Taken By Storm (6 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

Carrick brings me the newspaper back from town two days later and slaps it down on the table between me and my orange juice.

"Page four," he says.

I open it, and immediately I know why he's bristling.

"Hopkinsville man still missing, presumed dead." I read on, my gut feeling like I'm eating ball bearings instead of cheesy eggs. Missing two months, made the news because his family was finally notified after they disowned him two years earlier for demon worship.

"Fucking shitbag hells worshippers." My epithet doesn't carry as much punch as I want it to. My heart's not in it. My heart's somewhere around my feet, because I know what this means.

"More shades," Carrick says.

"More shades."
 

Jax and Evis go quiet, and I hear the sound of one of their characters taking a headshot and dying. They've gotten into shooters.

Jax hits pause, and they both turn to look at me.

"What are you going to do?" Jax asks.
 

"I don't know." The chances of me finding the person responsible for helping these hells worshippers spawn is next to nothing. Something creeps up on me, and I look at my eggs, appetite long gone. "This is the first shade spawning outside Nashville."

Carrick sits down at the table next to me, not speaking.
 

"Whatever the demons have been waiting for, it looks like they have." I feel sick. Carrick and the others are silent, because they all know what I'm thinking.
 

They've got Gregor. He's not in Tennessee anymore, and he's on their side. This cannot be coincidence.
 

An even worse thought hits me like a falling log. "It's here." I can't seem to catch my breath, and this time the shades around me don't follow.
 

Evis frowns at me.
 

"Here, where I am." The timeline's not quite right, since we've only been in Kentucky about a month and this man went missing two months ago, but hatred knows no logic, and I know that what I've seen in Mediator eyes when they look at me is exactly that. Hatred.

"What do you mean, Ayala?" Carrick says softly, his voice gentle but urgent.

"I mean the Summits are going to blame this on me. They're going to think I'm helping make new shades." Saying it out loud makes me want to vomit up the half of my breakfast I almost enjoyed.

I watch the understanding grow on Carrick's face, and just once I want someone to tell me I'm wrong. To lie to me.
 

None of them do.
 

"Find me where this man lived."

Carrick leaves again in my car, and I spend the next two hours poring over the map of Hopkinsville and familiarizing myself with the town through the miracle that is internet mapping. I've made my phone into a hotspot, and while it's maddeningly slow compared to my old apartment's fiber optics, it gets the job done.
 

By the time Carrick texts me the address, I feel like I could walk around Hopkinsville blindfolded and have a good idea of where I was.
 

Unlike Nashville, Hopkinsville has no plethora of parks large enough for the hellkin of the world to hide out in. Which leaves outside the city limits.
 

"Hey guys," I say.
 

Jax pauses his game and looks up, as does Evis. This question feels like a drunken version of Pin the Tail on the Donkey, but it's worth a shot.

"Do either of you remember where you were born?" The word
born
doesn't fit well, but it's the only one I've got.
Hatched
is probably closer, but gross considering their hosts were the eggshells.
 

They both nod, which is the only movement of their bodies. Great. They're nervous.

"Do you remember if there was anything important about where you were born? To your mothers, or anything. Did the place feel familiar?"

I'm assuming they were pretty disoriented when they busted into the world, but I can't comb the entire city limits of Hopkinsville looking for this missing man, and I don't even know how I'd find a place that was important to him, but I have to try. He's two months in, therefore about to burst. Literally.

Evis's face is blank, but Jax gives me a slow nod.
 

"I remember — he remembered — going camping in the forest near where I was born."
 

It's probably worth noting that shades' mothers can be male, female, or any other gender. The shades call them mothers anyway, which I suppose makes sense.
 

"Evis?" I try to slow my breathing when I meet my brother's eyes, knowing that whatever he remembers is connected to both of us.
 

"It was her parents' house," he says. "They were there when she came. They died. She watched."

My breathing stops.
 

My brother might as well be made of wood for how much he's moving. His eyes, though, in them I can tell he's hundreds of miles away. Our grandparents. Our mother went to her parents' home and let demons kill them. Or let Evis kill them. I can't bring myself to ask him. They were probably long dead when he was born, knowing demons. But he remembers seeing them die, and that's enough.

"It wasn't your fault," I say. "You didn't ask for this."

Even if he did it, fresh out in the world and surrounded by demons — I believe what I said.
 

Jax gently touches Evis's shoulder, repurposing the greeting to simply communicate to my brother that he's safe. Evis jumps at the touch, and a moment later returns it, but his eyes don't leave mine.

I get up and sit between them on the couch, moving the controllers. Taking Evis's hand in mine, I squeeze it tight. "I'm sorry I brought it up."

"Did it help?" he asks.

"Yes, it helps. It tells me that they take the hosts somewhere meaningful to them." Part of me wants to ask Saturn to confirm it, but from even the little I know of Lena Saturn, his mother, I can imagine her in Percy Warner in that clearing. Listening to music. Maybe practicing her bass. Did she know she would die there?
 

"Then don't be sorry." Evis squeezes my hand back, picks up his controller, and unpauses the game. Three enemies take head shots in the next five seconds.

Jax gives me a tight smile, and I plant a friendly peck on his shoulder.
 

When Carrick returns a few minutes later, I tell him to switch seats and hop in the driver's side. He got the car detailed — none of the sludge from Evis's and my adventure remains. And Carrick's wearing clothes, which means I am not sitting in his butt sweat.

Bonus.

"His name is Nik Edison," says Carrick as I pull out of the driveway.

"Doesn't matter anymore." I wish I didn't mean it. "He's dead meat."

Nik "Dead Meat" Edison lives in a nice, middle class neighborhood with a landscaped pond in his front yard and a hideous frog statue the size of a small pig beside it.
 

I will never understand people.

Carrick picks the lock on the door. If I weren't censured, a quick call to the police would have gotten us in here, but as it is I don't think they want to hear from me. There's a very short list of people who want to hear from me these days.
 

Inside, the house is coated with a layer of dust. There's a nice bookshelf with no books (all vinyl) and a massive television occupying one wall in the living room, and the kitchen looks straight out of one of those quasi-designer catalogs for people who wish they made more money. The walls hold pictures of football plays that somehow manage to look tasteful.
 

There's nothing personal on the walls. No family photos, no pets that I can see, no evidence of small critters or children running amok.
 

"Did this guy live alone?" I ask.

"Yes." Carrick jerks his head toward the hall. "Everyone said he kept to himself."

"They always say that, even if it's not true," I mutter.

Down the hall are two bedrooms, a linen closet with all jersey sheets and an afghan that looks like it was barfed out by the University of Kentucky football team and then used as an ash tray. It smells vaguely of sulfur. It's the first oddity I notice in the house, the yarn singed and dotted with melty burn marks. It stinks. Why would anyone keep that next to clean sheets?

The bedroom looks like it's been ransacked, probably by the police, who aren't too keen on leaving the homes of demon worshippers in a good state if they have reason not to. The computer is gone, with a lonely mouse perched on top of a UK mouse pad.

I wonder why he didn't use his spare bedroom as an office.

Leaving Carrick to check it out, I pause in the hall at a strange smell I can't quite place. It smells like metal, but vaguely sulfuric. The door at the end of the hall is locked.
 

"Carrick." Looking over the door, a tingly sensation begins at the base of my spine. A locked door in a house where the police have searched.
 

Carrick picks the lock, and I make a mental note to get him to teach me how at some point. We could just kick the door down. I'd like to keep some guise of stealth intact, though.
 

He turns the knob. The moment the door cracks open the sulfuric, metallic scent grows stronger. It's underlaid with a burning plastic smell, like the closet where the singed blanket is stuffed.
 

Too clearly, I remember Hazel Lottie's spare bedroom and her Shelves of Sociopathy in the closet there.
 

The room spreads out in front of us, and my vision fuzzes around the edges. "Carrick, go get that afghan."

I want to vomit. The carpet is singed at points that form a circle, and dried blood crusts the center in slashes and pools with a gap in between. The gap is about the width of a human body. The sulfuric smell comes from the blood. The walls of the room are decorated with college football memorabilia. Framed jerseys. A picture of a championship winning team. It's like the walls were plunked down around a murder scene.
 

I shouldn't be surprised anymore.
 

Carrick comes up behind me, his scent agitated with little fizzing bursts. He holds the blanket up by the edges as if just touching it might poison him.

The marks on the blanket mirror those on the floor.
 

I close my eyes, and I see Hazel Lottie and Alice in a circle of hellkin, Hazel brandishing the contract Alice signed in blood. Hazel said there would be more. She promised there would be more.
 

I saved Alice. Standing in this room are the ghosts of two more I couldn't save.
 

Opening my eyes, I look at Carrick. "This is new. The police can't have seen this. The dust on the table against the wall is disturbed, like something leaned on it."

There are streaks on the wall, like a clear substance dried. Without closer inspection I know it's demon slime. Carrick's expression is wooden. He wasn't in Miller's Field the day I saved Alice from the fate of spawning a shade from her body, but from his face he still holds the memories of the person four hundred years ago who saw a scene such as this before the demons implanted an egg of theirs to meld with his host's body, to feed off it, to grow to full size and burst forth fully formed.
 

"When we return home, I'll look for any new missing persons reports," he says.

My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I pull it out, unable to shake the sensation that I am spinning, round and round, faster than I can process. Or maybe I'm standing still and it's the rest of the world that won't stop moving.

It's a text from Ripper, and it just has an address of a motel on the Tennessee border. Wordlessly, I show it to Carrick.

"It could be a trap." Carrick's right.

"It's Ripper."

"Then let's go."

I call in an anonymous tip to the Hopkinsville Police Department, telling them to check out Edison's place again, and Carrick and I drive south. It takes an hour to get to the motel, and I don't bother texting Ripper that I'm on my way. If it's not him waiting for us, I don't want to give them the warning.
 

When we pull into the gravel parking lot, though, Ripper's rusty black piece-a sits in front of a motel room door that's ajar. I draw my knives, and Carrick shifts his shoulders, uncomfortable in any clothing to fight, even though I know a shirt won't lessen his deadliness.

But there's no ambush waiting for us inside the door. Just Ripper, unconscious on the foot of the bed, sprawled out like he tripped and fell into a wood chipper.
 

"Fuck," I drop my knives at my feet where I can reach them just in case, and I press my fingers to his neck. There's a pulse, strong enough to lessen my worry a little.
 

Ripper's blond hair is matted with blood that's formed a crust behind his right ear, and his face is covered in lacerations and bruises. His left eye probably won't open even when he wakes. The way his right arm is bunched up against his chest is unnatural, and he's laying on it. He must have fallen forward. The shoulder looks dislocated.