Any Port in a Storm (13 page)

The trees thin out up ahead, and I find one and get behind it. None of the trees nearby look climbable, and though I've yet to see a demon climb a tree, I don't think I want to test out any hypotheses with jeelings around.
 

The glow starts moving in my direction, and I suck in a breath.

Peering out around the tree, I see them now. About a hundred yards away, the pink glow materializes into three hulking shapes and illuminates the area around them enough to see that I am well and truly splatted.

The hotline was right. There are frahligs. And slummoths. And rakaths. And harkasts. And a couple snorbits. And though I've never seen one in the slimy flesh before, I think the one pawing at the ground on all fours is an aetna.
 

I count eighteen total. When they shift eastward, I let out my breath as slowly as I can, thanking every star above my head that they're upwind of me, even if that means I have to smell the rotten fish stink of the frahligs from here.
 

Texting the Summit again is probably worthless, but I do it anyway. It's another eight hours until sunup, and these monsters have the run of the land until then.

Hellkin don't gather in numbers like this, not without reason. So far the only reasons I've ever seen had to do with either making full-grown baby shades or killing the full-grown baby shades when they didn't work out as planned. Whatever they're doing is bad news.

Following them is a terrible idea, but the Summit texts back that they're sending backup and to keep an eye on the hellkin.

So I follow.

I keep my distance, staying as far back as possible while tracking the glow emitted by the jeelings. After a few minutes, I wonder how they're planning to cross the river. The only bridge on this side of the park is to the north, and the park is only about a half mile wide. Most demons aren't particularly good swimmers.
 

The river is close enough for me to smell now, that scent of algae and wet rock and damp earth. I stop again behind a tree and look out.
 

Half the demons have vanished.

My heart suddenly seems to exist in my tonsils, and I look around me, swords ready for a rakath or slummoth to come at me. But none do.

I look again, and what I see makes me freeze.

The air around the demons seems to ripple like a parting beaded curtain. The demons are going into it, and for a moment they appear like paper going through a shredder. Then they're gone.

The jeelings are the last to go, but after a moment, they also disappear through the tear in the air. My eyes see ghosts of their pink glow when they're gone.

Eighteen demons existing peacefully, vanishing into their own dimension in front of my eyes. Alarm bells scream in my head like a tornado siren. I look at my phone. The Summit's backup is only five minutes out. I'm going to have to somehow explain this to them.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The sun's up before I get to leave the park.

I go to the Summit with a group of Mediators, and they call in Alamea. She arrives at half past seven looking like she meant to be up that early, her linen blouse pressed and perfect and her heels clicking too loudly on the floors of the Summit. When she hears the story, she pulls all of us into a conference room I already know is an interrogation room. I've been interrogated in it before.

Grudgingly, I have to admit that if it weren't for Jaryn the psychic, I probably wouldn't have made it home last summer.
 

For as much as I hate psychics for their obnoxious attitudes and I-know-what-you're-thinking smirks, if Jaryn saves my ass one more time, I'm going to have to get him a pie or something. He happens to poke his head into the room to say hello to Alamea just before one of the other Mediators closes the door. His eyes lock on mine, and his mammoth hand catches the door and holds it open.

"I think you might need me," he says.

Ain't nobody trying to get to the truth of something gonna say no to a psychic's presence.

Within fifteen minutes, he's confirmed my tale. Alamea dismisses everyone but the two of us and closes the door behind them.

"Sit," she says.

We sit. Jaryn is as mammoth in height as his hands are, and he has to sit back an extra two feet from the table so his knees don't bang into the divider beneath it that runs down the length of it.

She sits at the head of the table in troubled silence for three whole minutes.
 

"Well. This isn't good," she says.

"No shit," says Jaryn.

"You don't seem entirely surprised." I look at her, then at Jaryn, feeling dwarfed by their presence, like a kindergartner at the big kids' table. I'm fairly tall, but Alamea's got six inches on me, and Jaryn's got another six on her. I feel like my feet should be dangling from my seat. I plant them on the floor, mostly to prove to myself I can.

"Let's just say that it's not the only oddity going on in middle Tennessee right now." Alamea goes silent, and I know she's thinking. She's always very deliberate about her words.

My mind does a quick run through the oddities I've seen myself. Frahligs away from water. A jeeling that fled me. Slummoths attacking the homes of norms. Two shades vanishing into thin air, at least one of them afraid enough to hurt a friend. Multiple species of demons gathering.
 

Yeah, I'd say a shitstorm's a-brewin'. I sure as hells don't want to be anywhere near the fan it's about to hit.

Too bad I don't have a choice.

Resigned, I meet Alamea's eyes. "Any ideas?"

"Demons aren't usually tactical," she says.

"I noticed that, too." My voice comes out more sardonic than I meant it to, and I want to swallow my tongue.
 

"In our history, when they start organizing, it means they're about to try something large to unbalance the scales. Tip them in their favor."

"They're always trying to do that," Jaryn says, but both Alamea and I shake our heads.

"Normally they're just trying to survive," I say. "They come here, raid for whatever food they can find at night, and go back to their snuggly hell dimensions at first light. When they start doing something other than that, things get bad fast."

"In the past, it's led to us losing entire portions of territory," Alamea says.

"Like Mississippi." I feel sick.

"Like Mississippi." Alamea seems to share my sentiment, and how could she not?

Now we've got Jaryn's attention. He knows as well as we do that when we say Mississippi, we mean Mississippi, Alabama, most of Louisiana, two strips of Tennessee — one west of Memphis and the other in the southeast near Chattanooga — and an ever-growing chunk of Arkansas all the way up to Little Rock.

I usually try not to think about that, because we're not that far from there. There used to be Mediator territories there. Not anymore. And Mediators can't retreat. We can't leave our territories. When we lose territories, well. If you're not alive, you're that other thing.

"We need to figure out what we're going to do and fast," I say. I think of the medal hanging behind Alamea's desk chair. Lowest norm mortality in the country. I have a feeling that's about to change. As if the universe is as psychic as Jaryn is, Alamea's phone goes off.

She answers it with a curt, "Talk to me."

I can't hear what the caller says, but Jaryn's face goes paper-white, and he looks at the phone in Alamea's hand as if he wants to take it from her and crush it against the marble-topped table.

When Alamea hangs up, she looks at me.
 

"Someone just reported two shades taking a man from his home and eating him in the middle of the street."

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if a Monday somehow manages to start out amazing, it will plummet to the depths of all the hells to make up for it.
 

I'm pretty sure that's what Jane Austen meant to say.

I barely make it home with enough time to shower, change into work clothes, and get to my office.

There's still leftover brunch food in the kitchenette, but there's not enough coffee in Tennessee to keep me from yawning through the day and into late afternoon.

Usually, I do okay on little or no sleep, but today all I want to do is crawl under my desk and nap.

My phone rings at quarter of five. Mira.

"Hey, what's up?" My computer screen blurs in front of my face. I've been staring at it for too long.

"Wane got a call from some morphs up in Franklin, Kentucky who said they have a shade hanging around town and it could be Saturn."

"Has he hurt anyone?" Alarmed, I push my chair back from my desk and bang my knee on a drawer. "Fuck."

Mira takes my swearing to mean I assume he has. "No, no, no. No one's hurt. They said he plans to move on soon, though, so we need to get up there tonight."

"I'll meet you at your house as soon as I can."

"No need. We're on our way downtown now. We can pick you up."

"Mira," I say before she hangs up. "Did they mention his tattoo?"

"They said he's wearing clothes."

Whoa.
 

"I'll meet you outside," I say.

"Ten minutes." She hangs up.

I duck into Laura's office before I go. "I've got to run out early," I tell her. "Mediator business."

"Be safe," is all she says.

I have spare hunting clothes in my car, and I run to the garage to grab my duffel and my spare swords from my trunk. The backseat of my car may be a disaster zone, but lately I've taken to organizing the trunk. I change in the lobby bathroom, tucking a pair of knives in my boots and slinging my sword belt over my shoulder.
 

There's a food truck outside that sells burritos, and I order six and several cans of Coke for the drive. I haven't eaten since I got to the office, and the combination of no sleep and no food is the difference between diplomatic me and boot-in-newly-torn-orifices me. Plus, Mira and Wane might be hungry.
 

They pull up just as I'm paying, and Mira leans on the horn. I give the food truck woman a ten and a twenty and tell her to keep the change, hurrying away. She looks so awed by my swords and the nearly thirty percent tip that she actually claps when I hop in the car and we drive away.

I distribute the burritos while Mira goes over what she knows.

"I think it's him. It has to be. Same build, dark hair, brown guy. Saturn's smart enough to try and blend," she says. "Though I don't like the idea of him stealing his gods damned wardrobe. Poor fool of a cop, if anybody tried to stop him, you know?"

I wince, because I know too well what can happen to cops getting in shades' way.
 

My mouth is full of shredded beef and cheese and tortilla, so I can't answer, but I nod at her in the rearview mirror.
 

By the time we get over the Kentucky border, I desperately have to pee. We pull over at a rest stop that's little more than a hole in the ground and smells like people were actively trying to avoid said hole when they used it. The sun's on its way down, and with everything going on in the hellkin world, we all try and make the stop as short as possible.

Franklin, Kentucky is just off I-65, and Mira takes the exit for the main drag, following it straight through town. It's a town of about 8,000 according to search engines, and the main street houses a few quaint brick public buildings and a few more recently boarded up storefronts.
 

We pass the county jail on the right, and Mira keeps on driving. Pretty soon, the town thins out, and she takes a right on a county road heading to the northwest. I have a roiling worry filling my belly, and it has nothing to do with the two taco truck burritos I ate. The last time I ventured this far to the north, I started feeling the territory sickness we face if we try to venture out of our area. At least I think I was this far north. The last thing Mira and I need is to get into it with a bunch of Kentucky morphs only to have cramps double us over and sweats soak our leathers. That'd be helpful in a fight.

I feel jittery and nervous.

We pass a small white church with a sparse, crooked cemetery, then the road curves and we pass over a creek signed as "Sinking Creek." It's little more than a stream, and Mira pulls the car over on the shoulder just past the bridge.