Taken By Storm (22 page)

He's about fifty feet from us, and we come closer. My smile fades. He's downwind of me, but my senses start to process what I'm smelling.

"Mira," I start, but she sees it too.

His head isn't attached to his body.

His hair's long enough that it reaches to his clavicle, but as we come closer, I can see the smooth-sliced edge of his neck. My breath won't come. I reach him, falling to my knees in the dirt. His body's cold, and it didn't take us that long to get here. I leap back to my feet, hands on my swords.

"He didn't send that text," I say.

"No, he really didn't." A Mediator steps out from behind a tree. His name is Gary something. Older guy, white skin tanned so dark he looks like he's made of leather, and his sword's edge is wearing enough nicks that he should be embarrassed. "Whaddya know, two birds, one text."

"Five more," Mira says from behind me.
 

Her back presses against mine.
 

"Thought better of you, Gonzales. Didn't think you'd be cavorting around with this trash."

"Yeah, and whose ass are you licking, Rickens? Gregor's?" She's not facing him, but she spits anyway.
 

I turn my head, trying to see who all is here. Seven of them total, and three of us.
 

Gary Rickens takes a step forward. "I ain't got nothing to do with that turd. But she does."

I can't help it. I laugh at that. "Yeah, and that's why he's taken such an fatherly role in my life. Blackmailing me, setting me up, killing my friends, turning my brother against me, trying to blow me up. We're pals."

It doesn't matter what I say to these people — they're never going to listen — but part of me wants them to hear it anyway.
 

Then Ben Wheedle steps out from behind a hickory tree, and I forget everything else.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I know then that the people surrounding us are the same ones who left Ripper with a dislocated shoulder and broken ribs. Eight of them. Two of us. Demons are monsters, but they're usually pretty stupid. These Mediators are trained and armed and just chock full of enough self-righteousness to make even a sectarian televangelist blush. First Ripper and Devon. Now Mira. As much as I want to run my sword through each and every loser in this clearing, I know I can't. Not that not killing them will help my image at all, but killing them would definitely hurt it. If there's anything the past few months have taught me, it's that there's always a way to keep digging at the bottom of a hole.

To Ben's left, Carus's body sits, arranged so carefully for us to find.

"You're a fucking psychopath," I say to Ben.

The Ben I grew up with would have flinched at that, but this Ben just gives me a sad smile as if he'd calmly have me committed whilst patting me on the head and telling me it's for my own good.

I happen to know for a fact that he'd do exactly that.

"Alive or dead," is all he says, and it's not directed at me.

They all rush us at once.
 

My saber clashes with Gary's, and I parry his strike, slipping under his sword arm to aim a kick at his knee.
 

Someone hits me from the side, and my kick falls short of its mark. I throw an elbow back into my attacker's solar plexus and hear her grunt. The rain begins to fall again, this time eschewing the drizzle for a full on pour. Behind me, the clash of swords striking each other rings out in my ears. I turn to face my new attackers. Five Mediators stare back at me, five pairs of violet eyes. They're looking hard at mine, disbelief on their faces to see that mine are no longer the same violet as theirs, but indigo like the decapitated body to my left.
 

I take that moment to strike out, moving faster than they expect though not as fast as I'm capable of moving. I smack Gary Rickens on the top of the head with the flat of my sword, and he goes down, unconscious. I manage to land a kick in the gut of the woman who hit me, and she falls back as well. Mira's spinning through forms behind me, parrying each strike between the two Mediators attacking her and holding her own for now. Ben is watching and not engaging, his stupid farm boy face calculating the wrong result, if I know him at all.

Ben's statement was a little genius, I'll give him that. He has to know I don't want to kill them, but he let me know they're fine with killing me.

The other three come at me, and I channel as much of my strength into my right arm as I can, swinging my sword to hit all of theirs in a wide arc that crashes through the clearing like a thunderclap. Their swords all fall to the ground. One of them grabs his wrist with a sharp gasp of pain.
 

I advance on the closest Mediator, ready to knock her out too.

Ben makes eye contact with one of my attackers, who yells a word in another language that I don't understand. The two Mediators Mira's facing leap back. They all grab something at their necks.

A wall of pressure hits me, and I fly backward onto the ground, hitting Mira as I go.

The world rings around me, my vision shifting in concentric circles that all spin at different speeds.
 

For a moment, everything goes dark.

It feels like only a moment.

When I open my eyes a sliver, there are hands on me, taking my swords away, checking me for knives and throwing them to the side.

Mira is knocked out cold, as is Gary still. The rest of them seem fine, protected by whatever the fuck is on their necklaces.
 

I let my body go limp, fluttering my eyes shut.
 

"It got her, just like the witch said it would. Where do we take her, the Summit?"

"Alamea will just let her go. We need to take them to the house, where the wards'll keep her shade buddies from finding her." Ben's voice sounds tired instead of triumphant. "There's rope back down that way where we came in. Somebody go get it."

Someone spits, hurling an epithet along with the saliva, and I hear footsteps retreating.

I take a brief moment to think while whoever it is goes to get ropes.
 

They've got my swords and knives, and they're still armed. It's the obvious first thing to do with a prisoner, to take her weapons. My body pulses with whatever Ben hit me with, but it's wearing off fast. I don't know if it's geared to Mediators or shades, but magic is a finicky thing, and I doubt it's geared to both. I can smell leather and sweat and metal, and someone's feet. There's a warm vanilla scent I know is Mira, and a whiff of her blood that worries me. I can hear ragged breathing, so she's not dead, but it doesn't sound like she's in good shape, either.

Right now I don't care if they poked her with a pushpin. They're going to pay.

I listen to my body, to the scents my brain's busy analyzing, to the slight changes in heat around me in the rain that tell me where all these Mediators are standing around me. No footsteps are returning yet. There's seven of them, and one of me.

They took my weapons, but they forgot something important, something that Ben's just enough of a loser to forget.

I don't need weapons.

I am one.

Without opening my eyes, my hands lash out and grab two wrists. I fling my arms crosswise, and two Mediators go sailing. A thud tells me one of them hit a tree, and a startled
oof
tells me the other hit one of the other Mediators. I roll to my knees and leap up, spinning my leg out to catch a fourth one of them behind the ankle, then grab his off-balance arm and spin him.
 

It's like the childhood game we played as Mittens, where one of the big kids would grab us by the wrists and spin us until our feet flew off the ground.

Except they didn't let go, and they weren't anywhere as strong as I am.

I can smell blood from their head wounds, and Ben's regrouping, his fingers tight on the hilt of his sword. I flit to the other two Mediators, raining punches on their bodies, hitting them in tender spots that will incapacitate them but won't cause permanent damage. The clearing fills with groans, and one of them crawls toward me, reaching for a pistol in his belt. I kick him in the head. His head snaps back, eyes showing white.

The Mediator who went to get ropes is returning. I can hear her footsteps in the squishy mulch. Ben watches me from a front stance, the point of his sword low to the ground.

"I didn't want it to come to this, Ayala."

"I'll take bullshit for five hundred, Wheedle." I keep trained on the returning Mediator, whose face tells me she's come back to a bit of a surprise. Good. Let her piss herself for a minute. "You're never going to figure it out, are you?"

"I'm doing what's best," he says. There's that annoying weary note in his voice again, like he's been wiping asses for forty years and is two days away from his pension.
 

"Wake the fuck up. You're making it worse."

"Why the fuck won't you see reason?" He yells it at me, anger burning in his cornflower blue eyes. "Demon deaths are down. The shades are under control. The only thing that's standing in the way of Nashville being back to normal is you!"

"Me?" I thought it was impossible for me to feel surprise at anything out of this jackass's mouth, but he's just proved me wrong. "Who do you think got the shades under control? And look closer, you bullshit-blinded nincompoop, demon deaths are only down because they're gathering their forces. You weren't in Seattle, Wheedle. You didn't see the fucking streets littered with corpses. You aren't in Hopkinsville. You don't see what Gregor's been up to, and you're too motherfucking
stupid
to listen to the one person who's managed to put a lid on any of it."

I'm so angry that red lines flash in front of my eyes. There's a strange whistling, but Ben advances on me.
 

"We're going to make our town ours again," he says quietly. "You'll see."

Something lands around my neck and jerks tight. Did that little shit with the rope just
lasso
me? My fingers fly to the rope, yanking at it. I gasp for air.
 

Ben raises his sword, his eyes full of pity and exhaustion. Our eyes meet. My vision has deep purple spots crowding in on my periphery.

I can't get the rope loose from my neck. But my hands drop it and instead grab the line the Mediator's got the opposite end of, and with all my remaining strength, I jerk on it.
 

The rope comes flying free, and the Mediator bites the dirt ten feet away from where she was standing. I spin out of Ben's way, grasping at the coil around my neck and pulling it free. I look at the other Mediator out of the corner of my eye. The little snot's given me an idea.
 

I'm faster than Ben, and he doesn't know quite how much faster. In a flash I'm behind him, the lasso now a garrote around his neck. I leave him just enough room to talk.

"You could have used your little spell right at the beginning, Wheedle. Why didn't you?"

"I wanted to see what you'd do first." He gasps it out, and I pull the rope tighter.

Mira stirs on the ground, and a few of the other Mediators are groaning. She opens her eyes, sees me with the rope around Ben's neck, and gives me a grim look. Picking up the closest sword, she sets about knocking the Mediators unconscious again, clubbing them with the hilt.

I put my lips close to Ben's ear. "Want to find out what I've been doing? Call a Mediator named Mavis at the Seattle Summit."

I tighten the rope until Ben's eyes bulge and a capillary bursts in his left. His hands grasp at the rope, but I'm stronger and he's pissed me off for the last time.
 

Just before his eyes close, I murmur, "You're welcome for not killing you. Jackass. Touch me or one of my friends again, and I will."

It's a dick move, but I take photos of the clearing before we leave, including Carus's body. I send them all to Alamea. She should know what Ben's up to, if she doesn't already.

The only text I send with the images is,
They're alive. Except Carus.

Mira and I take Carus's body with us. I wrap it up in a tarp from my trunk, stubbornly not caring that we have to drive all the way back to Kentucky with a corpse.