Storm in a Teacup (31 page)

Forget guilt. My blood starts feeling like it's been put through a generator. "I haven't done anything to betray the Mediators."

"You have if you are working with a shade."

"Even if they're not demons? Are you so certain they have to be killed?"

I've damned myself. I'm going to get blacklisted. Or worse.

"Do you have any evidence to the contrary?" Alamea sits forward in her chair.

I study her face before answering. Her cheeks are smooth cocoa planes. There's not even a hint of a wrinkle on her brow. Her eyes are hard as amethyst.
 

She doesn't want to hear what I have to say, and I can't let them find out about Mason. Even if they already suspect.

"No. It's just hunch. Have you considered that there could be more to it than we've already seen? Are you willing to violate the tenets of the Summit even if there's a chance they have some humanity?"

"You are sympathizing with them." Alamea stands. "You're off this effort. Resume normal patrols. I'll contact you when we are prepared to have your hearing."

"My hearing?"

"If you're aiding our enemies, you will be censured. And if that is true, you will be stripped of your medal."

Just then, a light flickers behind Alamea on the other side of the darkened window. It immediately flicks off again, but I've seen the flash of a familiar face through the glass.

Jaryn.

Jaryn the psychic.

I look around the room again. This isn't a conference room. It's an interrogation chamber.

I'm more fucked than I've ever been.

Alamea sees my face and freezes, one hand on the edge of the table. She shrugs her eyebrows and presses a button under the marble. "You might as well come in, Jaryn."

He appears in the doorway a moment later.
 

I can't read his face. He has to know about Mason. He's been sitting in there with his entire force of concentration focused on the contents of my brain. I never would have expected the Summit to stoop to that.

I feel like I've been stripped naked.

I wait for Jaryn's mouth to open, for him to damn me to censure and execution.

But he doesn't.

"Let her go, Alamea," he says quietly.

After a long moment, she nods.

I leave the room on shaky legs.

This is not what I expected from this meeting. I thought I had more time. More time to help Mason with his plan. More time to figure this whole thing out. And I don't. Alamea's decided already; I can see it in the way she looks at me, like I've fooled her. I can almost hear her thinking, "Fool me twice..."

Being a Mediator is what I am. It's what I was born to do. What if I've decided wrong? What if Alamea's right and I've betrayed them by helping Mason?

I believe in what we stand for. I believe that we are doing right by killing the world's demons. But shades aren't hellkin. There's more to them than that.

A tiny voice pipes up inside my head asking if they should be allowed to live when just one of them choosing to kill humans would cut a swath through the population.
 

I don't know the answer to that. I wish I did.

I used to know. I used to be sure.
 

I've said I don't know more times than I can count in the last two weeks.

I don't like it. I hate the uncertainty that buzzes my skin as I sit frozen with Alamea's gaze trained on me. I just need more time.

And the last five minutes has stolen days from me.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Ben's in the parking lot, just getting out of his car when I leave the Summit.

"Ayala!" His face brightens when it sees me. As it always does. Today that farm-boy smile makes me want to stab him with a railroad spike.

"You sold me out to Alamea? You've been following me?"

He stops, one hand on his car door. "I didn't..."

"You told her I'm working with shades! And she brought in a fucking psychic to spy on my thoughts!"

He flinches as if I've tossed acid at his face. Ben's been trying to get me to go out with him since I was twenty. If he thinks this is the way to do it, I'll turn him over to the shades that sent Mason home bleeding and let them hit frappe.

"I didn't, Ayala. I promise! I was just worried about you! You seemed so upset after the warehouse and you were hurt. I was just trying to keep an eye on you."

"This started before the fucking warehouse, and you know it."

Ben's face darkens, and his smile recedes into a tight-lipped frown. "I can't tell you why." He puts one hand out toward me. "You have to trust me. I haven't done anything to hurt you. I promise."

"I don't trust you! Why should I trust you? Because of you, I have a hearing coming up. I could get censured." I take three steps forward until I can feel my own breath ricocheting back from his skin. "You have no fucking idea what you're messing with. I decide what's best for me, not you. You weren't in the warehouse. You don't know what I saw or what happened. You have no right to follow me —"

Ben's lips crush against mine.

My fist connects with his stomach.

He crumbles backward into his car with a wheeze, his back making a thud on the metal.

"What part of me screaming at you made you think I wanted you to kiss me?" I've never heard that tone in my own voice before. Soft volume, but there are icicles in every word.

"I thought —"

"No. You didn't. You fucking stay away from me, Ben Wheedle. If I so much as see you somewhere you shouldn't be and it's not a Mediator function, next time I punch you there'll be a knife in my fist."

I turn in the direction of my car and then stop. "In case you haven't figured it out yet, I'm not fucking interested."

It's still early. When I get in my car, the clock tells me that only twenty-seven minutes have passed since I got here. Is that all?

I flick on my headlights. They illuminate Ben, hunched against his car. He clutches one hand to his stomach, but at least he's not looking this way. He kissed me. When I was ripping him a new one. Whatever signal receptors this asshole has, they need a serious reboot.

I need a cup of tea and a bottle or two of wine.

I drive aimlessly around Nashville and find myself outside The Hole. No show tonight that I can see, and I don't even know if Gryfflet still works there. Gryfflet. Shit. He didn't give me a ton of time, and now I've got even less.

Two blocks farther, I see Hazel Lottie's house. The lights are all on, and there's an extra car in the drive that looks vaguely familiar. I feel like I know someone who drives a yellow Bug.

I park in front of the house. I could maybe tell Hazel about Saturn. Maybe she'd be happy to know that at least Lena's progeny isn't a mass-murdering fuckhead.

The shredded screen door whinges at me when I open it to rap on the wood behind it.

"Who's there?"

"It's Ayala. I have some news you might want."

She kicked me out last time I was here. I probably should have thought about that before paying this social call.

Another voice makes a noise of surprise behind the door, and I hear the low tones of a not-too-heated argument.

After a few seconds, the door opens. "Come in." Hazel's got on spectacles as thick as the magnifying glasses one of the other MITs used to roast ants with.
 

Alice is sitting on the neck-tie skirted chair, sipping tea out of a mug that reads, "I don't make the rules. I just break them."

What is Alice doing here? I've never seen her outside the office, and her metaphysical facelift doesn't look nearly as bad in the warm lamplight as it does against the pallor of the wasabi green walls. Still has lipstick on her front tooth though. Some things never change. The Bug — last time I saw it was out in front of work.

"Alice, how do you know Hazel?" There's a shelf of figurines above Alice's head, little hunched-over lumpy things. I look back down at Alice's face, which beams at me.
 

"I needed to make some extra cash, so I told Hazel I'd help her with her housework and organizing. She's so generous," Alice practically gushes all over the chair skirt.

"She is that." I look at Hazel, whose mouth is pursed up into Dried Apricot Phase.

"Well, spit it out. What're you dropping in on me for?" Hazel doesn't offer me tea this time. Pity.

"I wanted to let you know that your friend's son is okay. I mean, we all thought he was a little monster. But turns out he's becoming a nice kid."

"What?" She takes off her spectacles and strides to me. "That can't be right."

"Not everything's black and white, apparently."
 

Hazel drums her fingers against her hip, muttering something I can't understand. "You're wrong. You've got to be wrong."

"I've met him. He was perfectly polite," I tell her, too aware that Alice is picking at her cuticles the way she does when she's really craning her ears to listen to something she's not meant to hear.

"That's not possible. First you come and—" Hazel looks at Alice, then slaps her hand down on the back of her sofa. "Then you come here and tell me he's fine? You don't have the tiniest inkling what you're talking about, girl."

I don't like the way she says girl, like I've talked back to the head of the World Summit or the Dalai Lama or something. Resentment wrinkles my insides. "Look, I just came to tell you that maybe things weren't as bad as I thought before."

"You're not welcome here."

"Hazel, Ayala's just being polite," Alice breaks in, looking alarmed at the tension turning the air to crunchy electricity.

"She doesn't know what she's on about." Hazel shoots one glance at Alice before turning back to me. "It's time for you to leave. This time don't come back."

CHAPTER FORTY

I feel sick as I drive home.
 

Hazel's still furious about what happened to Lena, and I can't blame her. And Alice. Poor Alice. Always on the outside looking in.
 

She doesn't know it, but she sure as hell doesn't want to be on the inside of this one.

My apartment is empty when I return. No Mason, but he's left a note.

He has really bad handwriting. I've seen kids with sticks write better in the dirt.

I guess I can't blame him. I'm surprised he knows how to write. The note just says, "Went to Saturn."

I'm having a hard time seeing the humor in anything right now. I don't even want to patrol. That feeling doesn't fit right, like a jacket too tight across the shoulders. I always want to patrol. Except right now.

I'm in enough trouble without failing to log kills for the night after that meeting with Alamea. If I don't, she might think I'm sympathizing with demons as well as the shades.

I stop in the middle of zipping up my leather pants.
 

How did I get here?

The night's humidity has fled for once, and stepping outside, it's almost chilly. There's a briskness to the air that's foreign in a Nashville summer. I'm glad my jacket fits better than my mentality.

I find a park on my GPS at random and drive there. I don't even register the name of it. Bleary, maybe. Or Blary. As long as I find a demon or two to slaughter, it'll be fine.
 

I park a block away and hoof it to the green area. There's a playground with only a sad pair of rusty swings and a slide, and a glimmer of moonlight hits a pond beyond it. Approaching the pond, I hear a disgruntled quack.
 

If I've disturbed a duck, there're no demons here.
 

The path leads farther into the park. You'd think demons would try to wreak more mayhem at night while they can. I never really stopped to wonder why they don't just head straight for the country bars downtown and snarf down some tourists before daybreak. They just don't.

Maybe it's us. The Mediators. Humans can pick us out in a crowd because of our bizarre eye color. To demons, us homo sapiens — whether homo sapiens magus, homo sapiens morphus, or homo sapiens libra — probably all just look alike. No one ever accused demons of being astute.

I walk about a mile down the path until the air goes silent and even the crickets and cicadas cease their deafening clamor.