Eye of the Storm (7 page)

"You said the Summit had an evacuation plan," Asher ventures.
 

"Alamea had them working on one, anyway. Even if they had one, a plan's only as good as the people paying attention to it."
 

"I just can't believe the Summit never thought it could come to this." The disdain in Asher's voice this time is unmissable.
 

I look at her. The beach towel around her shoulders is hot pink and lime green. There's a dark stain on one corner I try not to look too closely at. Asher's hair has tiny beads of moisture gathering on the dark strands, and for a moment, her face holds something I can only describe as rancor.
 

"You don't like the Summit."

"It's hard to like something when they stole your best friend's child away and keep as many secrets as the Summit does."

"You don't believe they do it for the greater good?" I can't keep the irony out of my own voice, or stop the twitch of my lip. I can't even play devil's advocate about the Summit with a straight face.

"I think they have their own agenda now and always have."

Asher doesn't say anything more than that, and I get the feeling she regrets bringing it up.
 

It gets very quiet, then.

You take the noise for granted. Not the big noises, like sirens and radio, but the small ones. The undercurrent noises. The sound of tires on asphalt and the whirr of appliances. The almost unhearable hums of electricity sparking through cables and walls. The occasional plane in the sky. Those sounds are the default silence of the modern world until they're gone and you're shown what silence really is. Even the street lights along I-65 are out now. No buzz of light through this mist. Only the quiet of a seemingly-dead world.
 

And through it, I hear something.
 

My head turns toward it, my ear straining to catch whatever it is. Asher sees the change in my body as I tense, and she gives me a waiting look, a prepared look, ready to sound an alarm.
 

It's not the snarls of demons I think I hear. At least I don't think so.
 

I suck in a breath, filling my lungs to about two-thirds capacity. I hold the air there until the only thing I hear is the
thu-thud
of my heartbeat and the sound of Asher breathing. Asher pauses, then holds her breath as well, watching me.

There.
 

I hear it. A small cry, like a sob. It seems to be coming from just south of us, though how far I don't know.
 

I debate whether to wake the others.
 

"We should go check that out," I murmur, letting out my breath. Asher mirrors me, darting a glance at the truck where the others lie sleeping.
 

"I can stay here," says Asher. "I can send up sparks if something happens. Even in this sludge, you'd see the glow."

It takes about half a second for me to make up my mind. I nod at her. "Stick close to the truck. If there's trouble on my end, I'll holler."

I don't need magic sparks. I can bellow with the best of them.

I make my way south, hands on the hilts of my swords. Every hundred yards, I pause, listening for the sound again. The first few stops, I hear nothing. Then it comes again, a tiny bit louder, a whimper. Fear. I hear that louder than the sound itself.
 

There's no way to see through the mist, and I can't tell how close I am to the source of the sound, but I know I'm getting closer.
 

Then I hear something else, a low rumble that cuts through the fog and the slow lightening of the coming morning.
 

"Help me!"
 

The voice somehow now sounds farther out still, and I take off running. I don't bother to holler backward at Asher — the cry is loud enough that she will have heard it. It hangs in the air now, that plaintive wail.
 

A snarl joins it, and a scream. My feet pound the asphalt. I leap over a corpse — one of the first I've seen — and my swords are out and in my hands.
 

The mist covers everything. I can't see what's around me, where the sounds are coming from, anything.
 

Another scream.
 

I target it like a homing missile sprinting toward it, jumping over cars instead of going around them. The clang and thuds of my feet hitting metal and fiberglass sound like drum beats.
 

I'm close enough now to hear the sounds of struggle, of someone hitting out against something, of snarls and of claws on glass.

A final scream slices through the air. My feet skid to a halt, and the world goes suddenly silent again.

I know that sound. I know the one that comes after it, that heavy plop of a body part hitting the asphalt, that splat of blood. The quieter spurt of arterial spray.

I'm close enough to hear all of that. Still not close enough to see, but I don't have to be any closer to know that whoever screamed is now far past my help.

I close my worthless eyes and listen.
 

Behind me, I think I hear the others running. In front, I hear the unseen demon eating. It sounds like only one. No glow, so not a jeeling. Maybe a slummoth or a markat. I'm mostly certain it's alone, but I'm not sure I can risk it.
 

I feel sick.
 

I turn and walk back northward, using the sounds of bare feet on the highway to guide me. When Evis materializes not twenty feet in front of me through the heavy, he has enough presence of mind not to ask anything. He stops, Mason and Jax behind him. I shake my head once, and their faces turn grim.
 

The first sign of life other than us and demons, and hell's turned it to death.
 

We wait an hour to move out, and then we pick our way south again.
 

The mist seems to mute everything, shifting the landscape like it's some sort of dreamworld. Or nightmare. Part of me feels certain that this morning will feature into my nightmares in the future. This hushed fog. Fighting through the fog only to be too late.
 

When we find what's left of the body, none of us look too close.
 

We all walk as silently as we can down the junkyard that is I-65 with only our footsteps, breathing, and the small clanks of Nana's cage to punctuate our passing. More corpses appear, more blood. None of us speak now, only pick our steps carefully and quickly, trying to close the distance between us and Nashville. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the mist begins to dissipate with the coming of day, lifting like a shroud to reveal a dead world.
 

Today we don't stop for lunch, by unspoken agreement pushing southward even though I think we ought to stop to allow Asher to rest. I think she'd refuse even if we tried to insist.
 

We keep going.
 

When the skyline of the city finally appears in the distance through the branches of winter-bared trees, I wish it gave me hope.
 

Mira and I exchange a look, but no words. None of us know what we'll find. My phone is dead now too. We have miles to walk, and the city looks like a model from here. No sign of thriving life, only a few lights in skyscraper offices that seem more accidental than anything.

Did Carrick and Gryfflet make it to the Summit? Is anyone even alive here? For a moment, just for a moment as we pick through the thickening horde of abandoned vehicles, I want to just turn the other way and run back into the wilderness. Back to the cabin, or to one like it. Somewhere we can hole up and take crash positions until we see if the world's going to end or not.
 

Maybe it ended already.

We're about to find out.

CHAPTER SIX

Two Mediators, three shades, a witch, and a bunny walk into a bar.

Mira Gonzales kicks over a slime-covered bar stool, scowling at a smashed bottle of vodka that's turned into a sticky puddle on the bar itself. "What a waste."

I nod in agreement. All the other bottles behind the bar are smashed as well. Liquor, liquor everywhere, and not a drop to get drunk with. Evis and Mason check the door behind us, scattering some foul-smelling dust Asher gave us at the threshold to activate a makeshift ward, and Jax holds Nana's cage out in front of him almost reverently.
 

Nana herself, her little velveteen red ears swiveling and nose twitching away, looks the least perturbed of anyone. Jax sets her cage on the top of the bar and turns to face me.

"We need to find her a safe place," he says, his voice very serious.
 

I couldn't agree more. I give him a terse smile.
 

It's been only days since we killed Gregor and returned triumphantly — sort of — to the Nashville Summit. She stomped everyone into submission — sort of — and now we've made it to Nashville. Sort of.

If you call hiding out from day-walking demons in a ransacked bar on Honky Tonk row ready.
 

Mira's poking around behind the bar, her phone charger dangling from her hand. "Power looks like it's still working. Bulbs out here are just smashed."

A small amount of light from the cloudy sky filters in through a grimy window, and Evis comes to stand by my side. I toss Mira my phone and charger, and she plugs it in.

She starts talking in announcer voice. "In a world where demon hunters have become dependent on modern comforts, two Mediators hide in a shit hole bar to hover over their charging phones in a desperate hope to save the world — if they can only reach someone who knows what the fuck's going on."

"You missed your calling," I tell her.

"Fucking right," she agrees.

Mason peers out the window, ignoring our banter. "I can smell the blood from here."

I look at him, troubled by the fact that I can too.

It was all over the streets on the walk in. We all pushed hard to get here at all, picking through the debris and corpse-riddled pavement and piecing together snippets of what happened to our city.

I can't think about that right now. I can't entertain the increasingly-confirmed knowledge that people have spent the whole of the last week dying by the thousands. I can't think about the probability that every major city looks like this one — or soon will. I can't think about the very real possibility that we're already losing.
 

The blood smell, everything from the fresh tang of warm copper to the dried whiffs of old rust — it permeates everything where we are. It's not just my enhanced sense of smell that allows me to know it. I never thought I'd smell the end of the world coming.

"And we wait," says Mira, eyeing her phone's dead screen.

After a moment, I hear both our phones ping on, thankful the power's working for now.
 

Jax and Evis stand by the end of the bar, both looking as uneasy as I feel. Evis meets my eyes.

"What if we still can't call Alamea?" Even after the past weeks, seeing how much my brother's face resembles my own still gives me a little bit of a shock.

"Then we go to the Summit and hope it's still there." My voice sounds more grim than I mean it to. Nana clangs at her cage, and I walk over to her. "I'm sorry, Bun. We'll find you a safe place if I have to build barricades out of the rubble."

I ponder leaving her here, but if I let her loose, a demon would get her, and this bar might not even be there when we get back. If we ever get back.

Nope. I prefer to have my loved ones close right now.

"Carrick called," Mira says, holding out my phone across the bar. "Three hours ago, it looks like. And yesterday."

Speaking of loved ones. The surge of relief I feel almost washes away my exhaustion. Almost. Everyone looks relieved, even Asher. Carrick is still alive, or was three hours ago. I take my phone from Mira, my thumb brushing hers. It sends a zigzag of a shiver up my arm, and from her wry look, the feeling's mutual. We both know there's no time for that now. I hold my phone, careful not to unplug it, and dial Carrick.

He doesn't answer. "Fuck."