Taken By Storm (4 page)

"I'm going to go out and see if I can't find something to kill." The statement comes out flatter than I expected.
 

"Want company?" Carrick asks. He's sitting on the kitchen counter with his bare ass, reading a romance novel with a beefy musclecake on the cover and a spine worn from multiple reads.

My life is so glamorous.

"I think I'm good." I turn to the hallway, then turn back with a scowl. "You better clean the fuck out of that counter. You guys might not cook there, but I don't want ass crack spice on my food."

To his credit, Carrick hops down and even has the decency to look abashed.
 

"There's bleach under the kitchen sink," I tell him.

It feels good to wriggle into my leathers in the bedroom, though they feel a little looser than I'm used to. I wish I knew if that was due to the tattoo changing my body or if I just haven't been eating enough. Tomorrow I'll start working on my forms again.
 

I hop in the car and drive twenty miles, eschewing my normal mix of Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn for Queens of the Stone Age. It feels good to be fully armed and outfitted. I can't remember the last time I went out like this. The thought is yet another unwelcome reminder of how much my life has changed in the past few months.

Parking the car up a logging track, I get out and stretch. I'm not used to this area, and I have no idea where the normal hellkin hotspots are, but there ought to be something out here I can kill.
 

Demons mostly stay near cities, because it's a little more bang for their buck. Sometimes, though, you'll hear of a rural area getting hit hard. It's why per capita there are usually more Mediators in a rural part of the state than in the cities. You might get three Mediators for a town of a thousand, but only three hundred for a city of a quarter million. I'm so used to being one of the three hundred that I'm not sure where to start.
 

In Mediator training, we get a lot of information and tend to internalize whatever suits our personal choices. We don't get a lot of choices, but career is one of them. That's why I enjoyed my work in public relations so much; that was my choice. Leathers and blades were the given. I got to study sword forms by day and communications by night. Nice always having something to fall back on, too.

Out in the autumn air, though, the hills of Kentucky spread out around me and a gibbous moon waning and drooping lazily toward the horizon, none of that helps me figure out where to find a hells-beastie to stick my sword in.

The night is cool with a bite to the breeze that says colder weather will be drifting in, and silvery clouds sneak across the sky like snakes.
 

I know the Summit has witch-tech and gadgetry to help rural Mediators track demons, but since I no longer have access to so much as an Oh Shit Beacon — and even if I had one, I probably wouldn't like who showed up — that doesn't do me any good.

Demons want meat, and barring the splatting of humans, they'll eat squirrels and cats and other fauna. Up in the hills here, there are definitely deer and maybe an elk. I might not be able to scan the area for hellkin hotspots, but I'm a decent tracker and even I know what fresh deer pellets mean. I follow the dear trail southward down the hill, listening to the sleepy autumn chirp of crickets and a very late cicada that tell me I'm still in the safety zone. The forest here sounds different than the parks and forests of Nashville, like the sounds have farther to travel and have to make themselves louder. An owl hoots in the distance, its call lighting the air.

I walk for almost an hour, always listening.
 

The forest around me continues to sing.
 

Instead of assuaging my nervousness, the crickets and owls pull anxiety tighter within me until the walk back feels twice as long and my swords seem to hum in their sheathes, unused.

No hellkin for me to kill tonight.
 

It's like I can see the shore where the sea has pulled back, but I cannot tell when the tidal wave is going to hit.

I wake the next morning to Jax's face directly in front of mine. I think I smelled him before I opened my eyes, but I'm too groggy to sort out that timeline.

Blinking, I grimace and swat at him. "Jax, watching people sleep is creepy."

"I was going to wake you up," he says.
 

His skin is warm like the sun, giving off heat like all the shades do. I don't think my basal temperature has risen with the new changes, and I'm not sure what to compare it to. I yawn in Jax's face, and he doesn't even cringe at my morning breath.
 

"What do you want?" My jaw almost unhinges with the yawn and pops when I close my mouth.
 

"Mira called twice. Carrick didn't want to wake you up."

Shit. My whole body tenses, fully awake. "For the future, if Mira calls, wake me up. I don't care if I just fell asleep."

She's not here to appreciate that honor, but I'll have to make sure to tell her she's welcome sometime in the future.
 

Jax nods very seriously. "I'm going to go hunt."

I rub my eyes. "Are you guys going through that much meat?"

"I'm bored."

That makes me blink again. "We'll have to find you a hobby. We don't have that much freezer space."

I get out of bed, wondering what on earth I could sic him on that would entertain him without grossly depleting the deer population of southern Kentucky. I'll worry about that more after I find out what Mira wants.

She answers on the second ring, and as I shuffle out into the living room of the cabin, the smell of cooking eggs
 
and onions greets me. Carrick is wearing a frilly white lace apron — only an apron — and his bare butt is flexed where he stands in front of the stove.
 

"Storme," Mira says in my ear. "Earth to Storme."

Belatedly, I look away from Carrick and shake my head, finding an innocuous chunk of dark-paneled wall to look at. First Jax and now Carrick. "Sorry, Mira," I say. "Somehow I woke up in the Twilight Zone. Or the world's most bizarre porno."

"Well, that's something I do not want to hear about," she says. "Just tell me the shades aren't boning in the living room."

"Nope."

"Good. Tell them to get a room if they start."

"Jax said you called twice. What's up?"

I can hear Mira take a deep breath through the phone, and I fix my gaze on the whorls in the faux wood paneling.
 

"Our territories have changed."

Whatever I was expecting her to say, it wasn't that. "What?"

"I never kept super detailed records of mine, but apparently Ripper's charted his own every six months since he graduated training." Mira's voice goes so flat when she says it that I feel a lump rise in my throat.

The limits of our territory affect all of us a bit differently. I've spent my life in a resigned sort of denial, avoiding maps, not thinking about the tropical vacations day job colleagues go on, just generally accepting what I can't change and all that shit. Mira keeps pictures of places she wants to go and never will. Maybe she's more of a romantic than I thought; there's an intrinsic sort of melancholy in an act like that. And Ripper it seems has treated his territory like he's a tiger in a zoo, pacing back and forth across the length of his cage to check it for weaknesses.
 

"And he never mentioned this before?" I ask, knowing the answer. Economy of words is in Ripper's genome.

"He never mentioned it when we started this experiment, even," Mira says. I can almost hear her running her fingers through her hair in exasperation. "He waited till the three of us — him, me, and Devon — took a circuit of Tennessee. My territory has changed, and so has Devon's, though he doesn't really know how much. But Ripper knows. His has shifted a solid fifty miles eastward."

"What?" Fifty miles. That's a huge shift.

"That's not all," Mira says. "All of ours are the same. When we got close to the edge, we had a deal that we'd signal the moment it hit us. All of us felt it at the exact moment. Yours is the only one different."

Evis and I set out as soon as I finish eating the omelette Carrick's made for me. I wash it down with a glass of orange juice, missing the smell of coffee in the morning more than the taste. Or missing the desire for the smell. These days I can barely walk past a Starbucks without wanting to hurl.
 

The clothes Evis has put on don't really match, a pair of grey shorts with a black bat pattern across them and a tank top with red and blue horizontal stripes, but as long as his bits are covered, questionable gym fashion is the last of our worries. He wiggles slightly as he waits for me to unlock the car.
 

"It tickles," he pronounces.
 

"Sorry," I say. "You don't have to come if you don't want to."

He gets in the car as an answer.
 

Driving south, my stomach churns, and it's not the territory sickness or the breakfast. I put Evis in charge of the map. We start with western Tennessee, and when we pass what I thought was the border of my territory without a twitch in my gut except from my nerves, I feel
 
as if the road has vanished beneath the car. We cross into Arkansas, and I feel nothing. I pull over on the shoulder of the freeway, not caring about the traffic speeding by.
 

Evis watches me from the passenger seat, the map now dotted with red where he's recorded our path.
 

I can't bring myself to keep driving west. I feel hot and lightheaded, and I turn on the air conditioning even though it's almost winter.
 

Taking the next exit to turn around, I head back. I'm seventy-five miles past my previous border.

We turn south, and for the rest of the day it's easy. We can't drive south into Mississippi anyway, so that boundary stays the same. Skirting the southern edge of Tennessee doesn't help my mood, and the air in the car feels heavy, oppressive. Evis seems to understand that I don't want to talk, instead doodling on the edge of the map, drawing strange fluffy birds with big eyes and gangly legs and wings that couldn't carry a fruit fly. He's surprisingly good, but I can't look too closely while I drive.
 

Looking south makes my stomach churn.

The reason we lost Mississippi and Alabama, the entire reason the Nashville Mediators couldn't come in to assist the folks down south, is because they couldn't leave their territories. I remember Alamea's face as she told me what happened, watching the southern Mediators pinned between the edge of their range and a horde of hellkin ready to devour them. Jeelings and slummoths, rakaths and frahligs, snorbits and golgoths — monsters from the pits of all six and a half hells. The Mediators stood no chance, and the Nashville Summit watched them die.

And yet somehow, some way, Gregor fucking Gaskin is in Washington State, looking neither queasy nor pinned by demons.

I want to know how. And I want to know why, if it's possible, we lost three entire states to the hellkin and gods know how many lives.

It doesn't surprise me when we pass Chattanooga and I feel nothing, nor when we drive through the night, circling into North Carolina and Virginia, two states I never thought I'd see. We return to Kentucky more because I can't bear to test my true limits than because I found any.
 

I don't know if it's because I think there won't be a limit for me now — or because I'm afraid of the plunging crush of the hope that there still is, just farther out.