Any Port in a Storm by Emmie Mears Read Free Book Online

muscular but untrained still. He's almost as pale as I am, with a smattering of reddish freckles that clash with his violet eyes.  
    Mine clash too; my yellow-orange hair doesn't look too good with purple. C'est la vie of the Mediator. Stuck with the same eye color, other coloring be damned.  
    "Sh-she's in her office!" The MIT points upward as if I need directions, which is kind of cute.
    "How old are you, Mittens?"  
    "Fourteen."
    Lordy. I try to remember myself at fourteen and fail. "What's your name?"
    "Conroy."
    "Well, Conroy, keep up the good work." I feel like Uncle Sam as I walk away, or a weird amalgamate of him and Smoky the Bear. Only you can prevent total takeover of Nashville by the teeming hordes of the hells . Wink wink.
    Alamea's office is always messy, which I respect. She never gives me shit about my car. She's got swords on her walls, gorgeous, functional swords that I can tell she cares for. They shine in the austere white light of her office, edges honed and blades bright.  
    Alamea herself shows signs of care. She's old money, cotton plantation owners dating back to the seventeenth century in North Carolina. The Virgili's came from Africa and took over half the South. She's one of the few Mediators who has a lineage everyone knows, though she's like the rest of us and cut off from her family. Not the first Virgili to be born a Mediator, either.  
    She's a titan, a legend, a walking god. Her white linen shirt is perfectly tailored; her exposed dark brown arms give the same effect. I know the strength and control in those muscles. She's over six feet tall even flat footed, and her long locs are tied in a hefty knot over her right shoulder, shots of silver winding through them like little lightning bolts. She sits with both feet up on the corner of her desk, typing away on a laptop with her desktop computer monitor angled to the side. Every so often, she looks back and forth between the screens.  
    My arm gives a twinge when I see her, and again I'm thankful to her reflexes that she didn't chop it off. She could have. Any slower and she would have. I'm always just a bit in awe of her, and not a little bit afraid.
    I know she sees me, but she doesn't acknowledge me until I hear her hitting the return key three times with her pinky, and then she looks up, dropping her feet to the floor and moving the laptop to the surface of her desk. She straightens a stack of papers as if it'll do anything to stem the overflowing mass of them that threaten to slide off the sides of the desk, and then she gives me a tight smile.
    "Thanks for coming, Ayala."
    "My pleasure. I think."
    Her smile widens at that.  
    "I hear there was a misunderstanding this weekend."
    "That's one way to put it. Carson and his buddies killed one of my friends." I don't want to think about Rade, even though I know that's why I'm here. I don't want to think about Thom and Sez. I also don't want to think of all the other names of shades we would lose if the Mediators went all out against them again.  
    Alamea's peace medal hangs behind her in a mahogany frame, ironically bearing a sword sculpted in silver, point down. Whatever honors we win, we pay for in blood.
    I don't want to think about the names of the shades I helped blow up this summer and the blood that paid for my own medal.
    Alamea seems to sense my thoughts, and she sits forward in her chair. She smells like lemon cake, sweet and citrusy, and she meets my eyes, silent for a long moment. "We were wrong this summer."
    Of all the words I expected to hear out of her mouth, we were wrong were at the bottom of the list. Somewhere around I've decided to marry a slummoth .  
    I want to say that yes, we were. And include myself in it, because before I was right I was certainly wrong. Instead my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth, and I just wait for her to go on.
    "What you're doing with Gregor is important," she says finally. "I'm glad that someone is there to give the shades purpose