run together.

Forcing myself to stand, I toss my biodegradable plate in the trash bin. "You'll watch Nana?" I ask Jax.

"I always do."

It's not a resentful statement, just truth. He likes my little fluffer of a bunny.
 

He seems to sense my thought. "She's better than the goat."

Fair enough.

Evis and I leave the room, unplugging my barely-alive phone again already, and I text Mira a quick
where are you?

I may have a line on every remaining shade alive, but I can't tell where my Mediator people are without some sort of coordinates.

She gives me the room number of the same conference room we slept in the other night.
 

At least it's not the infirmary we're going to. Sure enough, Devon's as well as any of us, sitting in a folding chair against one wall. The scars on his face stand out. I'm so happy to see him I want to shout, but I settle for a tight hug.
 

"I heard about Ripper," he says.

I hug him harder, but don't say anything.

"Where've you been?" I ask. "You've been AWOL a bit."

"I had to go check on some people in Murfreesboro. It took me two days to get back up here."

"Some people?" We all seem to have secrets these days.

"An old neighbor and a couple friends is all," Devon says. He looks at Mira, then back at me. "Not like…"

Not like Ripper.

I look at Mira myself, thinking of her cousin Wane. She gives me a thin-lipped smile as if to reassure me.

"What's it like down there?" So much of the country doesn't live in the metropolitan areas. With most Mediators in the cities, I have no idea how the rural areas are faring, or the smaller towns.

"Scared. A lot of folks are digging out old bayonets and whatever keen edges they can find. There have been a few smaller towns picked off, but Murfreesboro is doing okay. I think everyone in the countryside knows that it's the cities the demons are going for first." Devon looks as bleak as I feel about that.
 

Once the cities fall, the countryside will be a clean sweep. Sol and Luna look up from where they are crouched in the corner of the room, and the images I get from them feel like confirmation.

The cities are the threats; the countryfolk are the fodder after our world is taken over.
 

It makes me feel sick. Sicker.

Nothing about this makes me feel any better.
 

"Did you get into Nashville okay?" Mira leans against the conference table. "Any trouble?"

"It's a ghost town out there. It mostly took me two days to get back because all the roads are blocked with cars, and I had to walk the whole way. I wasn't sure what I'd come up against." Devon gives a bitter laugh. "Didn't think I'd head south and come back to find the city a nearly empty, though. That was a surprise."

I can feel the blood drain from my face, and I look up at Mira in near-panic. Has anyone told him about the rest of the South?
 

"Devon," I begin, my mouth so dry my words sound parched and cracked. "Did you hear —"

His eyes tell me he didn't, and the eggs and sausage I just stuffed down my throat suddenly want to come right back up.

The world swims a bit in front of me. I have to tell him, though.
 

"Hear what?" Devon asks.

"Chattanooga," I say, unable to come straight out with the whole of it. I don't know which way's worse. "Atlanta, Jacksonville, Charlotte, Little Rock, Lexington."

"Cincinnati," Mira murmurs.

My head jerks up. While I slept, Cincinnati died.

Devon doesn't get it, and no wonder. We're being dodgy and cryptic.
 

"They fell," I say quickly. Too quickly. I swallow the rising bile in my throat.

"Fell."

His eyes go wild, and around me the agitation of the shades picks up, filters into me like little shocks. I try to calm myself so they'll calm too.

"We're the only city left in the South," I say.
 

"They're all —" Devon's voice comes out in a croak. He jerks his head around, looks out the window where Nashville sits silent and grey in the afternoon light. "Gone?"

"The hellkin blitzed them," Mira says. "Motherfuckers."

"Then it's over," says Devon. "We lost."

For some reason, that allows me to choke down the eggs. "Not fucking yet," I say.
 

They both look at me like I've said something cute. Sol and Luna flare with pride in their corner.

"They haven't hit us yet. While they were hitting Cincinnati and Little Rock, we were locking them out of central Nashville. I'm not saying they can't hit us or that they won't — they will — but they haven't hit us yet. Alamea's put out the word to all the other Summits to get the norms in their area into boot camp. Teach them to fight beside us. We may have hobbled ourselves by locking Mediators away in territories and pretending the rest of the world was safe to go about their happy little lives, and we may be slow learners, but look. If this world goes down, we're going to go down fighting."

It's not a pretty speech, and no one applauds me for it.

But I almost believe myself.