Storm in a Teacup (34 page)

Who were these people?

Box thirty-six contains a wallet. I make myself stand, tell my knees to support me. They allow me to walk forward stiff-legged. I pull out the wallet.

A couple credit cards. A driver's license. Tennessean. A smiling face beams out from the picture, far happier than I've ever looked in a state-issued ID.

Through the plastic protector, I read the name.

Mae Harrod.

Mae.
 

"I read it on a jar." Again I hear Mason describe how he picked his name. At the time, I didn't think about how arbitrary it sounded to choose a name from a jar. I just brushed it off like some quirky shade thing. I think of Saturn, who chose his from his mother's.

Mae Harrod. Mason. Mae's son.
 

I'm holding a remnant of Mason's mother. Eighty-three boxes. At least fifty shades are still out there. Fifty. And another could be on its way into the world through my office's receptionist.

Did Alice puke on the floor because she was about to mate with a demon?

Most of the other boxes contain no identifiers. I try to time it back from Mae Harrod. Is Leila Storme box two, with the storm cloud colored nail polish? Or is she box fourteen, with a comic book bearing a lightning bolt? Or maybe she's box eight, which holds nothing but a tub of lip balm, quite like Alice's. Anonymous. I'll never know which one of these is my mother, if any of them.

Mae Harrod's wallet goes slick in my hand even in the short walk outside to my car. I don't know who to call about this. Alamea wants my head garnished with slummoth slime, Gregor is Gregor, and the police wouldn't know where to start.

Ben?
 

He'd be the one to shove my head under the guillotine. All his acting like he had a MIT-yard crush on me.

I might not be able to call anyone, but I can document what I saw.

I toss the wallet under the driver's seat of my car and head back into the house. I snap pictures of the crusted smear of vomit, the demon figurines lined up on their shelf, and the hundred cubby holes, eighty-three percent full.

Alice's phone on the charger merits the last picture. Then I realize I haven't gone into Hazel's room. After what I've seen here, I don't know that I want to.

Her door has mutated from the crappy hollow paneling concealing the bedroom of an old lady and her dentures to something more ominous. What if I find Alice in there, already pregnant and doomed to have a shade claw its way out of her? I approach the door with steps that make the floor creak like old bones.

I take shallow breaths through my nose and push open the door.
 

Hazel's bedroom is as tidy and odd as the rest of the house. Her bed skirt is made of neckties just like the chair in her living room. An all-white, starched quilt covers the mattress and twin pillow shams. When I open her closet, I only find hanging clothes, a dresser housing only underwear and an array of lacy bras, and the mothballs I expected in the spare room.
 

The room smells of damp must and that perfume only old women wear. Eau de Over the Hill.

Only one other piece of furniture occupies the bedroom. Across from the bed, there's a small vanity. Just like the sewing table, all her toiletries are lined out, regimented. Hairbrush, comb, eyelash curler, powder, perfume — which is actually called Mystique. I think my name for it's more fitting.

Three small drawers line either side of the vanity. The top two hold only cotton balls and a few small mirrors.
 

Something glints as I pull open the middle drawer.

A pile of small metal discs.
 

I reel backward, unable to process what I'm seeing. I remember Gryfflet holding one of those, terrified as it glowed. Tracing it to find The Righteous Dark exploded all over their reeking apartment. And one that Hazel Lottie handed to me, pretending not to know what it was.

She was trying to make a splat of me.

And I was idiotic enough not to get it.

I photograph the discs, too. Maybe she's a witch, or maybe the demons spell them so they can find the holder. I don't know, and I don't care.

All I know is they're a death warrant for anyone who's too close to them when the demons respond to the call.

The discs shine at me in the dim light. It doesn't take much for me to imagine a countdown pulsing at me.

Ticking down the seconds until Alice dies.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

"Mason?" I call his name before I finish bolting the door shut. "Mason! Where are you?"

Alkaline nerves jitter across my chest when only silence greets me, but a moment later the slide of the balcony door reaches my ears.

Mason comes around the corner of the kitchen, frowning at me. "Are you okay?"

I tell him what I found at Hazel's house, and about Alice. He doesn't know her from the Dalai Lama, but his forehead creases when I finish relating the story.
 

"There's more," I tell him. I pull Mae Harrod's wallet from my bag and hand it to him. "Why didn't you tell me your mother's name was Mae?"

Mason takes the wallet and tugs it open. His face slackens at the sight of the picture, and he snaps the clasp shut again. "I didn't think it was important."

"It's important to you. You gave yourself part of her name. Saturn did the same from his mother's name."

Silence slips between us. I want to reach out and touch his hand now, but his entire body is so still. His gaze falls like crumpled flower petals to the wallet in his hands.
 

"I killed her. For nothing more than her giving me life. Because of me, she'll never get to see the pyramids. Or the Great Wall. Or any other thing she wanted to see."

His confession bolts my feet to the floor. "You had no control over that, Mason. It's not your fault. You didn't ask to be born, and if what I've been told is correct, she knew what would happen to her. You didn't murder her. She gave her life to you."

It makes the creation of the shades sound so romantic, so Shakespearean tragedy, when the reality is souls and bodies given to devils for no more than blood in return. But it seems to help him. Would any half-brother of mine worry this way about what his birth did to our mother? Mason's dark blue eyes meet mine over the black patent leather of his mother's wallet.
 

"If I can help you save your friend, this Alice, I will."
 

I think Alice is probably beyond saving. But I don't tell Mason that.

In spite of this declaration, his face still wears a cloak of anxiety. He runs his thumbs over the smooth surface of the wallet. I can see him gazing at his own reflection in the silver clasp.
 

"Mason?"

"I don't want to trouble you."

Too bad. I'm already troubled. "Trouble me," I tell him.

"The Mediators are planning to take out the rest of the shades."

"I already knew that."

"The shades are going to fight back this time. Saturn heard it from some of the others. They know the Mediators aren't much of a match for them, and they don't want to be exterminated like a bunch of rabid cockroaches."

He's getting good with his similes.
 

Blasé thoughts or not, I do feel troubled. Very troubled. Because the Mediators will take out some of the shades, but it's much more likely that the shades will scratch out whole swaths of Mediators.

"Do you have any idea of when this is going to happen?" I kick off my shoes, not wanting to continue this conversation in my foyer. The couch. The couch looks inviting. I pull the puffiest pillow into my lap and cradle it to my chest. Mason sits next me, one knee curled on the center cushion.

He shakes his head. "They're waiting until they find out when the Mediators are going to move against them."

Mason goes still again, eyes on the wallet. He opens it, looks at Mae's picture once more, then snaps it shut. He repeats it three more times. Or at least that's how long it takes me to understand the subtext to his words.

"You want me to find out when that is, don't you?"

My heart feels like that wallet. Open, snap shut. Open, snap shut. Arrhythmia. Can I do that? With Alamea wanting to strip me of my medal and a hearing coming up, if I get caught feeding information to the shades I won't end up censured. I'll end up gutted and racked in the amphitheater in front of every Mediator in Middle Tennessee.

"I understand if you can't do it."

But I promised Mason. I promised him I would try and stop the shades from getting killed out of hand. Is it the right thing to do? The Mediators don't seem to be concerned with right or wrong.
 

No. That's not true.

The only right they know is the right they've always known. And until Mason swept me out of certain splatting, I knew it too.
 

Norms good, demons bad.
 

It doesn't leave any room for a gray area, but I'm sitting here staring that gray area in the face.

Even before I answer, I know I'll help him.

"These other shades. Are they the ones who attacked you?" I have to know who I'm risking everything for. It's not like I can flee.
 

"Some of them." Mason's answer is about as reassuring as a dentist telling you it will just feel like a tiny pinprick.

"And the others?"
 

"They're like me and Saturn. They just want to live a peaceful life. Make friends. Eat lots of steak."

A glint of white teeth shows as Mason's lips curve in a small smile. My lip twitches in response, and now I do reach out and take Mason's hand. "I'll help you. I don't know if I'll make it through helping alive, but I'll try."

A human guy might say something like, I'll protect you. No need to worry! Knight in armor is here, complete with horse and sunset.

Mason's not at all human.

He pauses, looks into my eyes, places his other hand on top of mine, sandwiching it between his.
 

"I know you will."

The first step to committing treason is a lot like the first step in poker: look at the cards in your hand. The second is scrutinizing your opponents.
 

My one advantage is that they already played their trump card.

The Mediators showed they could play dirty when they sicced Ben on me to spy. I've never surveilled anyone before, but I've known Ben for two decades. If he managed to haunt me, I can do the same for him.

I always return favors.

I tuck my bright yellow-orange hair under an olive green hat I've kept buried in my closet for two years. It doesn't disguise my face, but it covers up my most distinguishing characteristic.
 

The makeup disguises my face.
 

For as girly as I am, makeup is something I seldom do. I darken my eyelids with several shades of brown and pop in a pair of green colored contact lenses. My eyes hate me for it, almost smudging the thick brown eyeliner I've painted on both lids. The contacts sting and worry at my irises, but I aim a few drops of moisturizing liquid in there and hold my head back for a minute, dabbing the corners of my eyes with squares of toilet paper.

Ben's used to seeing me in leather or lace. I go grunge, digging through my closet for clothes that were popular in the years when rockers had long hair and before emo tightened their jeans. I don't think I've ever worn the forest green flannel I dig out of a musty corner of my bottom dresser drawer, but it matches the hat and looks suitably hipster.
 

I have exactly one pair of jeans, and I pull them on. Ben's not stupid; if I get too close, he'll recognize me. But he'd be expecting flame-haired, biker-posh Ayala, not a Kurt Cobain wannabe two decades too late.

Mason's already gone to keep his ear to the ground, leaving me to hunt Ben.
 

My first stop is the Summit. I park three blocks away and zig-zag toward the parking lot, hovering in someone's yard to look for Ben's car. He's not there.
 

I don't want to drive to Franklin to find him, and I suspect the last time I saw him that way, he was only there to tail me.

Ben's not here...but Ripper is.