Taken By Storm (14 page)

Udo shakes his head. "I haven't been able to find him again. But the Mediators in the city are hunting the new shades and their hosts. I met one."

"Met a new shade? Or a Mediator?" A surge of relief almost bowls me over that the Mediators here seem to have their shit together better than their Nashville counterparts.

"A Mediator." At my flabbergasted expression, Udo goes on. "She didn't try to kill me. I told her I want to help stop the bad shades."

Seattle: 2. Nashville: 0.
 

"Did she tell you anything useful?" Sometimes you need a crowbar to get information out of shades.
 

"I'm helping her track down the missing hosts. I might have more information later today." Udo reaches into the pocket on his sweats and pulls out a battered flip phone that looks like it was last used in a 90s action movie. "I'll call you when I know something."

"Do you want us to come with you?" I ask.

"No."
 

With that, Udo leaves Evis and me standing on the street.
 

Evis convinces me to go down to the beach, and together we walk down a small cobbled pathway leading to the beach behind our motel. There's land visible on the other side of it, but the expanse of it still makes my feet freeze in the sand. The beach itself is little more than a strip of beige sand, but the water is deep grey-blue and mesmerizing.
 

A small wharf protrudes a bit to the north, whitewashed and dull under the heavy cloud cover. It's not raining at the moment, but the sky threatens it.
 

Evis tromps down to the water's edge and peers into it. "It smells funny."

"It's saltwater." At his blank look, I continue. "Lake Erie is fresh water. Remember how that hash tasted?"

He makes a face. "This doesn't smell like that."

I realize he's got no real point of reference for salt by itself, except maybe through our mother's memories. "Did our mother like salt? Do you know if she ever saw the sea?"

Evis pauses for a moment, staring out over the water. "She never saw this. But she liked salt. It came in a round blue box with a picture of a little girl with an umbrella. She liked shaking it to hear the noise."

I don't know how much of a science lesson he needs. "Salt has a flavor. You can get it from deep in the ground in mines, or you can get it from that." I point out at the water. "You can taste the water if you want, but you won't like it."

He does anyway, and part of me wants to laugh but can't. It's something I would do. He touches his finger to the surface of the water and puts it in his mouth. His nose scrunches up, and he spits.
 

"You were right."

The feelings that overwhelmed me when I first saw Lake Erie seem to have numbed here. Maybe it's the heavy weight of the clouds above our heads pressing downward. Maybe it's that I'm still tired. Or maybe it's just that it doesn't feel real.
 

I order food from a Yakama eatery nearby, an unfamiliar combination of roasted salmon, home fries made from tuber called a wapato, and a relish of tiny dark huckleberries. It's delicious, which doesn't surprise me, but it's so different than what we find in Nashville that it leaves me feeling both full and bewildered.

If Evis weren't here, I don't know how I would be handling this.

I stay mired in my own emotional turmoil and existentialism while Evis channel surfs until my phone rings at midnight. Udo.

He doesn't say much, just spouts off an address and hangs up.

I guess he's learned how to use a phone but not how to talk to people on it.

The address Udo gave us leads to an alley downtown, and I have to pay thirty bucks to park the car within two blocks of it. Apparently night parking is not cheap.

We meet Udo in the alley, where he's sniffing around like Nana when there's hay in the vicinity.
 

"What took you so long?" He motions at us to follow him into the alley, and we do.
 

"Traffic," I say. "And parking."

Glamorous.

My swords are belted on, and it's a risk, but if we're tracking shades or anything hells-related, I ain't getting caught with my pants around my ankles or without a blade or five handy.

Five is how many I've got.

"Where are we going?" Evis keeps pace with Udo, looking at him like he's seeking approval.

Udo turns to look at him, but doesn't answer immediately. I can hear him sniffing, small inhales followed by long ones as he turns his head this way and that. All I smell is the two of them, a drying patch of urine-soaked concrete we just passed, and a dead rat somewhere up ahead of us. And garbage, but that's a given.
 

"I don't know where we're going." Udo stops, takes a deep inhale through his nose, and continues on.
 

We emerge onto a side street, but since we're downtown, even this street is busy with traffic. It's Saturday. The days have all run together for me since I quit my day job. Udo points to the left, and it's then I realize he's very literally following his nose.

"Who are you tracking?" I ask him.

"Rupert Fennel," he mutters. "Host. Missing two months."

I look around, anxiety casting its net over me. "You're tracking a host about to burst through downtown Seattle? He's here? Now?"

"Was, an hour ago. We'd be closer if you'd gotten here faster."

"How'd you even find his scent?"

"Mavis."

That's not an answer. It's barely plural syllables. I want to scream, but that would be less than helpful. Possibly more helpful than Udo's answers right now, though.

"Udo, please give us some more information than that. Who's Mavis?"

"I'm concentrating."

I take a deep breath, wishing I could smell what he's smelling. But I don't have the host's scent to go from, so all I smell is the city and the people who have come and gone down this sidewalk tonight. Too many people wearing too much cologne and perfume.

In spite of myself, I have to admit Udo has a point. He's moving quickly, and Evis and I trot to keep up with him. If we stop so he can explain himself in more than four syllables at a time, we might miss Rupert Fennel, who is very literally about to burst.
 

Udo breaks into a run a block later, and we follow as he darts back and forth across streets, heading toward the busy part of town instead of away from it.
 

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

A few minutes later, we don't need Udo's nose anymore because people are screaming.

Our run turns to a sprint.
 

I smell the blood from a block and a half away, that familiar scent of splatted human, coupled with the metallic, sulfuric combination that spells out demon.

The cars parallel parked on either side of Union Street wear splatters of blood and brains I've no doubt belonged to Rupert Fennel. One of Fennel's arms got flung over someone's side mirror, and it dangles there, hazy yellow in the light of the street lamps. There's a mashed puddle of innards and blood in the very center of the street.
 

Leading southwest toward the water is a trail of bodies.
 

"Do you see any demons?" I smelled them, but I don't see them now.
 

Evis points, and my hands leap to the hilts of my swords, but then I stop.

There's a pile of frahlig demons, a slummoth thrown over them. They're stacked between two cars at the curb, all killed and thrown there in a heap. The norms are littered across the road with no apparent pattern. Why this newly whelped shade decided to do that, I don't know.
 

"This is wrong," Udo says.

"Yes." Evis looks to Udo again, nodding.
 

"Are we going after him?" I point down the road. "We can track him. I've got his scent."

"This is wrong!" Udo points around us at the carnage littering the streets. There are no norms here now, but the stink of their terror still permeates the air. "This isn't how we're born."

It strikes me finally what he's saying. I was present at Saturn's birth. There was a ceremony to it, a whole ring of hellkin that showed up to celebrate. A few frahligs and a slummoth? Nothing like that.
 

The demons here look like they were executed.

A flicker of movement catches my eye, disappearing around a corner.
 

My heart leaps so high I think it might smack the back of my teeth. I know that blocky shape.
 

I take off at a full sprint, rounding the corner so fast my hair whips me in the face. It's a short block, and I see Gregor make a sharp turn at the end of it. A moment later, I hear the roar of a motorcycle speeding away. I see its taillights flash once, then it's gone. No way I'll catch him now.
 

Udo and Evis catch up to me, and I kick a recycling bin on the side of the road hard enough to leave an imprint of my boot.

"That was Gregor," I say.
 

They both look at me, then in the direction I'm staring.
 

Neither of them question my sanity. Now that I'm here and standing still, I can smell him. I'd remember the scent of his aftershave even if my sense of smell weren't amplified by the tattoo on my back.
 

"I've got your trail now, you son of a bitch." I don't care that he can't hear me.
 

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

We can't catch Gregor on foot, but we might be able to catch the new shade.

The three of us head southwest, following the trail of the newborn shade. The scent trail veers south at the waterfront, and we follow. We find more bodies along the way. I keep count even though I don't want to. By the time a live figure appears in our path, I'm at twenty.
 

Saturday night in a metropolitan city center. Fucking hells.

The figure ahead of us is a man, and from a block away I can see the sword at his waist that marks him as a Mediator.

"Careful," I say to Evis and Udo. "He might not be friendly, but let's try not to kill him."

I take point, noting the position of the street lights and hoping this Mediator doesn't see clearly enough to catch the difference from my eyes to his.
 

"We're tracking a shade," I call out when it becomes obvious he sees us. "Seen anything?"

"You a Mediator?" His voice is high pitched for the size of him. I'd put him at thirty-five or older, and his stance is wary.
 

"Yep. Lena Mason." I hope to all six and a half hells that Seattle is big enough for the Mediators to not all know each other.

I get lucky.
 

"Frank Chickaman," he grunts, motioning inland. "I didn't see a shade go by, but there's more bodies that way. I was tracking it in this direction."

"He came from this direction."

Frank Chickaman gives me a strange look, and I realize I've just used a personal pronoun that he didn't. I pretend not to notice his look and point. "We're hunting it, if you want to follow. We're fast runners, though."

"I can keep up."

I doubt it, but we set off anyway, the shades and I keeping our pace measured to make sure we don't give away exactly how much faster than the average Mediator we are.
 

It's strange how quickly my mind has shifted to classify me and the Mediators as us and them. Then again, considering they kicked me out, keep trying to kill me, and want to lock me away forever, maybe it's not so strange.

Udo comes up beside me after a few blocks and murmurs quietly, "We're gaining on him."

I nod, glancing over my shoulder at Frank. He's huffing and puffing, and we're not. I slow our pace just a hair, because we don't need a Mediator keeling over just as he encounters one of these creatures. The Shade 2.0 model is not something to mess with.

More bodies litter the ground, most of them thrown unceremoniously into the middle of the street. This time I check my pronoun. "It's stopping to kill. We might be gaining on it. These bodies have only been here a few minutes."

Frank spits in response, but I don't think the gesture is directed at me.