Any Port in a Storm (21 page)

I drive down Worley Road to the state route that leads northeast. A mile passes before I remember to turn on my lights. I flip them on and drive, drive, drive.

My seatbelt presses against something, and I look down. My GPS. Two miles up the road, Chickamauga Lake butts up against the road. I roll down the passenger window and chuck the GPS as hard as I can into the waters.
 

It makes the most sense for me to keep driving north, to go back to the highways that will take me home, so I turn the car around with a screech of tires and go south again.
 

I pass Chattanooga and the I-24 detour around the lost chunk of Alabama, ditching the interstate for another state route west. I drive an hour westward before I stop the car somewhere near the ghost of a town called Winchester and nearly fall out of my seat onto the asphalt.

It's only then I let myself see it again. The bodies of hells-worshippers slaughtered, not by demons.

By shades.
 

We don't kill norms. We don't kill norms. We don't kill norms.

I taught them that. I did. I am the one who taught them that we don't kill norms.
 

It sounds like something you'd tell a two-year-old.
We don't sprinkle salt on slugs, Little Tommy, it tortures them.

We don't pull the arms and legs off norms, little shades. It's bad. Wrong.
 

But they did. And Gregor knew.
 

Gregor must have told them to.

The roadside is dark, and the crickets tell me it's safe. I peel off my leathers and stand on the shoulder in my skivvies, finding a towel in the backseat of my car to sponge off the blood with some of the water from the jug in the front seat. I rub my skin until it's almost raw, but I feel better once the corrosive demon blood is gone.
 

I find a rumpled t-shirt and a pair of jean shorts stuffed under the passenger seat, and I put them on. Cleaning my swords with the towel takes more time, and I do it in the headlights to make sure I get all of the blood. By the time I'm done, the towel is ruined, but some of my sanity has returned, and my brain whirs into action.

Prying my phone out of its pocket and thankful for the oversewn seam that protects it from goo, I plug it into the charger in my car and sit, doors open, to see what shitstorm of messages exists.

Gregor's name alone makes me want to hurl.

Alamea is next, with four missed calls. Then Carrick. Mira. Even Ripper.

I call Alamea back first.

The second she picks up, I almost spit words at her. "Did you know?"

"Know what, Ayala?"

"Did you know he was going to murder norms?"

She goes silent, even the soft whisper of her breath.
 

I don't care if I deafen her. I scream it into the phone. "DID YOU KNOW, ALAMEA? DID YOU KNOW?"

"No."

I taste salt and realize I'm crying. Two and a half decades of
don't kill norms
. I still remember the sight of Hazel Lottie's head on the bloodied grasses of Miller's Field. I never wanted to feel this way again.

I hiccup into the phone. I don't know what to say.

"I didn't know," Alamea says, "but I suspected Gregor of wrongdoing."

My hand freezes to the phone against my ear. "You what?"

"I heard…things. I didn't know I could trust you. I wanted to. Now I am sure I can."

"How?"

"You are many things, Ayala Storme, but an actor is not one of them. You could not have faked your reaction to this." Alamea sounds tired and stretched, like a string pulled taut and about to break.
 

Little by little, I come back to myself. Gregor. A traitor.
 

He has used me this whole time, since he turned up in my apartment with Carrick.
 

Then something hits me. No. Not since then. Before.

"Fucking motherfucker…
fuck
!" The words trip out of my mouth, and I want to scream again.

"What is it?" The low tone in Alamea's voice is urgent, but I ignore it.

"He's been blackmailing me. Or was prepared to. Fuck." I can't stop saying fuck.
 

"Explain."

I take a deep breath, aware that I'm about to admit to the head of the Summit that I've flirted with breaking one of our primary edicts. I think of Mira and Wane, and I will keep their secret until the worms devour my marrow, but I need to tell Alamea this.

"I tried to find my mother. This summer. I sought her out. Gregor found out somehow. That's why he brought me the case of the missing people when the shades first came into the world. He knew I'd been looking for her and that she'd gone missing just like they had." I close my eyes, and the night air is cool on my eyelids.
 

I open them again and see stars twinkling brightly above, shining as if they too are waiting for Alamea to speak.

"You sought out your mother?" Alamea says, her voice full of genuine surprise. "Your mother was a host to a hybrid?"
 

The second question drips shock, and I bark a spiteful laugh. "Yes. My mother birthed both a Mediator and a shade. Go figure. And before you ask, no, I don't know who he is. I only know he's not Mason or Saturn, and probably not any of the shades I know."

"You say Gregor knew this."

"Yes. He did. And I think he was prepared to use it to blackmail me into helping him." I remember him telling me what to do, how he kept certain things from Alamea even then. I remember him showing up in my apartment with Carrick and just dumping a strange shade into my life, certain I would go along with it. I was an easy mark; he never even had to use his leverage. And tonight…

"Gods damn it. Tonight he got me out of the way. I don't know if he was trying to kill me or just distract me. I think someone came looking for me after I escaped, but I'd already gone. I had my tracker on me. They must have tried to follow."

"They did," says Alamea grimly. "They told me they lost you. I think they thought you were dead. At least wounded."

"You spoke to them?"

"Gregor called to report," she says. "I thought at first that I had misjudged you and that you were in on it with them, but then he said he lost you."

"I'm a hard one to lose."

"That you are." If I'm not mistaken, that's a note of pride I hear in her voice.

I swallow.
 

"Do you know how many demons you killed tonight?"

I stay silent, because I'm not sure I want to know, but as the quiet ticks by, curiosity starts to burn.

"Fourteen," Alamea says. "You killed fourteen. You killed an entire hellkin horde."

Well. I knew that part. But…fourteen.
 

"Ayala?"

"I'm here."

"I'm glad you're alive."

"Me too."

I take a swig from my water jug. The ice in it dislodges and splashes water all over my chin, but I don't care. It's cold and wonderful, and I'm alive.

"So," Alamea says. "We need to get you home. But first, here's what you're going to do."

I follow Alamea's directions to the letter. As soon as we hang up the phone, she texts me the address of a hospital in Cookeville, and I get in the car. I don't call or text anyone else. Not even Mira, to let her know I'm safe.
 

It takes me two hours to get to Cookeville, because I have to backtrack and go all the way north to I-40. I guzzle my Cokes and eat the remaining half bag of gummy morphs, along with a few pieces of jerky.
 

I only hope her plan works.
 

When I arrive in Cookeville, I stop at a 24-hour Wal-Mart and pick up a pair of yoga pants, a beanie, and a hoodie. Then I go through a drive thru and order the messiest burrito I can find. I make sure to drip on the hoodie, wiping off the spill with a napkin. When I'm done eating, I go to a motel at the edge of town where Alamea has already paid for a room for me. Before I check in, I tuck all my yellow-orange hair up into the beanie and pull the hoodie up over it. The motel manager doesn't look at me twice.
 

For the next day, I drink only water and don't change my clothes.
 

My phone blows up for the first day, mostly Mira. Then nothing. I let my phone die and throw my charger in the trash outside the motel room.

On the second day, I go to the hospital and call Gregor from the lobby courtesy phone.

He says he'll be right there.
 

While I wait, I relive the night that didn't happen, but that Gregor will soon believe did.

The jeeling almost killed me.
 

It gored me through the shoulder with its own shoulder spike. I killed it last, and I stumbled to my car. The venom of the jeeling spike and the slummoth blood on my leathers made me delirious. I threw my tracker in the lake, got as far as I-40, and passed out on the side of the road. When I woke up, my phone was dead.
 
I made it to the Cookeville hospital and collapsed.
 

They gave me two bags of fluids and kept me all day and the next night, and released me.

My hoodie smells like my story is true. It looks like I found it in my car, and it covers my neck where even a Mediator wouldn't have healed from being gored by now. My hair is greasy and pulled back with one of those blue rubber bands you find on broccoli.

When Gregor arrives, he finds me huddled on a plastic love seat.
 

"Thank gods, Storme, I thought they'd done you in."

"Still kicking," I say. "No thanks to you."

Alamea's right. I'm not an actor. Which is why I'm going to be as pissed at him as I can be.
 

He looks around, as if searching for a nurse or someone in charge of me. Seeing no one, he plunks down next to me on the love seat. I scoot away.
 

"They release you officially?"

"I thought about just driving off, but I wanted to see you face to face."

"Storme, I'm sorry." Somehow Gregor manages to work his blocky face into something resembling contrition.
 

"Oh? Sorry you left me to fend for myself with a horde of hellkin? Or sorry they didn't finish the job?"

Anger rises in me, but not on my own behalf. I keep the bodies of the hells-worshippers firmly in my mind.
 

"We got held up," he says, and he pauses.
 

I wait for it. This is it. This is the lie he plans to tell me.
 

"And exactly how many shades and washed up Mediators
does
it take to change a flat tire?" That fills me with another flash of fury. He thought I'd buy that. I don't even think I bought that when he said it on the phone.
 

"It wasn't that, Storme," he says. He looks at me and sighs heavily.
 

And Alamea says I'm the one who's no actor.

"Then what the fucknuts was it?"

"The hells-zealots," he says. "We found them and they were dead. Murdered by the hellkin. Splatted. We fanned out, because their tracks led away to the south, but by the time we got back to where you were, you were gone."

Cute.
 

His speech is touchingly false, but he does tell me one important thing: he doesn't know I saw the bodies. He has no idea I saw what he really did. His use of the word
splatted
tells me that.

I've seen splats. All Mediators have. Demons pulp people. Shades tear them apart and gnaw on the leftovers. Those hells-worshippers were no hellkin kills. Those were shades, even if they weren't eaten.
 

At least Gregor didn't let them go that far.

He listens to my story with his normal stoicism, which is how I know he believes me. When I'm done, he even gives me an awkward sort of hug, and I make sure to punch him in the shoulder for it.

I bicker with Gregor just enough to get him to think I'm okay to drive home, and I agree to let him follow me.

I think of Carrick at home and wonder how I'm going to face him every day now.
 

He better have fucking fed Nana.