Authors: Emmie Mears
Taken By Storm
TAKEN BY STORM
EMMIE MEARS
TAKEN BY STORM
EMMIE MEARS
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Emmie Mears
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author's intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the author at [email protected]
Thank you for your support of the author's rights.
Published in the United States by Emmie Mears
www.EmmieMears.com
Cover Design by Jessica Negrón
For Tam and Katie, who kept the wolves at bay while I wrote this book.
CHAPTER ONE
Raw meat still doesn't smell appetizing.
Even though it's been a few weeks since Carrick tattooed my back with my brother's blood and turned my eyes from violet to indigo, I still get this swell of relief every time the shades are having lunch and I don't want to join them.
Carrick, Jax, and Evis all sit around the dining nook of the cozy double wide with ramen bowls full of raw venison, munching away. I open a can of corned beef hash into a cast iron skillet and listen to it sizzle.
Even if the raw venison doesn't smell good, that doesn't mean I haven't changed.
I can smell the iron bite of the skillet, the brighter tang of the aluminum can, the punky scent of the wooden spoon in my hand. I can smell something rotting at the back of the fridge, even though it's closed, something I'm pretty sure is the remnants of a giant zucchini we picked from the homeowner's garden. The shades are not omnivores, and a two foot long zucchini that's over a foot in girth is not something I could tackle alone. Pretty sure that's what I smell rotting. I'll need to throw it out. I can smell the open container of baking soda in the fridge that's not fully doing its job. All of that. And I can smell them, the shades.
Even as a normal Mediator, I could identify the difference between shade and norm by scent, but it was almost subconscious, instinctual. Now I know on a conscious level when I hear footsteps behind me that it's my brother Evis, that he has deer blood on his right hand, and that he's anxious. I can smell his anxiety and hear it in his hesitant footsteps.
This, more than the color of my eyes, is the biggest change so far.
Well, that and the fact that the Mediators booted me from the Summit, took back their shiny toys, made me a pariah, and ran me out of Nashville with pitchforks for not killing Evis when I had the chance.
He leans over my shoulder and sniffs. "Can I try it?"
I give him a
your-funeral
sort of look and scoop up a little with the wooden spoon and hold it out to him. "It's got potatoes in it."
Jax and Carrick are still sitting at the dining room table, pretending not to be curious, but I can see their gazes flickering in our direction.
Evis takes a nibble of the hash. To his credit — or maybe not — he chews it once before spitting it into the sink like a corned beef grenade.
"Salty," I say.
He looks at me like I'm an alien, confusion drawing his yellow-orange eyebrows together. Is that what I look like when I'm confused? It's bizarre, suddenly having a mirror when I grew up with no blood family. Evis and I could be twins for how alike we look.
An expression crosses his face that isn't confusion. His eyes fall downcast, and his shoulders slump inward like a cardboard box left out in the rain.
I can smell the corned beef caramelizing in the pan, but I ignore it. "Evis," I say as gently as I can. "Are you okay?"
Carrick and Jax have gone very still, and I feel their turbulence like a gust of wind.
"She liked that stuff."
He doesn't have to explain who he means. Our mother, the woman I never knew but whose memories live on — literally — inside my brother's head. When I was born with the violet eyes of a Mediator, they wiped off the blood and cut the umbilical cord along with every other tie to my family. I was born to fight demons, and my mother decided to spawn one.
Sometimes the very non-metaphorical interpretation of the Summit symbol of the yin and yang gets me just a bit.
Evis, our mother's balancing act for the cosmos, spent a lot less time in her womb than I did, but he came out of her body with no cord though still covered in blood (and bone and guts) and her memories.
I used to think I wanted to remember her, to know her. But looking at my brother collapsing inward on himself, I think he got the short end of that stick and it's beating him constantly upside the head.
Putting my arms around him, I pull him close. "It's okay."
"If she liked it, why can't I?"
It's a child's question, and one I'm afraid to answer. Evis may be my brother, but we are different species. Last time someone tried to convince him of how different we were, he went on a murderous rampage through Nashville and almost killed me too. I push the thought of Gregor Gaskin out of my head, because if I let myself think of the man who pushed Evis into doing that, I'll break something. Like the house I'm in.
Instead, I pull back and look into my brother's eyes. "No two people have everything in common. It's okay for you to not like to eat what she did." I reach up and tug on a lock of his hair, which is the same color as mine. It's getting long, the yellow-orange waves reaching his muscular shoulders. We must have gotten it from our mother. "Look. We share this. It had to be from her. You and me."
He mirrors my gesture and tugs on my ponytail, but doesn't answer.
"Look at my eyes." This part makes me feel like I'm walking a tightrope over a chasm, because these eyes still don't feel like mine. "We're the same, brother. Not in everything, but we're family."
"Your stuff is going to burn," he says.
Shit. He's right. I flip a big chunk of hash just before it dies forever, still feeling Evis's presence behind me. His breathing has returned to normal, and his scent comes through over the salty meat in the pan, like a frequency more than a describable smell, the wavelength less frenzied, calmer. Swells instead of breakers.
I wonder what Jax and Carrick are thinking about.
I crack speckled brown egg into the pan in a trough of hash, getting out a orange-glazed plate from the cupboard. In these moments, making food and comforting Evis, I can almost forget that this is a haven.
I can almost forget what it's a haven from.
Out the window, the goat bleats. Jax wrinkles his nose and gets up to feed it, resolutely heading for the mud room built onto the back of the double wide.
Seeing a naked shade, a half-hellkin hybrid human, going to care for livestock makes me want to imagine a new world, one that's safe for him, for them, for all of us.
But it's daylight right now, and the illusion of light is one I can't afford to believe.
I know what lives when the sun goes down.
Even though the things that go bump in the night are my sacred calling and all that bullshit, sometimes it's the mundane that really bites me in the ass.
As I'm cleaning up my lunch and Carrick's doing the dishes, the phone rings. It's the owner of the doublewide, and she's broken her leg in Hawaii. She's coming back tomorrow, and I'm about to be homeless with three shades.
"She was supposed to stay another two weeks," Jax says as if that changes anything.
Shades don't exactly get that most norms need more than a couple days to heal a broken bone.
"It'll be okay," I say. In my head, though, I want to scream. I have money, but I have the social and political power of a hermit crab right about now, and I don't have my shelter attached to my back.
The shades can live off the land just fine. They can Dances With Wolves until the cows come home, and they can eat the cows raw. I'm fine getting covered in hell goo, but when I get home I like to soak in my nice big bathtub, drink a nice big cup of sake, and wrap my squeaky clean little self up in my nice big silk robe.
Said robe looks out of place hanging on the back of the door in this double wide, but at least it's got a door to hang on. I suddenly get the absurd mental picture of the three hundred dollar garment dangling from a hickory branch.
Get it together, Ayala.
My jitters are making the shades nervous, so I grab my car keys, tell Carrick to get our stuff gathered up, and head for the door.
As it closes behind me, I hear Evis telling Jax that he still can't kill the goat.
I shut my eyes, standing on the stoop in the dim afternoon sun. I breathe in the scents of autumn and goat, and I breathe out the same damn scents because I can't exhale my nerves through my nostrils.
I was never very good at that kind of meditation.
In the car, I call Mira, hearing the ring over the crunch of gravel beneath the tires.
She almost doesn't answer.
"Yo, Storme, I'm in the shit. What do you need?"
I feel a pang because whatever shit Mira Gonzales is in is almost certainly my fault. At least…ricocheted shit. "Lady Jax is house sitting for broke her leg in paradise. She's flying back, and we've got to fly this coop."