Taken By Storm (10 page)

I turn to face him, circling, his blood dripping from my blade.

"There's another way," I say to him.
 

It's dark, and there are no street lights, but I can see him. He's tall and pale, his hair shaggy and dark. Handsome, like they all tend to be. Symmetrical, muscular, feral.
 

He doesn't answer, but circles me, his indigo eyes assessing me. I meet his gaze, let him take in the fact that my eyes match his.
 

"What is your name?" I ask him. They all pick their own. So far I've yet to meet a shade who didn't use his mother as the point of reference for his name. Saturn's mother was Lena Saturn. Jax's mother was a man called Jack. Mason told me he got his from a jar, but his mother's name was Mae. Mae's son. Mason. Even Evis. Our mother was Eve Storme.
 

The shade doesn't answer. He darts at me, and again I dodge, feeling his heat pass me by. He comes at me again, twisting with a punch aimed at my kidney. I dance away, kicking his arm with a left crescent kick.
 

He smells different than my shade family. We circle one another again, and his eyes meet mine. Still he doesn't speak.
 

When he leaps for me, I jerk out of the way, slicing him again with my blade. The first cut is already healing, and the second isn't quite as deep.
 

I'm going to have to kill him.
 

Grimly, I attack, landing my saber between his ribs. Not even a hint of expression crosses his face as he jumps backward. He spins around, dripping blood. I need him to attack again, so I feint, flowing forward into a crouch and hitting him with a side kick to the chest.
 

His hands grab my ankle at the second my foot impacts him and he flips me backward. My back hits the pavement with a slap of leather, and my breath leaves me. Throwing my weight, I get myself to my feet in one movement. He could have attacked while I was down and didn't.
 

He's not trying to kill me.
 

He's studying me.

Warier now, I watch him watch me.
 

My grip tightens on the hilts of my swords. I've never had a shade do this. He is very, very different.
 

And then, as suddenly as he appeared, he turns and sprints away.
 

His movement is almost a blur, and I know there's no way I'll catch him, not with the way he's learned to somehow disguise or hide his scent trails.

But I do know that he wanted me to find him.

CHAPTER NINE

I arrive home to more bad news. A double murder — shade work — happened while I was out. And as the primary suspect was at that moment otherwise occupied with me and these two people died five miles away, it has to be a new one.
 

Thankfully, Carrick has some good news, too. "I was able to find out who the new host is, the one whose blood we found in Edison's house."

"How did that happen?"

He gives me a wry smile. "The police are good for something. They ran DNA on that room and it hit someone with a long record. Assault, more assault, felony theft, fraternizing with hells-zealots, pretty much anything that would make a person a candidate for becoming a hellkin easy-bake exploding oven."

Carrick's referencing children's toys. Today is a strange day.

"You've got his name and address?" I ask.

Jax nods. He's sitting at the dining room table with a yellow legal pad, looking studious, if naked.

I think back to my hunt for Lena Saturn. She wasn't being kept at her place — she shared a hovel with her band, who seemed little more than squatters and all ended up splatted.
 

"Your mothers," I say. "Where did they stay while they were pregnant with you? I'm guessing not at home."

All three of the shades shake their heads.
 

"My experience is likely less than helpful," Carrick says. "It was in the English countryside four hundred years ago, and isn't particularly analogous."

"Mine was in a basement," Jax says. His eyes stare off into the wall as if he's looking into the face of the past. "It felt familiar, like he'd been there before. There were other people there, other hells-zealots."
 

The word sounds strange from his lips, because it's mine and not his.
 

"My mother, she didn't leave that place for weeks. They brought her food." He pauses, looking at me. "They brought her our food, like what we eat."

The thought of norms eating raw meat by the pound makes my stomach turn a bit. "This is helpful, Jax."

"It was the same for our mother," Evis chimes in, as if he doesn't want to be left out of being called helpful. "She was in a tornado shelter. I remember — she remembered — hearing the sirens. They were loud because they were attached right outside."

It occurs to me that I've never asked Evis about the timeline of all of this. It's more of a pulling need in my gut than curiosity that makes me ask now. "When was this?"

"Right when the trees started to bloom."

His answer makes me start. Spring. He must have been one of the first. I think back to Hazel Lottie's shelves. Which of those keepsakes belonged to Eve Storme? I must have looked right at it.
 

"When did Gregor find you?" I don't think I want to know the answer to this.
 

"Right after I was born." Evis won't look at me. Maybe he smells the anxiety that twists my stomach.

I close my eyes, swallowing the tinny saliva that's filled my mouth along with as much nervousness as I can make go down.

Gregor had Evis in his clutches before he ever came to me about Lena Saturn's disappearance.
 

I go to Evis and put my arms around him. I don't need to say anything.
 

Jax said something more helpful than I think he knows. Arm still around my brother's shoulders, I look at Jax. "You said they brought your mother raw meat."

He nods.

"This was all a group of people, right? Hells-zealots and not hellkin?"

He nods again.

"What kind of meat, ground hamburger? Store bought stuff?"

Jax pauses, thinking. "It came wrapped up in paper. Big piles of it. They never froze it. They brought it fresh every day."

I turn my head to look at Evis. "What about for our mother?"

"Same," he says.
 

"Wrapped in paper." I pause. "Why?"

"They said it had to be the best."

Carrick is already reaching for the phone book on the breakfast bar, flipping to the B section.
 

Time for us to look up some butchers.
 

For once, the money Alamea dumped into my bank account actually does some good. When we all travel into Hopkinsville together, I pull a thousand bucks from my account and we hit up the town's only meat processing facility, a well-kept compound southeast of the town center. The white sided buildings are clean and gleaming, and the main retail area is grey with red checkers down the cinderblock corners.
 

Before I get out of the car, I plait my hair and tuck it up under itself, pulling a blue bandana over it like I'm about to go homestead on the motherfucking prairie. It doesn't fully disguise the color, but hopefully it'll allow me to go into the shop without anyone looking too closely at me. That is, if they don't pull the fire alarm at the mere sight of my eyes.
 

There's not a cloud in the sky, and the parking lot sports a few cars, an old pickup that would be right at home in Ripper's driveway, and a shiny red convertible that looks lost.
 

Inside, I can almost feel the shades mouths begin to water. It smells like blood and steak.
 

We take a number and wait, Carrick and the others unobtrusively looking over an announcement board and trying not to make eye contact with anyone but each other.
 

When my number is called, I head up to the counter. The woman on the other side of it looks like a born and bred rancher, her blonde hair the color of sun baked straw and about the same texture, pulled back in a ponytail tight enough that at its length, it almost sticks straight out behind her. Her eyes are creased from smiling, and her hands wear years of weathered use in their cracks.
 

"What can I get for y'all?" Her voice runs counter to her textured appearance, soft and gentle as a fluffy spring lamb.

"I was wondering if I could ask you a couple questions. I'm a Mediator, and I'm looking for a real son-bitch of a baddie. This person's been feeding hellkin big amounts of meat, and I think they've been buying it here."

The woman — her name tag says Bonnie — glances over her shoulder. "I reckon I'd like to help, but my boss probably wouldn't like me giving out information about our customers."

Just then, the man behind her heads back through a swinging door, and I pull out a stack of twenties and set them down in front of me, careful to keep it out of view of the one other real customer in the shop. Bonnie's eyes triple in size, and she darts another look behind her.

"Want to make a quick grand and save some lives? To the hells with your gods damned boss." I'm gambling on the assumption that she, like most retail workers, isn't overly fond of her supervisor.
 

"Uh," she says.

"Look. You can help me, save me some time, and make some money. Or I can just sit yonder all day —" I point outside to the parking lot, "— and just wait until I see some dodgy bastard come in here and leave with an armful of meat."

She reaches out and takes the money. "He'll be in around two," she says. "He's always alone. I don't know his name, but he's always twitchy. Real twitchy. Wears a pendant like the yin yang y'all use as a symbol, but different."

Bonnie has gone from zero to sleuth in about three seconds. She pulls out a length of receipt paper, scribbles on it with a pen to make sure the ink's flowing, and sketches out what she means. It's the yin yang, all right, but the tail of the black section is bleeding into the white one, swallowing it.

I take the paper and stuff it in my pocket. "Thank you." Looking over at Carrick and the others and then back at Bonnie, my eyes fall on a stack of filets. "I'll also take five pounds of those filets. You can put that on my card."

Blinking, she starts packing up the order, a question in her eyes.

"Bait," I lie, deadpan as I can manage.

Bonnie nods seriously.

We've got three hours before our little hells-zealot shows up, so we run the steaks home — each of the shades gulps down one of them, saving the rest for later — and I run through a drive-thru so I can eat something not raw.
 

We get back at one, and the waiting begins.
 

Jax suggests we park the car behind one of the other businesses on the street, out of sight just in case someone knows what I drive. We spread out, each staying as inconspicuous as we can. Carrick is in the car behind the wheel, in my line of sight.
 

The minutes slip by, and in the distance I watch a traffic light go through its cycles, the afternoon flow of cars sluggish and unhurried. Two o'clock comes and goes, and a breeze picks up, chasing clouds in front of it to cover the sky.

It's 2:37 when the van pulls up.

It fills me with a vague sort of disappointment that it looks exactly like you would expect a hells-worshipping fuckhead to drive. A black minivan with half-worn off stickers littering the tail end, it needs a new muffler and belches black smoke from the tailpipe as it careens into the parking lot.
 

The man who gets out of it certainly fits the twitchy description, sporting tight black jeans that look like they've been laundered by an asbestos factory and a tank top that probably used to be white once upon a decade. Now it about matches the sallow pastiness of his skin. He looks like month old mashed potatoes. On top of all of that, his dingy blond hair is cut in a mullet.

May the gods help us all.
 

I can't see the pendant from where I'm lurking, but I can see that he's wearing one. I make eye contact with Evis, who's all the way across the lot, pretending to clean his fingernails with a pocket knife I gave him. Or maybe he's not pretending, but either way I know my brother's body language well enough to see that his attention is fully fixated on our putrid little hells-zealot.