Any Port in a Storm (16 page)

She looks up from shuffling papers around on her desk. "I didn't ask you here to go over Ben and Gryfflet's projects."

"I figured."

Alamea turns her computer monitor so I can see it, touching the screen to bring up a map covered in colored dots.
 

In the bottom corner, there's a key tying the colors to different types of demons. There's a strange symbol in several places across the map, but it's not marked on the key. One of them is over Stones River Bend Park, where I saw the herd of hellkin the other night. Alamea's long finger lands right on that spot, tapping it twice to zoom in.

"You saw an actual hotspot the other night," she says. "We've added it to our database. There are certain areas in the city where something allows the hellkin to break through into our reality. This is a new one."

"New."

I really don't like the sound of that, and it seems from the bitter set of Alamea's mouth that she really agrees.

She nods and zooms the screen out again. "Look at the map for a moment. Try to fix it in your memory."

I frown, looking. The dots are multicolored and varied, clustered around the hotspots marked by the symbol. It's like an extra-curvy question mark with a diagonal slash through it in the middle. She zooms the map out even more, beyond Nashville to the entirety of our territory, which is marked with a violet line at the edges. I've never actually seen my habitat delineated that way before. It makes me feel claustrophobic. That's my cage. I'll never be able to escape that violet line.

Alamea is oblivious to my thoughts. "Got it?"

I nod.

She moves her hands to the computer's keyboard, and with a couple strokes of the keys, the screen changes.

"This is the same map, but from five years ago at this time."

I freeze in my seat. The colors of the dots are still there, but they're mostly segregated. The slummoth greens are concentrated in Percy Warner and a few other places. Frahlig grey is dotted along the riversides, the Stones and the Cumberland. Jeeling pink is mostly to the south near Franklin, with a couple clusters up by Clarksville and a few to the east. Yellow groups of snorbits by the Opry and not many other places. Brown harkast clusters in heavily wooded areas. One cluster of aetnas on the far eastern edge of our territory at the ascent of the Smokies. There's a little smattering of overlap where green and pink and yellow and grey dots mix.

There are fewer hotspots as well.

Alamea's fingers tap her keys again. "Ten years."

Now there's almost no overlap.
 

"Fifteen."

The Opry has no dots over it, neither does Stones River Bend. In the crook of the Cumberland, where I fought the slummoths, there's nothing. Just a peaceful blank. No hellkin activity at all.

Alamea's fingers click on the keyboard, going forward in time again, this time year by year. I watch it flash across the screen as the demons slowly diversify in their areas, and I see something else.

The clusters fifteen years ago were sporadic, spaced out with no seeming rhyme or reason. As the years tick on, though, those clusters grow larger and branch out like veins. When she gets to three years before now, they're spaced almost equidistant from one another. When she gets to today, they blanket our territory.

"They're organizing," I breathe.

We're in a cage, and the demons are the black mold growing beneath us, sending out unnoticed spores.
 

"When did you notice this?"

"We've always kept data, but only in the last few years have we really had the technology to see these patterns emerge." She keeps the screen on the most recent image, her eyes lingering on it as if she can will it to spill its secrets.
 

"What can we do?" My stomach churns. Mediator numbers are down, I know, but then my eyes fall on Alamea's medal again. "Alamea."

She looks at me and follows my gaze. "What?"

"Have you included any data about our numbers in that? Or norm mortalities?"

Her eyes snap to mine, and she stares at me. "What are you saying?"

"What about the shades? Any reports on them? How do they fit into this? How do we fit into it?"

For the first time in my entire stint of working for the Summit and knowing this woman, I see something like panic in her face. "I don't know. What are you thinking?"

"Our numbers are down. Their numbers are up. They birthed dozens of shades into our territory, but no other territory, even though Hazel Lottie said this wasn't the end of it. They have gone from warring factions who slaughtered mindlessly to diverse groups working together. Meanwhile, they're not killing norms." I point at her medal, then at the map. "These things do not fit together, Alamea. I'm not saying you don't deserve that medal, because you're damn good at your job. But this math? This data? It doesn't add up. There are more of them than there have ever been, and more hells-holes are opening up in our territory. We've lost actual ground, like the Opry. We've lost Mediator numbers. There are new players in town. But somehow we have the lowest norm mortality rate in the entire United States?"

She just looks at me, her mind absorbing what I've said, processing it. I can see it on her face.
 

"What if they were never bumbling, mindless killers at all? What if they were never at war with each other?" My tongue sticks in my mouth like its grown three sizes, and I take a deep swig of my blood orange soda. "What if this is what they did to Mississippi? Are we next?"

Alamea's mouth falls open, and her gaze returns to the computer screen. For a moment, I'm sure I can feel what she does, the walls of our territory shrinking and closing in on us like the maw of a spiked trap. There are many things she knows that I will never be allowed to know. I know the Summit has its secrets and that we grunts don't get to be party to them. That's fine. I'll try to keep the world safer for the Parkers and Lauras and Alices and Merediths and Leeloos of the universe. If this trap is going to spring shut on us, I'll try to jam my swords in its mechanisms until I'm dead.

If it comes to it, I'll stand here and scream into those ragged holes of hell until it swallows me.

"Ayala," Alamea says.
 

"What?"

"Help me."

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I promise Alamea I'll return to the Summit as soon as she's got the data compiled. We both keep our upper lips stiff through the rest of our meeting, but inside I can almost hear both our hearts ricocheting around our chests.
 

Alamea is the head of the Summit. She's our leader. For the first time, as I drive myself home, I wonder why she's asking me for help — and who it is at the Summit she can't trust if she's coming to me.

Carrick's not home again when I get there, and I feed Nana and settle in to eat some leftover Chinese food in my fridge. I've got a couple hours before I have to meet Gregor, so I stretch out on the couch and pretend to watch Alien.

Ripley was one of my first heroes.

I make it to Gregor's by ten, and I find him at his kitchen table with papers spread out all over it. Some of them look like expense reports. He's also got an old fashioned Rolodex on the side of the table, which I find amusing.

"Have a seat," he says, gesturing.
 

I sit, waiting for him to finish scowling at papers and look up at me. He does after a minute.

"Alamea said you came to see her today."

"She asked me to."

"What did she want?"

I think he wants to know if she asked about the shades, and I'm not sure she wants me to talk about the data she showed me, even to Gregor, who probably already knows. So I shrug. "Nothing other than normal Mediator stuff. Nothing about Carrick and the others."

He sits back in his chair, which looks like relief to me. I wonder why. Maybe he's worried about the plug getting pulled on his pet project.
 

"Job went well the other day," he says. "No shade deaths in Crossville since."

"That's good."

Gregor grunts. "You know why I do this, right?"

I shake my head, because he's never told me.

"They need a direction, Storme. They can't just be left to their own devices. This way they have something to contribute to the world. It's not like they can get a McJob and flip burgers like the rest of the millennials. They ain't got any skills that'd make them worth the risk to an employer."

"You don't have to justify yourself to me, Gregor," I say quietly. "I know them."

He looks at me, his violet eyes sharp and canny. "I know, Storme. I know."

There's a pause while he stacks a bunch of papers and shoves them in a manila folder, then he gets up and walks to the fridge to grab a beer. He pops the top off with his thumb, then holds it out to me. I shake my head. He shrugs, draws deep on the bottle, and sits back down.

"There's gonna be some jobs in the future that could be messier."

Messier than beheading surrendering shades? I listen, wondering what he's on about. He's talking like he can predict where we'll be needed. I raise an eyebrow.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that the work we do ain't never pretty. But it's necessary."

I think of what I said to Ben today, that the ends justify the means. I suppose that even though I meant it in snarky fashion, it might as well be the Mediator mantra. We make death with our hands because others live on if we do.
 

"I get that, Gregor. We've all done some messy shit in this line of work."

He nods, as if satisfied. "We're going to stay in a holding pattern for a little bit, but Carrick or I'll let you know if something comes up."

I know a dismissal when I see one. I go back to my car, feeling surly. He called me over just to say that?

Halfway home, my phone rings. I pull over to the side of the road and answer — it's an unfamiliar number.
 

"Hello?"

"Ayala? It's Wane."

"Wane? What's up?"

I can hear a commotion in the background, and a minute later, a door shuts. "Sorry, I'm at work. Triage has gotten three patients tonight suffering from…hells. Their arms were torn off."

"What?" Oh, no.

"Three vics, all with the same issue. I usually don't hear this stuff, but one of the ER nurses was in the locker room with me, and he said he'd never seen anything like it."

"Did he say where they were found?"

"Train tracks. By the old warehouses. You know the ones." The sounds from Wane's end grow muffled, like she's put her hand over the mic.
 

I do know the ones. I helped blow one up. It can't be a coincidence.

"Thank you, Wane. I'm on it."

"Be safe."

She hangs up, and I get back on the road. I stop home long enough to gear up, scratch Nana behind the ears, and text Carrick, and then I head to the bridge.

Even I'm not daring enough to go waltzing into the warehouse district alone. From the bridge, I have a good view. The burned out warehouse is still a shell; even after three months, the city hasn't managed to get demolition crews over to tear down the remaining wreckage.

I pull out my scope and set it up, attaching a night vision lens to the end of it. It doesn't take long to find the scene. Even in the dark, I can see the swaths of shadow that are blood pools. How did the ambulances even get called? The only think I can think of is that one of the shades orchestrated this.
 

My phone buzzes, and it's Carrick. I'm still not so sure I want to talk to him, but I answer.
 

"Hi," I say.

"Where are you?"

"Jefferson Street Bridge, looking at the aftermath of some shade hijinks."

"Damn," says Carrick.

"Yeah, not good."

"I mean, that's why I called."

That gets my attention. "What happened? Where are you?"

"Percy Warner Park. There's a pile of bodies."

I start moving toward my car. "How big a pile?"

"Seven."

Shit. "I'll be right there."

"I'll take care of it."

"Carrick—"

"I'll take care of it! Gregor's on his way."

That should make me feel better, but it doesn't. The warehouses, Percy Warner Park. These killers are targeting places that mean something to me, specifically. I can't be crazy about this. Percy Warner is where Saturn lived. The warehouse I blew up, yes, but maybe it's something else. I met Mason there.