Storm in a Teacup (9 page)

My two o'clock meeting goes by in a blur of yellow legal pads and nodding
uh-huh's
at my boss, and I spend the rest of the day wishing I'd eaten a salad instead of a cheeseburger.

That might be the talisman in my pocket talking. If the acid bouncing off my stomach lining is any indication, it probably is.
 

I don't feel much better having taken it from Hazel. It's good that she doesn't have it burning a hole in her pocket like dumping slummoth chum on your doorstep at twilight, but it's not something I want anywhere near me either. I'm amazed she's still breathing. I touch my fingers to the cool metal of the talisman. I go looking for demons. They don't go looking for me.

I try to space out my visits to the Summit as far as possible, but if I don't take it in tonight, I'll have to put it in my safe, plush, demon-free apartment. And I like my carpet just the color it is without a gallon of my blood changing it, thank you very much.

The Summit is housed in a rounded building across from the Parthenon. It used to be up by the Grande Ole Opry, but I think they decided they weren't sending the right vibe. Plus, the hotsprings up by the Opry smell like rotten eggs and farts. It's not as bad as the Mississippi countryside – the whole state is one big sulfuric mess – but it's gross anyway. Country singers and sulfur or Greek temple – one says prestige, the other says leather fringe and slide guitar. And flatulence.

The entrance to the building is a gilded door that looks more like it belongs in the Opry, but I never tell them that. While the outside looks like it's trying to make a statement, the inside is full of rounded corners and clean lines, and I like it in spite of its tragic lack of velvet and proper cream.

A massive inlaid yin yang makes up the floor of the foyer, which to me just says the bureaucracy has taken the place over. It's a trademark that should mean something more. It's the balance, the ebb and flow of light into dark, dark into light. It reminds us that the dark is only absence of light. All it takes is one guttering match, one dancing candle flame, one smoking wick, one spark. We are what brings the light back to the world.

I don't let myself get overly worshipful about my job very often. If the norms knew how snarky and tongue-in-cheek we Mediators are about our work, they'd probably be a bit scandalized.

Snark is a coping mechanism. They don't see what we see. They weren't given life only to use it to kill every night.

Even so, every time I walk over the yin yang symbol, I stand up a little straighter.

The front desk houses a receptionist pulled – dragged kicking and screaming – from the pool of Mediators-in-Training. And he looks it. His amber skin makes the violet of his eyes stand out, though that could be the light of his phone's screen reflecting in them as his thumbs hammer out a miraculous amount of letters on the phone's touchpad.
 

I tap the talisman against the marble desktop, and he jumps and drops the phone.
 

"If I were Gregor or Alamea, you'd be on splat duty, Mittens." That's the pet name for the newbies when they haven't been cleared for duty yet.
 

He shoves his phone under a stack of papers, blinking rapidly. "Sorry. I didn't see you come up."

"I realize that. Don't get caught not noticing again. They'll turn you into chum." I clink the talisman on the stone again. "Who's the witch on duty right now?"

"There isn't one. Only Wednesday through Saturday."

Gods be damned. I forgot. "I need someone who can deal with this."

"What is it?"

"Think of it as a demon magnet."

The kid cracks four of his knuckles, digging through a log of available Mediators with his spare hand. The sound makes me think of how The Righteous Dark must have gotten crunched, and I wince. He sees the expression and flattens his hand against the desk.
 

"Sorry. Demon magnet? I don't have anyone on here who specializes in that."

I want to bang my head — or maybe his — on the marble.
 

The click of heels on the stone floor pulls my attention away from this kid's ineptitude. The woman walking toward me is over six feet tall even without her three-inch heels with salt-and-pepper hair to her waist in twisted ringlets. Her violet eyes mesh with the deep cocoa color of her skin like blueberries in chocolate. Alamea Virgili is built like a fighter. If anyone was born to be a Mediator, it's her.

She smiles at me when she approaches. "Ayala, good to see you. What brings you down to the Summit?"

I show her the talisman, and the smile drops off her face.

"Where did you get that?" She shoots a belated look at the MIT behind the desk and beckons at me to follow her.

With her in heels, I barely come up to her shoulder as I walk behind her to her office. She closes the door behind me and gestures to a blue-upholstered chair. I sit down and set the talisman on her desk, nudging a haphazard stack of papers to the side to make room for it.

I tell her where I got the metal disc, and she eyes it as I speak. I know she's thinking of the three mounted claymores behind her desk, and I for one am not disappointed that she's got an office full of weapons. If a jeeling comes bursting through the glass block windows that surround her door, I don't want to be forced to try and kill it with paper cuts.

"I got the report from Gregor about the splats. Are you okay with following this trail for him? If not, I can tell him to do it himself." Alamea leans back in her chair, long fingers interlaced over her stomach.

It surprises me that she knows about Gregor's little pet project. I wonder if she knows about the connection to me and my birth mother. I wonder if she's ever tried to find her own parents. Gregor's not one to be free with his intel, and I get the sense he's left out my personal connection – or hidden it. He was so secret-op about it that I didn't expect him to have told anyone else. But then again, maybe he didn't and Alamea just found out. Two days ago, I might have jumped over her desk to hug her for suggesting I could be free of it, but now I'm too sucked in. Nashville won't miss The Righteous Dark's music, but they could be a symptom of a wider problem, and I need to find out if that problem is say, as wide as a crick or as wide as the Mississippi.

"I'm happy to help," I say, which is a bit of an exaggeration. More that I want to find out what can make a body go boom from inside without a bomb.

"You're still looking for Lena Saturn? Is that her name?"

"That's her." The talisman glows a little, casting a thin nimbus on the desk below. If I remember right, the one Gryfflet found started doing that only a few hours before the human smoothie happened. "What are you going to do with that?"

"I was going to ask you the same thing."

"Me?"

"I don't think any of our witches can dispel whatever magic draws the demons to it, so you'll have to think of something else."

"Me?" My mouth goes dry like I've hung my head out the window of a speeding car, tongue flapping in the breeze for an hour. I've already had an almost-get-eaten moment this week, and my shoulder tightens at the memory.
 

"It's your responsibility, Ayala. It was given to you."

Gee, that makes me feel better.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The second to worst thing to go along with possession of a demon magnet is trying to figure out how much time you have before getting eaten becomes a legitimate possibility.

The worst thing, of course, is the likelihood of ending up exploded all over a living room. Or a field.

Because of that, I'm proud of the plan I come up with.

Alamea hasn't completely turned me loose to become a splat, and she's lent me a small team of Mediators to help me. By small I mean she volunteered Ripper and Ben. I didn't know she disliked them enough to put them on demon talisman duty, but Ben will be happy to be in the same fifty-foot radius as me.
 

Forest Hills has a lot of little gullies and clearings, and I pick one I know well. If we're right and this talisman has a ticking countdown, I think it corresponds to the brightness of the glow. I deduce this because it's getting brighter.

I know. I'm a genius.

I meet Ben and Ripper about a half mile from the spot I have in mind. They've driven together in Ripper's dull black truck again, and Ripper nods at me as he slams his door. He's fixed his imp-chopped ponytail so it doesn't look like he got styled by someone's feet, though a ragged gap where the imp lobbed off a chunk of white-blond hair remains.
 

Ben hops out of the passenger side, hefting his preferred broadsword still in its sheath. His eyes scan the surrounding trees for movement. The sun's still up, so I'm not sure what he's looking for. Even though imps can make little forays into the daylight, they don't like to. And full demons stay in whatever hell dimension houses them until the sun plops behind the horizon.
 

The glow of the talisman is growing brighter almost noticeably. I don't like that. "This way," I say, striking a path through the underbrush.
 

I hear them follow, but only barely. They both move as silently as I do through the crackling twigs and leaves. I love the scent of the forest. Moss, mulch, bark. It reminds me that the light makes things grow, and that it's my job to make sure they survive the dark. We reach the clearing a few minutes later.

The place I've chosen is wide and open, the topsoil covered with a dusting of pine needles and no stones larger than pebbles. A range of trees from pines to oaks surrounds the clearing, and I know the trees are climbable because I've done it before. I place the talisman — now brighter than my phone's screen at night — in the center of the clearing and motion to Ripper and Ben.

I choose an oak with a helpfully-placed burl on the trunk and use it to give myself a leg up. Ripper jumps up to grab the branch of a hickory across the clearing and pulls himself up and over with ease. Ben scrambles up the side of a maple. Together we form a tripod around the clearing. We should be able to see the demons when they come.

What then depends on how many of them there are.

I position a Mediator beacon in the cleft of the branch above me. If a horde shows up, I can hit it and Alamea will respond.
 

I just hope I'll be able to hit it without alerting any demons. If a horde shows up, the Mediator reinforcements might end up doing more of a clean up job than a rescue.

The sun has long since dipped behind the encapsulating hills, but demons are pretty anal about coming out when the sun hasn't gone to bed on the other side of the horizon. Monsters or not, they have a strong drive to stay alive.

I pick at the bark on the branch I'm sitting on.
 

Maybe the stupid metal disc is just attuned to the sun to tell demon worshippers when it's okay to try and summon their deities. Maybe it's a clock and we're just idiots to think it means something.

My brain runs through another series of maybes as I watch the disc glow brighter and brighter.
 

I can tell the exact moment the sun disappears from the Nashville sky.

The talisman flashes once, bright enough to send orange spots pulsing across my vision. I'm blind, and I want to kick myself for staring at the thing so directly.
 

I can't see Ripper. I can't see Ben. I can't even see the fucking tree in front of my face.

Slowly, slowly, my vision clears.

The clearing is full of demons.

They're all standing in a circle around a naked woman.

Lena Saturn.

Three breaths before I can admit to myself what I'm seeing.

Three breaths before I confirm to myself that it is indeed the woman I've been searching for.

Three breaths before a roar begins in the circle of demons.

It starts as a deep rumble, like a mountain clearing its throat. But unlike a throat-clearing or a simple
ahem
, it doesn't stop. It grows in volume, swelling in timbre and vibration until my tree hums under my body. My fingers grow numb on my sword hilt, and one itches to touch the button on the beacon.

In three breaths, I'm seven years old again facing my first demon with only a distant backup circle of five veteran Mediators a hundred yards behind me.
 

That's how foreign, how frightened, how flaccid I feel.
 

I don't know what I'm looking at.

But then the circle of hellkin parts, and I get my first real look at Lena Saturn.

My first impression is that below her neck, she ceases to be.
 

She is nude. Her stomach is grossly distended. I don't know how she remains on her feet until I see the two imps supporting her convex frame. They're being gentle with her. Reverent. Tendrils of revulsion creep around the back of my neck.
 

Pregnant women have a look of cohesion, of nature, of vibrancy and life. Pregnant women have a polished curve to them. Lena has none of those things.

Instead, the bulge in her stomach seems to be reaching up toward her breasts and down toward her thighs. She sways on her feet, the bulge undulating and writhing under skin that looks thin as wet tissue paper. Her skeleton is visible, delicate like porcelain, and the roiling beneath her skin looks like a storm in a teacup. Her hair falls in jagged, uneven lengths to her shoulders, as if someone has cut off chunks of it.