Any Port in a Storm (34 page)

Ten blocks from where I live, the air flashes red and blue. I can't see what's going on. I pull over to the side of the road, and immediately I see smashed windows, shards of glass reflecting back the flashes of color from the emergency and police vehicles. Shifting in my seat, I try to look around the ambulance that's fifty yards ahead of me, but I can't get a good angle.
 

The last time this happened, a single shade took down several cops before I killed him in broad daylight off Demonbreun.

A police officer is walking by, his hat slightly askew over a bright pink forehead and his body armor clearly too tight for his beer belly. He sees my Mediator tags and scowls. I roll down my window and smile brightly.
 

"What happened here, Officer?"

"Ain't none of your business. You people think we're some sort of glorified cleanup crew. You should be doing your damn job." He takes three steps toward my window and looks like he wants to yank me out through it.

I waggle my cell phone at him. "Want to tell that to Alamea? I can get her to show up and we can get her take on the situation, or you can just tell me what happened on this gods damned street."

I'm starting to feel like I'm in an outdoor club with all the lights strobing across the jagged glass of the downtown block. Half a mile more, and we'd be in honky tonk central, but I don't see any shredded cowboy hats or denim shirts with the broken glass. I look up at the cop, feeling like it had to be only a matter of time before I had to deal with a shitty one. The last few have been charming.

"You don't even know it's your jurisdiction," he says.

"Pretty sure I do now, or you would have just said it wasn't, Officer Walking Stereotype."

His already-pink face turns pinker.

I kind of hate that I let that come out of my mouth, but honestly, seeing him turn into a tomato is worth it.

I get out of the car and slam the door, hitting the button on my keys to lock it. "Anything happens to my Hi-Ho Silver there, and you're getting a bill from the Summit."

"You fucking Mediators think you're above the law." Spittle gathers on his lips, and he doesn't take any steps back.

I step forward and meet his eyes. I'm tall enough that his face is almost level with mine. Six inches away, I hold his eyes, making damn sure he gets a full look at the violet of mine.

"Trade you," I say. I let a smile curl across my face.

His lips close, and he gives me a look that tells me he thinks he can do my job better.

Fuck this asshole.

"Fourteen."

I let the word snap my eye contact and turn to walk away, counting my steps.

One. Two. Three. Four.

"Fourteen what, you little piss-ant?"

"Demons. At once." I grin at him over my shoulder. "Summit record. Mine. You're welcome."

I earned those gods damned bragging rights.

The scene beyond the ambulance wipes the grin right off my stupid, cocky face.
 

It looks like a blood volcano erupted.

At least five bodies — or what's left of them — are piled like campfire wood and surrounded by a pool that stretches almost a full ten feet from the epicenter.

There's a head on top of the pile. It's wearing a hat.

If there was any doubt that this is Mediator jurisdiction, that's gone now.
 

"Who's in charge right now?" I ask loudly.
 

A detective gives a curt wave, and I walk over. "Looks like you are now," she says.
 

She looks familiar, and she does a double take when she sees my face, but doesn't say anything else.
 

I know this woman. She was a beat cop this summer when came across the mess at Demonbreun. Glad she's gotten promoted. I don't mention our history, and she says nothing to bring up that we've met before, but she points at the pile of parts.
 

"Got called in twenty minutes ago. Hit and run, without the car and with more of a sense of whimsy." Her face is grim, and I want to applaud her for the coping mechanism. "Vic on top wasn't wearing a hat when they attacked. They put it on him right before they ripped off his head, witness said. Three suspects, all in the same hats as the John Doe making the cherry on that nasty sundae."

Inappropriate or not, you don't get far in this business without the ability for euphemism and making bad jokes.

"The witnesses?" I ask.

"Take your pick." She points to a small crowd of bystanders behind one of the squad cars.
 

I start to walk away, and she moves past me. As she does, she mutters, "Good job with Officer Ervin. Man makes calling cops pigs an insult to pigs."

She's gone before I can say anything in return.

I duck under the yellow tape to reach the gaggle of witnesses. Most are green around the gills. A couple have smears of vomit on their faces that they missed wiping all the way off. One has a splash of it on a pair of four hundred dollar shoes and a probably thousand dollar suit.

It's not the witnesses that stop me, though.

Behind them, scrawled in messy blood on the lone unbroken window on a shop front, is a large circle with a slash through it.
 

The slash protrudes fully outside the circle, like someone got carried away drawing a no smoking sign.
 

Or like they were drawing a certain ringed planet.

The sight of it makes my stomach shrivel up into a ball. They wanted me to see it. I know they did. But I have no way of knowing if they mean it as a warning. They know Saturn's close to me.

Somehow I'm certain that the pile of bodies was only meant to draw my attention to that circle of blood.

I need to catch these gods damned monsters and stop them once and for all. If they want to come after me, they should be coming after me, not after the people I care about.
 

Then again, there's a certain poetry in "to the pain." I guess their strategy wouldn't be as effective if I were okay with it.

I spend the next hour talking to witnesses while I wait for the coroner to come and for another Summit representative to show up and sign off. The detective wasn't kidding when she said I was in charge now; everyone from the forensics team to the crime scene photographer checks in with me while I wait.
 

The witnesses all say the same thing, that the shades swooped in out of nowhere and grabbed people at random, arranged them, and left. No one remembers seeing them drawing the sigil on the window, which is unsurprising considering how fast shades are and how hasty the marking looks.

Not to mention shock. Half the witnesses are shaking under emergency blankets while I talk to them. I don't blame them. Talking to them gives me almost no information at all, let alone anything new. I hear the same story five times, but each time I listen, hoping one of them will share something revelatory, something I can take to Alamea, something that might lead me to finding these shades and showing them justice.

Even as I hope for that, I don't want to kill them. I don't want that to happen. I need to think of something that can be done for them, just like I need to think of something that can be done for the shades I've worked with for months who Gregor has turned into his own personal weapons for hire. The weight at the center of my chest grows heavier and heavier, as if someone's dropping ball bearings on it one by one. It saps my energy with each witness account. They were on their way home from dinner, walking to their cars, going to meet up with a girlfriend or boyfriend. Three shades swooped in out of nowhere. People seemed to vanish in a gust of wind, reappearing in the center of the street. The shades pulled them apart one by one. Blood. More blood. They put a hat on the last one, took his head, dropped it on top of their pile.
 

Every single witness says the same thing. The end result is the same. More dead bodies. When the scene is finally cleaned up, each step I take feels like my feet have been dipped in hardening wax over and over.

I feel drained by the time I leave, and in spite of what Mira told me, I feel alone.

In the end, no matter how many friends you have, you're always alone.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

I finally make it home at one-thirty, just in time to see Carrick heading for the balcony door. I want to collapse on the couch, but he stops when he sees me.

"You're home," he says, his voice carrying a whiff of surprise. "I was starting to get worried."

I raise an eyebrow at that. "They killed a bunch of civilians about a mile from here."

He doesn't need to ask who
they
is.
 

"Where are you going?" I ask.

"I'm supposed to meet with the others," he says.
 

"Gregor too?" I need to be careful, but I also want to know. I want to see the others, try and get a read on them. I stoke the hope twig by twig, waiting for him to answer.

Carrick shakes his head. "Gregor's out of town. I'm just doing some training with them at the usual spot."

It's late. My feet ache, and the tips of my toes are almost numb. I just took my shoes off. I need to sleep.

"Can I come with you?"
 

Carrick's face goes blank, and I feel the muscles in my body tighten with tension as if I'm walking through a sheet of ice cold water.
 

"You just got home. You should get some rest."

"Fuck off with what I should do. Can I come?"

A small smile creeps onto his face. "You can come."
 

He turns away from the balcony, and we leave the apartment together.
 

"You smell like blood," he says when we get into my car.

"I probably stepped in some," I say shortly. "They made a mess."

"We'll catch them."

I'm beginning to doubt that. If a group of ten shades and a few hundred Mediators are having no luck finding this trio of walking blenders, they're not going to show up as big red X's on a map.
 

I don't say anything else for the rest of the short drive to the football field. We're the first ones there when we arrive, the lights of the field illuminating only increasingly-dormant grass in need of a voracious cutting.

The bleachers are covered in dust and rust, but I pull up a patch of bench and sit.

Slowly, in twos and threes, the rest of the shades appear from the perimeter of the field. Udo and Harkan. Rex and Carus and Hux. Hayn and Sanj. Beex and Holden and Lawlor. And Boyne, the lone straggler who approaches from the north. I haven't seen them since the incident outside Chattanooga, and anxiety tickles up from my tailbone, climbing my spine to the base of my neck. I try to suppress a shudder. Maybe this is a stupid idea, being here.

Side by side with Carrick, I walk onto the field, and we all converge on the thirty yard line.

It's Udo who comes toward me first. His face is so still and neutral that I direct all my energy to keeping my own calm.
 

But his hand reaches out, and his fingertips touch my shoulder, and he gives me a sad little smile that crinkles the corners of his almond-shaped indigo eyes. The others follow, two by two, touching my shoulders from both sides with fingertips that feel like butterfly wings.

I want to weep for them. They are more than weapons. I return their greetings as assertively as I can, trying to reassure them with my touch that they are safe with me, wanting to tell them with my words that I will not use them to make money.

I can't say it out loud. We're all standing on a circle of ice, and below the surface are monsters trying to break it and catch us with their teeth when we plunge through.

Carrick directs them all with a few short instructions, and I join them, flowing into the forms I've practiced since I was a child. There's peace in our movements, even though they're the basis for violence.
 

I'm in the center of the group, and the presence of the shades around me helps refill my near-empty reserve of strength. In martial arts, they teach you about energy and maintaining it, conserving it and harnessing it. Witches and morphs can transfer it. But here, in this moment, I almost feel like the shades are giving some of theirs to me — or as if together we are sharing in a pool we create.

A cracking sound makes us all spin around.

Rex's head falls to the ground.
 

There's a jeeling behind his corpse.

And behind it, a football team worth of hellkin on the twenty yard line.

Carus lets out a bellow of pain and rage.

My swords are in my hands before I even register that I'm moving. Lawlor and Boyne are on the jeeling, using its shoulder spikes to swing upward to its head. There's another jeeling farther back, surrounded by slummoths and harkasts. A trio of markats drools, their throats undulating as they ready their corrosive spit. Five and a half feet tall with bodies that look like they're made of grey industrial tubing, they flow as they move. Behind them, two snorbits sway, their giant forearms like pendulums.
 

The first jeeling loses its head, and chaos explodes around me.