Any Port in a Storm (20 page)

Feeling antsy, I check my cell phone for any messages from Gregor, but nothing appears, even though I have three bars of signal. The area around my car is mostly wooded, but just beyond the road, there's a small clearing. Through the trees, I can see a glimpse of what looks like a guest house — which is approximately the size of Mira's regular house — that doesn't appear to be occupied.
 

I don't know where these hells-worshippers are, but either Gregor gave me the wrong coordinates, or they did what bipedal mammals are likely to do and moved elsewhere.

The sun inches itself into the trees, burying itself behind the still-yellow leaves of the oaks around me. The breeze bears the coolness that belies the season in the face of the warmth of the day, and I gather up my supplies from the back seat, pulling my sword belt out from underneath the gummy morph wrappers I threw back there on the drive. Lucy the Flamethrower goes on my back, her small canisters nestling between my shoulder blades. I thread the tubes out through my sleeves, shifting my weight to balance everything. In the heat of the day, my leathers immediately make me start to perspire.

I belt on my swords, stash knives where I can, and spend a few minutes limbering up. Then I let myself check my phone again. Still nothing. They said they'd be here. I pull the GPS out of my car and tuck my phone in its pocket at my waist, the GPS going in a little holster at my hip.
 

The dirt track encircles the entire plantation grounds, so maybe they went the other way. I start walking toward the blip on the GPS, keeping to the road at first, then veering off into the clearing after a few hundred yards.
 

Slowly, the darkness seeps into the sky as the sun fades, first cutting sharp yellow rays between the trunks of trees, then greying out as it falls below the line of the earth.
 

I see no hints of hells-worshippers, only feel the breeze through the trees that makes whispers from leaves and brings with it the faintest scent of...metal.
 

Turning to the south, my eyes find a ripple in the air.

I stumble backward, yanking my phone from my pocket. I dial Gregor, eyes glued to the movement.
 

He doesn't answer. I get his voicemail.
 
"Gregor, you motherfucking ass, there's a hells-hole opening in front of me, and you aren't fucking here!"

I'm going to die. The last time I saw one of these things, eighteen demons poured themselves through it. If that many come out, I'll go through it with them when they return to the hells — as half-digested Mediator in their small intestines.

I should have run. I should have stayed at my car. I should have ridden with them in that gods damned yellow school bus and sang the Wheels on the Bus with those fucking hellkin hybrids and their Harlequin romances.
 

Saturn's message rings in my head, and I wonder why I didn't peace the fuck out of this job.

I can't run now. They'll catch me, no matter what.

This isn't supposed to be how I go. Not like this.

I call Alamea next, but she doesn't answer either. My heart spirals downward until I'm afraid it's going to land somewhere between my hips. "Alamea, there's a hells-hole opening, and I'm almost to Chattanooga. Gregor's not here. He's supposed to be —"

My phone rings. It's Gregor. My thumb hits the green circle.
 

"Where the fuck are you?" My voice sounds shrill and panicky.
 

"We're coming. Bus got a flat tire, but we're on our —"

The first demon appears, like it's reflected in shards of mirror.
 

I hang up on Gregor and shove my phone into its pocket, unsheathing my sword.

Thank all the gods and stars it's a slummoth.
 

It slips through the hells-hole and comes right at me, a resonant bellow booming from its chest. For two seconds, I close my eyes and try to remember to breathe, telling my body to remember itself, remember its years of training, remember me.
 

I am instinct. I am a creature of extreme violence.

My body doesn't fail me.
 

It spins into motion, flowing through the sword forms I learned from the time I could walk. I send the slummoth's head flying the moment it steps into range just as two more materialize through the shimmering curtain of air.

My blades find their flesh and rend it from them.
 

I hear my breath in my ears like I imagine the sea, vast and endless and deep. Green blood spatters my leathers, but I pay it no heed.
 

I keep the hells-hole in front of me, catching the hellkin as they emerge, giving them no time to exist in my space. I claim the ground around me as mine and mine alone.

Darkness falls in my world; the day has fled. But I am born for the night.

Somewhere in that space of death and swords and snarls, I realize that I am going to be overwhelmed.
 

The burning of my muscles, I can push aside, but when the hells-hole widens and admits demons shoulder to shoulder instead of one after another, I feel my step falter.
 

The ground surrounding me is littered with bodies. Rakaths killed before they could shoot their quills. Slummoths, their slime coating the early-fallen leaves of autumn. A harkast.
 

When the pink glow begins in the air, like a floating cloud of light through this portal to nightmares, my blade slices through the neck of a slummoth — maybe the fourth, maybe the fortieth — and I step back.
 

Somewhere in the distance, I hear the sound of yelling, but I don't turn toward it.
 

There's a jeeling coming for me.

Eleven feet tall with shoulder spikes of metallic bone, the jeeling seems to tear the universe to enter my world.
 

It does something I've never seen one do.

It looks at me and smiles.

It's the only word I can think of for the expression on its face, its tight mouth of jagged teeth slanting upward like a sharp V.
 

It almost makes me turn and run. Instead I run toward it, ready to leap.

The jeeling's arm flashes out like a whip, and the ground flies up to knock the wind out of me. Dust and leaves fly into the air around me, and I gasp, scrambling to the side. More demons are coming from the hells-hole. I skitter sideways, encountering the severed neck stump of a slummoth. Chest wanting to explode, I force myself to my feet with a sound I've never heard from my mouth before.
 

Harkasts swarm from the hells-hole, swirling around the jeeling's knees. They don't attack me. They'll wait for it to take me down, and they will smother me with teeth and death.

Slummoths follow the harkasts, their screeching snarls turning my blood to liquid fear in my veins. Their movements are jerky, predatory. They know what I am and see what I've done around me.

I am alone.

I want Miles and Carrick and Udo and all of them to rush in from the trees, but they don't. It's just me and a horde. By myself.
 

Some of the slummoths lope off into the trees, but three stay. The air surrounding the hells-hole goes still again, and the sight makes me almost laugh. Too late for it to be any solace.
 

The jeeling seems to wait for me to move.

I run for it, straight at the giant monster and its skirt of lesser demons. I know the radius of its arms now, and I flip my short sword in my left hand, gripping it point down. At the last second, I duck, slamming my short sword into one harkast head and the saber into another. I throw my body to the right, my weight jerking both demons with me where the sharpness of my blades takes off chunks of their skulls.

I get up without thinking and run toward the jeeling again, keeping low, zig-zagging back and forth, working myself in a slow circle toward it. A slummoth comes at me, and I cut it down.
 

My arms feel like fire, my chest like the crater of a volcano. I take what breath I can and feint left, my saber flicking out to catch the jeeling just behind the knee.

Its a lucky hit, and though it doesn't sever anything vital, the eleven foot demon stumbles. Two more harkasts scuttle toward me. I kick one between the eyes as hard as I can, shoving it backward. The other I slice from shoulder to waist.

The jeeling bellows at me and rushes forward. I spin to the side, swinging my swords like a dervish's skirt. One catches the jeeling's shoulder bone, lopping off half a foot of the protruding appendage. I keep moving, my feet finding solid ground.

Normally, a jeeling could outrun me even with a knee injury. But with the harkasts around it, tripping it up, it struggles to track my movements.
 

I take out another slummoth and leave the harkasts be. Darting to the right, spinning as fast as I dare, I see my opening. The jeeling can't turn quickly. I launch myself at it, my foot finding a harkast head that I use as a springboard. I bury my down-turned short sword in the jeeling's side where its kidney would be if it were human.
 

Even though it's not, it really doesn't like that.

I don't give it time to fuss. I thrust my saber at the center of its spine with as much force as I can muster. The jeeling pitches forward under my weight, and I yank out the sword and stamp my foot down on the wound as hard as I can.

The crack of its spine resounds in the clearing. Three harkasts and a slummoth remain. I sway on my feet, expecting them to rush me.
 

They stand stock still on the blood-soaked soil.
 

It makes them easy targets.

I kill them all.

It's only when they're all dead that I realize I never used Lucy.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Silence.

Seconds pass with nothingness cocooning me.

No crickets. No cardinals. No hellkin.
 

With a gasp I heave a breath and drop my swords, falling to the ground. The gibbous moon has crested the trees, and it lights the clearing with a silver sheen.

Bodies.

Everywhere.

I'm alive.
 

For a long time, I simply breathe. The air comes cool to my lungs, and though it brings with it the stench of metallic entrails and death, it smells of nothing but life to me. As I breathe, the crickets return. An owl hoots.

I am alive.

Somewhere in the distance, I hear a yell.
 

My legs are the human equivalent of Gumby, but they unfold beneath me, pushing me to a crouch. I find my sword hilts and pick them up. The blades drip slime and blood, leaves and soil caked against the steel.

I follow the sound of yelling, working my way northward through the trees, back toward my car and to the west, toward the sounds I hear. I stumble through the brush, blades as ready as my exhausted arms can make them, ears straining for the screaming I hear.

By the time I reach it, it is gone.

And I see why.
 

More bodies.

This time when the ground comes up to reach me, it's not because something hit me.
 

This time it's because I collapse.

Surrounding the guest house are bodies — but none of them belong to hellkin.
 

Some are nude and painted with hellish symbols. Others are clothed in rags or ripped denim.
 

These are hells-worshippers, and they are all dead. Their blood paints the ground. Where the demons smell of iron and sulfur, norms smell of copper and flesh. They lie in piles, haphazard and uncared for.
 

It's not even that that brings me to my knees.

I know what did this.

I know who did this.

When a yell once again reaches my ears, this time from the direction from which I came, I wish I could vanish into a hells-hole and never return.
 

My car. I need to get to my car.
 

I stumble again to my feet. Behind my eyes are bodies, bodies, bodies.

The woods welcome me, and I walk. And then I run. Somehow, somehow, I run. I hear the yells in the distance, but they are too far to catch me. I find my car on the road and rush to it. My blades I throw unsheathed onto the front seat, and the ignition sounds like safety. Spinning around, I floor the accelerator, the smell of dust from the road gathering through the air intake of the vents. I cough on it, but I don't slow down.