Taken By Storm (23 page)

I remember when Rex died. He was Carus's best friend. I remember seeing the inception of a shade funereal rite, lining up with all of them to kneel by Rex's headless body and touching our fingers to his chest.
 

I remember seeing Udo comfort Carus, his arm around Carus's shoulder while Carus shook in his grief.

Now all three of them are dead.

When we get back to the cabin, no one says anything as Mira and I pull Carus's body out of the car and lay it out at the side of the house. There's a small shed out back by the archery target I destroyed, and I find two shovels in it. Mira and I each take one and start digging about a hundred yards from the house.
 

The shades all sit around Carus like a last embrace, Ripper and Devon off to the side. Even Evis sits with the shades, sandwiched between Jax and Carrick.
 

Mira's got red dirt smeared all across her forehead where she wiped her face with her muddy arm, and I'm sure I match the look. We get down to clay after about three feet of top soil, and the digging goes more slowly. It takes a couple hours to dig the grave.

The clay in the grave is deep red, and it looks like old blood.

I know it doesn't really matter to the shades, but I don't want to be covered in dirt to put Carus in the ground. Even though it's December, I hose myself off outside. I'd rather be dripping wet than muddy.
 

Carus's body looks grey against the blue tarp. Part of me wishes we didn't have his head. Seeing it positioned carefully doesn't make it any less detached. I make myself look. This has always been the reality of the violence I live. My life is made for death.

One by one, we each touch our fingers to Carus's chest. No one says anything. We don't need to. There's no more waiting once we finish, we just lift the edges of the tarp together — all of us, including Ripper and Devon — and carry it to the grave. We lower him in together.
 

I'm shivering, and my teeth clack together hard enough I think they might rattle right out of my mouth. Mira's doing the same. I go to her and put my arms around her. It doesn't do much to warm us, at least on the outside.

As one, the shades start pushing clay and dirt back into the hole with their hands. They kneel in the mushy ground, spongy from all the rain, and their hands fill the space in the earth that will swallow our friend.

When they finish, they look at me and run off into the woods. Carrick's the last to go, his naked body smudged with earth and eyes sadder than I think I've ever seen them. He meets my gaze, nods, and follows the others.

Part of me feels like I should run with them, but they're off to hunt.

There's only one bathroom in the cabin, and I let Mira shower first. Ripper and Devon make some hot cocoa. While I was in Seattle, it looks like they've all switched from tea and coffee to that, judging by the industrial size canister they're spooning powder out of. They hand me one, and I wrap my fingers around it.

"What happened today?" Ripper asks.

"Ben and his band of losers killed Carus and used him for bait." Everything seems to be a gods damned trap lately. I guess that's what happens when everyone wants you dead. I look around for my phone and realize I left it in the car. I set down my mug. "Phone. Forgot it in the car."

Devon waves his hand at me. "You just dug a grave and you're soaking wet and freezing. Drink your cocoa. I'll get your phone."

Gratefully, I lean back where I was and sip the cocoa.
 

"What do we do now?" I ask Ripper. I honestly don't know. Gregor's been about five steps ahead of me this whole time, and I don't have the jet pack I need to catch up with him.

"Kill the bad guys," he deadpans.
 

"Everyone seems to think that means us." My hands start to get some feeling back, and I rotate the mug around.
 

Devon comes back through the door with my phone. "You're blowing up," he says.

I don't know if he quite realizes that has a different context to me after Seattle. I take my phone and look at it. Alamea's called four times, which is more than she's called in the last four weeks.

I call her back.
 

"I've been trying to reach you," she says before it can even ring.

"I was burying a friend."

That stops her for a moment. "I'm sorry about Carus."

I try to disguise the sigh that tries to escape my lungs. "What seems to be the problem?"

"Gryfflet Asberry has gone missing."

"Missing? Hasn't he been the Summit's pet witch?" Gryfflet. Great. If Gregor and Ben weren't bad enough — and they are — the last thing I need is to contend with a cabbage-faced witch with a power complex.

"None of the other witches know where he is." Alamea ignores my little jibe. "Or even what he's been working on. There's a chance he'd come after you. He's been working with Wheedle for a while now."

"Has Ben woken up from his nap?" A bit of foam swirls on top of my cocoa. I wish I had some mini marshmallows.
 

"He's awake and in a holding cell here at the Summit." Alamea's voice takes a turn for the very annoyed. "If I had my way, he'd be booted from Nashville with said boot so far up his ass he'd be picking rubber out of his teeth."

That might be the most colorful expression I've heard from Alamea. I'm proud of her.
 

"So Gryfflet might come after me. Any chance Gregor got him first?"

"I suppose we can hope. Let me know if you or the shades hear anything." She hangs up without any other salutation.

I hear the water turn off in the bathroom, and a moment later Mira emerges in a cloud of steam. "All yours," she says."

Bringing my mug with me, I toss my phone on the coffee table. "Alamea says Gryfflet's gone missing. Nobody's going to find that witch unless he wants to be found, but we should probably find a way to beef up the wards here. And give everybody a haircut and a salt bath."

"On it," Mira says.

She's left me plenty of hot water, bless her.
 

Too bad the streams of it don't do much to warm anything but my flesh.
 

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The news of Gryfflet's disappearance coincides with another piece of very bad news.
 

Seattle and Hopkinsville must have been the beta testers, because the Summit radio Mira stole starts blaring with reports of new murders by the score in every major city and territory in the country. There's no word on if it's spreading to outside the United States, but the tribal nations of the northwest are getting together training seminars to broadcast out to the other Summits, and if the local Summits didn't want me dead, I'd suggest that Carrick and I do the same.
 

The scope of it doesn't feel real. I'm not sure if it ever will. Even after my blazing hot shower, I still feel cold.

When the shades return from hunting, they clean up and we all sit around the living room to try and strategize.

After three hours of discussion, we haven't made any real progress. How do we even start trying to find one witch who's an expert at security, a rogue Mediator who has no aversions to blowing up entire buildings, and a solution to feral half-demons being unleashed across the entire planet?

It's Evis who says the obvious thing. "I wish I could do to him what he did to me."

Everyone kind of looks at him sideways, more for the fact that he spoke at all than what he said.
 

But his words themselves make me think.

What has Gregor done to us? He's manipulated us, tricked us, gotten us to play directly into his waiting traps. He's played just about every psychological game he can.
 

Devon and Mira are talking about calling witches they know for help with the Gryfflet thing, but I barely hear them.

"Wait," I say. No one seems to hear me. I speak up. "Shut up for a second. Evis just said something brilliant."

Ripper and Carrick wear such similar expressions of bemusement that I almost want to take a picture.
 

Evis looks at me, proud of my compliment, but I don't think he quite gets why I said it.

"We can't find Gregor, right?" They all nod at me, impatient. "What if we don't need to find him? What if we just manage to make him think we're close?"

I think of the messages he sent me. The hells-zealot mechanic who fed us right to him. The alpha shade in Seattle telling me he said hi. All meant to fuck with my brain.

"You want to tease him out," Mira says.

"Everything he's done has been to throw us off balance. If he really wanted Evis to kill me, he would have sent him after me from the beginning. He's been toying with us." I think harder, because I think I'm finally onto something. "If he really thought I was a threat from the start, he would have taken me out."

I think of Jaryn Trident, the psychic who used to give me hell but who ended up pulling my ass off the coals more than once.
 

"He killed Jaryn," I say. "Jaryn was an immediate threat. He could have killed Alamea right then and didn't."

"He could have killed you multiple times." Mira speaks slowly, fire lighting her eyes until they glow. "Pretty much any time he wanted to."

The alpha shade in Seattle probably could have killed me. Either Gregor told him not to or that shade didn't want his strings pulled. It wouldn't be the first time a shade has opted for suicide-by-execution at my hands. Or maybe I'm not giving myself enough credit, but that shade was nearly twice my size.
 

The bomb at the house in Tacoma was a gamble. He wanted me to see that house, see my stuff there. He wanted me furious — but did he really want me dead?

What reason does Gregor have to want me alive? And why would he fly back to Nashville right before having me blown up?

When it dawns on me, I feel so stupid I want to hide my face in shame. "The Summit."

"What about it?" Ripper asks.
 

"If he wanted Alamea dead, he would have killed her. But he wants her alive. He knows she's on my side, and what is that doing to the Summit?"

"Fuck," Devon says. The shades all look around like they have no idea what I'm talking about, all except Carrick and Saturn.

Carrick nods at me. "You being alive works to his benefit. You divide the Summit just by existing. And Evis—" Evis looks up with a start at the mention of his name, "— Gregor had to know you were desperate to find your family. He knew you were searching for your mother. He knew you wouldn't let anything happen to your brother. He counted on it."

"And counted on what that would do to the Summit," I finish grimly. "The Seattle Summit handled those shades like a bunch of bosses. They made a plan, they checked the plan, they executed the plan. And sure, I helped, but I think they would have taken care of that alpha without me, if Gregor hadn't been trying to make sure that was my job alone."

"So how do we do this?" Jax asks. "How do we make him think we're going to catch him?"

I think back to the first day I found Gregor on my now-exploded leather sofa and almost stabbed him through the neck. If only my reflexes sucked. I patched up the nick on his neck with a Cinderella band-aid.
 

There's no way he doesn't remember that.
 

I smile at my friends, my little army, my chosen family.

"We show him we're everywhere."

Devon knows a guy who can get us what we need, and the shades are good enough acrobats to make it work. Two days later, the city of Nashville wakes up for the morning commute to find their billboards defaced with giant Cinderellas, big blue eyes staring knowingly into the eyes of any passers-by and a small trickle of blood visible on the left side of her neck.

It's subtle. That's the point.
 

No doubt they'll get plastered over or taken down by indignant marketing execs all in a tizzy about their precious ad space getting trolled with princesses, but the shades got a hundred of the things up overnight, and there's virtually no way Gregor won't see them.

The second stage of our plan is riskier.