Any Port in a Storm (10 page)

I try to forget the wet pain in my stomach and the sound of Carrick screaming. I don't know where the others are. I hope the Summit is sending backup.

But for now, it's me.

I swing my sword like a bat. One slummoth head goes rolling across the floor, and from the closet behind me comes a surprised thud and gasp. One of the two remaining demons has his teeth sunk deep in Carrick's deltoid. The other pulls bloody claws back from Carrick's ribs and comes at me. His head joins the other on the floor.
 

I can't decapitate the last one without slicing into Carrick's arm, so I settle for stabbing it through the head. My sword sticks in the slummoth's skull, and his jaw stays locked on Carrick's flesh for an interminable five breaths.
 

Carrick is unconscious.
 

Already I can see the slummoth poison inflaming his shoulder, spreading like red lines of a spiderweb out over his chest, speckled with yellow pustules that turn black at the top. Pretty. I should be more worried, but he'll be okay. I think.

Now that I'm not moving, I feel the seeping blood at my stomach. It tickles, dribbling down to pool at the waistline of my pants. I'm not sure I'm okay.

The man in the closet has gone very quiet, and I realize it's probably because he thinks I'm dead.

"It's okay. You can come out now, I think."

"You think?"

I grimace, taking a couple steps to lean on the man's bedpost. It's hard to get a breath around the ball of pain at my center. "Well, these demons ain't getting any deader."

The closet door creaks open, and a bearded white man wearing only a set of black boxers with light sabers on them steps out. He promptly keels over and vomits on one of the slummoth heads. I don't really blame him, but the smell of bile threatens to make me join him in his pastime.
 

A thump from the broken window breaks my urge to puke.
 

I raise my sword again, hoping to every star in the sky that it's not another pack of slummoths coming through.

It's Miles.

"Hey," he says. "You should come down."

I nod, taking a painful three steps to retrieve my short sword. "You get Carrick."

The house's owner rises to his feet, knees shaking and a wet streak visible across the back of his hand. "You're hurt."

"Part of the job. You dead?"

"What? No."

"Then I did my job." I look at the window, watching Miles scoop up Carrick with a graceful attention to Carrick's wounds. He somehow gets out the window without adding more scrapes to the unconscious shade.

Sorry, but I ain't going out that way.
 

I start for the stairs, and the man follows. "Can I at least help you get downstairs?"

That makes me speed up, though it doesn't do much. I'm still moving at about the speed of a walrus in mud. He catches up, and reaches for me. To his credit, when I shake my head, he backs off.

"It's not as bad as it looks. It's just inconveniently located." Yeah, Ayala. Sure. I turn downstairs at the landing, stepping over the lamp again. Lifting my leg like that pulls at the claw wounds on my stomach, and I fight the urge to swear. Instead, I talk to light saber britches. "If you contact the Office of Norm Casualties at the Summit, they'll walk you through filing a claim."

"I don't have demon insurance."

I snort a laugh, which also pulls at the gouges in my middle. "No one does. We have an endowment for it."

I can almost hear the man blink. We reach the living room, and I can see a crowd gathered on the lawn. A mostly nude crowd, and one blocky shape that's very, very welcome.
 

"What's your name?" the man asks.

This isn't the first time someone I've rescued has asked me that, and it probably won't be the last unless I get myself dead in the near future. I'm not sure why I hesitate to answer. After a long pause, I say, "Ayala Storme."

I can't tell by the man's face if he recognizes the name or not, but I don't really care. I shuffle past him and out the door, where a shade named Sanj greets me with a touch on my shoulder. I move my short sword into my right hand, almost dropping it to return the gesture. A patter of footsteps sounds behind me, and I feel something soft hit my shoulder. It smells like fake grass and flowers. Turning my head to look, my cheek encounters terrycloth.
 

"It's raggedy, but it's clean," says the man. "You can use it to clean your swords. Or stop the bleeding."

I meet his eyes for the first time, and I give him a wry smile. He sussed out my priorities pretty well. "Thanks."

"Least I could do."

Sanj helps me get down the front steps — by which I mean he walks in front of me so if I pitch forward, my nose will hit his back instead of the slates of the footpath.

Gregor beckons me, his gaze dipping to my stomach, then returning to meet my eyes. Somehow, his backlit form exudes relief.
 

The not-dead inhabitant of the house calls out my name as I walk toward Gregor. "Ayala."

I turn my head to look back at him. "Yeah?"

"Thank you."

Some nights, killing things in the woods and having the Mittens Brigade pick up the pieces makes me forget the human face of what I do. For a moment, warm fuzzies threaten to well up in my chest under all the drying sweat and still-seeping blood.

Then I remember the guy's slummoth-soaked bedroom, spattered with almost every bodily fluid.

I'm just sorry this dude got a taste of my life.

CHAPTER TEN

I'm one lucky sonofabitch.
 

The gashes across my midsection are just shallow enough not to sever much more than the skin and fat of my stomach. Fit as I am, they don't quite slice into the muscle.
 

Even so, I call Laura at eight in the morning to tell her I'll be taking Thursday and Friday night off. I no longer try and make up root canals and optometrist appointments to cover my injuries and hellkin-related hijinks. Instead I just tell her the truth — that a pack of demons tried to make julienne Ayala.
 

She asks gravely if I'm okay, and I tell her I'll live.

Laura also exudes relief about that.

For most people, living is a pretty low bar, but for me it's cause for celebration.
 

Carrick wakes up a couple hours after we get home, spitting mad and about ready to shred the thousand thread count sheets on my guest bed, but I lie down next to him, not touching him, just staring at the ceiling until he shuts the hell up.

I think about making a crack about his age and me saving his bare ass twice in a week, but I change my mind when I see him sleeping peacefully next to me. His long hair is an auburn tangle, and I wonder how I ended up capable of coexisting with this guy.
 

I manage some telework Thursday and Friday both, and by Friday night, my body itches from sternum to pelvis from the healing scratches. Carrick's back up and about, having scrubbed away the remaining scabs from the slummoth venom and thoroughly ruined my new loofah.

Gregor checks in on us at around ten, and to my delight he brings dinner. Filet mignon snippets for the recovering demonoid loofah-ruiner and pizza for me. Pizza covered in cooked meat. Just the way I like it.

Gregor sits down in my black leather easy chair. "I have a confession."

I'm never a fan of conversations that begin like that.

"Damn it."

Carrick gives me an amused look from across the room, where he's skimming titles on my bookshelf. He has a penchant for bodice rippers and kilt flippers. I subscribed him to a monthly book club. He picks one after a beat and returns to the sofa, where Nana promptly hops up beside him, curling into a little ginger ball by his leg. She falls asleep, velveteen ears twitching.

I stick my tongue out at Carrick and look back to Gregor. "Spill it, Strong Mad."

Gregor scowls at me, but he starts talking.

"I was waiting in the woods the whole time the other night," he says. He stretches, the chair squeaking as he leans back. He looks at me as if expectant of some explosive reaction.

I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't that.

"You and half the older Mediators in Nashville have probably done that for most of my life," I say flippantly. It's more breezy than I feel. An itch gathers between my shoulder blades.

The older Mediators always observe Mittens and the young Mediators right out of training; something about ensuring they live to get as snarky as me.

Then it hits me, what he's really saying.

"So. Did we pass?"

Gregor's thin lips become a you-got-me grin, and he nods. "You passed. Even Carrick."

Carrick doesn't budge from where he sits, book open to the blank flyleaf, but the stillness of his body betrays his agitation. By now, I speak shade.

I pretend to focus on Gregor, but I keep Carrick in my peripheral vision.
 

"So," I say.

"So," says Gregor.

A long pause stretches, broken only by a small thump as Nana jumps down from the couch and scurries to her litter box.

"I have a job for you."

My left hand goes involuntarily to my stomach, which is still a mass of scabs. It'll be healed to tender scar tissue by tomorrow, but I don't really feature getting all torn up again.

"What's the job?" Caution makes my question sound hesitant, and I wish I could rewind.

"Crossville. There's a trio — maybe more — of shades gnawing on the populace. I need you to go take them down."
 

Something seems to squiggle against my spine from the inside, and I wait a moment before responding. "Did you send anybody to talk to them?"

The flatlining of Gregor's mouth tells me no.
 

The squiggle grows a bit more insistent. "You want us to just go kill them."

"They're killing norms."

I don't like it, but he's right. I think. I remember the warehouse I found here in Nashville all too well. No more meat smoothies get made of the populace.
 

He goes over the plan then, telling me about an old barn on some farmer's property that's about to be subdivided into lots for McMansions. The shades have holed up there, and nobody will go near them.
 

"Have any Mediators tried?" I ask. It seems like the logical question; we're the ones who usually take care of homicidal pest control. Come to think of it, I'm not sure how I feel about classifying myself as a glorified exterminator. Then again, the Ghostbusters were exactly that. I can handle sharing their category.

Gregor shakes his head in response to my question, and behind his eyes I detect something I can't pinpoint. Summit politics. Ugh.

"When?"
 

"Tonight, if you're up to it."

Carrick on the sofa is still imitating a statue, but at that, he finally moves to nod. He was torn up worse than I was, but he heals faster.
 

The scabs on my stomach pull a bit when I stretch. I look at Carrick, thinking of a bunch of shades terrorizing Crossville. That's bad news. Then I think of Gregor, and how two days ago, us hunting packs of slummoths was seen as a test. How long did Crossville have to lose citizens before Gregor got around to asking us to do this?

I nod my assent, and Gregor leaves, but my troubled feeling doesn't.

Sometimes I wonder what it's like to spend Friday night at the movies. Or on a date. Or kicked back in my recliner with explosions on television, snuggled into my silk robe and sipping from a glass of sake.

Sometimes that wondering is prompted by stepping in a pile of rotting entrails. Like right now.

I bite back a curse, sidestepping the rest of the oozing offal and scraping the side of my boot on a scrubby patch of grass. The shades walking around me don't seem to care much — Harkan and Udo tread right over it — and the sight reminds me that as much time as I've spent with them, we're still very different.
 

The only good thing about having to clean decaying flesh off my boots is that it tells me we're on the right track.
 

The sky lightens above us, almost imperceptibly as the rising moon heralds the coming of the sun. If Gregor's intel is right, the shades who have been munching on Crossville's people — and leaving scraps for me to step in — should be about ready to tuck themselves in for the night. I only hope the abandoned barn they've settled isn't decorated like the warehouse by the train tracks was. That would make the pile of guts look like a paper cut.