Taken By Storm (9 page)

"You think it was a Mediator?"

"At this point, I don't think it would be anyone else."
 

The sun has just gone down, blurring the lines of possibility. It could be a demon ringing our doorbell, but I don't know. It's open season on me. And my brother.

Panic claws its way up my spine, and I bite the inside of my cheek. I catch a whiff of Evis's scent, an hour or so old, and Jax's too. They were here not long ago. I can only hope they're nowhere near right now.

Carrick points through the oaks and hickories that line our path. "It's that way about two hundred yards. I want to circle around, see if we can catch their scent where they came in and see if they turned about or not."

As we run, the woods go silent. Carrick and I exchange a glance, and I'm not sure if I am relieved that there are demons afoot or disturbed that they're so close to home.
 

The sky darkens through the bare branched trees. Up ahead, I smell blood. Demon blood…and human.

"Fuck." I speed up, Carrick pacing me.

I don't have to ask if he smells it too.

A hundred yards back from the road that leads to the cabin, there's a small clearing just past the ward line. Jax and Evis are standing in it, faces grim, but they don't smell of blood, hellkin or human in origin. A little of sweat and a little of deer, but whoever made the blood hit the dirt wasn't them.

Two slummoths and a blitz demon are sprawled on the far side of the clearing. "Did you see a person?" I ask, hurrying to Evis to touch his shoulder. He returns it, his fingers warm even through my shirt.

Jax does the same in a moment, and the reassurance that they're both okay calms me.
 

"There was a Mediator, but we stayed out of sight," Jax says. "It looked like she was tracking the slummoths, not us. She got clawed across the shoulder and went back the way she came after the demons were dead. She didn't seem like she was coming closer to the cabin."

But even Jax doesn't look convinced by his own words. None of us believe in coincidence, not when there's several thousand people across the country who want to separate our heads from our necks.

"Any pings on the inner circles of the wards?" From where I stand, I can see the Mediator beacon on the tree. The splat crew will be here in a bit to clean up the corpses of the demons.
 

Carrick shakes his head. "It's just us, and this clearing is just outside the wards. Whoever comes to get the bodies shouldn't trip it again. These ones barely did."

Even though I can't smell any other beings but the ones around me, I can't shake the queasy pit in my stomach as we walk back to the cabin.

CHAPTER EIGHT

"Ayala." My name is accompanied by a finger gingerly poking me in the shoulder.
 

I open my eyes, and there's Jax again, his own indigo stare — and it is a stare — a mere two inches from my face. His breath smells like meat.

"I'm awake."
 

He pulls back, gratified. "Carrick answered your phone."

Jax leaves the room, and I hop out of bed.
 

Shades are like children sometimes. You tell them to wake you, and they'll do it in the way they think makes sense, which apparently for Jax is getting close enough to see if I'm breathing. Next time I should specify that knocking on my bedroom door will suffice.
 

Come to think of it, Jax must have taken pains to not wake me until he was two inches from my face. Maybe he thinks it's funny.

Any hint of humor vanishes from my body the moment I see Carrick's face.

"Saturn called," he says. "The shade killings here aren't the only ones. There's another territory affected."

"Where?"
 

From both Carrick and Evis, I can feel apprehension rolling off them like raindrops off the back of a duck.
 

"Seattle," Carrick says finally.

"Where Gregor is." I don't need anyone to show their work on this math problem. The shades showing up in the territory I'm in and the one where Gregor is can be no coincidence.
 

More than ever, the Summits are going to think I'm in league with Gregor. And if they're concentrating on me, well. Fewer Mediators available to find his sorry ass and stick a sword in it.

"He fucking planned this," I mutter.

Jax, Evis, and Carrick all look at me. We all know what it's like to be used by Gregor Gaskin. All three of us have been puppets in his schemes. And me, he's used me from the very beginning. Manipulated me when I was trying to find my mother, held the unspoken threat of Summit censure over my head. He didn't stand up for me when Gryfflet came for me, then pulled me into his plans with Carrick. Who he also lied to.
 

And Evis, he made into a murderer with his lies.
 

Hot tears sting at my eyes, and I'm out the back door, barefoot in my pajamas. There's an archery target a hundred feet from the house. It smells like leaf mold and rotting paper. I don't care.
 

My fists find it, leaving deep indents into the woven twine covering. The sound of thuds from my knuckles' impact fills my ears with the angry rushing of blood. I can hear my heart, but even though it's racing it's too slow of a beat to pace my punches to. Even as my fingers smart from smacking up against the archery target, it doesn't help. The sting of pain from the twine leaving tiny cuts in my skin only reminds me of the futility of this not-a-fight. This will save no lives. My fury sears through me, pumping into my bloodstream with every frantic beat of my heart.
 

I have never in my life felt so fucking useless. The weight I've felt my whole life, the pressure in my chest when the cosmic scales are unbalanced, it's grown so heavy and ponderous in the past few months that I almost never notice it, but now, now it fills me. Chokes me. Freezes my lungs in my chest.
 

I collapse to my knees in the autumn-mulched loam, gasping for air.

And then Carrick is there, at my side. He wraps his arms around my shoulders and pulls me against his chest.
 

"Breathe, Ayala. You're having a panic attack." His breath puffs at the still-sleep-tousled hair around my ears.
 

Dimly, I'm aware of Evis and Jax standing off to the side, of the trickles of blood that have dried on my hands, the thin cuts that have already healed.
 

Someone, somewhere is going to get lucky and be the one to end my life.
 

The thought comes into my head so suddenly that it fills my vision, hanging in perfect clarity for me to see.

It blazes like the sun, and like the sun it burns.

Carrick's breathing is deep and slow, and mine melds to his, my back against his chest. It reminds me of what I did for Ripper, and the heavy choking rises again.
 

"Easy," Carrick says. He pulls me backward, rolls us onto our sides and curls around me, spooning me. Jax and Evis join us on the ground. Jax reaches out his hand and holds my knee gently. Evis strokes my hair back from my face.

Aside from the shoulder touches and a couple terse hugs, no one has touched me in months. I remember waking up next to Mason, going to sleep beside him. His hand in mine every night. It's not the empty bed I've missed so much, but the reassurance of a person's touch reminding me that I'm here, a tangible representation of real connection. A reminder that I'm not in this alone. I remember Mira leaning her shoulder against mine at the rest stop, how subconsciously I clung to that simple contact.

Slowly, like the waning of the moon, my breath returns to me, matching Carrick's.

The morning chill cools tears on my cheeks that I didn't feel falling in the first place. In my peripheral vision, I can see the archery target, obliterated.
 

The dampness of the ground seeps through my thin cotton pajamas and the cotton camisole shirt. I don't care.
 

I let these three people I love hold me.
 

When we finally go back inside, an hour has passed and a cool clarity has filled me. I can't keep sitting here, doing nothing and hiding. Not while people are dying. Not while I can do something.
 

I need to kill some motherfucking monsters.

I spend the day going through my forms, moving the furniture in the dining room out of the way while Evis and Jax shoot onscreen zombies on the television. My careful movements are punctuated by headshots and screams. Sweat drips down my body, and I don't even notice at first that Carrick has joined me. The forms are old to me and new to him, and they flow through so many traditions of martial arts from all over the world that I couldn't tell someone where one leaves off and another begins. There's the quiet harnessing of power from judo, the explosive expression of karate, the barely-bottled fury of muay thai, the vertical space of tae kwon do. Krav maga. Brazilian jiu jitsu. Boxing. Street fighting. The Summits have melded the best qualities of human fighting and turned it against the hellkin.
 

When I was in training, it was that funnel, that distillation of thousands of years of body training that made me most connected with the mysticism of being a Mediator. We are the vanguard of humanity, of the four — now five — species of homo sapiens. Homo sapiens sapiens, magus, morphus, libra. And homo sapiens infernus.
 

My body moves through forms that have been perfected by all those who came before me. I am the funnel for all that concerted knowledge, the fist with which we punch back at those who would destroy us and the world we know.

With Carrick by my side, I can stem the rising panic again. The fear of my own futility. He imitates my movements so easily, his body only a split second behind mine. When the heavy sun falls below the horizon, I gather my weapons, kiss each of the shades on the cheek, and leave the house.
 

None of them try to stop me, though Evis holds my hand for a moment before I turn to the door.
 

I go straight to Hopkinsville. If I encounter a Mediator, I'm not sure what I'll do. Run, probably.
 

I'm out for demon blood tonight.

The hours I spent poring over the maps of Hopkinsville have given me a dreamlike knowledge of the town. At first I wander the streets, tracing our path from the other day when we followed Nik "Dead Meat" Edison's offspring through the town. When I come to the place we lost the scent, a side street dotted with dilapidated houses and cracked sidewalks, I keep going, listening to the crickets around me.
 

A bat flaps overhead, swooping low for a moment to catch a late season mosquito and then winging away northward.
 

From the map, I know that the Hopkinsville Summit sits in the elbow bend of the North Fork Little River to the east of me. I give it a wide berth even though I know Mediators are capable of moving around and could be a block away on patrols.
 

Half a mile north, I realize the town has gone silent. No crickets. No flapping bats.
 

I'm in a residential neighborhood, but there are no cars in any driveways, just one in a side cul-de-sac up on blocks. Several of the homes are boarded up, and the street is dotted with for sale signs that look like no real estate agent has been by to replace in months. I inhale deeply, smelling wood rot and unraked leaves, damp concrete and oil and rust from the junked car.
 

And beneath it, so faint I wonder if it's only a memory, a whiff of something warm and familiar.
 

The shade.
 

It's then I realize that's why I've been walking this way, how I got here. I'm not used to following my nose on a conscious level, but that's what I've been doing without realizing.
 

I have a split second of warning, long enough to jerk my swords from their scabbards, before he rushes me.
 

His weight is heavy and as momentous as a wrecking ball. His shoulder clips me as I leap out of the way, instinctively positioning my body and blades as one. I smell a bright burst of blood when my sword finds his pectoral.