Dragon's Teeth (69 page)

“I will not contaminate my flesh with touching you,” he said contemptuously. “Contemplate your fates. When Herr Doktor Herbsten is finished with his subject upstairs, he will come to study you. Most of his subjects have not lived too long. Perhaps you will be the exception.”

With that, Eisenfaust turned abruptly and marched out the door, which swung ponderously shut behind him.

Now Roddy could see that, like Belle, Yankee Doodle was tied hand and foot to a chair that had been bolted to the floor. But the top half of his head was encased in a kind of helmet with an opaque visor. That visor, Roddy realized immediately, must be mirrored on the inside, so that anything Yank tried would just get shot back into his own face.

But the important thing was not what their captors had intended to do to them. The important thing was that he and the prisoners had the entire room to themselves.

He allowed himself to become visible; Belle reacted with a startled, smothered squeak.

“Marie? Baby?” Yank reacted with alarm, turning his head blindly from side to side. “What is it? What—”

“’Tis all right, laddie,” Roddy assured him as he stepped forward to take the helmet from Yank’s head. “I’m Sgian Dubh of MI6, and I’m here t’ help.”

With a little puff of displaced air, the Scotsman landed beside his French Resistance guide, falling wearily to the ground as she bit back a scream that turned only into a swift intake of breath.
“Sacre merde!”
she whispered harshly. “Do not—what happened? Were zey not zere? Could you not free zem? What—”

Roddy tiredly held up one hand for silence, forgetting that in the dark she couldn’t see it. But it hardly mattered as in the next moment the old stone mansion literally erupted with the sound of the pride of the USA metahuman forces as they began the grimly joyful task of kicking and blasting their way out of imprisonment. Holes began to appear in the slate roof as Yankee Doodle’s energy blasts reached for the heavens.

Under cover of the ruckus, Roddy and his contact slipped away. He looked back only once, just in time to see the two figures, illuminated by the flames licking up from the ravaged building beneath them, shooting off into the sky.

Roddy smiled. The Auld Woman couldn’t have done it better herself.