Eye of the Storm (27 page)

I spend the next several hours with Mira in the amphitheater, watching the map slowly gain pins as the wards get pinged around the city.
 

It's not hard to see what they're doing, not really. They're testing our lines. Never once do they attempt to cross the wards. They get close enough to see exactly where they are. They know we're in an invisible cage.

The arrogance of the Summit smarts.
 

My whole life, I was brought up to believe the demons were mostly mindless animals, even if they had language to communicate with one another. We spent so much time learning to kill them that we never spent any time learning about them, and now just about everything they do is a surprise. Until summer, I only ever saw mixed groups of demons together fighting. We're brought up believing that the hellkin are just as much at each other's throats as they are at ours, and that stupidity has cost us a price in blood.
 

The best way to get someone to underestimate you is to make sure they think you don't know the pucker of your elbow from the pucker of your asshole.

They let it go on so long that the Summits around the world have acted like all of Mediator-dom worked like perfect little gears chugging away at the problem of the six and a half hells, all the while none of us realizing that we are that last half a hell, that we've long been well on our way to becoming hell number seven.

Maybe we deserve to reap the crops we grew out of all those arrogant seeds.
 

But since I'm not the one who decided to isolate all of us inside handy-dandy packages on a serving platter from hell, I think I'll try to burn down the field instead.

Around noon, I feel a stir from the shades that tells me Alamea's awake and a small flash of fear from Sol and Luna that fades after a moment.

"Alamea's coming," I say to Mira quietly. She squeezes my hand.

Devon, who's returned from a patrol shift, gives me a look that happens again when sure as shit, she strolls through the door of the amphitheater not three minutes later. All the shades are with her, like a great naked phalanx behind her.

The woman still looks exhausted, but her linen shirt is immaculate, and her trousers too. Her swords are belted on, and her eyes take in the entirety of the room in approximately three seconds.
 

"Well done, Storme," she says. "They haven't attacked?"

"No." I point to the screen where the map's projected. "They've hit just about every spot they can around the circumference of the wards, though."

"So they know now exactly what our boundaries are." Her voice is a murmur low enough that I think I'm the only one who can hear it. "What are they waiting for?"

It's a good question, and I think it's one every single beating heart in that demon-pinged circle on the map wants to know more than anything.
 

I try to think out the logic of the hellkin plan. They've been hitting one or two cities at a time, sometimes in quick succession, but never more than two places at once. Looking back over the order in which the southern cities fell, it's clear the times the demons hit two at one time, they were going for smaller cities. That tells me that their numbers aren't high enough to really take on the larger ones, and San Diego holding out as long as they did may have bloodied their nose. They might be more cautious now.
 

That could explain the methodology of testing our limits here in Nashville. We're like a castle under siege here. With all the houses inside the borders, we're probably good on food for a long while, but we won't be able to hold out indefinitely.
 

I wish I knew the demon timeline. They've taken a big bite out of one continent in a week. But they took the first nibble over two decades ago. I find myself staring at a map of the US, from the Florida crescent to southern California. Something's niggling at me, and I can't quite put my finger on it. I take a tablet from under the podium and sit down in one of the chairs, listening to Alamea grill Devon about the state of the city.

The map of the country looks normal. Forty states. Mexico due south, Nahua beyond it stretching all the way to the southern continent. I tinker with the map in a photo editing program, coloring in states as they fell.
 

The invasion looks like the way a virus would do it. Each city is like a cell, the Summit its nucleus. Infect the city, kill it, take it over, expand. Spread to the neighboring cells. Or maybe it's like cancer, because now the entire southern United States is a mass of hellkin, and we're the weird semi-healthy patch in the middle.

I make myself look at Mississippi, poking at it, turning the state from red to white to red again. A couple months ago — was it only a couple months, really? — I drove along the Mississippi border, saw the rolling clouds above it and looked into its face. I saw nothing but darkness then.
 

And nothing's much different here, with the clouds and the death and the oncoming demons.

Clouds.

My breath lodges in my throat like a bit of stuck lobster.

We've been under constant cloud cover across the entire country, but Mississippi has been that way for years.
 

We were always taught that demons couldn't come out during the day, and we never saw them on cloudy days until now. My heart glugs in my chest like my blood has turned to syrup.
 

No army will go into battle without reserves if they can help it. You don't want the enemy to see your full force right away, because if they see it, they can prepare for it.
 

I look again at the map, filling in states and cities with a fingertip that feels numb and suddenly stiff.
 

No one's gone to Mississippi in ages. We've abandoned it for lost, because it was overrun. None of us had the resources to retake it, and because the Summit stuck us all in carefully-defined territories, they let us believe there was no possible way we could regain that lost ground anyway.

The weight of what I'm slowly realizing feels like someone's carefully set a tank on my chest and is lowering it pound by painstaking pound with a crane.

The hellkin aren't attacking these cities one by one because they have no other choice or because their numbers are too low.

They just want us to believe that.

Because their real army has been camped out on our southern border for over twenty years.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Waves of terror and fury course over me. I can't tell whether I'm more scared or angry or if the two emotions have fused to become a supercell of feeling that will explode out of me at any moment.
 

The Summit did this to us. In their arrogance and their desire to keep us docile and controlled little weapons of demon destruction, they locked us in cages and doomed this world to death.

Even from where I sit, I can smell brewing coffee and tea. I don't drink it anymore, but I'm so used to the smell from being constantly around it my entire life that it barely even registers, like a ring you never take off and your body forgets it's wearing.

The Mediators in the amphitheater are all milling about or bustling, doing something, moving, moving, moving. The futility of it staggers me so much that my vision starts to grey out.

I feel a hand on my shoulder. Mira.

"Hey," she says, her eyes narrowed to violet slits. "What's wrong with you?"

I look up involuntarily at Alamea. I'm not ready to talk to her about this yet. I could, and I know somewhere locked down inside me that she is as trapped by circumstance as I am, but right now she's the conduit to the Summit at large and that's too much. Too much.
 

Standing, I look at Mira and simply say, "Not here."

Together we scurry out of the amphitheater, and for some reason my feet lead me downstairs to the first sub level where the training rooms are. There's no one in them, which doesn't surprise me. I go into the first, which has free dumbbells at one end and a big open sparring area on the other. The door bangs shut behind us. The room smells like rubber and metal.

The heaviness on my chest grows with each struggling breath. I barely make it to the bench press before I gasp. And gasp again. Mira hits her knees in front of me. I can see the reflection of the back of her head in the mirrored wall, see how my face looks like ash.

I tell her what I've just figured out and watch the color drain from hers.
 

"And we don't know when it's going to happen," she says.
 

We have no way of knowing that. It could happen in five minutes. Five days. Five years.
 

Then Mira looks up at me, the weight of the world in her eyes. "You know what this means."

I look back at her blankly. "What what means?"

"Why they haven't attacked here yet and we're this fucking island in the middle of their territory."

Slowly, I shake my head. I can't see where she's leading.

"They haven't taken us yet because there's something they want here, and I think they want it alive."

"It."

"You."

My blood evaporates into smoke. "Why do they want me?"

The thought of demons wanting me alive…I can't think about that. I've spent my entire life facing the knowledge that they could make me dead, but the idea of them taking me alive makes my marrow curdle.

"Why do you think?" Mira's voice is uncharacteristically gentle, and she puts one hand on each of my knees. "You're the shade alpha. You're Prime Bitch."

The heat from her palms on my legs spreads outward. When I look at her, it's like we establish our own world, a safe bubble within a hostile zone.
 

"All those kids we saved," I say, and my voice cracks.
 

"Are probably only alive because you're here within city limits, love." It's the first time Mira's ever used an endearment for me that wasn't
bitch
, and it strikes a string deep within my heart that thrums through me.
 

I remember the jeeling in Jocelyn's basement where Ripper earned his death blows. I assumed it was behaving in a calculated fashion, removing itself from the fight because their numbers were too low.
 

But now I know that can't be true. It saw me. It went to report back to whatever demon hierarchical governance it would report to. It knew I was going to live through that fight.

"How did the Summit get us into this mess?" I ask. It's a rhetorical question, and I don't expect an answer.
 

I don't know if there is an answer. If there is, maybe Asher knows it, if she'd even tell me. Maybe my mother knew.

Mira's hands are still on my legs. I place mine over them, palms on hers. Both our sets of hands are calloused, rough from a lifetime of blades and heavy labor and fighting. With the world around us full of cold hell and death, the warmth and the evidence of both of us fighting for heat and life renews me.
 

My thumbs brush the tops of her knuckles. We both still have soot under our fingernails. Neither of us have bathed since the fire.
 

"We're filthy," I say, voice quiet, and her fingers tighten on my legs.
 

I can feel something wrestling within me. From the way Mira's hands won't let up on my jeans, I think the same something might be wrestling in her too.
 

"Maybe we should shower," she says. She meets my eyes, and hers are like cracked amethyst when she then says softly, "Will you join me?"

I look at her, my heart like spiderwebs of broken glass, and I nod.

There's a locker room attached to the training areas. Our footsteps echo against the tile in the emptiness. She pulls two towels and two sets of sparring uniforms from the shelves in the anteroom. I take the uniforms from her, my fingers shaking against the starched white fabric. The shower stalls are in the far back, partitioned off by more white tile walls and black curtains. We set the changes of clothes and towels on a low bench away from the shower's spray.
 

Mira's chin bobs as she swallows, stepping toward me. She stops only inches away, a question in her eyes.
 

I nod. Her fingers find the hem of my shirt, and I lift up my arms as she pulls it over my head. The air in the locker room is cool, and my skin rises with gooseflesh immediately. Or maybe it's not the air.

I mirror her, pulling her shirt over her slender shoulders, seeing the pink lines of scars that vanish under her plain black bra. When her hands go to the button of my jeans, my breath hitches. Every tooth on the zipper sends a small shock through me. Mira loops her fingers into my pockets and pushes my jeans down over my hips. Again I reflect her movements. Button. Slow
tick-tick-tick
of the zipper, the
whish
of denim against skin and cotton underwear. I feel her under it, her muscles hard and strong.

Still standing several inches away, she reaches around my arms as she steps out of her jeans, fingers finding the clasp of my bra. A tug, a tiny snap, and the restriction around my ribs eases, but brings with it a sudden difficulty of drawing breath.