Taken By Storm (17 page)

Mavis's voice through the phone sounds like Alamea's, confident and competent. I'm thankful we have at least one friend in the Seattle Summit, but I'm not sure how much good it'll do.
 

In the car on the way back to the motel, the emergency broadcast system interrupts Evis singing Blue Suede Shoes at the top of his lungs, telling us that the city is instigating a sort of pre-martial law and curfew. From sundown to sunup, citizens are expected to remain in their homes, finding the most secure possible locations. Non-essential government employees are on paid leave. Businesses are expected to close at sunset.
 

I call Mira as soon as we're back in the room and fill her in on what's happened.

"Things aren't good here, either," she says. "Ben's somehow leading an entire contingent of assholes. They're like the asshole brigade meets the fucking Crusades."

I tell her I think Gregor somehow tracked us to the motel.

"You better be careful. How do you think he found you?"

"Tracking spell? I don't know. I'm sure he could target me with something like that if he wanted to. I don't have any witch friends to help me out with that." There's got to be a shop somewhere in Seattle where witches peddle anti-tracking spells, but with this curfew instated, I'm not going to get anything helpful tonight. Sun's already down. I should have thought of this.

"Ayala," says Evis, poking at my elbow. "Gregor could always find me."

"Fuck. Mira, did you hear that?"

"Yup. Ask him how."
 

I can tell Evis heard Mira through the phone. He frowns. "I don't know how. But the first time I met him he took a piece of my hair."

"That'd do it." I feel a headache coming down. So it wasn't me he could track, but Evis.
 

I can't blame my brother for not mentioning it, but this complicates things.
 

"Any ideas?" I'm talking to Mira, Evis, and Udo, who's listening with a pensive expression.
 

Udo shrugs. I hear Mira mumbling on the other end of the line, but I think she's speaking Spanish, and I only catch every other word.

"Wane says if you trim his hair and bathe him in salt water, that should throw off any tracking spell." Mira sounds dubious, but I'm willing to try anything.

"What does the trim do?" I look at Evis's shaggy mop of yellow-orange hair. He touches it, his eyes wide.

It'll grow back
, I mouth at him.

There's a pause and more murmuring. "She said it confuses previous spells because it creates a gap between the subject and the focal object."

"Got it." I have a pair of surgical shears in my trunk that ought to do the trick. "For salt water, would the ocean work?"

"Yeah, that should work." This time I hear the longing in Mira's voice, and it sways into me.
 

Someday I will make sure she sees the ocean. We'll go together, and we'll sit with our feet in the waves.

"Thank you," I tell her softly. I wish she was here. For one long moment, we're both quiet. I war with myself. I'm not good at voicing feelings. But right now, with everything, I feel like my fear needs to go hang. "I wish you were here," I say out loud.
 

She takes a deep breath I can hear through the phone, and I don't know how to interpret it. "I wish I was too."

We hang up, and I look at Evis and Udo. "We're all getting haircuts."

We all take turns wielding the shears. I lose two inches off my hair, and Udo and Evis both lose about an inch. If we live, we'll all go for a spa day so we don't keep looking like haystacks, but right now our fashion sense is the least of our worries.
 

Puget Sound is freezing, and none of us have bathing suits, so we all dive in stark naked and come up shivering and spitting salt water. The movement of the waves is strange and frightening, reminding me just how small and fragile my life really is. I might get that reminder daily from the slime-skinned cesspools that come raging out of the maws of all six and a half hells, but the feeling of the pulsing water surrounding me is a different level of mortality.
 

The water doesn't want me dead, but even in its apathy it could take my life.

We stay in the water until we're all about to turn blue from cold, dunking our heads under as much as we can manage.
 

We've only spent one night at this motel, but I decide we should move to a different one anyway. Just in case we get another jeeling-gram because we didn't wash off the tracking spell soon enough.
 

The new motel is just south of the city, and it's clean and functional. We don't stay long, and I don't question it when Udo seems to settle into it as if he is living with us. Shades are communal creatures for the most part. It occurs to me that I haven't even asked him where he's been living.

A quick call to Carrick tells me that he and Jax have been successful in hunting down five hosts in Hopkinsville, which seems like a massive number for such a small space. They haven't managed to find that first shade, though. Canny and vicious are a bad combination. I tell him to be careful.

That night I gear up and we head into town to patrol. I suspect the Mediators will be out in full force, but unlike in Kentucky and Tennessee right now, the thought doesn't make me want to puke with anxiety. From my own and Udo's experiences with the Seattle Summit, they might actually stop to ask questions before sticking us with the pointy ends of their swords.

What a novel thought.

Downtown is quiet, with most of the businesses boarded up and shuttered, metal gates covering their doors. Seeing a major city look like this is beyond disconcerting. That weight that lives in my chest makes itself known, and I'm reminded of Nashville this summer, the uptick in norm-caused crime that accompanied the influx of shades.
 

Along with what Alamea showed me in Nashville a few weeks back before I got banished, it seems like the scales are tipping heavily, and not in our favor.

I'm thankful that the streets are free of bodies for the first hour of our patrol. We don't encounter any demons, and we don't encounter any Mediators. Or shades.

Udo and Evis are quiet beside me, and after a while, their silence gets to me. I feel jittery and directionless, but we keep walking west, toward the harbor.

"You guys okay?" My voice sounds too loud in the midnight quiet.

"I feel strange," Evis says bluntly.
 

I stop walking and turn to face him. His forehead wears tiny lines, and he holds up his hand in front of his face. It's shaking. I don't think I've ever seen a shade shake. I take his hand and hold it between mine. His fingers feel as cold as Puget Sound.
 

Alarmed, I rub his hand hard with my palm. Shades run hot. He shouldn't be this cold.

"Udo? Are you okay?"

"I feel it too. It's like a pull."

Alarm suddenly feels like too mild a word. "That host said the word alpha. Is that possible, that a shade could have enough power to draw the rest to him?"

I hate myself as soon as the words are out of my mouth.
Possible
and
impossible
have lost all fucking meaning.
 

"Let's just assume it is." I look back and forth between them. Maybe it's psychological, but I feel strange too. I could just be projecting because of the shade blood in my tattoo, but now that they've said something, I feel shaky and cold as well.
 

"I think he's close," Udo says. He points west, toward the sound.

We all take off at a brisk trot.

This time there's no screaming to alert us, only the smell of blood.
 

And this time, it's the norms whose bodies are arranged execution-style.
 

We reach the waterfront and skid to a halt. The bodies of fifteen people are laid out in a semi-circle like the reflection of the setting sun over the water. Even their hands are posed, held over their stomachs, pre-rigor.
 

Now I'm sure I feel what Evis and Udo do. My body feels a chill that cascades through my skin, skipping over me and lapping like a tongue.
 

"It's him," I say. My voice comes out with an odd disconnectedness that I don't think is all because of this feeling. What Frank said is true. I'm not a Mediator anymore.

I'm at least part shade.

Their alpha is calling us.
 

"South," I choke out. My feet windmill into a run, and my body feels floppy like a thawing chicken breast. Is this how my brother is feeling?

We run together, the pull growing stronger.
 

Ahead of us, a hulking shape appears.
 

At first I think it's Gregor and that he really is the alpha shade. But then the shape straightens, dropping a small body onto the ground. It looks at us, and I feel rather than see the surprise wave off of it.
 

This is the alpha.

I don't think he was expecting us.

For a long moment, we look at each other. I can't make out his face, but he's tall, bigger than most of the shades I've seen before. If Gregor had Jaryn Trident's height, he'd look something like this.

The thought of Jaryn makes me swallow hard. I can't seem to move.

I blink, and there's only a blur where the alpha was.

He reminds me of the shade I faced down in Hopkinsville, and suddenly I'm sure that one was the area's alpha too.
 

His disappearing tells me one thing: he will fight me only on his own terms.

Udo's phone rings just then, and I hear Mavis's voice through the line.

I'm still shaking, though the farther away the alpha gets, the more warmth seems to return. Evis puts his arms around me, and we stand there holding each other. I only half listen to what Mavis says to Udo.
 

"Tamar Soloman wants to meet you," Udo relays, still holding the phone to his ear.

"Who in the hells is that?" My teeth want to chatter in my mouth.

"She's the Summit leader here."

What in the ever-loving fuck. "Does she think I'm stupid?"

Udo's quiet for a moment. "She says she'll come alone if you will, and that she knows you're stronger than she is."

That gives me pause.
 

"Okay." It's probably the stupidest decision I've made in a long time, but I don't have a lot of other options. I'm gambling on the fact that Mavis so far has given us only good information. "Does Mavis trust her?"

"Do you trust her?" Udo says into the phone.
 

I hear Mavis's answer this time. "As much as you can trust anyone."

I always trust people a bit more when they seem to have a realistic view of what trust even is.

"I'll do it. Where do we meet?"

Mavis directs me to Stiqiw Park, which is on a headland just south of the oceanography museum in northeast Seattle. I leave Udo and Evis at the car and walk in, following a trail named after a frog pond. All the signs are in Salish and English.
 

There's a lone woman standing on the path, looking out over Lake Washington. She has black hair to her waist, and she's wearing khakis and a teal button down, swords belted over it. She turns to face me, and I see three vertical black tattoos that stretch from the bottom of her lip to her chin.
 

"So you're Ayala Storme," she says. Her voice has a lilt I figure has to be Salish or Chinook, and I feel abashed not to know the difference.
 

"At your service."

"I see." She looks me over where I've stopped ten feet away from her. From her stance and the way her weight's all balanced on her back foot, I can see that her apparent calm isn't as thorough as she'd like me to believe. "Alamea seems to trust you, so I will too. At least until you prove yourself untrustworthy."

"Well, if you don't trust me, it's not like you'd be in the minority," I mutter.
 

"So I hear." Tamar Soloman looks me over again. After a pause that's broken only by the waves to the east, she speaks slowly, deliberately. "If you're here, you know the Summit's biggest secret."