Eye of the Storm (20 page)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I still feel cranky when I leave the room, if
cranky
is an acceptable word for what I'm feeling.
 

Nothing in my life has made me accustomed to carrying the hope for so many people, especially when I feel so little of it myself. The only thing I know is that I can't just lie down and die.
 

A flash of fear cuts through me in the corridor, and before I can think about it, my legs turn me round and I race in the opposite direction.
 

My mind explodes in pain. I nearly crash to the ground, slamming into a wall instead, hard enough that my shoulder may well bruise and the wall already did. Only dimly do I notice the crater left in the drywall. I feel Sol and Luna behind me, their own minds brighter than their namesakes, but I don't stop. The stairs are crowded with people, and I don't have time to push them aside. I vault over the curved iron rail, hearing gasps and ignoring them. Dropping down one floor, then another, above me I hear the muffled
kang-kang
of Sol and Luna doing the same. Three floors down, I pull myself back up over the rail, balancing on it on my feet for a moment before launching myself over the heads of the Mediators blocking my way. I accidentally kick someone, but I don't care.

I'm close now, close enough that the pain nearly blinds me.
 

And then it cuts off, sharply, a void in its place so stark and absolute I feel as though I've stepped off a cliff into the vacuum of space.
 

Behind me I feel Luna. I feel Sol. Somewhere above, rushing toward me, I feel Mason and Carrick and Evis. Below in the holding cells, I feel Jax and Miles. Saturn somewhere off to the southwest.
 

Harkan and Holden are gone.

I plunge through the doorway of an out-of-the-way conference room, and there they are. I see their heads first, set neatly on the table, severed part down, their eyes half-open and hair in their faces. Their bodies aren't as neat. Harkan's torso is cut and blood-covered a few feet away, and Holden's is slumped in the far corner.
 

I wasn't this physically close to Sanj when he died; I felt the gaping emptiness of Saturn's unconsciousness, but that couldn't have prepared me for this.
 

The boundaries of my skin feel null and void. I feel disembodied, like I'm watching through my own eyes but standing somewhere behind my own head and using them like peepholes. Sol and Luna are there, close enough for me to have the heat of their bodies warming my shoulders. Or is that their hands?

It is.
 

They have each raised a hand to my shoulder. It's only then I realize they're propping me up because I'm leaning farther backward than I should to be able to keep my balance.
 

I feel Harkan and Holden like ghost limbs. Like a cut strand of a spider's web that furls up and dangles where it should be stretched taut and dynamic.
 

And then Carrick and Evis are there, and Jax and Miles and Mason. Saturn's still too far, but he's coming. I feel him. The others surround me, their bodies as still as mine.
 

Whoever did this was trusted enough to get close. Strong enough to take them both down, which means they weren't alone. No Mediator could go up against both Harkan and Holden alone. Another thought wriggles unbidden through my mind. They targeted the two shades I was least close to, the ones they could get to more easily.
 

My brother's hand takes mine, and I cling to it, staring at the two heads on the table that don't stare back.

Clean cuts straight across the neck. Definitely a Mediator, as if there were any doubt of that here in the Summit. No norm with two weeks of sword training would be able to do this. Hells, a norm with two years of sword training couldn't manage.
 

The slashes across the chest on Harkan's body tell me Holden died first and someone tried to slow Harkan down. I make myself look closer at Harkan's body, still allowing the shades around me to support my own. Though the wound is bloody, I can see the directionality of the slice. He was hit from behind, probably while the other attacker was cutting up his chest.
 

There's only one Mediator I know here who would do this for sure. My blood feels as though someone has injected it with raw, pure sodium. I feel sparks, thousands of tiny explosions reaching up and down the length of my circulatory system.
 

I'm moving, pushing Sol and Luna aside, my feet somehow functional. "Stick together," is all I say to the others.
 

I expect Evis to be the one to follow me, maybe Carrick. Instead it's Mason at my side as I leave the conference room.
 

"You don't know it's Ben," he says quietly.
 

Of course he knows what I'm thinking; of all the shades, he's the one who's had the most face time with Wheedle. And he's the one who knows how Ben betrayed me, spied on me, fed me to the Summit.
 

"I'm going to find out." I can feel every shift in air pressure, every give of the low-pile carpet beneath my feet. "He had to have done this. And I'm going to lock him so deep in the beehive of doom that he'll start making honey before he gets out."

I see a few Mediators as we walk. I stop one at random.
 

"Ben Wheedle," I say. "Where is he?"

"Uh, he was in the cafeteria when I was down there an hour ago. But he might not be there anymore." The Mediator is someone I've seen but whose name escapes me.
 

An hour ago was plenty of time for Ben to finish eating, grab a helper, and kill Harkan and Holden. So far it's a place to start, but it's far from an alibi.
 

"Get Alamea," I say to the Mediator. "Tell her to go to the conference room at the end of that hall."

I point, then feel my face turning pink as the Mediator shakes his head.
 

"I've got my own orders," he starts to say, then stops when I take two steps and close the distance between us.
 

I can feel Mason's apprehension in the touch of his fingers on my elbow. The touch quickly falls away, but the feeling stays.
 

When I speak, my breath bounces back from the Mediator's nose, I'm so close to him. "You go tell Alamea that someone, probably Ben Wheedle, just murdered two shades in that conference room. You go get her right now and I'll manage to keep myself from adding your head to the two on the table in there."

The Mediator takes a stumbling step back from me, his cheek twitching. "I…got it."

He runs, and I don't stop to watch him disappear.
 

"You didn't have to do that," Mason says.

"What, threaten him?" I can still feel Harkan and Holden's pain echoing through me like biting down on tin foil. Even though they're gone. Their death cut something off, but the pain is still bouncing through the connections between me and the shades, and it makes me want to go to the top of the Summit building and scream.
 

"Yes," says Mason. "You didn't have to threaten him."

"You don't know what it's been like," I say. "We're here now, but while you were off on your little world tour, the rest of us were trying to stay alive not knowing who among the Mediators we could trust, if any. I don't have a lot of patience for their self-importance right now."

"What about your self-importance?"

The snarl escapes my lips before I can stop it.
 

"I'm sorry," Mason says quietly. "I know you've lost people. But so have they."

"I've lost people because of them. Because they were so busy fighting each other that they forgot we have an entire hell worth of demons camped out on our property line." I don't care that a Mediator we pass gives me a pained look, hearing me. I give her a sarcastic salute. "This really isn't the time for recriminations, Mason."

He goes silent. I don't know why he's following me. We start down the stairs, neither of us talking now.
 

I do know why I'm so angry. It's not just because Holden and Harkan are dead, though that fills me with fury. I'm feeling rage at myself. For trusting the Summit had put aside its differences. For believing they'd really accepted Alamea's return. For thinking they could stop being fractious and petty when we're the only motherfucking city left in the South. For my faith that a common enemy this big would be enough just because it gods damn well should be enough.
 

The Summit cafeteria is on the second floor of the building, taking up about a third of the space. The food's not bad, though right now it's mostly powdered eggs and steamed vienna sausages I can smell the moment we step through the doors.
 

It's also packed with people.
 

"Ben Wheedle!" I bellow his name, hearing a small shocked clatter that ripples through the room.
 

If he's here, maybe he didn't physically chop off any heads in the last fifteen minutes. If he's not, when I find him I'm going to take my time finding out.

Then I see him, sitting alone at a far table, the people around him not-so-surreptitiously moving away from him like he's the wrong pole of a magnet in a sea of iron filaments.
 

He visibly braces himself to see me coming toward him. He's here and not elsewhere, but he could have left and come back. Either way, directly or indirectly, this is his fault.

I sit down across from him on the plastic bench. I haven't been in here in ages, but still it feels as familiar as finding a beloved childhood book in a box when you weren't expecting to. Once upon a yesteryear, I probably sat at this very table with Ben and Mira and other Mittens. We probably laughed and told boisterous tales of how we didn't die on patrol, full of puffed chests and bravado and enough swearing to make a radio station bleep out the entirety of our conversation.
 

Ben's face looks tired. He wears lines around his eyes like tiny ladders in his skin that you could climb to reach his forehead from his cheekbones. His cheeks are hollow and his violet eyes are dull and lackluster, matte where they should be glossy. None of that makes him innocent.

"There are two dead shades in the third floor conference room," I say conversationally. The words come easily from my mouth, but they leave lacerations in my heart. Again I see Harkan weeping over Carus's death. Again I see those two heads arranged carefully on a faux wood table.
 

Ben flinches with his whole body at the words. He's not a particularly good liar, and somehow the evidence of his probable lack of culpability in the shades' deaths stokes my anger instead of dampening it.

I ignore what I've just seen. "You did this."

He shakes his head, the movement jerky and violent. "I've been in here for the past two hours."

There are cameras in the corners, and he knows it. They can confirm this.
 

"Who was it?" he asks.
 

"If I knew, I wouldn't be talking to you." I'm aware of Mason next to me, but I don't want to engage with him. I'm still mad at him, too. Perhaps the Mediators of the Summit deserve some of my compassion, but the millions of people across the southern states who are now fertilizing the ground deserve it more.
 

"I don't mean who killed them. I mean who were they?"

"The shades?"

Ben nods.
 

"Harkan and Holden." Saying their names tightens my throat as if vocalizing it allows some of their memory to escape me. Above me, I can feel the others' pain. They're still in the room, all still hurting, a few flashes of helplessness and irritation palpable through the pain. Alamea must be there. Even as I think her name, I see her face through Luna's eyes. I blink it away, looking again at Ben in front of me. "Why do you care?"

"I'm not a monster, Ayala," he says.

That's debatable.
 

"I'm a good person. I made some…wrong choices."

Is Ben admitting he did something wrong? Is the sky falling? Fuck, this probably is one of the surest signs of the apocalypse. We're all goners.
 

"What, so you're a good man who did a bad thing or three hundred? That's not how this works, asshole. That doesn't make you any more worthy of pity than anyone else. We're all fucking capable of pulling some bullshit, Wheedle. That's not an excuse for your moping, and I'm not here to dry your gods damned tears. All that is is Humanity 101." Anger courses through my veins again like fluid in a chemistry set working its way through the tubes to simmer in a beaker. "Don't give me that reductive horse turd."

Startled, Ben opens and closes his mouth a couple times. "I did what I thought was the right thing to do."

"Beating your best friend almost to death was something you thought was right? I guess I shouldn't be surprised."

"Ayala," says Mason.

"Can it," I retort.
 

Okay, so telling Mason to shut up that way is a dig at his name — he told me he read it on a canning jar, even though technically he chose it because his mother's name was Mae — and it isn't really fair because he doesn't get it. But I don't know what's with him right now. Or I do. He's not exactly thrilled I wouldn't jump back into bed with him when he turned back up on my doorstep after peace-ing out of my life.

I'm sitting at a table with two men who have at various points wanted in or have been in my pants.
 

I want to set something on fire.

"That got out of hand," Ben says softly. "I didn't want it to go that far."

"Oh, so just roughing him up a bit would be fine. Put the screws to his knuckles, you know. Make him see things your way." I can still almost feel Ripper's shoulder popping back into its socket when I found him half-dead in a Kentucky motel room.
 

It must show on my face, because Ben flinches again.
 

"I didn't have access to all the information you had," Ben says. His voice is still soft, like he lost his volume somewhere. I'm not sure if I prefer him yelling at me.