Any Port in a Storm (33 page)

I watch Alamea's face, and she looks pensive; whatever thoughts are roiling beneath the surface of her skin, they are far too deep for me to see their ripples.

"They'll at least get a chance." When she looks at me now, her eyes are calculating, assessing, planning. "Be prepared, though, that if you want them protected, it could put you at risk in unexpected ways. Are you prepared for that?"

"Yes," I say. It's not even a question. I won't stand by and watch them get crushed between two warring bodies when they never asked to be here in the first place. We're quiet for a moment, then I look sideways at Alamea. "What is it you want?"

"I want a safe city, free of hellkin."

"Don't we all," I agree. "But give me a real answer, for fuck's sake."

A smile blossoms on her face, showing a row of white teeth. One of them has a tiny chip in it. "I want to get out of this alive." For a moment the fear returns, like claws almost reflected in her eyes. "I'm not finished here yet, Storme."

I understand her then, more than ever before. To stay alive, she has to keep control of the Summit. She has to fight back the encroaching hordes of all six and a half hells, and she has to do it before those hordes push the walls of our territory in and fall upon us like an avalanche.
 

Clarity catches me, brief and brutal.

We might all want things we can't have.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

That night, I meet with Mira, Ripper, and Devon about confronting Gregor. Wane's at the hospital all night, and I promise to brief Alamea later. She can't come; it's too risky for her to be actively involved, and I understand that.
 

Even though Mira's house isn't exactly a swinging hot spot of Mediators dropping by unannounced, we all travel out of town to a campsite Ripper frequents and gather around the cold fire pit. Safer where we know we won't accidentally encounter anyone we know. The woods are quiet, but not silent, most of the critters settling down for the cooler months. A few crickets still sing, and I can tell by the relaxed stances of the other Mediators that they find that as much of a comfort as I do.
 

I fill them in on what Saturn and Miles told me, and then I brace myself.

"You're sure?" Devon says. His face looks just as I feared it would; shocked and disbelieving.

"I know what I saw. And I trust Miles and Saturn to tell the truth. Shades aren't exactly motivated by money."

"Saturn doesn't lie," Mira says flatly, her voice about as yielding as a donkey neck deep in cement.

Ripper's the only one who doesn't say anything. He's not usually much of a talker, but he's watching one of the stones in the fire pit like he's expecting it to tell him some sort of transcendent truth.

"Yo, Ripper," Mira says. "Got something you want to share with the class?"

"You know sometimes how in training, when you were learning something new, one day your muscles would find that exact right movement that allowed you to nail a form you'd fucked up for months?" He looks at us until we nod. "Yeah. That."

Part of me wishes we'd brought marshmallows.

Ripper kicks the rock he's been staring at. "Couple months back, I was working a tracking case with Wheedle —" he spits when he says Ben's name, which surprises me, "— and we ended up down Chattanooga way. Bunch of hellkin kept poppin' their heads up, dotting up and down the countryside. It was right after all the shit hit in the summer, and it was the first good job I'd had since. Wheedle and I were at a gas station filling up my truck, and this fancy-ass Mercedes S Class pulled up. Coupe. Tinted windows, but they had 'em rolled down at first. I looked over and could've sworn I saw Gregor in that damn car, in the passenger side, laughing and grinnin' like he'd just been told the car was his for free. Big pickup drove by, cut off my view, and by the time they passed, window was rolled up, and the man I saw get out of the car sure wasn't Gregor. I wrote it off. Wheedle and I'd been up for two straight days, chasing the pack of slummoths at night and trying to triangulate a movement pattern in the day. After what you told me about this though, Storme, anybody driving that car would have had the money to pay for that much murder."

I'm not a car person, but Mira and Devon are both nodding. Mira catches my blank stare.

"Two million dollar car," she says. "Not something you want to drip your burger juice on. Asshole driving that around's got cash to burn on pest control."

Pest control.
 

Her words sink in, and in that moment I know they're the truth. That motherfucker at the plantation paid Gregor a half million dollars to have the conveniently monetarily-unmotivated shades murder a bunch of hells-zealots he thought were pests.

Hells worshippers are shitty human beings, but they're still human beings.
 

Devon looks well enough convinced now. He sits down on a rock. "Christ on a platter," he says. "What are we going to do?"

"It's pretty obvious that Gregor's managed to get himself well-connected," I say slowly. "If we want to take him down, we need to make sure he's isolated from the shades and publicly exposed in front of the Summit. I don't care how much some people want Alamea gone; what Gregor's doing is anathema."
 

It's not just cause for censure or death. It's cause for his records to be expunged, his name stricken from Mediator record. Bound and shipped overseas to the World Summit where Alice went for safe harbor. I don't know how they'd get him there, since we can't leave our territory, but I do know it's been done before.
 

I try to imagine what it would feel like, being put on a plane in a straitjacket in a box, your stomach churning from the first half hour of flight, each progressive minute rusting your entrails to clumps in your gut.
 

Just hitting the Ohio border was enough to bring it on for me. Cincinnati Mediators turned me back once upon a time. I don't even know if a Mediator would survive a trip like that. I know an hour in, any Mediator would wish for death.

"How exactly are we going to get him in that situation?" Mira asks. She walks over and sits by Devon, pulling out one of her knives to sharpen it. The scritch-scritch-scritch of her whetstone on the blade sneaks through the air.

"We could use me." I'm dubious to how much of a plan that would be, but if Gregor thinks I've got wool blinders firmly in place as to what he's been up to, it just might work. "Lately he's been proud of me. Weirdly paternal, almost."

"He chose you in the beginning, to look into what was happening," Ripper says, thoughtful. "Do you know why?"

I do know why. He had leverage. But no one else knows that, and I can't tell them. Even so, Alamea gave me something I can say, something that makes sense. "I'm a loner. I keep to myself and don't have any friends. He probably thought that made me vulnerable to his influence."

Something flashes across Mira's face, but it's gone in an instant. I can't tell what it was, but something in my chest drops, and I'm sure I've just hurt her.

"He had to have been planning this for a while," says Devon. "I heard one of the shades he's working with is a thousand years old."

That makes me snort, but that little oh-shit feeling stays with me, nibbling at me like a baby piranha. "Carrick's four hundred years old, and he'd bust your face into the next eon for calling him a thousand." I take a few steps back and forth, almost pacing. "But you're right. Gregor didn't just pull Carrick out of his ass. The timing was too perfect. What, we have a big blow out with the hells-hordes and all these shades and he just happens to find one from the Jacobean era?"

The sudden picture of Carrick in a frou-frou lace collar and breeches makes me want to snort again, but I resist the urge.
 

"It's possible the shades happened just at the right time. Maybe he was trying to figure out a way to monetize the Mediators," I say. The words taste bitter in my mouth, and I resist the urge to spit. Saliva pools, and I swallow it.
 

The other three also look sick at the thought. Our speculation on Gregor's past won't get us anywhere. We need to truncate his future, and fast.

"The Samhain gala next week." Mira's whetstone stops with a
snick
. "Everyone will be there. If you want to make sure everyone sees his ass when he shows it, that's when you should do it."

I don't really like the idea of massively ruining our biggest party of the year, but then again, Mediators do like gossip. It'll be unforgettable.

It'll be really nice if I live through it.

"What did you mean, you don't have any friends?" Mira catches me at the door to my car.
 

My feet halt in the dirt, and shame caresses my face with heat.

"Alamea said —"

"Fuck what Alamea said."

Mira's right. Hearing it out loud sounds absurd.

"Do you seriously think that?" she goes on. Her voice gets a note of gravel, and I startle. Is that tears? Mira?

Fuck.

"I don't know," I say finally.

Five dozen emotions flit across her face. Among them, frustration, anger, pity, sadness, fury.

Devon and Ripper are already in their cars, but I see Ripper's eyes on us as he pulls away. I can't bring myself to open my own car door.

"Yo," Mira says. "You gotta do better than that."

"What do you want me to say?"

"How about yeah, Mira, your trust isn't misplaced. You're not stupid for thinking growing up together and having each other's backs was sort of what friendship is about." Now she's straight pissed, and she punches me in the shoulder. Hard. "Gods damn it, Storme, you're only friendless if you want to be."

I expect her to stomp off and drive away, but she just waits.

The shades up and dip out when they feel like it, but Mira's stuck to me like a piece of gum on my shoe. She came over to help me wake up every two hours when I had a concussion. She cares about the shades. Saturn and Mira are close. She looks at them as people, just like I do. She cares about doing the right thing even if it's not what she's told is the acceptable thing.

"I'm sorry," I say, and now the gravel's in my voice. It's contagious. "You're probably the only friend I have."

She stares at me like I've just told her I fart bubbles, and for a second I think she's going to punch me again.

"Dude, knock it the fuck off. Okay, maybe, if the hells-hit shades don't count — which they do — but Alamea and Devon and Ripper will be your friends if you give them half the chance."

Mira stalks up to me, and I flinch. She throws her arms around me.

"You're not alone, Ayala. Not even a little bit."

My hands hang limp at my side for a minute before I can make myself hug her back. She smells like leaves and vanilla.

"Okay," I say.

"Okay?" She pulls back and pats my shoulder awkwardly. "Now fuck off for real. Go home. And keep an eye on that asshole Carrick."

Going home is the plan, but it lasts about as long as it takes for me to reach view of Nashville's skyline. When I take the exit toward my apartment, the night rings with sirens.
 

Sirens are normal in downtown Nashville, but not this many.