Storm in a Teacup (11 page)

"Yes."

"Is there any way you could find out if there are more like that? Outside of Nashville?"

"You suspect this is happening elsewhere?"
 

I haven't told her what's even happening, but the way her eyes have suddenly deepened in intensity tells me she already suspected too. I stretch my fingers against my opposite palm.
 

"I think it's possible." I tell her about the string of disappearances. "I have all the information at home. I'll bring it by tomorrow if you want to look over it." Off the top of my head I remember that there were a bunch of cities, and I rattle them off. "Knoxville, Birmingham, Louisville, Cincinnati. Start there and let me know what you find."

I pass her my card from work after scrawling my cell number on the back of it.
 

She pulls her white lab coat back and tucks the card into the breast pocket of her bright pink shirt. "I have an autopsy," she says. "I'll check into these and let you know in a few days."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet."

I don't linger around to puzzle about what she meant. It's midmorning, and I'm supposed to be at work in ten minutes. I dig through the back seat of my car for something presentable to wear and find a pair of wrinkled grey slacks stuffed into a knee-high boot. There's a green sweater probably left over from winter wedged under the passenger seat. It'll be hotter than all of the hells in the summer humidity that already dampens the back of my neck, but it looks more presentable than leather.
 

The shoes I can't help, but I at least try to wipe off the bloodied pine needles that still cling to the tread. The last thing Laura will want is bloody footprints all over the office. They'd clash with the wasabi walls.
 

I'm the first one in this morning, and I start a pot of coffee in the kitchenette. I work on a few press releases, three mugs lined up in a row on my desk. I drain them, systematically pumping enough caffeine through me to get me through the day. Maybe I can take a nap before tonight's patrol.

I can't keep my eyes open. Even with Alice bumbling about the reception area and the staccato click of her talons on her keyboard, my eyelids droop until I find I've typed eight lines of z's across the pages on my word processor.

Maybe I could call Gregor. I don't know if he would tell me anything different than Alamea did, but it could be worth a shot. I pick up my phone and hit speed dial.

The phone rings several times. When I hear the automated voice telling me to leave a message and to press one for more options when I'm finished, I hang up without leaving a voicemail. If he's not answering, it probably means he's with Alamea now. And something tells me she wouldn't be punch-pleased if she heard I was grilling Gregor for information on a subject she told me to drop.

Images of the night replay in my mind as I piece together a press release folder for a witch's crystal shop launch party. News clippings about the crystal market, the block of East Nashville where the storefront was leased, and the witch's creds take up one side. I can't concentrate on what I'm doing. I dump the dregs of my last cup of coffee down my throat and gather up the three empty mugs.

Alice starts at my entrance with a disapproving sniff at the three mugs in my hand, probably because she's the one who has to wash them.

"Hi, Alice," I say.

"One of these days you're going to have a heart attack from all that coffee."

"Yeah, well I didn't get much sleep last night. Or, you know, any."

She clucks at me, a smear of cherry red lipstick on her left front tooth as always. "You should take a vacation."

That's snort-worthy, but I manage to resist. "Mediators don't get vacations."

"That's not fair."

I don't know what I'd do on vacation. Probably patrol anyway, just on a mountain instead of a city park. I'd love to say beach, but can't. Tough luck; I'm stuck here. Sacred calling, bound by birth, all that fun stuff. I can't go farther than about five hundred miles in any direction. I tried once when I was an MIT and pissed off at splat duty. I got as far as Columbus and then collapsed into a sweaty, pallid heap. Gregor had to get one of the Columbus Mediators to bring me as far as Louisville. It was the one time in my training I actually got the whip.

Not that I would have tried it again anyway. Something about the feeling of your insides liquefying is sort of discouraging.
 

Alice has forgotten about fairness and has gone back to typing clickety-clack on the keyboard. I set the dishes in the sink, turn around, and then turn back again and wash them myself. The clacking halts, and I can almost feel Alice's eyes on my back, trying to penetrate why I would wash my own dishes when she's paid to do it.

She opens her mouth as if she's about to ask me something, but then she looks back down at her computer and the furious clacks resume at half again their normal speed.

I ignore her and go back to my desk.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Gregor calls me back at half past three when I've got my face stuck to my keyboard and a string of drool about to ruin my T key. I pop up when my phone rings, batting away a stuck strand of orange hair from the key prints on my cheek.
 

"Yello." I blink rapidly and rub my eye, glad I'm not wearing mascara.

"Storme. You rang?"

I try and dispel the sleep from my foggy mind. "Uh, yep." Now I can't remember what it was I was going to ask him.
 

"If it's about this morning, I can't tell you anything."

"It is."

"I can't tell you anything."

"Dammit, Gregor." I'm awake now. "You sent me haring off down this unbalanced bunny trail. Now you want me to go sit on my hands. Do you all know something about that...thing?"

There's a moment of silence — well, a moment of a whooshy sound. Gregor must be outside where it's windy.
 

"If I tell you something, will you promise to leave it alone?"

I sit upright at that, straightening my spine against the back of my chair. "Yes. I promise." Gregor should know me enough to know I would lie about it, so if he tells me, that's his own fault. Right?

"We don't know anything."

"What?"

"We don't know anything," he repeats. "Nothing. What you saw disturbs us as much as it did you. We've never heard of anything like it. We don't want anyone at your level on this trail because we don't know what we're dealing with yet."

That chills me more than if he'd said they'd seen it before and had it under control. "You're serious."

"You're not going to listen to me, Ayala," he states. "But you should. Let us deal with it. Leave it alone."

Of course he hangs up, and both his voice and the whooshy sound fade into the silence of my office.
 

I can't leave it alone, but I can't risk running into demons like this. Hazel Lottie told me Lena worked at the Waffle Spot in East Nashville, so to the Waffle Spot I'll go. See if I can track down the waitress she had her arm around. The girl probably worked nights with Lena, so I'll have to go later. Gives me time to take a nap.

As soon as Laura leaves for the day, I duck out of the office, head straight home, and collapse into bed.

By the time I wake up at eleven, I feel jangled and backward. I stop by The Witch's Brew on the way to the Waffle Spot and drain a giant chai tea latte. No way I can face diner coffee tonight. Not on an empty stomach.
 

The waitress from the picture is the first person I see. Her nametag says "Grace."
 

Grace smiles at me when I walk in — until she sees my eyes. With that, her smile flops into an unhappy grimace. Her own eyes flit back and forth, looking everywhere but my face. Time to find out what Grace knows. By her caught-in-the-headlights look, she knows exactly why I'm here.

I point to her, then to a cleanish booth with only minimal crumbs on the table. "You. Sit."

She opens her mouth to protest, but I cut her off.

"Tell your boss to come take it out on me. The place is dead." I wave a dismissive hand at a customer I dub Flannel Crack for the two inches of ass crack between his rather ironic belt and the red flannel shirt.

Grace sits on the edge of the booth as though she wants to be ready to flee if I attack her. Which I'm not going to do. Probably.

"So," I say as conversationally as I can. "I saw your friend Lena get pulped this morning."

Admittedly not my most diplomatic opening.

Grace's mouse-sharp face scrunches in on itself. Her chin shudders, and she pushes her back up against the booth. "I didn't have anything to do with that. I don't — I don't deal with demons."

"But she did."

The whites show all around the brown of Grace's irises. You don't have to be a psychologist to know she's terrified. The girl has some sense, but she's applying it all wrong. Sometimes people get the idea that if they talk about demons to Mediators, we'll think they're helping them or worshiping them. Mostly we just need to hear any information so we can make some hellkin nice and dead, and the people who really do consort with the critters down below don't last long – and don't talk about it to Mediators during their limited shelf life.

"Grace." I try and make my voice warmer, calmer. It has the opposite effect. Her feet start bouncing on the floor, and her knee bangs into the table. "Grace. Chill. I came in a little hot, and I'm sorry. I'm not going to hurt you, and I don't think you were complicit in what happened to Lena."

"I'm not!" She blurts it out loudly enough that Flannel Crack turns to glare at me.

"I know. But I need to know what you know."

Grace shakes her head, wetness sparkling at the corners of her eyes.

"I need to know so I can stop it from happening again."

"You can't!" This time it comes out in a whisper instead of a shout, but I feel the tight panic behind it.

That stops me. I reach out and take Grace's hands and squeeze lightly. She won't look at me; she's staring at a crumb of toast on a square of chipped linoleum.

"Grace, look at me."

"You can't stop it. She wanted it." One tear makes a squiggly track down Grace's cheek. "She wanted them to...do that to her. She said she'd be a god, that they'd make her one of them in her next life. That her..." Grace stops and shakes her head again, violently from side to side as if she's trying to tell herself not to go on. A few strands dislodge from her messy ponytail.

"You say Lena wanted what happened to her?" I think back to the look of determination and pride on Lena's face. A word pops into my head and wiggles into the missing slot in my mind. Zealot. Lena was a demon zealot. I don't like that word. And I like even less that it implicates my mother.

I can almost believe what Grace is saying about Lena. But that last look of surprise, maybe as Lena caught a glimpse of one of her legs a couple yards away — that tells me she didn't know entirely what she was getting into.

"What else did she say, Grace?"

The bell on the door jingles, and a couple of hipster morphs come in. I don't see morphs much in East Nashville because they avoid witches, but these two scrawny guys breeze in like their names are on the deed. Morphs like to pretend they're human, which is tough to do when half of your DNA is animal. I avoid them when I can, which is almost always. Grace twitches her hands away from me and moves to get up.

"Wait. What else did she say?"

"I have to greet them," Grace says mechanically, watching the two morphs spin onto bar stools.

"Tell me."

She stands anyway and looks down at me, wiping away the tear track with a scrawny thumb. "She said her child would tip the scale."