Storm in a Teacup (10 page)

Chunks.

I can't see from here, but if I were a betting woman, I'd put money on seeing light brown matted dreadlocks around hellkin necks.

Not trophies at all.

Relics.

I work my jaw open and closed to hold the strangled whimper in my throat. I don't dare signal to Ripper and Ben across the clearing. For the first time, I start counting demons. I see slummoths, slimy skin glistening in the light of a gibbous moon and glowing pale pink when they move near a jeeling. Rakaths, their spines rolling like waves as they move. Massive jeelings towering above the others.

Sweat beads on my upper lip, and I wipe it away with my left hand. Times like this I wish I could communicate with telepathy. I don't know what to do. There are over fifteen demons in the clearing, and even on a great day three is a lot. And today's not a great day, because I had a one of those when I took down three two days ago. My flesh may be healed, but five to one odds make the claw wound in my side twinge.

So I'll wait.

I wrap my leg around my branch, shifting my weight away from the knot digging into my ass.
 

The demons seem to be waiting too.

The unfurling rumble continues, and I'm startled to find that I have grown accustomed to it. That's why I notice when it changes.
 

Several of the demons let out a booming "
GRAH
!" that vibrates the tree beneath me.

It's only twenty-six years of training that keep me attached to my branch. The demons pulse forward and back, forward and back, forward and back. I don't know what they're waiting for, and a chill zigzags down my spine.

There wasn't the space for this sort of ritual in the splat house. This feels different. Worshipful.

Lena doesn't look afraid. She looks proud. Her face is drawn and grey, but the set of her jaw pushes her chin forward, fierce and determined.

What in the six and a half hells is going on here?

Whatever they're waiting for doesn't happen. So I stay in my tree as the minutes bleed into hours and numb is what I wish for my ass.
 

Once I catch a flicker of movement on the opposite side of the clearing, and I cross both arms in front of me in an X. If Ripper can see me, he'll know I want him to hold. The hours slide by. After what feels like a hundred of them, the first lights of dawn begin to paint the sky with pastel blue-green.
 

The demons don't budge from their circle, don't alter their tone or timbre.
 

I have never seen demons stay for the sun. The sun kills them. At least we assume, because they always skeedaddle like the golden rays are an angry farm wife's broom long before the sky turns light like this.
 

"Gaaaaaaraaaah!" The cry rises from the circle of demons, and I teeter against my nonexistent backside.
 

A foot bursts from Lena's ribcage.

Blood-covered and kicking, another explodes from her shoulder. I'm frozen, glued, stuck. I can't move. I can't breathe.
 

Lena collapses into the circle of demons. I see only glimpses.

Hands in fists.

Blood.

Lena's face, smooth and peaceful as a lily pad on a lake, rolls to the side. Her eyes open once, widen in surprise, and close.
 

It's only then I see her head isn't attached to her body.
 

Her body is gone.

Pulped.

Just as I didn't see the demons come, I don't see them go.

Except one. A slummoth cradles her head in its hands, claws nestled deeply in her scraggly hair. It lets out a triumphant bellow.

All I see are the sun's golden fingers caressing Lena's shining brown hair between its claws. The slummoth sizzles. Great boils rise on its skin, and they pop with audible
ploop-ploop-ploop
sounds. It screams through melting lips as Lena's hair catches fire. Flames lick up its arms, course over its slimy body, igniting it from fingers to toes to the top of its head.
 

Oily black smoke rises through the purity of oblivious morning. The golden rays incinerate the slummoth until a puff of breeze blows the smoke away.

All that remains is the sun and ash. The sun turns the blood to rubies on the bed of pine needles.

The sun brushes against a mass of blood, a pile of organs that escaped me during the slummoth's self-immolation.

The mass moves.

A body unfolds, glistening carmine in the dawn's light.

A humanoid face. I see it only in two-third's profile. Before I can react, it bunches its legs beneath it and blurs into the woods, the sun dappling its muscular back.

I fall from the tree more than jump, lurching off to the side to heave onto the oak's exposed roots.

The only thought in my mind is:
Could this have been my mother's end?

Ripper and Ben run across the clearing, skirting what's left of Lena Saturn. Their lips bear evidence that they've done the same as I'm doing right now. Their faces are tight white, movement stiff from all night in a tree.

None of us speak as I stumble toward the remains of the girl I've been searching for. If her head were still stuck to her shoulders and the rest of her still intact, she would look like she were sleeping, but for the post-mortem burn marks across her ears and cheeks.

Instead her arms are ten feet apart, and her pelvic bone looks like what Gryfflet and I found in The Righteous Dark's apartment. Exploded. From the inside out.
 

I don't know what to make of what we've seen. My birth mother. Leila Storme. Was this her fate? It's the first time since beginning this search that I've been able to think her name. It strikes me that she had the same initials as Lena Saturn. Coincidence or not, it makes me want to shred the bark of the tree next to me. If it's true, she's long gone. And we're here, in the present, faced with a whole new hell on our doorstep, banging on the knocker like a Jehovah's Witness.

Ben's the first one to ask.
 

"What was that?" His voice comes out like he's wearing a mask, hoarse and muffled.
 

I shake my head, staring off into the direction the creature ran. Ripper follows my gaze, then traces a line of sight back to Lena's severed head. The thing looked human. How did a fully-grown human fit inside Lena Saturn? Even as I think it, I know how stupid the thought is. It wasn't human. It wasn't anything close to human.

"The sun," I say.
 

Ripper nods. "It didn't hurt it."

Ben flinches away from the words as though Ripper has waggled Lena's left arm at him.

"What the hell did we just see?"
 

"A demon?" Ripper stretches, pulling his arms in front of his body to elongate the curve of his shoulders. "But hellkin can't walk in the sun."

"It came from Lena." I state the obvious. "She...spawned it."

"Do you think she was a demon?" Ben visibly gathers himself, folding his hands behind his back and looking anywhere but at the blood-soaked ground.

"She wasn't a demon. And that was..." I drop my words before continuing. "I don't know what that was."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

"We'll handle this."

Alamea's "we'll handle this" sounds suspiciously like a door slamming in my face. Ripper and Ben are clustered around me in her small office, and they look about as happy as I feel about her words.
 

"You got the part where a creature exploded out of Lena Saturn and pranced into the woods in the fucking sunlight, didn't you?" I don't usually like to swear at Alamea. But right now I want to swear a lot.

"We understand, Ayala. You can all go home. Get some rest. Unkink your muscles. We will take care of the creatures.

We fight demons. We kill them to keep the balance. Whatever cosmic scale exists, the measure tips according to how many demons are in the world. When we hack them up, it rights things. I feel when the scale is unbalanced. I feel the weight against my chest like a bucket full of rocks. And right now, I feel like that bucket is a dump truck.

One of them for every one of us, my ass.

Something is unbalanced. Something is wrong. And that something ran off into the woods.

"I've been helping Gregor with this. Let me stay on the case." I'm surprised at the words that come out of my mouth. It sounds almost like a wheedle, and that's Ben's last name, not mine.
 

"You didn't want to help him at first, and I'm telling you to back off." Alamea stands, long fingers against her desk as she leans forward to look at me. "Ayala, this is beyond your control."

That's not something I take well.

Alamea shoos us out of her office and clicks down the corridor, leaving us standing in front of her locked door.

Ripper shrugs. "Guess that's that."

I turn and take a step closer to him. The toe of my boot runs into his, and I can smell his breath. It's like morning breath, but worse. Coffee mixed with a night in a tree.
 

"Really? That's all? You're just going to sit, stay, and go back to your crate?"

"That's not fair, Ayala. She gave us an order." Ben pokes me in the shoulder, and Ripper steps to the side without retreating.

Ben's right. Alamea is the head honcho in these parts. I don't have any kind of right to ignore her authority, but the thought of that creature running off into the forest covered in the blood of a human woman flusters me. And I still hear the slummoth's dying screech echoing through my ears. I wave my hand in the direction of Ben and Ripper and walk away.

I get in my car and sit for a full five minutes with the radio on. I couldn't tell you what kind of music is on, because my brain is full of seeing Lena explode.

I've never seen someone get splatted before.
 

That's not even what's bothering me. There's something deeply off-centered about what I saw this morning. Pieces that swirl in my head, trying to fit, failing.

And one that fits too well. My mother. A splat.

I put the car in gear and peel out of the parking lot. I know one person who might have the answer.

The morgue is about a fifteen minute drive from the Summit, but I make it in eleven. The receptionist buzzes me in, and I hurry down the hall to room three.

The coroner's office looks exactly like you might expect. The whitewashed walls glow sick yellow in the fluorescent lights. Models of the human body queue up on a shelf next to her desk, which is tidy and wearing a light blanket of papers, spread out, but organized. The only thing out of place is a collection of plastic kittens with disproportionately large eyes. Her nameplate even has a kitten sticker on it. Coroner Martha Birkberry.
 

She doesn't look up from her typing, peering down her nose at the screen of her computer in a way that looks uncomfortable. If she just pushed her glasses up, she wouldn't have to crane her neck.

"Excuse me," I say.

If I expected her to jump, she disappoints me. Instead she meets my eyes around the edge of her monitor. "Mediator Storme. How can I help you?"

I point at a chair. "May I?"

"Of course. But I have an autopsy in ten minutes, so you'll have to make this quick."

"I'll try." I pause, considering how much I can tell her about last night without Alamea putting me on receptionist duty. Not that I've ever heard of that happening to a Mediator out of training, but Alamea has been known to surprise a body. I decide to leave out the part where I found Lena alive.
 

"We found another splat last night."

That gets Birkberry's attention. She slides her chair back a couple inches to look at me and interlaces her fingers for a moment before untangling them and stashing her hands in her lap. "Pelvis broken by an expulsion of internal pressure?"

"Yes. And I think there was something inside that came out."

Birkberry nods, blinking once. She's not surprised. "And you saw the something you suspect was inside?"

I don't have to answer, and she chews on the corner of her lip.
 

I change lines of questioning. "You said there was one other splat you found that matched the one from the apartment?"