Any Port in a Storm (26 page)

Mira pops the top off a bottle and hands it to Wane, who downs half of it in one swig.

"Didn't find Saturn," she says. "But I think I found where he's been staying. Found a tree in Willow Creek Park that smelled too much like him for him to have just passed by there. He wasn't around, though."

The relief on Mira's face is contagious.
 

My phone rings, and it's an unfamiliar number. I pick it up. "Hello?"

"It's Carrick," comes his voice on the line. "Did you hear about the second killing?"

That gives me pause. "Killing? We heard there was a disturbance at Walden's Puddle and a developing story, but there haven't been any updates."

"The shades killed two of the late night staff."

"Where are you?" I ask.

Wane, Ripper, and Mira all go silent, listening to me.

"I'm going there now."

"I'm coming with you," I say.
 

I hang up before Carrick can tell me not to come.
 

Mira and Ripper join me, but Wane looks about to pass out and curls up in the guest room instead.

Together we arm ourselves and pile in Ripper's dull black truck, with me stuck in the middle between the two of them. His truck smells like beef jerky. The seats are covered with multicolored tweed, and he has a shard of smoky quartz hanging from his rearview mirror. The radio's tuned to a top 40 station that makes me raise an eyebrow, but I don't dare mention it.
 

His gearshift is way too close to my kneecaps to risk his wrath.

The rain's stopped, and with the windows rolled down, the scent of damp earth fills the cab.

The drive to Joelton only takes about twenty minutes, and I'm more or less sure the shades will be gone by the time we get there, but I have to go. Around me everything in my territory feels like it's spiraling out of control, and if I'm not careful, I'll be swept away with it.

Ripper's little speech on how the other Mediators see me didn't come as a surprise, not really. I've always been a loner. Until now, I haven't really had any friends. There were people I felt friendly toward, like Mira and Ripper, but before Mason I kept everyone a few steps back from arm's length.

I don't know if I can afford to do that anymore, but it scares the piss right out of me.

Ripper parks his truck a little ways from the center, and even from there we can see more police lights. None of us are surprised to see it, but still, it makes my stomach sink. The people at the center didn't deserve this. They save lives. I don't know where Carrick is going to be, but the three of us aren't bad trackers by ourselves. We may not have a morph's nose between us, but we might be able to at least figure out what direction the shades left in.

On foot, we approach the center, which is a huge building on a large plot of land. As we approach, we can hear the din of distressed animals, and it makes me think of the bunnies I dropped off here a couple months ago. I feel sick. I don't know what these shades are thinking, targeting places that I've gone, but the people they're hurting don't deserve it.

Maybe it should disturb me more, the fact that I think I'm the one who deserves their wrath, but I accept it. I wish this batch of shades would come after me instead.

There's squawking as we approach, and the lights from the police cars don't really show anything. They let us past the cordoned off area when they see our eyes, and we duck under the yellow tape and enter the building. The lights flicker when we walk in, and the fluorescents buzz unpleasantly in my ears. I hate fluorescent lighting. We Mediators never use it, and since the witch community came up with a green alternative a few years back, most businesses have switched to it. If I ever win the lottery, I'm buying them new lights here. I'm sure the animals don't appreciate the fluorescent buzz any more than Mediators do.

The lobby looks innocuous at first glance, but at the side of the desk, there's a smear of blood. When we walk up to it, the desk itself is covered in spatter.
 

And I recognize the head that lies alone between two wheels of a rolly chair. He's the person who took the bunnies when I brought them in. Sometimes I hate my life.

Ripper heads off down the hallway, past a door that says "Employees Only."
 

I make myself look at the bodies behind the desk. They're torn apart in true shade style, piled in a heap with the heads separate. I wonder if the shades do it that way so they don't feel like they're being watched by their victims.

Mira stands just beside me, her shoulder almost close enough to touch mine, but she doesn't say anything.
 

I start to go after Ripper, but he's already on his way back.
 

"Doesn't look like they so much as touched a baby skunk back there." He looks relieved at that, and I echo his relief.

That they spared the animals makes me a little confused. I know I don't want to see any dead owls or beavers or fawns, but shades usually aren't picky about who they kill. Maybe they thought the deaths of the staff members would hurt me more. I'm not sure if they're right or wrong.
 

I turn back to the pile of parts, trying to divorce them from their owners and look for anything helpful. Two bodies make an awfully large blood pool, and though this side of the desk doesn't have much aside from that one smear, the other side has a wide pool already growing tacky.
 

"They must have come straight here from the Waffle Spot," I say, and Mira nods her agreement.
 

She moves to the other side of the desk. "They didn't come out this way," she says. "No way they could have avoided stepping in the blood pool."

"They could have jumped over it," Ripper says, but I hold up a hand.

"Even if they'd have jumped, they'd probably leave drops of some kind." I look at the floor near my feet. It looks recently re-done in square tiles. "They were careful not to leave too many marks."

The pile of parts draws my attention again.
 

"Both people were killed on the other side of the desk where the blood pool is," I say. "They must have killed them, then backed up a few feet and piled up what was left."

The smell of voided bowels and blood is heavy, and though I've seen a lot worse, it still makes my stomach feel curdled, like milk with lemon juice dropped into it.
 

I look down at the young man's head between the chair wheels. A foot away there's a red print on the ground with what looks like the texture of human hair. "They threw the head," I say, disgusted. "Looks like they decapitated them first."
 

Peering around the desk, I see the other attendant's head under the desk next to a computer tower. Both heads are far enough from the blood pool to be thrown. The chair itself is black, but when I lean over to look at it, I can see an arc of blood spatter across the plastic back side, and a drying dribble across the textile-covered padded seat. Another arc leads to the one under the desk.

Footprints would make it easy, but that doesn't mean that's all the clue they left. Hard to keep your hands clean when you're pulling off heads.

There — on the edge of the desk, I see it. A finger print. A few of them, and a thumb, as if one of the shades grasped it on his way past.
 

There's no blood on the front door, so they must have gone somewhere else. If we can find which door they left by, we might be able to track them into the woods.
 

The door Ripper went through to check on the animals is clean as well, which leaves the side door out into the back enclosure. Sure enough, when we get to it, there's a drying red smudge on the handle.

"Come on," I say, pushing the door open. I'm careful to avoid the smudge; even though the Summit doesn't really have a forensic team, I don't want to destroy any evidence

The earlier rain left the ground just soft enough, and just outside the concrete pad in front of the door, there are three sets of bare footprints.
 

Ripper's got a flashlight in his belt — he carries a bunch of shit like some kind of Batman wannabe — and he flicks it on. Together, we follow the footprints through the enclosure. The place is fenced in chain link, but it's not topped with barbed wire or anything, so when the footprints reach the fence and reappear on the other side, the three of us alley-oop over the barrier and follow. The footprints space out, both in the stride length and the distance between the pairs.
 

"They started running," Mira says. "If they stay going south-ish, they'll hit Beaman Park."

"How far is it?" I ask. Beaman Park. Where Jax lived. Could these shades have been the reason he left?

"Couple miles."
 

I look at Ripper. "Want to meet us there in the truck?"

He nods. "I'll park off Old Hickory and wait for you at the junction of Eaton's Creek."

"We'll call you if the direction changes." I reach out and take the flashlight from him, and Mira and I set off.

The prints are even and easy to follow for now, the ground clearing as the summer grasses die away and go dormant for the winter. I keep the flashlight aimed at the trail, and Mira and I quicken our pace into a jog.
 

"What do we do if we find them?" she asks.

"I don't know. I'd rather take them alive than dead."

She's quiet for a moment. Our boots make a steady squishing pattern in the ground. The prints we're following shift just a bit, due south now, and I want to high five Mira for being right. We come across a narrow stream and splash across it. The prints in the mud on the other side are clear as Crystal Light and easy to follow.

"You don't want them to die, do you?" she asks. Her words are steady and unhurried, where I'm over here panting. Talking and running has never been one of my strong points.

I take a deep breath and feel it rush through me. "No. I don't."

"It's not your fault, what they're doing."

"I know."

"And the warehouse? You did what you thought you had to."

Irritated, I look over at her. She's looking at the ground, at the beam of light illuminating the trail.
 

"Yeah, well, I was an asshole and a fucking blockhead."

"I didn't say you weren't."

I choke and lose my breath pattern. It takes me a hundred yards to get my breathing back under control.
 

Mira gives me a sidelong grin and keeps running. "I think it's good that you try to help them. But even norms are sometimes beyond help."

Her words startle me, and I look at her. She couldn't mean that the hells-worshippers Gregor ordered killed had it coming?

She catches my horrified look, and she immediately shakes her head. "No, no. I know what you're thinking. I didn't mean they deserved to die if they couldn't get their shit together. Just that you can't help people who don't want help."

Wise words. We're quiet then, running along the path. Sure enough, Eaton's Creek Road appears in front of us, with the Old Hickory Boulevard junction beyond it slightly to the north. The tracks still run due south, right into the park as Mira predicted.

Ripper's truck is pulled over on the side of the road, some pop-funk track playing low on his speakers. And he's talking to Carrick through his window.

"Fuck." I pick up my pace, and Mira mirrors me.

"You think Carrick's helping them or something?" she asks.

"Nope, but if Carrick's here, it means he either found the trail and the shades, or the trail peters out somewhere."

Turns out, it's neither of those things.

Ripper flags us down as soon as he sees us — as if we'd keep running the other way — and he holds up his phone.

I stop running twenty feet from the truck and pull out my own phone. There's a text from Ripper, who's talking to Carrick about the football playoffs now.

The text says:
Need to get to Summit. Ben just called out Alamea in front of a whole committee meeting. Erase this.

I delete the text immediately and saunter up to Carrick with as much grace as I can muster, still panting from the run. This is more running than I ever do.

"Did you find them?" I ask Carrick. "Trail keeps going south from there." I point to the road's shoulder, where even from here I can see the footprints in the soft ground.

"Harkan and Hux are on the trail. I saw Ripper pull up and though you'd be with him." Carrick nods at Ripper, who rolls up his window and turns up the music as if not caring what any of us have to say.

Mira hops in the truck.
 

"We followed the trail south from the refuge," I say. "But if they've picked it up here, I guess we're sort of superfluous."

"We can handle it," Carrick says. "If you hadn't hung up on me, I could have told you that."

"Then handle it," I say quietly. "If you really can, make sure they don't kill again."

That shuts him up.

I turn and get into Ripper's truck before he can say anything else. By the time I look back, Carrick's gone.