Eye of the Storm (21 page)

"You never fucking asked. If you had, I might have told you. In fact, I tried to tell you. You refused to listen." I slam my fist down on the table so hard Mason actually jumps. Ben doesn't move this time. "You could have talked to me, or at least talked to Ripper. He trusted you, you slagging sack of mule balls. He could have filled you in. Instead you broke the Summit into tiny pieces and now we've got someone killing off allies inside the walls of this building because you were too busy playing the gods damned hero to help the rest of us who were trying to kick the evil in the teeth."

It feels good to spew out my anger at him. I don't care that Mason doesn't approve. And when I see the glimmer of a tear at the corner of Ben's eye, I feel even better. Yes, I feel better for making him cry. I can be sorry he feels pain, but he's the one who did this.

"So let me tell you what's going to happen now," I say. "You're going to find out exactly who in this Summit doesn't have stopping the end of the motherfucking world as priority one, and you're going to turn that hero complex into something useful, or when the demons come I will personally spit and roast you myself and feed you to the hordes."

"Okay."

He agrees so quickly I have to do a double take. Mason goes still beside me. Somewhere in the kitchen I smell mint among the powdered eggs and canned sausage smell. It doesn't mesh well.
 

I look at Ben, at that stupid farm boy face I've spent more time wanting to punch than anything else. He didn't kill Holden and Harkan, of that much I'm sure now. But I'm also more than willing to bet that whoever did is someone Ben helped set on this path.
 

I say the one thing I don't want to say. "Can I trust you?"

There's no time for me to mince words, and I also don't have the time or energy to go on a lie hunt. Whatever comes out of Ben's mouth next, I am going to choose to believe, and if he's fucking with me, there will very literally be hell to pay.

He looks me right in the eye, his face pained as if he knows exactly what just went through my head.

"Yes," he says. "I'll prove it to you."

CHAPTER TWENTY

The world feels as though someone has snuffed out its flame.
 

Maybe it's just Nashville.

Either way, there's a deeper silence that rules it today, and I don't have a way to accept it. Mason stays by my side for the rest of the afternoon, and though his presence should be a comfort to me, instead it feels like something moving under my skin. I can't shake the feeling that he wants something from me that I'm not willing to give.

Feeling that way in the face of a world crumbling off the edge of a cliff is unpleasant.

I don't know where Mira is, and I wish I did.

I also don't know why the demons haven't hit us yet here in Nashville. Throughout the day, I gather bits of information about what's happening outside Tennessee, but none of it sheds light on why we are perched on this precipice.
 

The entire world is trying to mobilize, even though we all know it might be too late. That's part of the hush, and it's not just Nashville. In the reports from elsewhere, in this country and beyond, people are for the first time understanding that we are precarious, that this planet is the only one we have, and that if we lose it, there is nowhere else for us to go. It's such an obvious admission, but if there's anything humanity is good at, it's waxing eloquent about the bark of one tree in a vast forest.
 

How we drew the short straw here in Nashville, I don't know.

Then again, it's probably Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana who really got that one. We're just fucked by association.

I go to see Alamea alone, and for once lately, I close the door behind me. She's got a pouch of anti-eavesdropping dust — it probably has a better name I don't know or care to find out — on the corner of her desk, and she watches me curiously as I coat the door in it.

I don't offer an explanation, but I do tell her about my conversation with Ben.

"I'm surprised you didn't bash his face in," she says when I finish. Her tone is light, but her face is troubled, and I think the number of lines on her forehead has doubled every day for the past week.
 

When I don't answer, she goes on.

"I knew there were some Mediators here in the Summit who weren't happy to see me back in charge. I did, however, underestimate their foolhardiness, it seems." Alamea's orange juice bottle is empty, and she's replaced it with water. There's a mint leaf in there that makes me think of the mint smell from the cafeteria.

I wonder where she got fresh mint leaves.

"The other Summit leaders think we could be hit at any moment," she says.
 

"What do you think?" I know what I think, but I want to hear what's going on in Alamea's mind.

"I think what you've said in the past has merit. They're conserving their resources. I think this first wave was meant to scare us, but that they likely pushed themselves. If there's anything we learned from Mississippi happening decades ago, it's that they're playing a long game. They could indeed strike tomorrow. Or they could strike in five years."

"I doubt they'll wait five years."

"They have no reason to," Alamea agrees. "We're now fully isolated."

I can tell the statement bothers her more than she's saying. We're in a hamster ball perched on a lava floe.
 

"Sol and Luna have been quite a help," she says. "But all they can offer is what they've seen, and they haven't seen the past. They don't know what timeline the demons are working with."

"Gryfflet's our saving throw," I say. "If he can figure out what allowed this to happen, maybe we can fix it."

Alamea looks unconvinced. She pulls her long train of locs over one shoulder, examining the end of one and pulling what looks like a piece of dried grass off the side of it.
 

"What I'm more concerned about right now is losing the shades," she admits. "They are some of our strongest fighters, easily worth two or more Mediators a piece. If — since — there are Mediators in the Summit trying to destroy them, that could end up proving…problematic."

I hate that word, problematic. It's about as useful as complaining that the issue with an ocean is that it's wet.
 

I hone in on the specifics. I can work with specifics. "If there are people who are going to be hunting the shades, that will fracture the Mediators as much as it will undermine the strength we have as a whole. What are we going to do about it?"

"I hope Wheedle will help," Alamea says, but she doesn't sound actually hopeful.

"They might not be safe here," I say.
 

"None of us are safe here."

"You know what I mean. Here specifically. In the Summit building. Where there are enough Mediators to take them all out at once if they decided to." The thought makes me feel clammy all over. It wouldn't be hard, if enough Mediators turned on us. They could kill us all. It seems like a stupid, counterproductive thing to do from a purely pragmatic level, but if they really think the shades are the enemy instead of allies, I know there would be no hesitation.
 

For most Mediators, until now the idea that anything half-hellkin could be an ally was as foreign a concept as finding a whale on the moon.

"You may be right," says Alamea.
 

I leave her office a little later, feeling as though we accomplished a big fat zero. It's with relief that I don't see any of the shades waiting for me outside. I felt Mason depart when I coated the door jamb with dust, and I'm thankful for that.

My feet carry me downstairs, through the bustling lobby that's now piled high with enough supplies to keep us all in swords and MREs for a month. On the far side of the lobby, I take the corridor toward the elevator bank that leads down to the holding cells. Nana's back down there, and I need some bunny love.

It's strange to voluntarily venture down into this place. When the elevator doors slide open, revealing the now-familiar grey walls, my stomach still wants to fold in on itself. This place is claustrophobia brought to life. It's constructed like honeycomb, hexagonal cells with the narrow corridors running between and around them. Even the elevator blends, and one turn takes me out of view. Alamea taught me how to navigate without a key, but I've got one now. Depressing the small bulb in my hand casts light across the shimmery grey, displaying colored lines and numbers of cells. I wonder how many of them are filled and with whom. There are multiple levels. If — and without the knowledge I have, it's a very big if indeed — a prisoner were to manage to escape their cell down here, they'd then be stuck in a labyrinth of this hive. Every wall, every obtuse angle, every path the same. It's enough to make even an awake, mostly-sane person question reality.

But I know where I'm going, and it's there my feet take me, following the pathways that light before me with the key in my hand.
 

I open the cell with fingers that chase the slowly-rotating glowing circles in the wall itself, and the very surface of the grey wall opens into a the hexagon.

It closes again behind me, and Nana rustles in her cage.
 

There is a stack of pillows in one corner of the room that are an untidy pile of red and green and purple, and a projector on the floor aimed at a wall someone affixed a sheet to. Mittens having a pajama party with a bunny in a prison. Gotta love it.

I step on a popcorn kernel on the way to Nana and open her cage. She hops on out. She's well-stocked on hay and pellets, and her litter box looks clean. Her water bottle is about two thirds full, so it's good that the Mittens are taking care of her. She comes over to me, her little paws tufty against the floor that shimmers in the same grey as everything else. As usual, she seems unperturbed by the strangeness of her situation. I guess this place isn't as unnerving for a bunny as it is for me.

Scratching her between the ears, I settle down on the stack of pillows, leaning back. The cell feels almost like a cocoon. It's quiet down here, with no footsteps running to and fro, no click and whirr of the HVAC even though I know there's ventilation, no voices, no nothing. All I can hear is the
thub-thub
of my heart and the little whistles of Nana's breathing and the tiny ticks of her claws on the floor as she hops around. She eventually settles at my side, red velvety nose slowly moving up and down, her ears still.

"You've been a champ," I tell her. "You deserve a bunny medal."

I think again of the baby bunnies I rescued the day all this started. The Ayala who took down a couple imps in Miller's Field with Ripper and Ben both nearly sliced to ribbons, the imps wearing matted threads of human hair. Lena Saturn's hair, probably, as it turned out. I haven't seen an imp in ages. Makes me wonder where they went.
 

Most times in life you can't point back to an exact moment something started or changed. Change is usually gradual, like the Hakhwata River slowly carving out that vast canyon in Arizona. You don't usually see or mark the day the spring bubbles out of the source and starts flowing in a direction.
 

And as I'm finding now, it doesn't even matter.
 

I don't have to deal with the bubbling spring.

I have to deal with the canyon full of demons.

That afternoon, I need to get out of the Summit. I join the shades to pay our final respects to Harkan and Holden, and then I leave the building. Mira jogs up behind me as the doors start to swing closed behind me.

"Yo, you think you're getting your fresh air without me?" Her face looks as tired as I feel, and there's a smudge of dust on her jaw.
 

Without thinking, I reach up to brush it away with the pad of my thumb.
 

She flinches, and I drop my hand.
 

Hers goes up to her jaw and rubs at it. "Sorry," she mutters.
 

"I shouldn't assume…" I trail off, not sure what I'm saying. Nothing's a given, not our feelings, not touch, nothing.