Eye of the Storm (22 page)

"No, it's not that," she says. She rakes her fingers through her hair. It's a little greasy, but it just makes her silky black hair textured and sort of apocalypse-sexy.
 
Her crossed scabbards on her back look natural, as do the double sheathes for daggers at her hips and the boots with hilts protruding from the tops. She's all in black, her brown skin paler than usual under the unlight of the perpetual cloud cover. Mira shoves her hands into her pockets, gesturing with a sharp nod of her head. "We walking?"

"I was going to walk the perimeter."

"The whole city?"

I shrug. "Better than sticking around here. Alamea'll be pissed at me, but if the attack comes, there isn't going to be a good place to be. We're all going to be in the shitter."

Mira adjusts the daggers at her waist. "Well, I'm at least dressed to party."

We set off to the north, heading to I-440 with the most direct route. For the first mile or so, we're both quiet.
 

"I don't want you to think I don't want you to touch me," she says softly as we step around an overturned SUV on Charlotte Avenue.
 

I don't answer. I don't know what to say. I look at her, turning my head because she's a little bit behind me. She meets my eyes.
 

"I don't know how to do this even with the normal amount of death and gloom hanging over my head. Wane would probably have good advice for us, but she's not here." The pain in Mira's voice leeches some of the light from her eyes. The corners of her mouth are turned downward, small creases at their edge.
 

"I know," I say. At that moment, all I want in the world is to stop, turn, and put my arms around her. I want to feel the firm strength of her muscles and the soft cushion of her breasts. I want to kiss smiles onto her lips and pretend for a few seconds that there aren't claws grasping at our ankles.
 

Her lips part, and I wonder if she's thinking the same thing.
 

"It's fucking scary to say what you want out loud, isn't it?" Her laugh then is bitter, and I join her in it.

"Damn right it is." I take a shaky breath.
 

The streets are too quiet, the sky too still. With sunset quickly approaching, most of this hike will be in the dark. We're as safe as anyone ever has been walking these streets at night, but it's the kind of safety that comes walking in the crater of a volcano you know isn't dormant.

"I don't want to die."
 

Mira's words make a pocket in the air, a fuzzy pocket that makes me feel like I finally understand fainting spells. It makes the air warm and heavy and makes my head feel dizzy.
 

"I don't want to die either," I say. "It fucking pisses me off that these are the choices. Grow up knowing you might die every night, looking for death in the forests and in the streets. Watch it come after you, watch it get your friends."

I think about Ripper, the way his arms grasped Jocelyn so tightly, the way his hand clasped Bart's, the way he
 
looked at Alison's face when she called him Dad.

I still can't think about the shades. Thinking about them pulls the others to me, and for tonight I need to be as human as I can be.

"It feels unfair." Mira looks moodily ahead of us, where no death waits in the bushes except the kind that shrivels the bushes from the roots up.
 

We both know that it is unfair. But sometimes you don't need platitudes. Sometimes you just need to sit with someone and acknowledge how much something sucks.

For the next quarter mile, walking alongside the silent freeway, we both let that happen.

Finally, I take a deep breath of stale, stagnant air, feeling it rattle against a too-quickly beating heart. I stop and turn, looking at Mira.

"I want to wake up beside you in a warm bed with the sun shining through a window onto the pillows. I want to feel your skin pebble with gooseflesh when I touch it, and I want to get up and make waffles and eggs and sausage even though I'm a shitty cook. I want to spend a day reading or watching movies or just napping on the couch with your head in my lap. And I want that every day, or as many as we can. I want to hear you swear if you spill coffee on your shirt on the way out the door, and hear you yell at me for using all the hot water. I want to sit and listen to Carrick and the others discussing their favorite romance novels while you and I drink beer and watch Die Hard. Most of all, I want to go to bed knowing that there will be another day in front of us. Not because I want to take it for granted and get glutted on the routine, but because I want to have a chance to be thankful for it, and all the ones we get." My next breath is a shuddering one, and Mira has twin silver lines of tears on her cheeks. "I wish that we could both live however many days we have left and live them the kind of way we never thought we'd get to. But I'm scared shitless that if we try, we'll be so busy living each one like it might be the last that we might fall through the floor into hell when we could have stopped it."

I've got tears to match hers now, and she closes the distance between us. Her hands find mine, but that's all. She doesn't step closer, only squeezes my fingers like she's afraid she'll be torn away if she doesn't hold on for dear life.

She doesn't say anything. She doesn't have to. She understands.
 

And more, I know from the way she looks into my eyes that she feels the same way.
 

We've been friends for years; she was always the closest thing to a friend I ever had in the Mediators. She's had my back — literally and figuratively — as long as I can remember. Again I think of the two of us curled naked on the ground, our skin seared with markat venom and our faces wet with drying sweat and tears. I trust Mira more than I trust just about anyone on this planet.
 

And in that moment I know when she looks at me that she trusts me right back.
 

Love we've always had. You can't help but love someone when you've spent as many years fighting beside them and you've helped them pull rakath quills out of their back while still half drunk. There's the kind of camaraderie that comes from leaning on someone in battle, and it's powerful. It's not too hard to trust someone to want to keep you alive. But trusting someone to actually live with you, to walk beside you — that is a fragile, precious thing.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Mira and I move on to less personal topics as we continue the circuit around the city, our path taking us along a long stretch of the Cumberland River. Under other circumstances, this might be romantic, though really, no one takes romantic walks by the river at night. No one really wants to end up with their guts mixed with fish guts in the belly of a frahlig demon.

It's eerie, the city without any activity at all. It's also amazing how quickly things disintegrate when the activity ceases, though I imagine it would be faster if there were animals in the city. Even though we've driven out the demons, apparently the critters have all taken to the hills. Either that or they're all in a different part of the safe zone. Too bad we don't have a way to communicate to them that central Nashville has become one big wildlife refuge.
 

My phone buzzes in my pocket twice, and I'm thankful to just see the equivalent of a text eyeroll from Carrick about our little excursion. His second text lets me know that all the shades are staying in one spot until whatever happens happens. They have to know they're vulnerable even as a pack, but I think the requisite qualifier is
safer
.

The city is so silent that when a splash reaches my ears, I jump. It takes a moment for Mira's look of puzzlement to register; my ears are more sensitive than hers.
 

"Something's up there," I say, pointing ahead.

"Demon?"

"Unless a townie decided to go for a mid-winter dip in the river."

We pick up the pace, and the splashing sound continues. The boundaries of the wards are the river and the highways, and any demon can backstroke right up to the shore without setting them off, but the closer we get to the sound, the less it sounds like just one demon.

"Shit," Mira says when we get into earshot for her. "Frahligs?"

"It almost has to be."

They're the only water demons we have around here. I reckon other types exist in other territories; we don't have estuaries or oceans in a landlocked state, and frahligs like rivers and smaller lakes. They really piss off the local fisherfolk, since they eat any fish worth catching.

Still dangerous to bipeds, though.

"We'd have an alert if this were the big attack, right?" Mira says. Her voice is dubious.
 

We both know there's a chance the Summit could be the epicenter and no one would have time to warn us, but it doesn't look like that's the case. Looks like we just have a frahlig pool party.

Sure enough, when we reach the shore, four frahligs are splashing about in the water, fighting over a carp. Fish are the only creatures that don't flee demon presence, at least that I know of.
 

"Water's sort of shallow here," Mira remarks.

"Gonna be hell on the leathers no matter what." I ponder that.
 

We both draw our swords at the same time, the steely whisper of the blades too quiet to reach the demons' ears. Frahligs have shit hearing anyway.

I pick up a rock from the shore, holding both of my blades in my left hand for a moment as I chuck it at one of the demons' heads. It hits it right between the rheumy eyes, and the slimy creature gives out a squelching sort of roar.

Frahligs are pale beige and look prune-y like they've been in the bath too long and weren't built to be underwater. They exude slime, and their mouths are filled with long, spiny teeth that look like oversized, sharper baleen. They have webbed feet — webbed underarms, even — and I wouldn't want to go up against one underwater.
 

These ones, however, are on the shore. Their paddle-like feet stick in the mud, and my sword point finds the first demon's throat before it takes two steps. Frahlig blood is yellow, and it spurts out over the mud like egg yolk, the color visible even in the dark.
 

Mira slips in the mud, recovering so gracefully for a second I'm not sure the slip was an accident. Her dual swords dig into a demon's chest, and the crunch of its ribs reaches my ears. They smell like rotten fish when you gut them. The stench pours out over us.
 

The remaining two hellkin scramble out of the water toward us. So far none have hit the ward line or we would have heard it. These are easy kills, and I feel a stupid grin spread across my face in spite of the smell and the muck and the slime.
 

My blades make short work of my demon, and I hear the slippery squish of Mira's doing the same. It's a fast fight, and in the grand scheme of everything we're trying to do, a pointless one.

Mira starts laughing as we kick the bodies into the Cumberland. The fish they would use as prey will return the favor, or some other frahligs will.
 

"What's so funny?" I ask.

"Can you imagine if we both had somehow died doing this? Everything we've fucking been through, and either one of us could have face planted into the drink and gotten our throat ripped out."
 

"Alamea would never forgive us." I'm not sure why she finds this so funny. Perplexed, I pull out the rag I use to clean my blades and put it to use, making sure to step back inside the ward line.

A bell-like tone goes through the air.

"What the fucking fuck?" I freeze, my hand on the blade. Frahlig goo seeps through, and hastily I resume my cleaning.

Mira's laughter halts, and she looks at me. "Did you just trigger the ward?"

"I…it let me through, but it sounds like it." Fuck. I finish cleaning my blades and resheathe them, grabbing my phone to dial Alamea.
 

It rings three times before she answers. "Storme, do you have trouble?"

"Uh, no. We just killed four frahlig demons on the shore of the Cumberland, and when I walked back through the ward line, it pinged."

Alamea's silent for a moment. "Hold on."

The line goes quiet, and seconds tick by. Mira doesn't seem overly disturbed, but I now feel a surge of adrenaline that I didn't have facing down the frahligs. I was with Asher when she set the wards on the other side of town, and nothing happened then. Maybe because they were new? My brain rushes through possibilities.

When after what seems like an eternity, Alamea's voice comes back on the line, her reassurance doesn't make me feel better. "Asher says it's probably your tattoo."

"No shit," I say.
 

"It's nothing to worry about, Storme. You're not a demon, obviously."

I resist the urge to repeat my
no shit
.

"Well," I say flatly. "No danger up here."

Alamea sighs. "You shouldn't even be up there."

"I needed to get away."

Her momentary silence could mean anything. "Just get back."