Any Port in a Storm (29 page)

"You could have died."

"That's an average Tuesday for me."

"That's not true, and you know it. Most things out there are no threat to you."

"Cute that you think so," I say. "I've seen better Mediators than me get killed by a lone slummoth that got lucky."

Carrick's concern is strange to me, like someone's moved me just slightly outside my own head, and I'm not sure what's happening. If the shade tonight had wanted me dead, I have every belief that I would not be standing here in a pair of aqua pajama pants and a black tank top, talking to a shade who's wearing boxers with lipstick on them.
 

Not lipstick marks. Little patterns of lipsticks.

"You shouldn't go out alone right now," Carrick says.
 

I look at him sideways, unnerved. "What on earth is your problem?"

For a moment, he just looks back at me, his face showing nothing. "I'd rather not lose you too."

Too. Oh.

I go and sit beside him, feeling like I'm walking out onto a frozen lake with no idea of how thick the ice is. I don't know if this is all just an act, with Carrick and Gregor both thinking they got through the battle at the plantation without me finding out what they did, but the apprehension in Carrick's eyes seems genuine.

"You're upset about Miles and Jax and the others," I say. Rade. Thom. Sez. I fought side by side with them for weeks. "Did you see what happened to Miles?"

Carrick shakes his head. "Immediately after the fighting calmed down, I went looking for you. But I couldn't find you, and then more hellkin turned up and Gregor said Miles got caught by a jeeling."

"I miss him too," I say, though I can't help but notice how false his story is. When I found the bodies of the hells-zealots, there were no shades nearby, no demon bodies, only earthbound flesh and blood.

But I do miss Miles. Miles was steady, kind. He always had my back. I will find out what happened to him, even if I have to pry it from Gregor with my fingernails. This story Carrick's just told — it could just be what Gregor told him, though I'm not convinced it is. Either way, Carrick seems upset.

"Before you met Gregor, what did you do?" I ask suddenly. I've asked him how he met Gregor before, but he would never answer. I don't know if I expect him to now, but I'm curious. Carrick's lived a long time, and considering the lifespans of the average norms, he's seen generations come and go. It must be a lonely life.
 

"Nothing of consequence," says Carrick, but his eyes turn cloudy, and his body stills, and I see sadness in every line of him.

What is it like to sum up four centuries with three pointless words? Not for the first time since Carrick showed up in my home, I realize how little I know this man, and how little I understand what he is capable of doing. Even if he seems to hate the idea of losing me, I don't think he understands quite how close he is to that — though there are different kinds of loss.

A little ember of anger in me grows. I want to know how he could do such a thing, how he could help Gregor kill that many people. I want to know why Gregor turned his back on everything we stand for as Mediators and slaughtered the very people we are born to protect. I want to know when I finally stepped over that line where I don't know who the bad guys are or even if I'm one of them.
 

And I want to know, sitting here on the couch with Carrick, how in the six and a half hells I'm supposed to go on like this.

I rub my hands over my face, feeling the blood rush to my skin and heat it. It feels like a sunburn for a brief moment, and I keep my palms against my skin's warmth. Carrick takes it for frustration.

"Perhaps it isn't what you want to hear," he says quietly. He turns, but doesn't look at me. His eyes find a spot across the room, a patch of blank wall, and there he fixes his gaze and does not meet mine. "I prefer not to speak of the past."

"It's your past," I say. He doesn't have to tell me. "I'm tired. I'm going to go to bed."

"Sleep well," says Carrick.

I go into my room and shut the door, climbing into bed. The cool sheets feel good against my skin, but for the next hour I toss and turn until they tangle around my legs.
 

My phone buzzes on the nightstand. Alamea.

She's sent a screenshot of a map where she wants me to meet her tomorrow.
 

For some reason, that single concrete task of
get up and meet Alamea
relaxes me enough to calm my body into sleep.

I dream of wandering through a field where the grasses bear drops of blood that shine in the dull sun. Around me are bodies. Demon, shade, witch, morph, human. There is no wind, no clouds moving across the sky. No birds or animals or insects send songs into the air. There is no breath but mine.
 

The grasses turn to ash and dust beneath my feet, and the earth gives under each step I take. Each movement forward sends my feet squishing deeper into the ground, and I cannot see why I sink.

I walk on through the field, each step a burden until I look down at my feet and see them rimmed in red when they bear my weight against the ground.

The bodies around me are still and silent, but as I walk through the field, every hand is outstretched toward me. In the distance I can see the tree line, and my feet keep moving toward it, but it seems to edge farther away. Each time I think the bloodied ground will take me, suck me under to join the beetles and worms, it frees my feet for one more step. I walk, and the trees come no closer. I walk, and the end of the field is as unreachable as the horizon. I walk, and the field is full of endless death.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The map Alamea sent me takes me to a strip mall Mexican restaurant on the outskirts of Murfreesboro, in a neighborhood sprinkled with trailer parks. The sky is bright blue above, and the sun shining brings with it an inherent cheeriness, especially when driving past a single wide, I see a family of four emerge, both kids running down the sidewalk with colorful pinwheels. The parents are holding hands and smiling, and even though I know the world expects you to feel pity for people who live in trailer parks, I can't help think that that family has a lot more than I ever did.

I'm just a little jealous of Wane and Mira, I think. I've never had a cousin.
 

I wonder what it's like.

Alamea's seated at the bar with a half empty red basket of chips and a giant margarita big enough to fit her entire face in. She's in jeans and a t-shirt, like I am, but she makes no effort to hide the dual daggers strapped to her back, nor the knives at her hips. I can see the hilts of two more poking up above the tops of her boots, as well. Wouldn't be surprised if she had some throwing stars on her somewhere as well. I've never mastered the things, but once I saw Alamea plant one in a rakath's eye from around a corner after one peek.

I sit down next to her and flag the bartender for some water and a plate of chimichangas, and Alamea raises her margarita to me. I hope she's not drunk. It's not that easy to get drunk as a Mediator, but a kiddie-pool-sized margarita'll do it.

"What'd you bring me here for? Girls' night out?" I ignore the fact that it's one in the afternoon.

Alamea raises an eyebrow, sips from her drink, and sets it back down. The blue parasol in it rolls around the rim of the glass, which looks hand-blown, little bubbles dotting the glass from base to bowl.

"I thought you might want to come with me to follow a lead on our mutual friend," she says. "I made a contact who said they had information about what he's trying to do, and they agreed to meet me today."

"Here in Murfreesboro?"
 

"Yes."

"How do they know him?"

"One of them said he approached them about a business arrangement, but that's all they'd say over the phone. We're supposed to meet them in about an hour, so eat fast."

Well, if anything, chimichangas should give me farts enough to impress this source of Alamea's.

By the time I'm done eating, Alamea's ordered and eaten a flan, and she's mopping up the remaining caramel with the tines of her fork.

She even picks up the check. "I'll drive," she says, jingling her keys at me.

I look at the giant — now empty — margarita.

"It was a virgin," she says drily. "I don't drink."

I follow her out to her Jeep and jump in. The back seat is littered with fast food bags and empty engine oil bottles. She catches me looking.
 

"You and I have a few things in common."

I don't even know what to say to that.

She heads down the pike to the first major intersection and turns left. Murfreesboro isn't a big town, and within five minutes and two more lights, we're out of it. We drive about ten miles down the state route. Alamea turns down a side road, where I can see a house at the end. Some of the homes we've passed have been old farmhouses with chipping white paint and wraparound porches. This one's just your average brown double wide on an acre or two of grass just as brown to match. There are no trees around it to speak of, but a few scraggly bushes dot the perimeter of the house, which is framed by a gnarled rail fence that wouldn't keep out even the most placid cow.

Alamea pulls into the circular driveway and parks. There's only an old white Ford pickup in the side yard, but it's got grass and weeds growing up around the wheels and doesn't look like it's budged in fifty years.
 

"You're sure this is the place?" I ask dubiously.
 

"Yep." That might be the first time I've heard her say
yep
.

I open the Jeep door with a thunk and climb out, adjusting my various swords and knives. Nothing says safety than a house in the middle of nowhere that looks like Ted Bundy ought to live here.
 

Approaching the house, I see a small addition on one side with a tattered screen door swinging on its hinges, and a storm cellar just visible on the back edge. Hells, it doesn't look like anyone's been here in the last decade, let alone lived here. The blinds on the front windows are down and shuttered, and when we get closer, I can tell there's curtains on the other side of them. No view in at all.

Alamea pulls open the storm door and knocks hard with a brass knocker that has a screw loose. "He's a little hard of hearing," she says.

Whoever he is doesn't answer, and we stand on the porch in the sun while she knocks two more times.
 

"Are you sure he's not dead?" I ask.

"He wasn't this morning."

She gives up on the brass knocker and hits the doorbell, which gives a quiet wheeze that wouldn't wake a mouse.
 

"Let me try," I say. I make a fist and pound on the door as hard as I can.
 

I still don't hear any movement behind the door, but the loose screw on the brass knocker falls out onto the porch.

I reach down and pick it back up, wondering if I can screw it back in with my utility knife or if it'll just fall out again. I've just decided to try when I hear a holler behind the door.

"Lea, that you?"

I look at Alamea. "I don't know, is it?"

"It's me!" she yells. "I told you he's hard of hearing."

A moment later, the door cracks open, and I see one giant blue eye peering out at me from behind a Coke bottle lens the size of my palm. Above it is an enormously bushy silver eyebrow and skin so pale the word
white
really does describe it.

"You ain't Lea," he says to me.
 

Alamea shoves me out of the way and waves at the man, who opens the door the rest of the way and grins a big toothless grin at her.
 

"How does he know what you look like?" I whisper to her.

"We Skyped."

All right, then.

"Come in, come in. I'll make you girls some sandwiches."

Much as I want to get this over with, Ollie Anderson the Fourth will hear nothing of business until he has us settled in his brown linoleum kitchen with grilled cheese sandwiches and pickles he says he made himself.

"Ain't got the knees for gardenin' no more," he says, "but the neighbor girl brings me the cukes a'cause she ain't know what to do with 'em. I pickle 'em up right and proper, and she lets me keep a quarter of them."