Taken By Storm (7 page)

"Carrick," I say, but Carrick's already moving.

He gently lifts Ripper's legs, and I grasp him under the arms, careful as I can be because I'm pretty sure he has broken ribs, too. How Ripper made it here is a gods damned mystery. His jeans are sliced over his quad, and blood seeps out.
 

It wasn't claws that did this. Blades. Fists. Maybe a club.
 

Rage pulses at my sides, pressing insistently into my awareness.
 

"We need to set his shoulder." My voice sounds detached, terse.
 

It might wake him up, but Ripper's been passed out on a dislocated shoulder, and he'll thank me for it later. Maybe after he tries to punch me in the face, but he'll thank me, and I think I can dodge a jab from someone who looks like they came out second best in a tussle with the Titans' entire defensive line.

"I'll hold him," says Carrick.
 

I position Ripper's right arm as gently as I can, lining the joint back up where it's supposed to go.
 

"Sorry, buddy," I say. I sit behind him on the bed, one leg on either side of his hips, his back dead weight against my chest. Wrapping both arms around his, Ripper's head lolls forward. I hear his teeth click together.
 

"Ready?" Carrick has Ripper's ankles pinned to the bed, which will hopefully keep him from thrashing too much.

I nod. I shift my grip around Ripper's upper body once more and push his shoulder back into place. The pop sounds in my ears and sends a little shockwave through my arm.
 

Ripper's head snaps backward into my face with a crack.
 

"Fuck!" I hold onto him tight, angling my head away so he can't head butt me again. "Ripper, it's Storme. We had to set your shoulder. You're okay. You're safe."

I feel his torso expand as he gasps a breath, and I meet Carrick's eyes for a moment before he looks down at Ripper.

"We've got you, mate." Carrick's hands are stronger than shackles, and after a beat, Ripper's thrashing stops, and the rhythm of his breathing against my chest slows.

"Storme?"

"Right here," I say, my voice cracking on the note of vulnerability I hear in Ripper's single word. He looks like Robert Redford, but about a hundred times as tough, and I've never heard him scared before.
 

I don't need to ask him who did this. Slowly, I extricate myself from behind him and help him lean back wincing onto the deflated pillows.
 

"How many were there?" I ask instead.

"Eight," says Ripper. He won't make eye contact with me, and his hand raises to feel at his ribs. I can see him counting, and from the tiny flickers of pain across his face, I count with him as he finds four broken ribs.
 

Eight. Eight fucking Mediators did this. Ripper is a foundation in the Nashville Summit, someone who in a couple decades would graduate to outright legend. And he got jumped like this?

I'm so buzzing with rage that I almost miss Ripper's next words.

"It was Ben."

My fingers freeze where they were tracing the acrylic seam on the too-old motel comforter.
 

"I could have fought harder," Ripper said. "I probably could have killed some of them."

But he didn't, and I know why.

Ben used to be his best friend.

CHAPTER SIX

I don't realize I've torn a hole in the comforter until Carrick lays his hand on my shoulder.
 

"Ayala," he says softly.
 

My breath comes fast as if a blacksmith is pumping bellows into my lungs.

White fluff spills out from the gash I ripped.
 

"It's not going to stop," I say. "You and Mira and Devon, you're not safe."

I know I'm taking the title of Stating the Obvious, but I need to say it out loud.
 

Ripper doesn't have to say anything for me to know he gets it. "That's not all," he says. "They're circulating rumors that you've become a shade. Alamea's trying to keep a lid on it, but she can't show you too much favor right now."

I snort. "She's trying to put cellophane over the top of a volcano and acting like that'll keep it from erupting."

"She's gonna take a face full of lava is what's going to happen," Ripper agrees.

I wish it made me feel better to know the Summit leader is my ally — and my boss — but she's about to be swallowed whole, and the one person responsible is out of my reach.
 

"They really believe I'm on Gregor's side," I say. My voice is steamrolled. I feel like I'm trying to put together a puzzle and all the pieces are upside down in a brown mass.
 

"Yep." Ripper's Adam's apple bobs, and he shifts his weight on the bed, wiggling his shoulder.
 

"The only way this is going to get any better is if I kill Gregor." And that won't even be enough. Just killing him by itself will only eliminate him as an immediate threat. It won't convince the Summits that I'm not their enemy. It won't get anyone to stop open season on shades. "I'm going to have to do it in public. Or on camera. Something incontrovertible, that no one can claim I doctored. With enough witnesses that I gain allies instead of making more enemies."

"That's a tall order," Ripper says. "Especially when you can't leave Kentucky."

I bite my tongue on protesting. I don't know how far my range goes right now or why it's different than my friends'.
 

"I am going to find a way to kill Gregor," I say.

Ripper doesn't say anything, but in spite of the evidence to the contrary, he seems to believe me.

"Until I can get my hands around his neck, I need to find a missing person who's about to burst." I fill Ripper in on the missing persons in Hopkinsville, and his face tells me that he's thinking the same thing I said to Carrick — this will be blamed on me.
 

Carrick describes the scene we found, down to the football shit on the walls, and I tell Ripper how the shades' hosts all go to familiar places to die. I try not to think of Evis's and my mother going to her parents house and leaving them to die. Even if they were shit heads, nobody deserves getting splatted.

Too bad it's already too late for Nik Edison.
 

"The obvious place would be UK," Ripper says after a moment of silence. His puffy left eye opens a sliver for a moment, then he swallows and leans back, closing both eyes.
 

"No way could a horde of demons turn up in the middle of UK campus without the Lexington Mediators showing up." It's true, but I don't like the dubious hint I hear in my own voice. Could they? These days nothing is certain.

"You're probably right," Ripper agrees.
 

Carrick is quiet, perched on the edge of the bed at the foot. "They tend to stay local," he says finally.

"The hosts?" I look at him, but he's just staring at the wall. There's a picture of a waterfall, yellowed around the edges, frame askew.

He nods. "They — we — grow so fast that moving after implantation is very difficult for the hosts. They need to stay somewhere safe and isolated during the day so that the demons can check on them at night."

Demon midwives. The thought makes me want to tear more holes in the comforter.
 

Ripper looks as repulsed as I feel.
 

"So we check football fields in Hopkinsville," I say slowly. "Even in a small town, there's high schools and stuff. And football season is over for the year for the kids."

Ripper motions to the door. "My laptop's in my car. There's wifi. You can make a list."

This shithole motel has wifi and my cabin doesn't. Go figure.

Nine football fields dot the Hopkinsville map. Both Carrick and I know the chances of catching Nik Edison before he goes boom, but it's worth checking out. It should be any night now, if my timeline is anywhere near accurate.
 

Carrick confirms that two months is normal gestation, and I'm thankful for him being a walking encyclopedia of weirdness.

Most of the football fields are at high schools or middle schools. There's also a small college that has one, and that's where we go first, because it's the first one we come to. It's lit up like the gods damned New Year, floodlights beaming into the center and some intramural Frisbee tournament results in Carrick almost being clocked in the back of the head with a flying plastic disc. I snatch it out of the air and wing it back to one of the players, turning away before they holler a thanks in our direction.

The next three are a bust, but the fourth is an abandoned middle school that looks like it should be the set of a horror movie. Sometimes the thing you're looking for is in the place you'd most expect it.

It's midnight, and any lighting that used to exist here got turned off with the power to the school. Somebody's been plinking with the lamps, and under the first we pass is a crust of broken glass. There's a sign on the ground near the next light that says no trespassing. It's dotted with bullet holes, from a .22 looks like.
 

The place smells of rust and grass. And decay.

Carrick and I both catch a whiff at the same time and look at each other, uneasy. I unsheathe my swords, even though whatever we're smelling is long dead. Around the five yard line, I see it. A few raised hummocks against the too-long-neglected grass.
 

One is a human leg.
 

The flesh has greyed out and sunk in sagging rot off the femur. The next hummock I see though isn't human.
 

"Demon." Carrick says it for me.

This happened within the past couple days. It wasn't tonight; too much decomposition. "I think we found Nik Edison."

Carrick gives me a grim nod.
 

I count at least four different types of demon and probably twice as many total, with all the parts added up. Even in their disassembled state, I see a snorbit's freakishly Popeye-worthy forearm, an arm with a jeeling's shoulder spike, a rakath's spiny neck, and a ball of gooey flesh that could have only been a slummoth's.

"This isn't right," I say.

"You expected something not wrong here?" Carrick spits. It lands on the snorbit arm. I call that an improvement.

"I mean, the one shade I saw born just ran off into the woods. It didn't go on a hellkin killing spree. Also? Newly spawned shades are hungry as a hippo on a diet. This one didn't eat. It just killed."

Carrick's stillness tells me I'm right. "Bloody hells."

"So why isn't it killing norms?" I can't help the chill that passes over me. I haven't seen any murders in the papers. "Did you check missing persons reports for any new ones?"

"There weren't any, but you know the forty-eight hour rule."

"That goes out the window if it's suspected Summit jurisdiction."

"How would they know?"

Fuck, he's right. "Well. Gives us a possible timeline for this. Spawned two nights ago."

The carnage around us is heavy. I walk through the center of it, careful not to step in any piles of ex-demon. Nik Edison's other leg is on the far side, as if he got blown proportionally apart.
 

"Many happy returns on the birth of your little one, Nik," I mutter. "Fucking rocks for brains hells worshipper."

The goal line is dotted with rakath parts, and it seems to just keep going.
 

"Why would a newly whelped shade kill the demons there to greet him?"
 

"I don't know." Carrick hasn't budged, and I don't turn to look at him.
 

Carrick not knowing is the biggest red flag about this, piles of demon parts notwithstanding.
 

"The Mediators haven't sent a splat team out to clean this up. Which means they don't know about it."

"They're probably too busy trying to murder you." The smirk in Carrick's voice is mirthless, but welcome.

"Good to know they've got their priorities sorted out." As soon as they find out about it, I know damn well they're going to plaster my face on every local news station in western Kentucky and make me the handy scapegoat.