Taken by Storm by Emmie Mears (Ayala Storme #3)

PRAISE FOR THE

AYALA STORME SERIES STORM IN A TEACUP

Mears’s world is creative and fast paced, her characters witty and engaging. ~ Ellie Ann, New York Times Bestselling Author ~

ANY PORT IN A STORM

My favorite new series…if I could give it more stars I would…highly recommended. ~ RabidReads.com ~

TAKEN BY STORM

The world, creatures, social, and magic systems Mears have created are very unique. ~ OneBookTwo ~

EYE OF THE STORM

Mears has a way of writing that really elicits the feels! The Storme Series has...amazing emotional depth; it’s full of love and betrayal and family and sacrifice and triumph and despair. ~ OneBookTwo ~

Cover design by Jessica Negrón

Taken by Storm Copyright © 2015, 2017 Emmie Mears

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published by Indigo an imprint of BHC Press Library of Congress Control Number: 2017936184 ISBN-13: 978-1-946006-89-9 ISBN-10: 1-946006-89-0 Visit the author at: www.bhcpress.com Also available in ebook & audio

ALSO BY

EMMIE MEARS THE AYALA STORME SERIES STORM IN A TEACUP ANY PORT IN A STORM EYE OF THE STORM

THE SHRIKE SERIES THE MASKED SONGBIRD RAMPANT

THE STONEBREAKER SERIES HEARTHFIRE

STANDALONE NOVELS A HALL OF KEYS AND NO DOORS LOOK TO THE SUN Available in trade paperback and ebook.

Select titles in audio.

1 RAW MEAT STILL DOESN’T smell appetizing.

Even though it’s been a few weeks since Carrick tattooed my back with my brother’s blood and turned my eyes from violet to indigo, I still get this swell of relief every time the shades are having lunch and I don’t want to join them.

Carrick, Jax, and Evis all sit around the dining nook of the cozy double wide with ramen bowls full of raw venison, munching away. I open a can of corned beef hash into a cast iron skillet and listen to it sizzle.

Even if the raw venison doesn’t smell good, that doesn’t mean I haven’t changed.

I can smell the iron bite of the skillet, the brighter tang of the aluminum can, the punky scent of the wooden spoon in my hand. I can smell something rotting at the back of the fridge, even though it’s closed, something I’m pretty sure is the remnants of a giant zucchini we picked from the homeowner’s garden. The shades are not omnivores, and a two foot long zuc-

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chini that’s over a foot in girth is not something I could tackle alone. Pretty sure that’s what I smell rotting. I’ll need to throw it out. I can smell the open container of baking soda in the fridge that’s not fully doing its job. All of that. And I can smell them, the shades.

Even as a normal Mediator, I could identify the difference between shade and norm by scent, but it was almost subconscious, instinctual. Now I know on a conscious level when I hear footsteps behind me that it’s my brother Evis, that he has deer blood on his right hand, and that he’s anxious. I can smell his anxiety and hear it in his hesitant footsteps.

This, more than the color of my eyes, is the biggest change so far.

Well, that and the fact that the Mediators booted me from the Summit, took back their shiny toys, made me a pariah, and ran me out of Nashville with pitchforks for not killing Evis when I had the chance.

He leans over my shoulder and sniffs. “Can I try it?”

I give him a your-funeral sort of look and scoop up a little with the wooden spoon and hold it out to him. “It’s got potatoes in it.”

Jax and Carrick are still sitting at the dining room table, pretending not to be curious, but I can see their gazes flickering in our direction.

Evis takes a nibble of the hash. To his credit—or maybe not—he chews it once before spitting it into the sink like a corned beef grenade.

“Salty,” I say.

He looks at me like I’m an alien, confusion drawing his yellow-orange eyebrows together. Is that what I look like when I’m confused? It’s bizarre, suddenly having a mirror when I grew up with no blood family. Evis and I could be twins for how alike we look.

An expression crosses his face that isn’t confusion. His eyes fall downcast, and his shoulders slump inward like a cardboard box left out in the rain.

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I can smell the corned beef caramelizing in the pan, but I ignore it. “Evis,” I say as gently as I can. “Are you okay?”

Carrick and Jax have gone very still, and I feel their turbulence like a gust of wind.

“She liked that stuff.”

He doesn’t have to explain who he means. Our mother, the woman I never knew but whose memories live on—literally—inside my brother’s head. When I was born with the violet eyes of a Mediator, they wiped off the blood and cut the umbilical cord along with every other tie to my family. I was born to fight demons, and my mother decided to spawn one.

Sometimes the very non-metaphorical interpretation of the Summit symbol of the yin and yang gets me just a bit.

Evis, our mother’s balancing act for the cosmos, spent a lot less time in her womb than I did, but he came out of her body with no cord though still covered in blood (and bone and guts) and her memories.

I used to think I wanted to remember her, to know her.

But looking at my brother collapsing inward on himself, I think he got the short end of that stick and it’s beating him constantly upside the head.

Putting my arms around him, I pull him close. “It’s okay.”

“If she liked it, why can’t I?” It’s a child’s question, and one I’m afraid to answer. Evis may be my brother, but we are different species. Last time someone tried to convince him of how different we were, he went on a murderous rampage through Nashville and almost killed me too. I push the thought of Gregor Gaskin out of my head, because if I let myself think of the man who pushed Evis into doing that, I’ll break something. Like the house I’m in.

Instead, I pull back and look into my brother’s eyes. “No two people have everything in common. It’s okay for you to not like to eat what she did.” I reach up and tug on a lock of his hair, which is the same color as mine. It’s getting long, the yellow-orange waves reaching his muscular shoulders. We must

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have gotten it from our mother. “Look. We share this. It had to be from her. You and me.”

He mirrors my gesture and tugs on my ponytail, but doesn’t answer.

“Look at my eyes.” This part makes me feel like I’m walking a tightrope over a chasm, because these eyes still don’t feel like mine. “We’re the same, brother. Not in everything, but we’re family.”

“Your stuff is going to burn,” he says.

Shit. He’s right. I flip a big chunk of hash just before it dies forever, still feeling Evis’s presence behind me. His breathing has returned to normal, and his scent comes through over the salty meat in the pan, like a frequency more than a describable smell, the wavelength less frenzied, calmer. Swells instead of breakers.

I wonder what Jax and Carrick are thinking about.

I crack speckled brown egg into the pan in a trough of hash, getting out a orange-glazed plate from the cupboard. In these moments, making food and comforting Evis, I can almost forget that this is a haven.

I can almost forget what it’s a haven from.

Out the window, the goat bleats. Jax wrinkles his nose and gets up to feed it, resolutely heading for the mud room built onto the back of the double wide.

Seeing a naked shade, a half-hellkin hybrid human, going to care for livestock makes me want to imagine a new world, one that’s safe for him, for them, for all of us.

But it’s daylight right now, and the illusion of light is one I can’t afford to believe.

I know what lives when the sun goes down.

EVEN THOUGH THE THINGS that go bump in the night

are my sacred calling and all that bullshit, sometimes it’s the mundane that really bites me in the ass.

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As I’m cleaning up my lunch and Carrick’s doing the dishes, the phone rings. It’s the owner of the doublewide, and she’s broken her leg in Hawaii. She’s coming back tomorrow, and I’m about to be homeless with three shades.

“She was supposed to stay another two weeks,” Jax says as if that changes anything.

Shades don’t exactly get that most norms need more than a couple days to heal a broken bone.

“It’ll be okay,” I say. In my head, though, I want to scream.

I have money, but I have the social and political power of a hermit crab right about now, and I don’t have my shelter attached to my back.

The shades can live off the land just fine. They can Dances With Wolves until the cows come home, and they can eat the cows raw. I’m fine getting covered in hell goo, but when I get home I like to soak in my nice big bathtub, drink a nice big cup of sake, and wrap my squeaky clean little self up in my nice big silk robe.

Said robe looks out of place hanging on the back of the door in this double wide, but at least it’s got a door to hang on.

I suddenly get the absurd mental picture of the three hundred dollar garment dangling from a hickory branch.

Get it together, Ayala.

My jitters are making the shades nervous, so I grab my car keys, tell Carrick to get our stuff gathered up, and head for the door.

As it closes behind me, I hear Evis telling Jax that he still can’t kill the goat.

I shut my eyes, standing on the stoop in the dim afternoon sun. I breathe in the scents of autumn and goat, and I breathe out the same damn scents because I can’t exhale my nerves through my nostrils.

I was never very good at that kind of meditation.

In the car, I call Mira, hearing the ring over the crunch of gravel beneath the tires.

She almost doesn’t answer.

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“Yo, Storme, I’m in the shit. What do you need?”

I feel a pang because whatever shit Mira Gonzales is in is almost certainly my fault. At least…ricocheted shit. “Lady Jax is house sitting for broke her leg in paradise. She’s flying back, and we’ve got to fly this coop.”

“Fuck.”

“Yep.” I hear someone yell in the background, and a muffled sound as Mira covers the mouthpiece. I can still hear her, though. “Hey, get your fucking shit together, Mittens. That sword has a pointy end, and if you stick it in somebody not from the hells, you’re gonna be on splat duty till you’re fifty.”

A moment and a couple more barked orders later, she’s back.

“Sorry, Storme. Fucking children.”

“They have you training Mittens?” Mittens is the pet name for Mediators-in-Training, and the thought of Mira doing whatever she’s doing is like seeing my bunny Nana doing calculus.

Aw. Nana.

“Yeah, Alamea thought it’d be a good idea to keep me out of the main Summit business.” Mira’s voice has the quality of a wood chipper, so I drop it. Alamea knows what she’s doing. I think. “So. You need a place to live.”

“Nobody’s going to rent to me.”

“No shit.”

That’s what I love about Mira. She doesn’t bullshit you or wipe your ass for you. Just chucks the roll of toilet paper at your head.

“I’m not sure what we’re going to do. Evis and the others might be able to go Paul Bunyan on me, but if I don’t have running water I’m going to start slicing up the populace.”

“Give me an hour. I’ll call you back.”

“What, you got Bungalows for Blackballed Badass Bitches on speed dial or something?”

“Or something. Watch your gods damned stance!” She bellows it into the phone, and I hold it away from my ear.

“I’ll talk to you soon,” I say.

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“Yeah, I’ll call you back after I whoop these babies into shape.” She hangs up.

I drive into town, not sure where I’m even going. In daylight the tiny Kentucky town looks almost more pitiful. The tattoo shop where Carrick stole the machine for mine has been repaired, and I’m sure the owner is suitably perplexed by the new machine I gift wrapped and left in her studio. We had to replace the one we stole—couldn’t risk any norms accidentally getting a shade blood tat. There’s a diner on the next block, and I parallel park in front of it. At two in the afternoon, there’s nobody around except a couple regulars who cope with their retirement by drinking more caffeine per diem than anyone should drink in a week.

Sometimes I miss coffee and tea, but since Gryfflet Asberry, the cabbage-faced, two-faced witch used my beloved morning coffee to drug me and kidnap me, I’ve soured on it. I sit down at the bar, thankful at least that the people in this town haven’t asked me any questions and whatever Mediators patrol this territory haven’t realized I’m here. I order a Coke and ask for the newspaper.

The owner brings me the paper and a glass dripping Coke over the rim. She and her wife run the joint, and her brother runs the little convenience store attached to the north side. She nods at me, doesn’t make eye contact, and walks away. I open the paper, unsure what I expect to see.

There’s nothing on the front page except the usual norm news. Homicide in Lexington, the demolition and of a long-unused coal mine to the east which makes the news because it’s apparently the last in the country, nothing of interest to me. I comb the classifieds, but all I find are the normal apartment complexes and single family homes that won’t admit a censured Mediator and three half-demons.

Even though I just ate, I order some cheese fries and eat them, burning my tongue and not caring because it now heals almost immediately.

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I fold the newspaper and slide it back across the counter, leaving cash without asking for the bill. My phone rings as I jingle the bells on the door and cross the threshold back onto the street.

“Hey, Mira.”

“Found you a place.” She’s in a quieter location now, but her voice sounds tense. “Well, I didn’t. Wane did. She’s got a friend of a friend with a cousin in Kentucky still in your territory range who has a cabin he’s willing to rent. Cash in hand, six months in advance.”

I stop on the sidewalk, not believing what Mira’s saying.

“You found me a place?”

“Yep.” She rattles off directions, and I dig in my car—it’s been cleaned and it feels wrong to not see my back seat full of crap—pulling out a note pad just in time to jot down what Mira’s saying. It’s about an hour from here, and it’s dangerously close to the edge of my territory. Close enough to that boundary that if I go for an evening patrol and walk a couple miles north I might double over with nausea.

But I can’t be picky. “Just tell me where to take the money.”

She does, then pauses. “Nana’s doing fine, by the way.”

I know she doesn’t mean for there to be any recrimination in her words, but guilt stabs me anyway. “Thank you.”

I hang up, my fingers feeling numb. Nana is my bunny, a little red velvet hopster. She was a gift from Mason, the first shade I got to know who became my lover and then ran away to Egypt.

I miss Nana and her little flumpy hops around the living room. I miss her twitchy little nose and soft fur. I miss the way she’d hop up to my foot and lean against it. Having a small furry creature dependent on me made my life a little better and a lot more full of cuteness. Gave me another good reason not to get dead. I look up from my phone, about to get into my car.

Someone’s staring at me from across the street. When the wind blows my direction, my newly heightened sense of smell makes my hands twitch toward the knives in my boots. It’s a Mediator across the street. The first I’ve seen here. I don’t know

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him. We’re far enough away from the Nashville Summit that he probably reports to Lexington or Louisville.

I don’t have time to wonder if he’s going to attack me.

His sword is drawn and he’s halfway across the street in the time it takes me to unsheathe my knives.

And suddenly, I’m out of his way.

I haven’t been hunting or even training since the tattoo, but when I see the Mediator’s baffled face, covered in day old stubble, I realize that maybe the sense of smell is the least of it.

He recovers quickly and comes at me again. I dodge. I don’t want to hurt another Mediator, not really. I don’t kill norms.

But this guy probably thinks I do.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” I say, but I’m going to have to and I know it. Even if he doesn’t yet. I won’t kill him, but I have to incapacitate him.

He’s in range. I parry his sword thrust with one knife. My foot flicks out and slams into his knee before he regains his balance, and a crack slices through the air.

The Mediator yells and spits, wobbling sideways on his remaining good leg. He tries to slash at me again with his sword, and this time I aim my kick at the blade, knocking it out of his hand. It clangs to the pavement. I kick it out of range, pointing my daggers at his face. Peripherally, I see that people are sticking their heads out of the few shops along the main drag. A couple move this direction. They know this guy, I’m sure.

“I know what you did,” he says. He tries to snarl the words, but with a broken knee, all he manages is a gasp.

“I sincerely doubt that.”

“You’ve got some half-hellkin half brother, and I’m going to put him down like the demon he is.”

That he manages to say loudly enough that the people on the street flinch.

“You don’t know what in the hells you’re talking about,” I breathe. I kneel a couple feet away from the Mediator, sure he’s got more blades stashed on him. I see the bulge of a knife at his side in an inner pants holster, and another at his ankle. But I

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want him to hear me. “You know nothing about the shades or who they are. And you know nothing about my brother. If you want somewhere to stick your sword, try aiming it in the direction of Gregor Gaskin, if you can find him.”

The man in front of me is tense like a coiled spring, and his eyes have locked on mine. I know what he sees.

“You’re not one of us anymore,” he says, again loudly enough for the townies to hear him.

I don’t know what to say to that. It’s true. “I’m still on your side. And you shouldn’t open your mouth about things you don’t know shit about.”

“Tell you what I do know.” He props himself up on his elbow, smart enough not to go for his blades, but I know he’s aware of the small contingent of townies advancing down the sidewalk.

He’s not expecting them to attack me—they’ve got brains. But he’s banking on me not wanting to fight them. Correctly.

“What do you think you know?” I ask flatly.

“If it’s not me to take your demon brother’s head off, it’ll be somebody else.”

I get to my feet and look behind the Mediator at the people coming my way. I walk directly toward them, toward my car.

They step back a foot to let me pass, but I hear the murmurs, the whispers, the heartbeats racing.

Mediator Assassin: 1. Ayala: 0.

He’s right.

They’re going to keep coming. Safety is an illusion.

Looks like I need a new cheese fries dealer.

2 I MANAGE TO KEEP the incident to myself until we get

to the new cabin.

Nestled in a small valley fifty miles from the double wide, I drop the shades five miles away so their nudity doesn’t freak out the owner. I meet the landlord at the cabin, fork over six months of rent in cash, and he salutes and leaves in an SUV. There’s no internet, which makes me twitchy, but it’s got a landline phone, gas heat, a satellite dish with more hunting channels than anyone should ever watch, and electricity, all of which he included in the rent. I don’t know if I’m being overcharged, and I don’t really care. The little two bedroom cabin looks like heaven to me.

Heaven has decade-old vinyl siding, kudzu encroaching from the hills, and smells like moth balls, but I’ll take it.

Carrick’s the first of the shades to make it to the cabin, and he raps his knuckles on the screen door before walking right in. “Ayala?”

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I give him a wry smile from the living room, which is almost in the kitchen. There’s not a lot of space in the house.

Good thing the shades are indoor-outdoor creatures and they can climb a tree if they start feeling cagey.

“Want me to show you around?”

He shakes his head. He’s got a leaf in his long auburn hair.

It’s almost nice to be alone with Carrick. After a rocky start in which Gregor-who-I-intend-to-kill dumped him at my apartment, twisted his plans into killing norms, and betrayed him, we sort of bonded. Shaky trust turned to actual trust, and since Carrick is the oldest living shade at around four hundred years old, I’m glad he’s on my side.

He’s also a considerate roommate and taught me that it’s okay to like romance novels for the happy ending. Let it not be said that I’m incapable of changing and growing.

“Where are Jax and Evis?” I ask. My spine feels like a xylophone someone’s run the mallet up and down, and I shiver. I wish Evis were here. There have to be Mediators out there looking for us.

“Hunting.” Carrick sits down next to me on the sofa, which is about twenty years old. He sinks in, grimacing. A few crickets begin to chirp outside, late for the season.

Reaching over to pluck the leaf from his hair, I take a deep breath and tell him about the Mediator who attacked me. He listens, his quietness and near-statue stillness telling me that this disturbs him.

“They’re going to come after Evis,” Carrick says.

“I can’t let anything happen to him.” My quiet admission startles Carrick into silence, and he gives me a queer look.

“You might not be able to protect him.” The traces of remaining English accent show through in his words, and I hate the truth in what he says.

“I have to try.”

“I know you do. But this is bigger than him.”

“Then what am I fighting for?”

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Carrick’s forehead bears few lines for his age, though he doesn’t look like a nubile seventeen-year-old, either, and just now the lines deepen into creases. He reaches out and takes my hand, giving it a squeeze. His mannerisms are always more human than the others’, but the tightening of that hand contains a strength no norm could manage.

“You have more than just him to lose,” he says, voice soft.

There’s a rustle of leaves outside, and Carrick and I turn simultaneously to look. I catch a small twitch of surprise in him that I heard it too. A moment later, Jax and Evis come through the door without knocking. Outside, I can see a white-tailed deer dangling off the side of the small porch, already bled out.

Jax’s brown skin is spotted with blood, and Evis has a few smears against his paleness as well. They’re getting less messy about how they hunt. The first few shades I saw eating left chunks everywhere and gnawed on the bones. I’m acutely aware of my position, to see an entire new species find its footing in a hostile world. I wish I could convince the Summit of that. I want these people to be safe. They didn’t ask to be born.

They’re trying so hard.

In spite of their bloodied appearance, both Evis and Jax come up and gently touch my shoulder. I return the gesture, even though by now it shouldn’t be necessary. They trust me, I trust them—but this is a fragile ritual in a still-fluid people group. I won’t break it.

The three of them go out to take care of the deer, and I pick one of the bedrooms at random, mulling over what Carrick said. The other Mediators will keep coming. I remember how I felt when I first discovered the shades, and for most of the Mediators, the shades being half-human won’t matter. It’s only the hells blood in their veins that makes them monsters, and for Mediators that’s all they need. Us versus them. I’ve become the them.

The bedroom I entered contains a queen bed with a clean—albeit musty—green and red plaid flannel comforter and more pillows than even I need. The pillow shams are the

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same pattern, and when I peel back the comforter, the sheets are too. That’s some dedicated matching. The carpet is a neutral brown, old enough to show some track marks where people made their paths through the room enough times, but not so old that it looks like it holds more nightmares than a hellshole at midnight.

On the far wall, there’s a large framed map of the United States. It’s not even a particularly nice map, nor a particularly nice frame, but I walk over to it.

I don’t look at maps like this very often. Local maps, sure.

But I don’t like the reminder of how big the world is when I can’t go out into it. The map is old. The state lines of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana are still there, and the Gulf hadn’t yet encroached into the Louisiana bayous. And Florida was a little bit more phallic and a little less crescent-like.

Raising my finger to the glass, I trace the southern border of Tennessee, up through the eastern mountains, cutting off a strip at the end, skirting the northern border of the state before curving up into Kentucky, farther westward brushing into the southernmost part of Ohio, then plunging back down into Tennessee due north of Memphis.

My territory, my cage. The map’s too small to get a clear view of where we are, but I make a guess. It’s far closer to the edge of my range than I like. Not for the first time, I feel claustrophobia threaten at the edges of my consciousness. Even with the chunk of the south taken out of the country, North America is still a big place. My territory is not so much.

If the Mediators keep coming for us and ignoring the bigger evil out there, how far could we really run before we ran out of places to go? The shades don’t have to stay here. They’re not like me and bound to a specific geographical space. Many of the shades Gregor used to murder norms did just that—up and left. Pulled a Mason. I don’t blame them.

If it comes down to it, I could send Evis away. Try to make him leave and go somewhere safer. Except even outside this territory, there’s no safe place on this planet for the shades.

MIRA CALLS ME AGAIN while I’m in the middle of cook-

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ing dinner, which is to say, taking a once-frozen pizza out of the oven.

“Saturn told me he has news. He wants to see you, and I’m coming too because that asshat wouldn’t tell me what it was.”

From the sound of it, Mira’s having a bad day.

“You could all come up to the cabin.” My pizza steams on top of the stove, and I resist the urge to pull a piece free and eat it now.

“Not in my range. You’ll have to come south.”

Startled, I forget the pizza. “Not in your range? I thought our range was the same.”

Silence on Mira’s end of the line. “I guess it’s not. I just know that mine ends about thirty miles south of you.”

“I’ll meet you on the Tennessee border, then,” I say, watching the curlicues of steam waft up from my pizza. “I’ll be there in an hour and a half.”

We pick a rest stop near the highway, and I inhale my pizza as fast as I can. I don’t know what Saturn found out, but usually he tells Mira everything. Maybe he just doesn’t want to repeat himself.

Jax elects to stay at the cabin, and he convinces Evis to stay as well. It crunches something inside me to leave Evis, but I can’t babysit him all the time, and we’ll only be gone a few hours.

“If any Mediators show up, run,” I tell them.

taken by storm

There are Mediators in every state, every country. Even Antarctica, because there are some cold-loving demons who would take over the whole continent were it not for the Summit’s presence there.

The truth is, Evis is probably safest with me.

And that’s not saying much.

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Carrick and I pile in the car and head south as the sun dips beneath the horizon. Winter’s coming on, and we might even get some snow where we’re living if we can stay alive long enough to see it.

We pull into the rest stop at half past seven, and Mira’s car is already there. She, Saturn, and Miles are gathered around it, watching us pull in. My heart gives a hop to see them, followed immediately by the ache I know by now to expect. It’s only been a couple weeks, but I miss them so much it makes me want to tackle them. I don’t. Instead, I exchange shoulder touches with Miles and Saturn, and Mira hugs me tight enough to crack a rib. She smells like vanilla and leather.

“Where’s Jax?” Miles asks. They were always close, and the reminder makes me question why Jax chose to stay home.

“He stayed at the cabin,” I say, but Miles is looking over my shoulder at Carrick.

When he looks back at me, he meets my eyes directly, his own indigo eyes wide. This is the first time any of them have seen me since the tattoo. Miles reaches out with one dark brown hand and touches the side of my face.

“What did you do?”

“A spell.” Carrick’s voice is as sharp as a glass shard, and Miles doesn’t pry any more.

Mira already knew—I told her—but even so, she’s peering at me.

“I’m not a gods damned science experiment,” I say.

“Nope, just a freak.” Mira grins at me, and Saturn grins at her.

Glad to see her calling him an asshat hasn’t damaged their friendship.

We’re not here to look at Ayala the Freakazoid, though.

Saturn sees my look and nods.

I saw Saturn come into this world after being sent to find his missing mother. It hasn’t really affected our bond much, but it’s not something anyone could easily forget.

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“We found Gregor,” he says. “He is in Washington. The state one.”

That gets all our attention, and I’m no longer the freak.

“Saturn,” Mira murmurs more gently than I’m used to hearing from her, “I wish you’d told me before we drove up here.

That’s impossible.”

Carrick stares at Saturn, his eyes as hard as lapis lazuli.

Miles turns, revealing a bag that he’s been leaning against.

“It’s true. There are pictures.”

He pulls out a folder with photographs. The blocky man in the photos is instantly recognizable. Mira’s breath hisses in.

Gregor in a car with Washington plates. Gregor on a street where there’s a view of the ocean. Gregor at a supermarket.

“He’s not even hiding.” I can’t keep the incredulity from my voice.

Next to me, Mira leans up against my shoulder, the touch somehow a comfort. “Motherfucker,” she says.

Somehow her swearing is a comfort too.

The obvious question is whether the images have been doctored, but I know without asking that they haven’t. That glimpse of ocean behind Gregor is real. He’s been close enough to the sea to smell it, touch it. A surge of jealousy catches me off guard, even though it’s not the point.

Gregor is in Washington, and we’re all stuck in Tennessee.

“What the fuck are we going to do?” The question tumbles out of my mouth, and all the calcified rage from weeks of knowing Gregor was a traitor, from seeing what he did to Evis, from seeing him violate every sacred corner of our calling—it comes back to life with blood seeping through it, surging around it.

My fingers and toes feel hard on the ends, and my breath lives in my throat.

“We can track him,” Saturn says, motioning at the pictures. “He can’t stop us.”

It’s probably irrational that I hate that idea. I want to be the one to find Gregor, and the sense of stagnant impotence I feel listening to Saturn go on about the shades who managed to

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follow Gregor thus far feels like welling magma, and there are cracks in my surface.

A light touch on my shoulder makes me turn, expecting Miles or Carrick—but it’s Mira. Her eyes burn like backlit amethyst, and I know she feels what I do.

“You’re thinking about this wrong,” she says. She’s not talking directly to me or even Saturn, but he shuts up and looks at her.

“What do you mean?” Carrick sidles up to us, taking the pictures from Miles and flipping through them, disgust twisting his sensual lips into a sneer.

“I mean that you’re all thinking about how to find this hellslime fucker when the question you should be asking is why he can leave our territory and we can’t.”

Everyone’s looking at Mira, but she’s still looking at me.

“I don’t know about y’all,” she says, “but I sure as all six and a half hells want to know.”

I think of her home, covered in pictures of places we’ll never go. Aztec ruins and shining beaches.

My gaze locks with hers. I nod.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR EMMIE MEARS WRITES THE books they always needed to

read about characters they wish they could be. Emmie is multilingual, autistic, agender, and a bad pescetarian.

Emmie makes their home on planet Earth, and (soon) more specifically in Glasgow, Scotland. They live with their partner and two rescued kitties who call Emmie and John a forever home.

However you felt about the book, please consider leaving a review on Goodreads or the site of your favorite retailer (or if you’re feeling extra angelic, both). Reviews are golden to author-folk. Thank you for reading and for supporting!

Visit the author’s website at: www.emmiemears.com