Taken By Storm (12 page)

"Yeah, and we've got jack shit. What's got your panties in a French twist?"

"I'll tell you some other time." I don't want to talk about it. "No progress at all?"

"Well, you already know everything we've found out." A shrill whistle sounds in the background. "Ripper's coming over in a minute for tea and treason. Wanna bark any more questions at me?"

Carrick grabs my arm, and I almost go off the road. "Fuck, Carrick! What?"

"Stop the car."
 

I pull over to the side of the road, and a red Honda speeds by and honks, but I don't care. I hit my hazards.
 

"Mira, can you hear Carrick?"

"Yep. Are you talking and driving again?"

"Not anymore," I mutter. "Carrick, why'd you almost run us into a tree?"

"I know what it is. The territory problem." He slaps my shoulder so hard I'm pretty sure it's going to leave a bruise.
 

"Spill, asshole!" Mira shouts it through the phone.

"When did you stop drinking tea and coffee?" Carrick asks me.
 

"After Gryfflet poisoned me with it."

"I don't think he poisoned you. You said it felt just like the territory sickness, right? Which you'd felt before."

Slowly, I nod. Mira's silent on the other end, and both Jax and Evis lean forward.

"We went past her territory when Ayala and I went driving," Evis says.
 

"Wait, you what?" Mira must have dropped something, by the clatter in the background.

"Must have forgotten to tell you," I murmur. "Carrick, finish what you were saying."

"The spells I found in that book. We were joking about locational tomatoes, but you Mediators get all your tea and coffee directly from the Summit, right? For free?" Carrick looks at me so intently that I am sure whatever he's about to say is correct.

I nod.
 

"Yes, we do, unless we get a hankering for Starbucks. Get the fuck on with it!" Mira can't see me nod through the phone, I guess.

"And Ayala stopped drinking tea and coffee. Suddenly she can leave her territory."

It dawns on me what he's saying. "They use locationally-geared tea leaves and coffee beans in what they give us." My brain wants to shut down at the implications of this. "And when Gryfflet poisoned me…"

"He must have simply given you coffee from a different territory. Probably just one over, or you would have been comatose."

"Fuck," says Mira. "Fuck."

"Yeah." It's not the territory sickness making me queasy now. "How long would it take for something like that to wear off?"

"I don't know. A while, if you've had it in your system long enough. A lot of those sorts of things build over time."

"Ayala." Mira's voice sounds like gravel underneath the wheels of a monster truck. Is she crying? "You know what this means."

I do. All our lives we're told the territory we're born into is all we get of this world, a cordoned off patch of land we can't leave. We're told it's inborn. Immutable.
 

"Tell Ripper and Devon," I say. "Don't tell anyone else until this is over. I need them to keep looking for me in Kentucky."

There's a long silence, punctuated only by the breathing of the three shades in the car. "Where are you going?"

"Where do you think?"

We hang up a few minutes later, with Mira promising to bring me a Summit radio she stole while she was training Mittens that should alert me of hellkin hotspots and Mediator activity alike. Might keep me alive. She drives north and we drive south, meeting up with stony faces and a sick cloud that seems to spread through the rest stop parking lot. I hug Mira before we go, and it's a hug I think we both don't want to end. Her arms lock around me like shackles. She won't look at me before she gets in the car. For once, she has no parting epithet, no potty-mouthed declaration.
 

That worries me more than just about anything else.

Back at the cabin, I drop off Carrick and Jax, leaving them to make a plan of attack for dealing with the newborn shades in Kentucky. If these new shades can't or won't communicate with them, we're not going to have any choice but to kill them. My stomach feels like a barrel of crude oil has spilled in it.
 

Evis and I get right back into the car. It's late afternoon, and I don't care that it'll take six hours. I need to test this.
 

Before, I couldn't even get to Cincinnati without keeling over. I already know I could get to Little Rock at least, but I need to try north. If nothing else, I need to prove it to teen Ayala. My skin feels scorched with the anger roiling in me.
 

Evis rolls his seat back and props his feet up on the dash. He seems to sense I don't want to talk, but I'm glad he's coming along.
 

I get on the highway heading north, the GPS on my phone leading the way.

We drive north, the sun sinking on our left and darkness slowly rising to envelop the car. We hit Cincinnati at half past seven.
 

My stomach feels sick, but not because of the territory illness.
 

The miles seem to stretch out and time seems to slow itself like molasses in a blizzard. I keep expecting each town we cross to come with a side of clammy sweats and intestinal knots.
 

But they don't. At eleven, we see a sign that says, CLEVELAND 27.

A half hour later, we pull into a parking lot I can't bring myself to look beyond, and I stop the car. My eyes are on the blackness of the asphalt and the dimly glowing streetlights.

Even before I turn off the ignition, I hear the sound of waves.
 

Aside from a nature sounds app on my phone, it's a sound I never thought I'd hear.
 

I turn the key. The car goes quiet. Evis is very still beside me.
 

I don't realize I'm weeping until Evis reaches out and brushes a tear from my cheek.
 

"You hurt," he says.
 

I don't answer, just hold his hand, squeeze it, and drop it. I make myself get out of the car. My feet move across the solid asphalt like I'm walking on the waves themselves.
 

Our feet crunch in the gravel beyond the asphalt, then sink into damp sand.
 

I know it's not the ocean, but to me it may as well be.
 

Lake Erie stretches out into the night, the waves undulating against the shoreline.
 

"Why would they do it?" Evis asks suddenly.

"The Summit?"

"Yes."

"Why did Gregor tell you I hated you?"

Evis flinches, his eyes searching mine. "To control me."

I nod. My entire life and the lives of how many thousands of Mediators who came before me — kept in cages and made to kill. The wind off the lake is cold, cold. But the tears from my eyes burn like lava.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Somehow I tear myself away from the coast, drinking in every lap of every wave until well after midnight. Even though it's dark, I take pictures with my phone and send them to Mira.
 

She doesn't respond until we're in the car, an hour back toward Kentucky and the cage I will find a way to dismantle. Her return message is just a picture as well, of Ripper and Devon holding boxes of Summit-issued tea over the bonfire in her back yard.
 

Another two hours south, and I get a call from Carrick.

"What is it?" Evis answers, since I'm driving and still don't feel like talking. I can still hear Carrick's answer, though.

"There's a hotspot about fifteen miles south of Columbus," he says. "If you feel like a fight. Thought you might want to know."

We left the Summit radio with him — the last thing I was in the mood for was hearing their radio babble — but I'm thankful Carrick's been listening to it.
 

"Thank you," says Evis.
 

"Text the coordinates!" I holler as Evis goes to end the call.

I hear Carrick laugh through the phone, which lightens the weight in my chest a smidge.
 

"Feel like doing some damage?" I ask Evis.

He nods so seriously that I hope we find some real action.
 

We're only about twenty minutes away from the coordinates, but they're two miles off the beaten path. I can deal with a midnight run.
 

I suit up, and Evis keeps his eyes on the fields beyond the car.
 

Together we run at a steady pace into the fallow field. After a mile and a half, we don't have to wonder where the demons are.

The glow of the jeelings gives them away.

I recognize the roars of the slummoths as they charge us. Swords out, I slice through skin and slime alike. Both slummoths go down before any of the three jeelings can move.
 

But all three of them target Evis.

He's surrounded at the exact moment the slummoth carcasses meet the ground. I sprint for him, stabbing one of the jeelings through the back of the knee.
 

Claws sink into my side.
 

I scream, whirling to face the attacker. Another slummoth, and it's not alone. I can't reach it with my sword with its claws buried in my side. I throw an elbow at its face. It connects with a sharp crack, and it releases me. I stumble to the side, hearing Evis's scream to echo mine.
 

Three slummoths come at me at once. My side burns, but I ignore it. I feint and dodge to the side, saber finding one slummoth's neck enough to almost detach it. It falls to the ground, twitching. I take the other two down, aiming to incapacitate. I'll make sure they're dead later. Stabbed through the face is enough.
 

Evis has one jeeling's head off, the ragged neck stump losing its pink glow already.
 

The other two have him in a pickle, each heading off his exit every time he twitches.
 

They don't seem to be concerned about me.

I make eye contact with Evis, circling around behind one of the eleven-foot jeelings. He angles to face that one. I strike. My saber connects with the jeeling's spine, and it flops forward just as Evis spins back to meet its partner. I stab mine through the ear and rush to help him. He has one of its arms off in the time it takes me to reach his side, and I take the other with my saber, splattering both of us with bright green blood.
 

I stab this jeeling through the knee cap as well, and it stumbles forward. Evis jumps backward and catches the demon's head between his hands.
 

Grinning at me, he kicks the armless body backward with a hard crunch of the jeeling's ribs and the ripping sound of its head leaving its body.

I can't help but grin back at him.
 

Whatever the Summit did to us, however they lied, they got one thing right.

I was made for this.

We get home just as dawn is lightening the eastern sky, and we find Carrick and Jax asleep on opposite ends of the large sectional sofa, Jax curled around a pillow shaped like a moose.

The Summit radio sits on the coffee table, still on, and I walk over to it to turn it off.
 

The sound of my name makes me freeze.

"Attention all Mediators of the Nashville Summit. This is a repeat announcement. It is the in-voted will of this Summit that former Mediator Ayala Storme be detained and returned to Summit custody with all possible haste. She is to be taken alive and in reasonable health, on charges of abetting known murderers, seeking out familial relations, and other charges already discussed. This message will repeat hourly."

It repeats now, one more time.
 

Carrick opens his eyes, starts to smile at me, then seems to hear the radio.

"So you heard."

I nod at him. "The only way this could have happened with Alamea still leader is if the Summit voted with a majority of seventy-five percent."

A few months ago, they were slapping a Silver Scale on my tit. Now they're calling for me to be brought in. I have no illusions about what they meant about returning me to Summit custody. I've been in Summit custody before. While Alamea recently gave me the secret of escaping their underground beehive of grey-walled doom, I don't really feature using it again before I'm dead, and if I'm dead they can just salt my bones anyway.