Storm in a Teacup (21 page)

"They went on." I swallow, my esophagus sticking to itself. "For a minute. Maybe two. Or thirty seconds. I don't know."

"Did you see anything? How many did we get?"

I shut my eyes. "Twenty. Maybe fifty."

Stunned silence greets my assertion.
 

I open my eyes again. "I couldn't count."

"How did you get out?" Ben's talking to me, but he's looking at Gregor. "How did you get away?"

I don't know what to say. I can't tell them the truth. Then I remember the lights, how they shocked me. "The lights. It blinded them. Long enough for me to get away."

Mira slaps Ben on the shoulder. "That did it. It did. Your witch Gryffin?"

"Gryfflet? Gryffin's his dad." Standing is becoming not easy. I sway on my feet, and Ben catches my shoulder. He doesn't even cringe from the smell. "Gryfflet did that?"

"He did."

"Good for him."

Gregor snakes an arm under my other side. "We need to get you out of here."

I can't argue with that.

They start hauling me away, Ripper and Mira bringing up the rear. My legs work enough to walk, but if I had to try without support I don't know if I'd make it. Yeah. I'm a big Mediator with pointy knives, and I'm fucking terrified.

Still.

My eyes search before us as our little procession moves forward between train cars and the remaining warehouses. Chunks of debris litter the ground, thrown from the explosion. And when we turn, the smoke hits me full in the face.

It smells like a crematoria.

It kind of is.

I turn back once.

A hulking shape crouches on the roof.

Watching me.

Never before has a bath felt so good.

Mira's still out in my living room, sipping a glass of wine. She threatened to stay with me for two days, but I'm hoping I can convince her in the morning to, well, leave.

I'm fine. I think.

My leather cleaner is going to be unhappy about the damage my clothes sustained. I don't even know how to start cleaning piss and adipocere from leather. They might be lost to me.

I sink into the bubbles. I've already changed the water twice. My hair — I've had it full of some nasty shit in its day. Including actual shit. But today it took five rinses under the shower head before I trusted it in the bath. Even then it colored the water red-brown when I dunked it, and it grossed me out so much that I rinsed it for another ten minutes.
 

Now it's clean. Ish. I've washed it three times, at least until the water ran clear.
 

I made the mistake of looking in the mirror before I got in the tub. No wonder Ben was looking at me like I was some sort of catatonic Holocaust survivor.
 

I looked like I'd been dunked in blood. Chunks of rotting flesh stuck to my hair and skin and clothes. My hair matted with gore. I don't blame him. Especially because I'll never get that image of myself out of my memory.

I don't know that I'll feel clean for a month, but it's a start.

For half an hour, I let the water lap the sides of the bath, soaking away as much of the night as I can.

Once I'm out, I survey the damage. There's no cut on my head, which means the shade didn't break my skin when he punched my lights out.

He. Him.

When did I stop calling him an it?
 

The question bothers me, makes my hair stand up on my naked arms. I pull my bath sheet around me, feeling very small. I think back through the fuzz of the concussion.

Then I find it.
 

I started thinking of him as a he and not an it when he first spoke.

My whole body quivers inside the bath sheet. It's warm and steamy in the bathroom, even with the air conditioning. I'm trembling like a frightened rabbit because suddenly I don't know what's right anymore.

My whole life has been straightforward. Norms good. Demons bad. Demons very, very bad. Black and white. That's how it has
always been
. Since the first Mediators, that's the world. Demons are bad. That's it. They're never good. They don't feel. They don't have souls. They don't have goodness and light and compassion and empathy. They don't have feelings except rage and hunger. They have no pity, no charity, no real intelligence.

But the indigo eyes in the face that saved me from being torn to bits — intelligent. Pitying. Honest, in a strange way.

My mind flashes back to Madeline's, the thin, curving smile on the face of the shade after it tossed the businessman onto my plate. Plate. Breakfast. Did it make a
joke
?

I sink to the floor, toes curling on my thick bath mat.
 

I don't know what to do.

I've killed four of the creatures with my own metal. And how many more with my demolition plan? What if there were more like the one who helped me?

No. No. I scrunch my eyes shut and press my face against my knees, tugging the bath sheet's nubby softness tight across my huddled body. Hellkin are bad. They're all bad. Any other thing is just impossibility.

Except it's not. Something part demon — half-demon — saved my existence today. Saved me from getting eaten. Up with burning, getting eaten tops my list of ways to avoid going out.
 

A shade saved me. A shade. A creature. A half-human, half-hellkin hybrid of a creature. A monstrous thing that shouldn't exist, that came into being only by ripping a human to shreds from the inside out.

Something that came into being wearing nothing but blood.

The warehouse was like a sick attempt to reconstruct their wombs.
 

The thought sticks in my head like an ice pick.
 

They don't even need wombs. Birkberry said some of the exploded splats have been male.
 

I need wine, and I need it now.

I get to my feet, wobbling for another moment. By tomorrow, my concussion should have faded enough for me to regain my balance. But now I just want to collapse on my sofa and drink myself into unconsciousness.

I don't even care if you're not supposed to fall asleep with a wonky head bonk. That's what Mira's here for, to wake me up and make sure I'm not dead. She can do that just as well if I'm drunk.

There's a puffy pair of fleece pajamas I keep wedged at the back of my bottom drawer just for such occasions — though this one's about as unique as you can get. I drag them out and sit down on the edge of my bed to pull the pants on, shrugging into the shirt as soon as I'm done.
 

Mira's read my mind. She's lined up two bottles on the coffee table along with my corkscrew. Some wine aficionados buy those crazy gadgets that basically just look at a wine bottle and uncork it. I'm old school. The corkscrew ain't going nowhere. Mira herself is curled up in my armchair, looking far from sleepy. Her black hair falls over one violet eye, and she pushes it back as I enter the living room.

"Better?"
 

I like Mira. Economy of words. I don't see her much, and I wouldn't call us friends, but she's cool. "Cleaner."

Flopping on the couch sounds like a great idea, but I don't trust my head not to trigger a gag reflex if I do. Instead, I sit gingerly and lower myself backward. Mira unfolds her long legs and picks up a bottle of cabernet.

"I figured you might want this. Remember the rakath slaughter we walked in on just out of training?"

I can't help the chuff of a laugh that escapes. I forgot she was there for that. We'd stumbled across three rakaths about to make a splat of a teenager. The two of us took them down, but we each took about seventy needles to various parts of our bodies. We looked like we'd been fighting really pissed off, giant porcupines when Gregor found us. Then that night we got ourselves hammered on box wine we convinced a tripped-out morph to buy for us.

Come to think of it, Ben was there that night too. Not drunk though. He was always terrified of the law.

I accept the glass she pours me and settle back against the fluffy cushions of my sofa. "To traditions."

She raises her glass and sits back on the armchair. "Really though, Storme. You okay? Cleaner isn't a synonym for better."

"Have you seen my apartment?" I wish I could say I was better. At least my apartment is spotless, and after the hour-long shower I plan to take again in the morning, I should be too.

"Not the same. Fuck. If I'd been in that warehouse, I'd be a gibbering lunatic right about now. You should have heard Devon when he came stumbling back."

I almost sit straight up. "Devon. Is he okay?"

Mira shakes her head. "He's fucking torn up, Storme. But he's alive. They almost took his arm off. The hospital managed to keep it on, but his shoulder was dislocated and only the tendons and shit were actually holding it together. He'll be in a body cast for two months. He wants to see you, though. When you're recovered."

Body cast. Two months in a body cast. For a Mediator, that's like being in solitary confinement for a year.
 

Here I am, sitting on my couch chatting with Mira, sipping cabernet.
 

For the first time all night, I feel fortunate.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Mira's adamant about sticking around, and as much as I hate her for the five times she wakes me up through the night, at least I'm alive and not in a body cast.

I forgive her for being a human alarm clock when she ducks out and arrives with bagels and coffee at eleven thirty the next morning. And I forgive her even more when she finds a Terminator marathon on one of the movie channels. There are worse ways to spend a Friday. Arnold may be a morph who spends a few days as a grizzly bear each month, but he sure knows action movies.

By Friday night, Mira decides that my brain isn't going to implode and leaves with a promise to return Saturday to check on me. And I'm not allowed to patrol. Another night in a week where I won't be patrolling. It just feels off.

But part of me is relieved.

One more day I don't have to face one of the creatures. I haven't been really scared of demons since I first killed one. I was seven and terrified. It was a harkast, which are slow and not very big. They have stumpy legs that make it hard for them to get away from anything faster than a tortoise, and I sliced its head off with my short sword. I knew then I was doing the right thing. I knew it.
 

Now? If I have to fight a shade, I don't know if killing it will be the right thing to do. I don't know if I'll be killing a monster or a man. I don't even know if the one who saved me was a man. Just that it didn't gut me when it had the chance.

I haven't left the sofa all day, and I don't much intend to. But I have to pee, and charming as my little accident last night really was, I'd rather do it in the porcelain bowl like normal people rather than in my fleecy pajama pants. I can't make myself look in the mirror. Even though I know my skin is free of blood now, I still picture myself as I was last night. It makes me shudder as I flush the toilet.

I open the door to the bathroom.

There's a shade on my sofa.

I stumble backward and hit my head on the door. My still-recovering brain feels like pudding inside my skull, pain blossoming anew at the point of impact. Fear hits like a fist in my gut, reaching back toward my spine. I pitch into the wall, tripping over my feet.

Strong arms catch me around the waist and right me. I'm looking into indigo eyes that seem to be shaking. No. The eyes aren't shaking. My whole body is shaking with quick fluttery breaths.
 

I close my mouth and breathe through my nose. It doesn't help. I can't get enough air. In my home. It's in my home.

My head twists to the left. All my bolts are closed. All of them, even the slide lock. There's no way it could have gotten in. Except Mira. Did she let it in? I look past the shade's shoulder. To the balcony.

The balcony.

I'm seven stories up. I don't lock my balcony door. But I sure as hell will now.

If I'm alive to do it.

The shade's hands are still on my waist, and the rubbery feeling of my legs tells me those hands are the only things keeping me upright.