Eye of the Storm (35 page)

Then she doubles over, teeth gritted.
 

Her baby is coming.
 

Its father was a shade.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Carrick looks every ounce as shocked as I feel.
 

"Shades can't father children," Carrick says dumbly. It's the first time I've heard him sound that flummoxed.
 

Still dripping, Asher leans on the conference room table and gasps as a contraction hits her. "Tell that to Kelby."

Gryfflet scurries back and forth at the table, looking like he's not sure whether to go for help or go to Asher or pretend she didn't just go into labor in his conference room and continue scrawling on the walls. A warm, almost sweet smell makes its way through the room.
 

"Do you need to…sit down or something?" I know nothing about babies. I mean, I know how they happen, but the whole birth thing is a blazing mystery to me.
 

Asher gives me a bland look. "My mother is a doula. I've been around plenty of births. I think I can manage to stay on my feet for a while."

Gryfflet mutters something under his breath. "I can clean that up if you want."

I blink at him. Asher pulls out her phone and calmly opens an app that tracks contractions, entering in a few taps of information. Carrick is still staring at her, not speaking.

I have to assume she's telling the truth. How Kelby went from Asher's lover to murderer of Nashville civilians, I don't know, but at least I do know I can probably blame Gregor for it. My mind races. My mother birthed a shade. Her best friend is about to birth a shade's baby. Asher Anitsiskwa made her way directly to me as soon as she figured out who I was.
Think, Storme
. The sight of Saturn's body invades again. I push it away. Mira. I swallow the bile that rises in my throat.
 

Asher is under a gag spell. A powerful one. She and my mother studied the Mediators for almost three decades. Evis's birth and Asher's pregnancy have to be connected.
 

"Why?" I ask. "Why did you get pregnant?"

Asher doesn't answer, which is almost enough answer in itself for me.
 

I try a different question. "You didn't have to come find me. Why did you?"

There's a suspicion I harbor, that even if Asher hadn't seen my face plastered in the national news media, she would have sought me out somehow.
 

Asher doesn't answer this one either, but her gaze drops momentarily to her belly. She winces as another contraction hits.
 

I look to Carrick, and I can almost see the wheels turning in his head.
 

"You planned this out," I say to Asher. "You meant to find me now, when you were about to give birth to a shade's baby. Even before — before everything happened, you planned to find me."

"Yes." I can't tell if Asher's gasp is a result of struggling against a spell or the fact that a baby is camped out at the gate to her cervix, trying to get it to open sesame.
 

"The baby itself is a message," Carrick says, looking at me with dawning understanding.
 

"Yeah, and one Asher can't deliver herself." I cringe at my accidental birth pun.
 

"Okay," says Gryfflet, looking at Asher like she's a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle and he just found his first corner piece.
 

"She knows — or believes —
 
something about the Summit, about Mediators. Something she can't tell us, but that contradicts everything we think we know." I speak the words slowly, turning them over on my tongue. "Carrick, why did you assume shades couldn't have children?"

He looks a bit embarrassed for a moment. "Because in four hundred years, I never got anyone pregnant." Then he pauses, his embarrassment shifting to a sick expression. "That I know of."

Suddenly I think of all the unprotected sex I had with Mason. "Gods," I mutter. "Guess I got lucky."

"Mediators can't get pregnant," Asher says, surprising all of us. She taps in her new contraction information into her phone.

"What?" I should know if that were the case. I rack my memories, trying to remember if I've ever heard of a pregnant Mediator woman. I think of Ripper. "Ripper had children."

"Mediator sperm is viable. Eggs are not. The biology is…complicated." Asher takes a deep breath and wipes her forehead on her sleeve.
 

Gryfflet looks like he's been handed more puzzle pieces.
 

Asher looks like there's more she wants to say, but from her face I can tell she's skirted as close to her gag spell as she can. She looks to Carrick, a pleading expression tightening her lips and drawing her eyebrows upward.
 

He moves his shoulders in a helpless shrug.
 

"Do you…need anything?" I ask Asher awkwardly.
 

Asher presses her lips together. There's a long silence. "I'd like a few people to be here for the birth."

With Asher's contractions irregular and spaced out, she shoos me out of the room, talking with Gryfflet and acting like she's not about to push a baby out of her vagina. I text Alamea that Asher's in labor and that she's invited to the birth. On the list of people Asher wanted there were a few Mediators of varying ages, a witch I can only assume is the one Asher knew here at the Summit, and a pair of norms from the Vanderbilt camp. She specifically requested norms who weren't tied to the Summit. I don't tell Alamea about who all Asher wants there, and with Carrick by my side as we hide out in one of the lesser-used Summit bathrooms, I think he feels as unnerved by Asher's requests as I do.

I take a shaky breath, leaning against the sink. A wet spot soaks into my jeans. I need to change back into leathers. I'm glad Carrick is here.
 

"Each time I think this can't get any bigger, I turn around and suddenly it's dwarfed me again," I say. "Do you get the feeling we think we know what's going on, but in reality we're looking at the giant's nose without seeing its feet a hundred feet below?"

"That's exactly how it feels." Carrick leans beside me, his long auburn hair brushing against my arm. "I shouldn't be thinking about this now, but I can't help but wonder —"

"If you left some women pregnant along the way? In a less-than-good situation?"
 

He nods. "Times were different."

I've never asked Carrick about his life. Now that we might all be nearing the ends of our lifespans, I wish I had time to sit down and hear about it. "You'll have to tell me about them sometime," I say lightly, as if the apocalypse isn't hanging over our heads.
 

He gives me a smile that only changes his lips.
 

We sit there together for a long moment. I know I'm stalling. I know I should be running through the corridors of the Summit until I find Mira and can tell her. I should text her to come meet me, but I know damn well if I do, she'll get that sinking lead cannonball dropped into her stomach because she'll know something's wrong. Carrick knows it too. He doesn't tell me we should move.

"I was married once, you know," he says. His words are such a surprise that my hand slips from the edge of the counter.
 

"What?"

"In the eighteenth century. 1789. She was a blazingly smart woman from a lower class family in York. I'd found a way by then to make a living, to keep a home, to blend in. Her name was Edith. I gave her a better life, or at least I thought. She always thought she was barren. Sometimes I'd hear her crying, because she couldn't get with child. In those days they always blamed infertility on the women. I never told her it was me, even though it might have lifted that burden from her. Eventually, we traveled together and I did my best to fill her life with adventures, to find things that would stimulate that mind of hers. But I know she always regretted not being able to give me a child." Carrick's eyes grow dark, and he gives a bitter laugh. "It may have been her infertility after all, if what Asher says is true. I've felt guilty all this time that I never told Edith what I thought was the truth."

"What was she like?" This window into Carrick's life intrigues me. How he managed to marry someone when in four hundred years he's aged only about twenty or so, I don't know.
 

"Smart, like I said. Her father worked in a mine, and when he got injured, she engineered a better wheelbarrow for him to be able to move things about. She taught herself how to read. She was tall, almost as tall as you, which in those days was gargantuan for a woman. The other townsfolk never found her handsome, but to me, she was magnetic. We studied together after the wedding, and I bought her every scientific text I could put my hands on. She was fascinated by engineering and physics. She died when she was forty, of what I think was pneumonia. At the time, physicians called just about everything consumption." Carrick goes still beside me. "I never tried to marry again, after Edith. I drifted a lot. When Gregor tracked me down in Cornwall, I'd been studying magic with a witch there for the past thirty-some years."

That knowledge clicks into my brain along with the now-familiar panicked awe I feel knowing Gregor didn't just leave Nashville for Seattle. Cornwall. Gregor managed to make it all the way to England without any Mediator being the wiser.
 

"So that's why you've been so helpful with Gryfflet's projects," I say, leaning over to bump Carrick's shoulder with my own. "And my handy dandy back art."

We're quiet again, then. "I should find Mira."

Saying her name aloud clenches something in my heart. I wish I could wave my hand and make Saturn and Miles live again. I can't articulate how much I hate that I wasn't there with them when they died.
 

"Why were they outside the wards?"

Carrick pushes himself forward, turning to face me. "They were trying to track the movements of the hellkin, to see if they could figure out any patterns."

"Guess the demons didn't like that."

"I suppose not." Carrick surprises me again, stepping forward and planting a kiss on my forehead. His mannerisms sometimes are more human than shade. The product, I guess, of a few hundred years of pretending to be one.
 

It takes us about an hour to find Mira. Most of the Mediators I ask about her whereabouts look like they're trying to knock Carrick unconscious with the force of their stares, but I finally pry it out of a Mitten that she's in the holding cells with Nana.
 

We find her in Nana's cell alone, propped up on a pile of pillows with Nana curled up next to her and a bag of potato chips on her lap. She's playing a game on her phone while the Terminator riddles a car with bullets on the makeshift screen.

She looks up when we enter the cell, and I can tell from her face that our presence is the same cannonball to the gut that a text message would have been.
 

"What is it?" Mira asks, and from the way her lips tighten on the
it
, I think she already knows.

"Saturn and Miles are dead," I say. I can't bring myself to soften it, and she wouldn't forgive me if I tried. "Demons. Not Mediators."

She doesn't yell
no
or even react for seconds that stretch into minutes. Nana stirs beside her and hops around Mira's bent knee, her ear brushing the bag of chips with a small crinkle of foiled plastic.
 

I don't know where Mira's gone in her mind. She looks straight ahead, not at Arnold onscreen or at either of us, her eyes distant and empty.
 

"Asher's in labor," I say after several minutes pass. I don't know what else to say. I don't know what to do with death anymore, besides acknowledging it. At this point I feel like I pass it every morning on the way to work, tip my hat as it tips its own, both knowing we'll meet again soon.

Mira doesn't answer or look up. Carrick gives me a worried glance, but he doesn't say anything.
 

"Do you want me to stay here with you?" I feel like it's the wrong thing to ask. Looking at Mira's blank face, I feel like I may as well ask the clouds why they won't go away and let the sun shine through.