Eye of the Storm (4 page)

I have no doubt that if I were to take the others into the bedroom to talk, Asher would hear us.
 

"She's hiding something," I say bluntly, not caring that Asher jumps a bit at being spoken about when she's sitting not ten feet from me.
 

Mira shoots her a look, but keeps surprise from showing on her face. "Yep."

"Are we going to trust her or not?" It's one thing not to mean us physical harm at this exact moment. It's something else to extend that trust to the future — or keeping Asher here in our home. Whether she knew my mother or not.

"What can I do to assure you that I intend only to help you?" Asher asks.
 

Mason raises an eyebrow at me. Jax pretends to be very interested in his controller.
 

"Tell us everything," Evis says. There's a red flush to his neck that I don't remember ever seeing before. I think if I stuck a tuning fork on his shoulder, it would hum from the tension.

"I can't do that," says Asher softly.
 

"Why?" I ask again.
 

"I know it's asking a lot of you, to show up here unannounced and expect you to believe I'm a friend. I can't tell you much more. But if you look through that album, it will at least show you that I love — loved — your mother. Neither of us ever thought I'd meet you." Asher looks suddenly tired. She knows she's at our mercy.
 

She starts talking.

CHAPTER THREE

"I've already told you the basics," she says. "I wasn't lying. I was there through her pregnancy with you, Ayala. Hells, I was there when she peed on the stick that told her she was having a baby. She was terrified and knew your father would never help her — he was an asshole, died of a scratcher overdose three years later, and good riddance — but from the moment she saw that stick turn blue, I knew she was in it. You were hers, and she was determined to be yours."

I press my teeth together so hard I'm afraid they'll crack. If I relax, I won't be able to swallow around the lump clogging up my throat. It takes every ounce of will within me not to blink or break my gaze. The room is so quiet you could hear Nana fart in the bedroom.

"I helped her as much as I could. We already lived together, in a tiny two bedroom that had walk-in closets. She got rid of most of her clothes and put the rest in a wardrobe she could barely open because it was smushed in so close to her bed. She put a bassinet and a changing table in the walk-in closet and decorated it with the prettiest blue bears. Eve was an excellent artist. I went to all her doctor's appointments with her. I was there when she picked your name. When we saw you on the ultrasound for the first time. When she first heard your heart beat." Asher flexes her toes and sits back, crossing her arms on her swollen belly. If I was any less astute, I might think she was displaying comfort, but to my eyes she looks anything but.
 

"I was there when you were born," Asher says softly.
 

Beside me, Evis is flipping through the album, and he stops when he turns the next page. It shows my mother on a large bed with a doula massaging her shoulders from behind. The doula bears an unmistakable resemblance to Asher, but with gray braids and a plumpness that doesn't come from pregnancy. My mother isn't looking at the camera. In the picture, it looks to me like she doesn't see anything at all. Anything except the baby in her arms. Pink and mostly swaddled, a shock of yellow-orange hair protrudes from the little white cap on the baby's head. My head. I know it's me.
 

Mira gets up to see what we're staring at. "Fucking hell, Storme."

"That was taken just before the doctor came in and took you. I couldn't bring myself to take any pictures after that." Asher's face goes so stony that I start to believe her before I can help myself. I know that look in her eyes, that look of having borne the pain of a loved one for far too long. "To say Eve took it hard would be like saying the sun is rather bright. She locked herself in her bedroom for two weeks and didn't come out for work. She got fired. I picked up extra shifts to cover the rent. When she finally came out, I was just getting home from work and she'd already thrown out the baby furniture and painted over the bears in the walk-in closet. She'd moved her clothes back into it and any trace that she should have been a new mother was wiped from the apartment. She didn't want comfort. A couple weeks later, she got a job at the library. I didn't think much of it, but then she started working doubles almost every day. When I stopped by once to bring her dinner, I found out that she'd been off the clock for hours and that she'd been spending half her days in the study carrels reading every page of Mediator history and demonology she could get her hands on."

 
That gives me a start, and I'm not alone in the reaction.
 

"What for?" Mira stays next to me, and Evis stops turning pages in the album. Jax and Mason watch keenly, their eyes searching Asher's for something I can't fathom.
 

"She wanted to help you. Even though I'd known her for most of her life, she didn't confide in me until sometime later. Eve was always a private person, but it was the first time she ever locked me out like that. When she told me almost a year later what she wanted to do, she had put together such a meticulous plan for herself and for me that I couldn't help but agree."

Again, I get the sense from Asher that she's not telling me everything. The feeling is oddly familiar, and I can't place what this conversation is reminding me of. I can allow someone the luxury of not spilling every single one of their thoughts, but in this situation it just leaves me feeling nervous.

"So what did she do? What was this plan?" Mason pipes up, much to my surprise. I can't read his expression, and the scars on his cheeks are still angry and pink from where Gregor sliced him up.
 

"Eve wanted to learn everything there was to know about the Mediators. Most norms just know the basics — that the hellkin want in to our world and that the Mediators stop them as much as possible. Eve wasn't any different at that point. She knew there were professors who studied Mediator methodology and history, and she wanted to learn everything she could without paying tuition to do it. She thought that maybe if she learned enough about demons and the hellkin in general and about the Summits that perhaps one day she might be able to help you, Ayala."

I look at Mira. "It's pretty unheard of, isn't it?" It's a genuine question; I don't know if any parents of Mediators turn up on the Summit doorstep wanting to help their offspring or what happens. Until hearing Asher's account of my birth, I don't think I ever let myself fully engaged with the barbarism of how we happen.
 

Maybe some reluctant mothers here and there are relieved to have their kid snatched away within seconds of birth, relieving them of the choice of adoption or the pressures of incipient parenthood, but for most who make it to the actual birth stage of pregnancy without ending it early on, it has to be traumatic. I wonder if there are support groups. There probably should be.
 

Mira shrugs at me. "I've never heard of a Mediator's family seeking out their children. Ever. Makes me wonder why."

Yet another troubling question to add to the mountain of them.
 

"So how did my mother plan to help me? Knowledge is power and all that, blah blah blah, but she certainly never came to find me." Another disturbing thought; she must have known where I was my whole life. At least the early bits. Because of the Summit infusing our tea from earliest ages with their fabulous Potion of Geographically-Triggered Barfiness, she had to know I was stuck in Tennessee. And for the first decade or so, there's only a few places in each territory where Mediators are raised and trained.
 

Asher gives me a wry smile. "At first, I don't think she really knew. But every year, that fervor she felt got stronger. She knew you were getting closer to having to hold the sword. She got obsessed. I don't think I ever blamed her for it. She held down a job, worked her way up, got promoted to head librarian in Memphis at the central library. Eve managed somehow to compartmentalize her professional life and her drive to track down every ounce of Mediator lore she could, even while using her professional resources to access her personal obsession. I helped her as much as I could. She was desperate to be ready just in case she ever saw an opening." There Asher's eyes darken, her heavy-lashed eyelids dipping. "Fifteen years after you were born, Eve stumbled across something that…changed things."

The pregnant woman has me now. I don't know what she's about to say, and I know any guess will be farther from the mark than the Earth is from Orion's arrow.
 

"Your mother discovered a discrepancy in Mediator history. Just a small one, and one that anyone who hadn't spent fifteen years delving into every book she could find on the subject would have glossed right over." To my surprise, Asher's upper lip is shiny with perspiration. She swallows. "There was mention of a Mediator from London in the diary of a Mediator from an Incan tribe in the late nineteenth century. He had a somewhat distinctive given name and a very common last name. Eve had a memory like flypaper. The second she saw that name, she went into a frenzy, tracked down the original reference and, to her, that was enough confirmation. I tried to tell her that there could have been two people called Hephaestus Johnstone, but she wouldn't hear it. Later she dug up census records from London that showed Hephaestus vanishing between 1885's census and 1890's census, and there was no death certificate. I started to believe her. When she combed through and cross-referenced the entire London Summit's death certificates with census records for a fifty year span and confirmed that every other Mediator of Hephaestus's age had a death certificate, I stopped doubting. Your mother discovered a hole in the Mediator foundation of territories."

"Territories," I say flatly. Asher doesn't have to tell me about that hole. Mira and I know firsthand. "If that information was findable, why hasn't anyone else made the connection?"

"You have to understand," Asher says. "Even scholars devoted to history and the historiography of the Summit don't hold a tea light to the research Eve did. People get their Ph.D's in five or ten years. Your mother made this her full time job for almost thirty. She read journal articles, scholarly theses, dissertations of every leader in the field. She sought out primary sources wherever she could find them. And after she found that, it was enough to sow doubt for her."

"Doubt in what, the Summit?"

The perspiration on Asher's face is now more than a sheen. It beads on her upper lip. Mira frowns, and Evis is still standing stock-still next to me with his fingers tight on the photo album.

Asher nods, blinking at me.
 

I get it. I've seen that look. I know where I've seen it before — on Alamea Virgili.
 

"You're under a gag spell," I say. Gags are illegal, though the Summit uses them on the leaders to keep the plebes like me from finding out their dirty little secrets. Like the territories being controlled by spell-drugged tea and coffee.

Asher doesn't even answer me, but I know I'm right. Whatever she's under must be strong. She looks like she wants to bite off her own tongue.
 

"Shit," says Mira.

"Tell me that my mother would have had the ability to speak freely to me." I watch Asher's face closely.

"Your mother would have been able to tell you anything she wanted." Asher speaks the sentence with so much prompt decisiveness that I believe her.
 

I don't bother asking Asher about the gag; she won't be able to tell me, and she might barf or pass out if I prod her.
 

"Switch to a subject you can talk about, then," I say.
 

"I've already told you the most important parts."

"You haven't told us about Evis," I say.
 

Asher gives me a slow, calculated nod. "Eve kept digging into everything about the Summit she could find and beyond. She was probably the foremost expert on demonology in the United States when it happened."

"When what happened?"

"One of the librarians disappeared last spring. He'd helped her with her research into demonology and the theoretical physics of the hells. When he vanished, she discovered that he'd become a hells-zealot. She blamed herself for not noticing. At first she — and the police — assumed he'd been killed by demons. But then she got a note from him telling her he was okay and that he was going to bring a new being into the world and not to look for him." Asher's face is set in grimness, and every one of us knows the end of this man's story.
 

"Let me guess, she didn't listen." I feel a surge of respect for my mother. It's one thing to go after hells-worshippers when you're a Mediator who's been trained for decades. It's something else altogether to go searching for them when you're a librarian.