Any Port in a Storm Read Free

me.
    "Did something happen?"
    There's something in me that wants to just tell her about Saturn. She took it awfully well when a few months ago she found out I was being targeted by hellkin and Mediators both for working with shades.
    But I don't tell her. Instead, I just nod.
    There's a long pause.
    "I've been thinking of making you a partner," she says finally.
    What?
    I stare at her blankly. Six months ago she hated my guts. Three months ago, I think she started to fear me. Now she wants me to have a stake in her business?
    "I'm bringing it up because I want to know your thoughts on it," Laura goes on. "You're the reason we've been as successful as we have. I couldn't have grown this business this way without someone competent whose work I don't have to question or worry about. Meredith and Leeloo—" they're the two witches who work here too "— are great, but they're content with punching a clock, and your work shows you take pride in it."
    It's one of the longest speeches I've ever heard her make, and in spite of the business with the shades and the heavy cloud of worry about Saturn, her words fill me with a bubbly sense of excitement.
    The corners of my lips tug back with a twitch, a smile trying to escape. I don't know why I'm trying to suppress it. I let it curve into a grin. "Really?"
    Mouth open, her surprised bemusement is contained in a pause and a blink. Then she smiles back at me. "Really."

    Night finds me in Belle Meade, trying to keep my mind on keeping the pointy ends of my swords ready to stick in a demon. My mind still flits around the prospect of being a partner at work.
    I'm not usually one to flit in any fashion.
    Being a Mediator is thankless work. Most norms greet us with fuzzy respect and apprehension. Their expressions when they see my marked eyes varies between awe and "I'm about to shit myself." If we get accolades, they come from within, from the Summit.
    I have a one of those, for murdering a bunch of shades. The Mediators gave me the Silver Scale for all the blood on my hands.
    Ain't that how it goes?
    That was the night I met Mason. If ever there was a single day I could point to and say it forked my road good and proper, it's that one.
    The norms mostly forget. And I was born into this. It was in me no matter what. Whatever I do between eleven and seven for pay is one thing. What I do from sundown until the wee hours, now, it may not put money in the bank, but it lessens the heavy weight on my chest. I do that because I have to, and because I was born to it. That's a given.
    But making partner?
    I earned that.  
    A pink glow ahead snaps me out of it.
    Hellkin don't give a rat's hairy balls about what I earned. Their currency is death and teeth in the night, and I pay them back with cold steel.
    I hope to all six and a half hells that this son-bitch jeeling is alone.  
    The pinkish light grows more pronounced as I approach, and I hear a sucking crunch.
    Great. It's eating.
    After coming up on a shade munching on a frat boy a few months back, a jeeling chewing on a squirrel isn't going to win any gross-out competitions, but that doesn't mean I can't feel bad for the squirrel.
    Turns out, it's a cat.
    From five feet away I can see the cat's tail dangling from between the jeeling's glowing fingers, and that just pisses me off. Poor kitty. I wish people would keep their critters indoors. Jeelings are big, strong, and mean as the hells they come from, but they get really into their food.  
    This one doesn't see me coming.
    I take it off guard, hamstringing it with a flick of my sword.  
    The demon drops the cat and screams a grating roar into the woods, stumbling to the side. A dog starts barking in the distance, but I ignore it, darting back a couple yards until I can see what this nasty glow-worm-from-hell is going to do.  
    I stand on the balls of my feet, knees just bent, swords held like extensions of my arms. It's going to attack.
    I wait.
    Seconds tick by, and the jeeling rights itself,