Eye of the Storm (8 page)

It's an unspoken rule right now that we don't assume anyone's dead until we see their corpses, but even so, there's a glob of lead at the pit of my stomach.
 

Mira's on her own phone. I can hear the ringing even though it's pressed to her ear.

"Yo, it's Mira. We're on 4
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Avenue in some dive charging our phones. We had to ditch the car on 65 three days ago. Where do you want us to go?" It's Alamea she's talking to, and that gives me another breath of relief to hear the older woman's voice through the line. I only catch snippets of what she says. After a moment, Mira nods, saying "Uh-huh" at the same time.

She hangs up.
 

Alamea. Alive. The world's still here. My feet suddenly feel more solid on the floor beneath me.

"Where are we headed?" I ask.

"Summit. She said it's still good. There's a big gathering of Mediators at the Parthenon and refugees hanging near there, and they're keeping the area pretty much clear. There's another contingent still trying to evacuate those who are left in town, but it's slow going." She looks at her phone, expression dubious. "I don't want to leave here until we've got a full charge, though. We don't know how long it'll take us to reach them."

I meet her eyes, understanding. What she leaves unsaid is that anything can happen. We could get to the Summit to find it decimated. While I'd like to hope the forces of the hells invading our world aren't quite ready for the full on assault I know they've planned, if there's anything I've learned in the past six months, it's that what you don't know wants to kill you. And eat you. And your little bun, too.

I scratch Nana's head between the ears, reaching my fingers through the bars of the cage.

"So we wait," Mason says. There's still an echo of pain in his eyes when he looks in my direction, pain that seems to manifest visually through the scars on his face. They're fading. I'd like to think the other pain will too.

We've likely got enough pain in the future to distract us from the pains of the past.

By the time our phones are fully charged, the dingy window that looks out over 4
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Avenue has darkened with the sun's descent toward the horizon. It looks like it's going to storm, but it hasn't rained all week. And yet, the clouds roil in the sky, pregnant with lightning that won't flash and thunder that won't crash, and that sense of waiting makes me feel like an entire avalanche of other shoes is about to fall on our heads.

Probably because it is, except instead of shoes, it's demons.

"We've got trouble," Mason says, pointing down the street.

"How many?" Jax asks.

Mason turns his cheek against the window, his scar for a moment meeting the reflection. "At least twenty."

"We can take twenty," says Evis.

"From the west." Mason's voice goes as dark as the clouds, and he points to the east. "Another group is coming from the east."

"I could slow them down," Asher says, "but not for long if there's that many."

"Fuck." Mira's heart doesn't really sound in it. She's tired. We're all tired.

"Any indication they know we're here?" I look at Nana in her cage, unperturbed by the threat of encroaching hellkin or impending doom.

Mason shakes his head.
 

I look to the door behind the bar. "There's got to be another exit in here. Probably an alley, delivery door, something. Might be the best shot we have."

Jax picks up Nana's cage again, and Mira unplugs the phones, winding the cords up and stuffing them in her backpack. It fits snugly against her back and doesn't seem to interfere with her fighting. My own's a different story, but then it's got Carrick's giant magic tome, a bunch of granola bars, and as many pairs of underwear as I could fit. I don't really want to try and save the world with constant swamp ass.

I wish I could have brought Lucy. My flamethrower would come in handy.
 

Evis takes point, leading us through the bar's storage rooms and small kitchen that smells like old grease and rotting garbage. Sure enough, there's a door leading out. He starts to nudge the bar with his hip.

"Wait," I say. The door says in big peeling block letters
FIRE EXIT: ALARM WILL SOUND
. "Let's not have a screaming siren let all the demons know we're here."

It's alarmed, and we already know the power's still on.
 

"There should be a button or something that keeps the alarm from going off," I say. "A switch that stays engaged when the door's shut. We had a couple exits like that in my office building." I just hope whatever it is doesn't require a key.

Evis nods, bending to peer at the crack between the door and the jamb. "I can see it, I think. Here." He points about six inches above the door's latch.

The door opens out, and all of us crowd around. Evis pushes the bar on the door, edging it open, his hand pressed against the jamb with every millimeter the door gives way. I'm not the only one who lets out a breath when his thumb catches the alarm trigger before it pops out of the jamb. Mason and Mira go first, then Asher, with Jax hanging back with Evis. I give Jax a grateful look as I squeeze past my brother. Jax, the bunny whisperer. If we live through this, someone should buy the movie rights and write a rom com tearjerker out of that.

The alley behind the bar is clear of demons, but it reeks of trash and urine and worse.
 

Jax follows me out when I signal. Evis, keeping his thumb against the alarm switch, angles around until he's outside in the alley, letting the door ease shut against his foot, which he wedges into the threshold.
 

Mira points southwest. "If we follow the alley to Demonbreun, we ought to be able to take that down to Music Square and cut through Vandy to the Summit."

It's over a mile to the Summit from here, another mile after walking over twenty-five, and if we can just get to the Vanderbilt campus, we might just be okay. The Mediators have kept a clear radius around the Summit, according to Alamea.
 

"Let's give it a shot," I say.
 

Evis is still inching the door shut. There's a cardboard box, half squished, lying off to the side by an overflowing dumpster. I tear off a chunk.
 

"Here." I press it down above Evis's thumb, and he slowly moves his hand away until the cardboard is holding the trigger and the door clicks shut.
 

I feel jumpy, like even with the door shut an alarm is going to wail through the alley and bring down an entire horde on our heads.

The alley's still clear, and though I can hear demons off in the distance, they're not fighting, just moving around.

Before the summer, that alone would have been enough to set my hackles up. Before the summer, I never saw two different demons in one place without them fighting each other and me both.
 

Funny how quickly a new normal can happen.

We move to the end of the alley, Jax somehow managing to keep the clanging of Nana's cage to a minimum.

A scream cuts through the air.
 

I freeze, hands on the hilts of my swords. "How far, four blocks?"

Mason nods, and Mira's face turns bleak.

"They're already dead," she says.

I look at her, and I see in her eyes what I know is in mine too.

I hear Asher's small sigh and know she's seeing the dead kid whose death throes we heard.

If we don't get to the Summit, screams like that are going to be the music that serenades us as our Earth sinks into hell.

CHAPTER SEVEN

We hear more screams as we move up Demonbreun toward the university, some closer than others. It makes me feel sick, wrong, helpless. I keep swallowing as we walk, as if the action will keep the bile from churning in my stomach with each voice we hear. The problem is, by the time we hear the scream it's already too late. They're echoes of lives already lost, not deaths we can prevent.

I think my real sick feeling comes from the knowledge that four months ago, I would have tried anyway.

Now I just know it won't do any good if we can't stop what's still coming.

There is no wind down the street, and cars are strewn haphazardly across both lanes. In spite of the crowds of hellkin Mason saw advancing on 4
th
Avenue, Demonbreun is barren. No birds. No bugs. Just the silence of a world we're losing hold of and the screams of the dead.

Nana in her cage is strangely calm. Jax murmurs to her as we walk.

The train tracks cut under Demonbreun a bit up the road, giving us a view in both directions as we cross the bridge. It also gives anything on them a clear view of us.
 

"Cross fast," I say. "Mira, keep an eye to our nine. Mason, to the three. Evis, watch our six."

We all speed into a brisk trot across the bridge.

"Hellkin to the right, about a thousand feet away," Mason says. "But they're occupied."

He doesn't have to explain what he means.

"Keep going," I say.

I feel a tiny bit better once we're across the bulk of the bridge. The street is still elevated, and it's a twenty or thirty foot drop to our right. Even if something sees us, from here we have the advantage of higher ground, and we can get ready if something comes at us.
 

It doesn't last long. We've got a good pace, and soon we're back on level ground, both sides of the street edged with scaffolding and construction. There are a few warehouses in this stretch of blocks, and this isn't the first time they've been under threat of hellkin. Before I met Mason, I killed a shade around here. He'd taken down a bunch of cops. And by taken down, I mean taken apart. This time, we cross through the construction zone without incident.

Demonbreun widens out after 14
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, and a median of naked trees and low bushes divides the center of the street. Any other year, those trees would be dotted with golden lights for Yuletide and Solstice. Now their bare branches just look like skeletons.

Another scream pierces through the air. This one's close.
 

Too close.

The right side of the street is lined with cafes and boutiques — this close to Music Square, everything's polished and classy. Except that when I look to my right, several of the shop windows are broken, and all of them bear streaks of demon slime. The left side of the street is apartment buildings, all tasteful modern brick and boarded up glass.

"Where did that come from?" Mira asks.
 

"Up ahead," says Evis. "Where the road changes."

"The roundabout." I point up the road to the traffic circle where Demonbreun meets Division. At its center is a sculpture of nude people dancing in ecstasy, but right now it looks like they're trying to flee the Earth into the sky, their hands reaching up as if someone will throw a rope down from above to save them.

A ring of low hedges surrounds the grassy center of the circle, and in grotesque mockery of the sculpture, I see human hands appear above the hedge, fingers clawed.
 

I break into a run, aware of the others at my sides. It's just harkast demons, small and stumpy, but there are six of them and one swiftly-dying norm.

My swords spring from their scabbards, and the points find two harkast heads at once.
 

One of them has a mouthful of flesh.
 

Mira falls on two others, and Evis and Mason take down the remaining two. Behind me, I hear Asher murmuring something that makes the air feel somehow electric. The only other sound is the squelching of dying demon and the gurgling moans of the human, who tries to crawl away. His leg is clothed in tattered denim and missing several bites of skin. Blood soaks him, running down his face from a gash in his forehead. His nose is skewed to his left, his eyes swelling.

But he's alive.

I wipe my blades as fast as I can and resheathe my swords, hitting my knees on the blood-spattered grass. Jax has Nana and is looking around, eyes alert. Nana's bunny ears swivel as if she's our radar system.

Maybe she is.

"Hey," I say to the guy, whose eyes are trying to roll back into his head. "What's your name?"