Taken By Storm (21 page)

"We got the Hopkinsville alpha last night," he says. Now that I look at him closer, I can see a healing bruise on the side of his face, and both Jax and Miles are nursing shiners that'll be healed in a day or so.

The relief that fills me is enough to make me want to collapse. "Where are Ripper and Devon?"

"Sleeping," says Carrick. "Where's Udo?"

He only has to ask the question to know the answer. I feel my body fold my emotion inward, and for the barest moment I have a strange out-of-self sensation. I can see myself going still like watching reversed footage of a splash. It's a shade reaction.

The second I put it into words, I snap back to myself and jump as Miles puts his arms around me. He's tall and lanky, his deep black skin warm like a furnace. I feel more than observe his pain. It passes from him to me and back, and as Jax and Saturn come up beside us, hands reaching out to our shoulders, it passes between them as well.
 

I'm their alpha
.
 

The thought is unbidden and ricochets through my head.
 

Evis stands to the side, but Mira pulls him into a hug, kissing his cheek like she's known him forever. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him cling to her, a strange look on his face.

He meets my gaze, but neither of us smile.

Inside, Ripper and Devon are on the sofa, blinking bleary-eyed into the morning. Devon gets up and hugs me. His eyes are still half shut with sleep, and his pale skin marred by deep scars. It's been a while since I really looked at Devon. This summer I pulled him out of a warehouse of shades, and he was the first Mediator to believe me that maybe they weren't one hundred percent monstrous. He told me then that he thought they just wanted to talk to him, until he got skittish and pulled a blade. He almost lost an arm and ended up in a body cast for weeks. Ripper looks back to normal. Even his blond ponytail isn't mussed.

The cabin is crowded and smells like sugar and cinnamon and oranges, and as I adjust to being around so many people again, there's one person — well, furry person — I want to see and haven't.
 

I meet Mira's eyes over the table where she's thrown some paper plates and what appears to be a pan of sticky buns. She gives me a crooked smile and drops a handful of plastic utensils on top of the plate, jerking her head to the side to gesture down the hall.

"Too many people out here," she says. "Come on."

She opens the door to my room, carefully blocking the gap in the door with her foot.
 

"Come on out, little fluffer. Your mama's back."
 

There's no way a bunny'll respond to that, but miraculously I hear a little scuffle from under the bed, and a moment later out hops Nana, her velveteen red fur brushed with fuzz and dust from the floor. Her little nose twitches, and her ears swivel, and I've never been so happy to see a goddamn rabbit in my entire life. My heart melts into a little puddle and sloshes around.
 

She even lets me pick her up. I cradle her warm little body to my chest and sit down on the bed, setting her on the comforter next to me and scooting up to lean against the pillows. Mira joins me, sitting awkwardly on the edge of the bed at first, then kicking off her shoes and curling up to face me. Nana hops between us, then settles up against my chest. I scratch her between the ears.

"I missed you, Nana-bunny," I say. Then I look at Mira, stroking Nana's soft back to get the dust bunnies off and return her to all-natural bunny-bunny status. "How bad has it been?"

From the way Mira sucks air in through her nose and doesn't meet my eyes, I think the answer is
very
.

Around her eyes are crow's feet, and the still-pink speckles of scars from the markat spit that almost blinded her. She's wearing a black camisole and a pair of black yoga pants, and the pink scars trail down the side of her neck, where they take up almost all of it, then dribble down her chest and vanish into the low neckline of her cami. She didn't almost just lose her eyesight that day. She almost lost the rest of her too.

Nana's nose goes, taking in my scent. I can hear her tiny breaths.

"It's been bad," Mira says. "Carrick said you heard that the Summit voted to apprehend you and overruled Alamea, but that's just a symptom. Ben's been rallying people against her and starting a crusade against anyone who thinks shades are more human than not. What he did to Ripper wasn't even the half of it. His fucking posse of nitwits have half the Summit ready to piss themselves and the rest sharpening their teeth for war. Demon deaths are way down in the territory, so they're using that to call Alamea a liar."

"Calling someone a liar is usually the lazier tool of the propagandist," I mutter.

"You're not wrong."

There's more damage to be done in a wrongly-wielded truth than in most lies, and because everyone's muttered an untruth at some point, falling back on calling someone a liar usually means you know deep down they're right but don't want anyone else to believe them.

And what Ben's doing is the perfect example.

"How's Wane?"
 

Mira traces the stitching of the comforter with a finger. "She went to Oaxaca."

"Oaxaca?" Startled, I jump and Nana twitches. "What? Why?"

"I told her to get out of town. She wanted to stay and help, and I guess that's her right, but the entire Summit's gunning for anyone even remotely connected to you, and her connection to you is a few ticks above remote. I told her she should lay low for a while, and she was quietly spreading the word to people in town that maybe Tennessee wasn't going to be good for their health." Mira looks like she has a sour taste in her mouth. "That's another thing. Ben and his nitwit brigade have been trying to convince everyone that it's fine and they should stay."

We're both quiet then. All I want to do is sleep for about a decade, but even though my eyes feel like the Kalahari and my bones are screaming at me for rest, I don't think I could conk out if I closed my eyes. At least until Nana falls asleep next to me, and I see Mira nodding off.
 

I forget that she was getting breakfast together, forget the others out in the living room, forget everything but Nana's little ball of warmth against my body and the bed under me.
 

I let myself give in to the illusion of home.

The next day, Mira and I head down to Nashville together. It's strange, seeing the familiar skyline appear over the bare naked autumn trees. The spiked Gotham building, the winding elbows of the Cumberland River. Even the air coming in through the heating vents of the car smells familiar.
 

I think until I saw my things in Gregor's mock-house in Tacoma, I had held on to some little feather of hope that when this was all over I could get my apartment back, set it up the way it was, and live happily ever fucking after. He blew more to smithereens than just my leather sofa.

No one even told me where my stuff was being held. How in all six and a half hells Gregor found out is a gods damned mystery.

Then again, there was probably enough of my hair on it that he could have found it if he used a tracking spell.
 

It's a long shot what we're doing, heading to the Nashville airport to see if we can catch Gregor's scent, but even though we wouldn't be able to follow it once he got in a car and zoomed away, I need to confirm for myself that what Mavis told me was actually true and that he's here.
 

The city feels oppressive, and I think Mira feels it too. We both sit forward in our car seats, me with my hands at the perfect position of ten and two, her with her palms flat on the dash and the seatbelt pressing between her breasts.
 

"If we live through this, I'm never coming back to this city again."

"Amen."

The airport is just off Interstate 40, and we pull up to the arrivals gates just after ten in the morning. I pull my bandana over my hair, not that it'll help. Both Mira and I are recognizable to any Mediator here by now, but I have to risk it.

I take a quick circuit of the arrivals area, inhaling the exhaust fumes and smell of travel-weary people alike. There are cameras along the overhang above me, and I'm careful not to look up at them, positioning my body to face out toward the road. Down at the far end where an attendant is wrestling a suitcase onto a buggy and sweating, I catch it. Gregor's scent. It's two days old, just like it should be, and it goes to the curb and then trickles away. Someone picked him up.

 
Hopping back into the car, I drive away, handing my phone to Mira. "Text Alamea. Let her know that Gregor was picked up at the Delta gate and drove away. Unless he's figured out how to get a car to drive itself, there was a person behind the wheel, and the car might lead us to them."

"Cameras," Mira says, nodding.

"Yep." Also, if Gregor's flying commercial, maybe he didn't make as much money from his murder schemes as he seemed to think he would. No Mercedes S Class for him.
 

We don't drive past Mira's house, even though I kind of want to. Having some through line of a connection to this city would be nice, but it's the most obvious place for us to go. Instead, we head to Belle Meade and pull over in a shady side street to wait for Alamea to respond. Which she does before we've been waiting five minutes.

Her text only holds the address of the vehicle's owner and a note that she'll be in meetings all day, which to me just reads like
plausible deniability
.

I'm not sure what illusion Alamea is clinging to, but somebody sneezed on the house of cards long before I trundled back into town.

The address is down Old Natchez Trace, halfway between Nashville and Franklin. I've got Lucy in the trunk and more blades than I can feasibly carry. Even so, this is just recon.
 

We get there at eleven, and the car we're looking for is parked in the driveway. It's a newish model Oldsmobile with a terrible key line down one side that gives me a ridiculous amount of glee to see.

Instead of parking, we just drive past. Heading down to the end of the street, Mira looks around for anything that could signal who lives there.
 

"Not that I know all the Mediators in town, but I couldn't tell you if it's one of us living there or somebody else. Name doesn't ring a bell."
 

I have to appreciate that Mira includes me in that
us
. "The name on the car's registration could be faked, anyway. Or the car could be stolen."

"Touché." She turns around to peer out the rear window of the car. "Do you think Gregor's in there?"

"No. And I don't know if I want to go check. Last time I followed him to a house, he blew it up with all my stuff in it."

Mira flinches, then regains a bit of her old self. "I'm gonna miss those couches."

We sit about a quarter mile down the road with a pair of binoculars, passing them back and forth for a few hours, but no one comes out or goes into the house. When Mira's phone buzzes at two in the afternoon, she opens the text message and frowns.

"It's Carus. He says he has news." She squints at the phone screen. "His spelling's improved, at least."

All the shades seem to have gotten used to the information age, but most of them can read as well as their parents, which for some of them isn't saying much.

"Where's he staying?" I ask. I don't remember where Carus used to hole up.

"After Rex died, he moved. He's out in Timberland Park now, not that far from here."

Rex. Gods, so many of these shades have died. I wish I could protect them all, but I can barely protect myself.

I drive straight to the park, a light rain falling on the windshield. I was hoping once I left the dreariest city in the country I might see the sun again, but it looks like I'll have to wait a bit longer for that.

Mira directs me to a small parking enclave, and I belt on my swords before we go.

"How are the other shades?" I ask. There's a whole troupe of them, or there was. I watched too many of them die.

"Scattered, mostly. Lawlor and Carus are the only two here right now, with Miles and Saturn up in Kentucky. A lot of them were off looking for Gregor, and they sort of stayed gone. I think Beex was up with Udo, and so was Holden. I don't know where they are now, but I guess they check in with Saturn sometimes." Mira points up ahead, through the trees. "Carus should be up there."

I feel responsible for the shades. I hope those who have scattered haven't done so alone. The thought of them all on their own in a world where most Mediators would try and put them down without asking questions makes my stomach twinge. I'd like to believe they're out there like Mason, seeing the world and ticking off items on their mothers' bucket lists, but Mason's probably the exception rather than the rule. He usually was.

I wonder where he is.

"There," Mira says. Even though she doesn't mean Mason, her word gives me a bit of a jolt.

A figure's leaned back against the trunk of an oak, head back and only visible in profile. The rain's trickling off my face, but the drizzle is slowing. I smile at the sight of Carus snoozing. "He probably got sick of waiting for us."