Any Port in a Storm (2 page)

The wind shifts, and I smell them coming before I hear them.

The scent is hot and smells slightly of ash and metal and life. Shade blood. A lot of it.

I've been around them long enough, fought beside them enough to recognize it.

A moment later I hear the crash of bushes and a yell, followed by a gurgle.

I keep my sword points low, hoping the blood's not Saturn's and that the voices are friendly. My hope is misplaced. Half of it, anyway.

"Put him there!" an unfamiliar, urgent voice barks.

Then I see them, rounding Saturn's large oak.
 

It is Saturn. And the blood is definitely his. Mira Gonzales, another Mediator and the closest thing to a friend of mine, helps him lay back against the trunk of the tree. I don't recognize the morph with them. She moves with sharp, precise competence, pressing her hand against the side of Saturn's neck, which is the source of the blood.

My feet start moving without me, lurching me forward over the mulch-covered ground. The morph lets out a yell of alarm, but Mira sees me and waves the other woman off.

"Wane, chill. It's Ayala."

That's all Wane seems to need, because her attention snaps back to Saturn so fully that it seems she's forgotten my existence. I drop to my knees at Saturn's feet, and I finally get a good look at him in the dim clearing.
 

Someone sliced through almost two inches of his neck. His left side is gushing blood. It pulses out between Wane's fingers like oozing lava.

"What happened?" I've seen a lot of shit, but this makes me feel like someone's running their fingertips along the inside of my stomach lining.

Mira's violet eyes are black in the night, her brown skin turned blue grey, her hair like onyx. It's then I see the way Saturn's clutching her hand and the quick, shallow rise and fall of his chest.
 

His eyes are closed, but his lips form my name.
 

I scoot up beside Mira, feel the coolness of her presence compared with the heat of Saturn's fear. He burns like a star instead of a planet.
 

"He got ambushed. He was on his way home. We were supposed to meet him here and heard the fight." Mira's voice is dispassionate, but her fingers clasping Saturn's aren't.

"Did you see who did this?" I ask.

"Keen blade to the carotid. Would have finished the job if he hadn't gotten away long enough to make our presence scare them off. Whoever did this cared more about not being seen than they did about finishing the job." Wane pipes up, her voice brittle.

"Motherfuckers." Mira says.

I'm about to say something, but the morph keeps going, ignoring Mira's expletive.

"He'll live," she says. "I can feel him healing. I'm trying to help him along."

I stretch out my hand and touch it to Saturn's shoulder. His throat convulses.
 

Help him along. I forget that morphs can transfer energy. By nature their animal transformations are fueled by some sort of primal woo-woo creation magic — they can manipulate that when they see fit. A lot of them are in health care. From Wane's clinical choice of words, I think she probably is too.

My body relaxes a bit at her prognosis, exhales breath it had locked in my lungs.
 

"He said he had something to tell me," I say.

Mira shrugs. "Whatever it is, it'll have to wait."
 

She's not wrong about that. Saturn's not able to say anything right now.
 

The three of us hold watch over Saturn as the sky slowly lightens with the coming dawn. Finally, the blood flow from his neck slows to nothing, and he sleeps between us, blood drying on his naked form.

By nine in the morning, Saturn is healed enough to move him to Mira's, and I help Wane and her get him to her car and load him in, leaning the passenger seat back as far as it'll go. She covers her seats like a good little Mediator, but getting him in the car leaves crackling flakes of his dried blood dusting onto her floor mats, the seat backs, and the center console anyway.

I belt him in while Wane climbs into the back seat. I finally get a good look at her. She's of medium height and wiry, with short hair that's the color of old quarters. Her face is unlined, with a strong jaw and light brown skin. Her eyes are grey, and after being surrounded by shades and Mediators for months, the sight is welcome and a little unnerving, a reminder of the norm world I've lost track of. The reminder is like a drop of cold water falling out of the air onto my scalp. I'll have to ask Mira about this morph later.

Mira herself meets my gaze, violet to violet. Her face is unreadable for a long moment, then she gives me a cheeky smile.

"I'll take care of the invalid. Come over after work." She cranks up the radio — old school Bonnie Raitt — and waves an impatient hand at me to close the door. Before I do, Saturn reaches out and touches my shoulder with his fingertips, and for the tiniest moment, his indigo eyes flutter open and meet mine.
 

They drive away, and a wave of relief crests in my middle to know he'll be okay and that he's in good hands. Too much death and loss this year already. I can't bring myself to think about what I'd do if I lost him too.

I hike slowly back to my car, taking a detour to where Mira and Wane found Saturn.
 

It's
 
not hard to find — his blood is still red and heavy, splashed on the trunk of a cottonwood.
 

After a few moments of finding exactly nothing helpful, I leave.

Whatever Saturn wanted to tell me, I have a feeling I'm not going to like it.

CHAPTER TWO

Carrick's door is closed when I get home, and I'm glad for that. In my room, Nana Bunny greets me with a twitchy-nosed squeak, and I change her water and give her some hay before getting in the shower.
 

Flakes of Saturn's blood dissolve into the stream of water.
 

The hot water doesn't wash away my feeling of unease.

Three hours later, I'm bicep-deep in a pile of press releases for a new mattress store opening up in Franklin. I'm so busy compiling testimonies and blurbs that I miss my boss standing in the threshold to my office until she coughs loudly for what can't be the first time.

She's in her signature eggplant suit, and she's started dyeing her hair to cover the greys.

They started taking over right around the time she learned that the whole Mediator-killing-hellkin thing isn't as neat and tidy as it sounds.

"Sorry, Laura," I say. "I didn't see you there.

She watches me silently for a moment, her eyes the only brightness on her face.
 

"Have you ever thought of working for the Summit?" she asks. "I mean, do you really like putting out PR fires and puttering with press releases?"

To disguise the surprise I feel at her question, I save the layout I'm working on, push my mouse aside, and lean back in my chair. Here in my office, my painstakingly painted and designed office with its cream walls and dark blue accents, I wonder if all this time she's assumed I was just playing house.

"Well, the Summit doesn't pay for shit," I say lightly. It's true, but it's not my only reason. When Laura doesn't budge, I drum my fingers on the arm of my chair. "I like PR. I like doing something all week that doesn't involve getting blood off leather and I like not coming home smelling like rusty metal and sulfur. I like being able to solve problems with words during the day because at night, the answer's always the sharp edge of a blade."

I don't know why I tell her all that. I think of just such a clean edged blade biting into Saturn's neck, and of what might have happened if a Mediator and a morph hadn't shown up in time to stop the sword's wielder from putting it all the way through the other side.

I swallow, feeling sick.

Laura seems to sense it, because she takes three steps into my office and sits across from me.

"Did something happen?"

There's something in me that wants to just tell her about Saturn. She took it awfully well when a few months ago she found out I was being targeted by hellkin and Mediators both for working with shades.

But I don't tell her. Instead, I just nod.

There's a long pause.

"I've been thinking of making you a partner," she says finally.

What?

I stare at her blankly. Six months ago she hated my guts. Three months ago, I think she started to fear me. Now she wants me to have a stake in her business?

"I'm bringing it up because I want to know your thoughts on it," Laura goes on. "You're the reason we've been as successful as we have. I couldn't have grown this business this way without someone competent whose work I don't have to question or worry about. Meredith and Leeloo—" they're the two witches who work here too "— are great, but they're content with punching a clock, and your work shows you take pride in it."

It's one of the longest speeches I've ever heard her make, and in spite of the business with the shades and the heavy cloud of worry about Saturn, her words fill me with a bubbly sense of excitement.

The corners of my lips tug back with a twitch, a smile trying to escape. I don't know why I'm trying to suppress it. I let it curve into a grin. "Really?"

Mouth open, her surprised bemusement is contained in a pause and a blink. Then she smiles back at me. "Really."

Night finds me in Belle Meade, trying to keep my mind on keeping the pointy ends of my swords ready to stick in a demon. My mind still flits around the prospect of being a partner at work.

I'm not usually one to flit in any fashion.

Being a Mediator is thankless work. Most norms greet us with fuzzy respect and apprehension. Their expressions when they see my marked eyes varies between awe and "I'm about to shit myself." If we get accolades, they come from within, from the Summit.

I have a one of those, for murdering a bunch of shades. The Mediators gave me the Silver Scale for all the blood on my hands.

Ain't that how it goes?

That was the night I met Mason. If ever there was a single day I could point to and say it forked my road good and proper, it's that one.

The norms mostly forget. And I was born into this. It was in me no matter what. Whatever I do between eleven and seven for pay is one thing. What I do from sundown until the wee hours, now, it may not put money in the bank, but it lessens the heavy weight on my chest. I do that because I have to, and because I was born to it. That's a given.

But making partner?

I earned that.
 

A pink glow ahead snaps me out of it.

Hellkin don't give a rat's hairy balls about what I earned. Their currency is death and teeth in the night, and I pay them back with cold steel.

I hope to all six and a half hells that this son-bitch jeeling is alone.
 

The pinkish light grows more pronounced as I approach, and I hear a sucking crunch.

Great. It's eating.

After coming up on a shade munching on a frat boy a few months back, a jeeling chewing on a squirrel isn't going to win any gross-out competitions, but that doesn't mean I can't feel bad for the squirrel.