Storm in a Teacup (26 page)

"And all I have to show for it is this shiny medal." Platinum. Boy, howdy.

"Medal?"

He's looking right at it, which also happens to be right at my left boob. I unpin the thing, mourning the loss of a favorite blouse, which now looks like one of those fictional bloodsuckers has sunk its teeth into it.

I hand Mason the medal and shuffle to my wine rack. No cure for the remnants of a concussion like getting drunk in the safety of home. I'm dismally low on wine. Only six bottles left.

I pop open a dry Shiraz while he examines my medal and pour two glasses before I think to ask whether he can handle alcohol. The coffee seemed to be fine on Saturday.

He takes the wine glass and looks at it. He looks at things a lot. I guess because everything is new, or at least because everything familiar is blurred like an old photograph — or someone else's memory.

Mason sniffs the wine.

"Like this," I say, swirling mine around in the glass. I stick my nose in the goblet's opening and inhale deeply. Mason imitates me.

"What do you smell?"

"Old oak, cherries, and fermentation."

I blink. It's one of the stranger assessments I've heard, but the wine is aged in oak barrels and its one they add dried cherries to. "Does it smell good to you?"

"Yes. I think my mother liked wine."

I take a large sip of the Shiraz and swish it in my mouth. Mason does the same after a beat and swallows just when I do. It's an easy warmth and a slow kindle that suffuses my throat and stomach, reaching alcoholic tendrils into the rest of me with subsequent sipping.

Then I stop, bottom lip on the rim of my glass. Maybe giving Mason alcohol isn't the best idea.
 

"This makes you anxious," he says.

"You've never gotten drunk before. I don't know how alcohol will affect you. You might be dancing on my coffee table singing Barbara Streisand or huddled under it singing Barry Manilow and crying, for all I know."

"I don't know those songs."

"They're people." Okay, so Barbara's a morph who hasn't gotten over the eagle nose her dad passed on to her and Barry's a witch whose best power is making the name Mandy seem somehow romantic, but they're people nonetheless.

"Oh." Mason drains the rest of his glass. "I feel fine."

"That's what they all say."
 

He does seem okay though.
 

My phone buzzes as I refill my own glass. Gregor.

"Hi, Gregor. Thanks for the shiny."

"You earned it, Storme."

"Devon getting one?"
 

"Not that one, but yes. He's getting a shiny." Gregor's tone as he uses my term is dull as a mud covered show pig, but I can hear a smile in there somewhere. "Look, Storme. I'm sorry to ask you this after tonight, but can you come to the Summit again tomorrow? Maybe for lunch? Alamea wants to talk to you, and she ain't telling me jack about what."

Alamea's using Gregor as a messenger? I don't know what she could want from me. "I guess. But I won't be able to stay long without the wrath of Laura raining down like a markat demon's spittle."

"You let me deal with Laura."

And of course, after that I'm left with a beeping phone and no Gregor. Nonplussed, I drink half my wine in the next gulp.
 

"Who is Alamea?"

"She's the head honcho of the Summit in these parts. She might even be able to kick your ass."

"Is that a joke?"

"Try her and find out." I'd bet my shiny new medal on Alamea most days. Even against Mason. When I meet his eyes, he's smiling.
 

A big, toothy grin. He pulls back the balcony door and walks back out to his perch. "Kick my ass."

I think Mason made a joke and I missed it.

Laura is almost shockingly docile when I tell her I have a meeting at the Summit. Either Gregor drugged her, or he pulled a just-turn-up-in-her-living-room like he's done with me a couple times and scared her shitless.

Knowing Gregor, it's probably the latter.

Alamea's in her office when I arrive at the Summit, drinking out of a full quart of orange juice and picking her fingernails with a letter opener.

Mediators are nothing if not eccentric.

"Storme. Come in."

I take a seat across from her. "What did you want to talk to me about?"

"Straight to the point as always. Congratulations on your medal, by the way. I didn't get to see you last night." Her eyes are fastened on my face, which I try to flatten into a humble-yet-grateful expression.
 

Her chuffing laugh casts doubt on my success.

"Thank you, Alamea."

She places the letter opener back in her desk and flattens her palms on array of papers. "You all pulled off something miraculous. I know it better than the others might. Most of them had never really come face to face with a shade — aside from you, of course — but you better believe it smarted when one took me down."

"You got beaten by a shade?"

"It was a damn fool move on my part, Storme. I went after it like it was human. Went for the stomach and heart. You can guess at how effective that was."

I don't have to guess; the answer is not very.

"Gregor thinks this initiative we pulled out of our asses last week was the last of it. I think you and I both know that's not the case."

I nod smoothly, trying to convey gravitas instead of the hopping and bopping that's started up in the region of my ribcage.

"What I want from you is to track them. Find out how many more are left and where they're hiding. If there are more spawning." Alamea bares her teeth. All that's missing is a snarl. "However you tracked down Lena Saturn, I want you to start tracking any other missing people you think could be connected."

So far what she wants me to do only lines up with Mason's thoughts. So far, so lucky. "That's it?"

"One other thing."

I'm so confident, that I say something stupid. "Anything."

"Take out as many of these motherfucking, people-eating monsters as you can."

Oh. That.
 

That I'm not so sure about.

Somehow, I make it out of the Summit without vomiting all over the marble floors. I don't know what I said to appease Alamea, because the moment it left my mouth, I was busy concentrating on the sense of my head separating from my neck.

Because that's what'll be waiting for me if I disobey a direct order like this.

And yet I have to disobey.
 

All I'm doing lately is hiding things from the Summit. I convinced them to hunt the shades into extinction. How can I be the one to say I was wrong? That they gave the Silver Scale to a Mediator who's hiding a shade in her apartment and feeding him flank steak by the pound?

That and getting him addicted to rom-coms. Who'd have thunk?

Would the Summit really behead me? I don't know. I feel sick as I return to work. I can't even muster up a sassy retort when Laura jabs at me even though I'm back an hour earlier than I thought I would be.

I haven't patrolled in days. I need to go out tonight, and I know even as I turn my key in the locks on my door that Mason's going to want to go with me.

I find him in the kitchen with some of my best china, daintily eating raw flank steak with a knife and fork.

I stop in the doorway to the kitchen. He meets my eyes. I turn and slowly walk to the bedroom, wondering who in the six and a half hells landed in my apartment.

With a few hours before peak patrolling time, I don't have much else to do but wait, and waiting makes me antsy. Mason finishes his meal and washes his dishes — I can tell by the running water and the poffa-poffa of him playing with the bottle of Sparkle Dish Soap to make it spew tiny bubbles into the air. A moment later, he appears in the bedroom.
 

"What happened at your meeting?"

My eyes fix on a snagged stitch of my duvet. I pull the pillow Mason usually uses to my chest and hug it tight. "Are you sure you want to know?"

He steps into the room and eases his weight onto the foot of the bed. "She wants you to hunt us, doesn't she?"

At least I don't have to break the news to him. "Yeah. She does."

"What are you going to do?"

"I don't know. Help you find them first?" In terms of sneaky plans, it's not the most slippery in the world. More of a desperate, beat out the clock sort of plan. But it's the only idea I have that might allow me to keep my cushy king-sized bed and a head to put on my cushy king-sized pillows.

"We should start tonight."

I look at his dark jeans and bright blue shirt. I should have gotten him more sensible clothes.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

The clothes thing turns out to be moot. While I'm shut in my bedroom painting myself leather, Mason's in the spare room getting full nekkid.

I open my door to his full monty and stifle a yelp.
 

"It's me."

"I know it's you. It's a very naked you."

"Why does this bother you?"

"Norms wear clothes."

"I'm not a norm."

Touche.

"Besides," Mason says, "I don't want to have to fight my kind more than what is necessary. If I approach them dressed as a norm, like you say, they might attack me. They might attack you anyway."

"Well, I'm not going naked. I've never seen a female shade anyhow."

"They don't exist."

"Why not?"

Mason shrugs, and I try to keep my gaze at face level. No, I'm not getting hot and bothered. Each time he moves it reminds me how easy he could rip me in half. You try thinking that's sexy. I'll wait.

Even though I'm the one who asked, I think I might know the answer. All demons are male. They're not born; they're spawned. Maybe there's some Big Momma Demon down in Hell Central laying eggs willy-nilly, but I've yet to hear of it. I don't know where little demons come from. What do I look like, a sex-ed teacher? But maybe all the shades are male because of the demon half of them. I don't want to stand here next to a naked male shade and wonder if he could procreate with a naked female shade.

Instead, I head to the living room and start arming myself. Four knives in the usual places, an extra short sword down my spine in a special holster, and one special object I usually reserve for clearing nests.

A flamethrower. Custom-made, very expensive.
 

But hey, tax-deductible. Yeah, I pay taxes. Can you believe it? You'd think bleeding for the health of the populace on a regular basis might give me a bigger exemption rate. Nope. Oh well. It's not like I'm hurting for cash.

The flamethrower is in an all-black canister of high-efficiency compression fuel. I have a pair of witches to thank for it, though they've been dead about a hundred years. They invented these things just for Mediators, and only passed the how-to onto their own kin. It's housed in a leather casing, because no matter how much you try and make it matte, metal tends to shine.

It sits across my back like a quiver, and the segmented hose slides through loops in my leather jacket. It almost looks like magic when I do it. Abracadabra — demons
en flambe
.
 

Mason watches as I gird up for battle, intrigued. Probably by the fact that I need weapons at all when his are all firmly organic and entrenched in his bod.

"You need all that?"

"I'm paranoid by nature."

"Fair enough," he says. Is he quoting me now?

"Lead on, MacDuff," I tell him. "You know where your shade buddies are better than I do."

We drive north, far enough to cross into Kentucky, outside the light-polluted haze of Nashville and into the dense forests that blanket this area with underbrush and kudzu. He signals for me to park beside a forestry route and gets out of the car before I've even put it in park.

"In a hurry much?" I get out and lock the car with the clicker. It doesn't beep — I'd be an idiot to chance that in my profession. All Mediators get that particular function removed from their vehicles. Instead, the clicker vibrates to let me know the alarm is armed. I don't need anything chasing me just because I want to keep my car stereo intact. Mason may have the endurance of a Kenyan morph in the Olympics, but I'm still mostly human and get winded after ten miles or so.