Any Port in a Storm (11 page)

It's hunting season, and as we walk through the underbrush and kudzu in the direction of the farmer's land, I keep my eyes peeled for any flash of orange among the trees. The last thing we need is some trigger-happy hunter alerting the shades to our presence. The news has probably spread enough to keep norms away from this place, but it only takes one clueless out of towner to spoil the surprise.

I look at the GPS tracker Gregor gave me. We're about a mile out from the barn, which I know from pictures is in an overgrown meadow the forest is trying to swallow. This time we split into three teams led by me, Carrick, and Miles. Gregor, I suspect, is sitting in a Crossville diner watching the blip of our GPS movement crawl across a screen.
 

Carrick leads his four shades up to the north, and Miles takes his to the east. I take my team, which consists of Carus, Udo, and Sanj, to the southwest. We linger for twenty minutes where we are, and I keep an eye on the green dots that are Miles and Carrick as they get into position. They each agreed to wear a tracker on a necklace. After all, it's not like they have any pockets you'd want to put a piece of tech into.

Not if you wanted it back, anyway.

When the others are finally in place, I motion to Udo and the others. Udo is short and lithe, like a young Jackie Chan. He moves like Spider-Man and looks like he could climb a pane of glass with only his fingertips. Sanj has a mop of black hair and brown skin and walks forward in sporadic bursts. He reminds me of a sparking live wire. Carus is white, but tanned to the point where his blond hair looks like he belongs on an eighties magazine cover. I didn't know shades could tan until I met Carus. Apparently he likes the sun.

The four of us approach the barn — or at least I think we do. All I have to go from is the little green dots converging on a green X on the GPS screen. Half a mile out, I still don't know if we're going to find the barn or a herd of deer.

A quarter mile out, I see a fluorescent orange mark on a tree, the paint still wet and dribbling down the bark like the oh-fuck feeling dribbling down the inside of my stomach.

Hunters. Nearby. They couldn't have come through here more than fifteen or twenty minutes ago.

The barn appears through the trees under the dawn-grey sky, quiet and innocuous.
 

I want to hope that whoever spray painted that mark on the tree was heading northwest, away from the barn and out of the range of these murderous shades. Going out to bag a deer and ending up caught between warring hellkin hybrids and a pissed off Mediator is a pretty crappy turn to the day.

I try to keep that little hope alive, but with every step toward the barn, it sputters.

A scrap of torn bright orange fabric snuffs it out entirely.

Miles' and Carrick's dots are still; with mine, they triangulate the barn. I listen for anything my ears can pick up. Sleepy crickets settling down for the night, a cold breeze rustling from the north that carries the slightest scent of woodsmoke.
 

We fan out until the fourteen of us form a circle around the barn. Next to me, Udo shifts his shoulders and goes still, his flaring nostrils the only movement I see him make.
 

After a moment, I see why. The coppery scent of blood, fresh blood, wafts through the air.
 

Carrick is thirty yards away, only just visible on the other side of the barn. The building is a small structure, maybe twenty feet by twenty feet. Sided in hickory, the wood in places is half-eaten by dry rot, but not quite enough to provide any visibility inside. That doesn't mean that the shades inside can't see out, though.

I can't see the door from where I stand, but pictures Gregor showed me allow me to visualize it, a large wooden panel on a rusty slide, facing east.
 

Turns out the shades inside don't plan to use the door.

I get one shouted warning from Carrick, and a blur coupled with the thuds of footsteps on the roof becomes a pale comet launching itself from the building at me. I whip my swords from their sheaths and dive to the side, rolling and bouncing back to my feet. Two more shapes leap from the roof of the barn in my direction. I have enough time to realize that they're using a blitz tactic before one hits me.
 

I'm ready, and I don't lose my footing, thrusting my sword into the hard muscles of my attacker's arm. His white skin is brushed with blood like paint, the strokes as varied as an impressionist's. My stab wound adds to it a stream down his bicep, but he doesn't stop. I jump back from him, putting steel between me and his hands that can tear my limbs off.

My saber comes down on the side of his neck, sending arterial spray arcing across my body. The shade stumbles, and I finish the job, my body flowing through the movement with grim purpose. Udo and Sanj have a second shade stretched by the arms between them, and ten feet away, Carus kneels on another. I don't watch, but I hear the snap of the enemy shades' spines as my battalion of killers takes off their heads.
 

Three down, and the sounds of growls tells me Gregor was wrong about it being a trio. The three shades on my team and I move east toward the barn door. Miles has wrenched it open, and from the bodies littered around it, another five shades boiled out.

There are still two alive.

One goes down as I watch, Harkan and Hux finishing him.

The last one is cornered in the barn, his eyes darting to the rafters above him as if calculating the possibility of a successful jump, and Hayn and Rex stalk toward him.
 

In the morning light, the final shade's eyes shine with a silvery sheen, and I can almost smell the stench of his terror over the copper blood that I can see now as well as smell. It coats the inside of the barn, seeping into the hard-packed dirt floor. I try not to look at the lump of red-spashed bright orange in the corner.

The shade backs away from Hayn and Rex until his back is against the wall.
 

"Help," he says.

I stop two steps inside the barn.

"Wait," I say.

Hayn and Rex slow their advance, but they don't stop. The shade goes still between them, looking back and forth with pleading eyes.

I try not to think of the carnage behind me or the twelve Crossville people Gregor told me have gone missing.

The shade closes his eyes and puts his hands in the air, and Hayn and Rex take that opportunity to pin his arms to the rough wooden wall.

"Help," the shade says again.

"He wants to surrender." The words spill from my lips, and the shade nods, sharp jerks of his head.
 

"Surrender." His words feel jagged around the edges, like he's not used to talking.
 

I feel Carrick's presence behind me before I see him pass by my right shoulder. I walk forward, toward the shade.
 

Urgently, I turn to Carrick. "He wants to surrender. We should help him. Teach him."

Carrick keeps walking, and suddenly I'm very aware of the other shades watching me. The one pinned to the wall still has his eyes closed.

"Carrick!"

"Help," the shade keens. "Help, help, help, surrender, help, help, surrender."

His words blur together in my mind, over and over,
helphelphelpsurrenderhelphelpsurrender.

"Carrick!"
My voice holds tinny panic, and I feel frozen in the gaze of the other shades, Udo and Harkan, Hux and Beex, Holden and Carus, Sanj and Lawlor, Boyne and Miles, Hayn and Rex. Their eyes burn me.

Carrick's hands find the shade's neck.

His pleas cut off.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Mira hands me a mug with Pooh Bear on it, and the smoky heat of the whisky within reaches my nose. I take a big drink, hating that my hand is trying to shake on the mug's handle. Mira's dressed all in black, freshly showered with her sleek, asymmetrical cap of black hair so perfectly styled that she could easily waltz onto a photo shoot without anyone asking questions. Her bottom lip, though, is wedged between her top and bottom teeth, tucked into her mouth as she watches me take another sip of whisky. And another.

I don't really know why I'm here, except I didn't know where else to go.

Mira's table is shining mahogany that reflects the sunlight from the window. The top of the window is purple and red stained glass that casts glowing colors on the table. Mira sits across from me, her palms flat on the surface and her eyes tracking my every move.

The alcohol suffuses me with warmth like the early afternoon sunlight and a pleasant buzz, but it doesn't help. Not really.

In my mind, the track replays over and over again. The shade saying
helphelphelpsurrenderhelphelpsurrender
over and over until I don't know where one word starts and the other ends and I want to put my hands over my ears, even though I know that's crazy. I can't drown him out. I can't make it stop. He won't go away. He'll live in me now, this memory of a being who didn't want to die.

Gregor told me calmly that the shade was going to double cross us, that as soon as we'd turned our backs, he would have fled into the woods and eaten someone's first grader or something. I nodded along, numb and quiet, and when Gregor said he needed to talk to Carrick, I got in my car and drove straight here.

Again I remember the warehouse I blew up with more than twenty shades in it. It was my intel, my plan, my idea. Take them out. Monsters. Murderers. Demons.

And then one of them saved my life.
 

What would Mason think, if he were here?
 

Would that shade have been safe with him?

If there's anything I've learned about shades, its that they are just as much a duality of nature and nurture as norms are. In my mind, a dozen scenarios play out at once, like forks of the Cumberland, twisting through eventualities where that surrendering shade dreamed of something more, remembered his mother, wanted to be different, didn't know how.

Maybe we could have helped him. Maybe I could have helped him.

I swig down the rest of the whisky, and as soon as the mug hits the table, Mira refills it.
 

She knows; I told her. She watches me, waiting for me to say something.

"I could have stopped him," I blurt out. The whisky on my lips tingles, numbing the fragile skin.

She knows the
him
I'm referencing is Carrick. And it's true.

I could have stopped him. I could have gotten between them, thought faster, been cleverer. But I didn't.

"What would you have done if they'd all turned on you?" she asks carefully. Her voice is even and calm like a pond at first light. For once there's no swearing from her, just a question.

The question gives me pause. Would they? Would the shades I've spent months with simply take me down for challenging Carrick? Again my shoulders remember the touches of their fingers, the tiny touches that speak so huge. Trust. Safety. Confidence. I want to believe that those touches would translate into my immunity from their violence, but suddenly I don't know.

"I would have died." I know her question is rhetorical, but I have to say the words out loud. They don't absolve me of the surrendering shade's death, but they give me some comfort in their truth. I couldn't face all those shades on my own. I would be pulped in three seconds.
 

I take another drink of whisky and set the mug down again.

Mira reaches across the table and takes my hands. Her hands are so like mine. Calluses from years of wielding blades. Nails trimmed to the quick. Nicks and small scars from blades that slipped while sharpening them. They're warm and strong, and they return some of my own strength to me.

"You did the best you could," she says. Then she pulls back and stands up, going to the kitchen. She returns a minute later with a plate bearing unceremoniously dumped crackers and pre-cut squares of cheese. "Better eat something, you sad bastard, or you'll have a hangover from the hells."

I pick up a piece of cheese and nibble on it, a sharp white cheddar that's usually one of my favorites but right now I can barely taste.
 

"Is it always like this for you?" Mira asks suddenly.
 

"Like what?" I feel tired and weighed down. Maybe it's the whisky making my arms feel heavy, but I feel like it's only taking hold of an exhaustion that already exists.

"Always questioning. Wondering constantly if you're making the right decisions."

I look at her, unsure if it's only me we're talking about. Her mouth is pursed just a bit on one side, and she watches me intently.
 

"Yes," I say. Then after a beat, "Didn't used to be."

"Things used to be simpler."

"That they did."

Norms good, demons bad. Keep the balance. Right the scales. I was good at that.
 

I don't know what I'm good at anymore. Continuing to breathe? I guess that's a plus.

"What made you disobey Alamea this summer?" I ask Mira. I think back to Miller's Field that day, just as the sun set. Mason chained beside me. Mediator swords at my throat. We were the bait for Saturn and the rest of the shades. I was the only Mediator who spoke for the shades, and in the end, with the field teeming with demons, it was the shades that kept us all from getting dead. All of the Mediators were ready to kill as many hellkin hybrids as they could, never mind that I'd told them the shades have free will and that Mason had saved my life. Mira was the only one who refused. I want to know why.