Midnight Blue-Light Special (25 page)

“If they were going to kill her, we could create a gas leak in the building and blow them all to Kingdom Come,” said Dominic. If having a shift-primed tanuki menacing him was a problem, he wasn’t letting it show. “Since they’re not going to kill her any time soon, we have to come up with a solution that doesn’t include killing her ourselves.”

“Oh,” said Ryan suspiciously. He didn’t shrink back down to his original size. I guess some things take time.

“As I was saying: no, the Covenant will not kill her. It would be, if you will forgive me an unpleasant turn of phrase, wasteful. Verity Price represents something they have not had in generations. She is a source of information about her family, and about the cryptids of North America. They will break her, through whatever means necessary, and then they will drain her dry.” Dominic shook his head. “I love her. I do. But believe me when I say that the Covenant of St. George is extremely good at breaking people. She will do her best to withstand them, and I believe she’ll be able to hold out much longer than many people could. In the end, she’ll break. In the end, everyone breaks.”

“So what do we do?” asked Angel.

“The Covenant is using a dockside warehouse as their temporary headquarters while here in town. Their hotel rooms have already been abandoned; presumably all three of them have moved into the warehouse to supervise their prisoner, and to fortify their defenses against me.” Now Dominic’s voice turned even grimmer. “I didn’t tell them Verity existed; I vanished when she was taken.”

“And our family has a history of converting Covenant agents to our way of thinking,” I said. “They’ve probably already decided that Dominic is no longer on the right side.”

“This is true,” said Dominic. “In their eyes, I am as much of a monster as any of you, if not more. After all, I saw the light, and turned it aside.”

“Congratulations,” said Istas primly.

Nervous laughter spread through the room like a stain. Uncle Mike allowed it for a moment before stepping forward, saying, “Okay, folks, get it together. My niece needs saving.” He glanced to Dominic, who nodded. Uncle Mike nodded back before he continued, “We know where they are, and we know how many of them we’re going up against. We also know they may have bitten off more than they could chew when they took Verity. If they’re hoping to get information out of her, that means they’re keeping her awake and reasonably aware of what’s going on. Now, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve seen that girl kick a boundary imp’s ass when she had a concussion and a broken arm. If they think she’s just going to sit there and let them ask their questions, they’re going to find themselves with a nasty surprise. That works in our favor.”

“If things are so slanted in our favor, what are we still doing here?” asked a Pliny’s gorgon I vaguely recognized as being one of the newer members of the staff. He crossed his arms, posture daring Dominic and Uncle Mike to come up with an answer he’d believe. The snakes on his head hissed ominously, twining themselves together in a sinuous braid which undid itself just as quickly. I thought his name was Joe. Maybe. Whatever his name, he was tall, unfriendly, and crowned with venomous snakes. That alone made him worth listening to, if only so his hair didn’t start biting people.

“Because there’s this little factor called ‘the unknown,’” said Uncle Mike. “We need to worry about what we don’t know.”

“The three Covenant operatives are highly skilled in their own areas, and are not going to be inclined to go gently on us,” said Dominic. “Peter Brandt is a demolitions expert. Robert Bullard is a tactical specialist. Between the two of them, they’re very likely to have turned the warehouse into a death trap for anyone coming in without knowing how to avoid the trip wires. Margaret . . .” He hesitated.

“Margaret is a Healy,” I said. Several heads turned toward me, like everyone had forgotten that I was there. Sadly, they probably had. Stupid cuckoo powers. “For those of you who don’t know what that means, she’s like an evil Verity. She won’t stop hitting you just because you say you’re going to be good, you changed your mind, and you’d like to go home now. That means that no matter how heavily weighted we think this equation is in our favor, we have to be better than the probabilities. We have to be absolutely certain of what we’re walking into.”

“Nobody’s absolutely sure of anything, cuckoo girl,” said Kitty, sending mutters through some of the staffers who had managed to forget what I was. Stupid,
stupid
cuckoo powers. Sometimes I get tired of apologizing for my species to the same person a dozen times. “How are we supposed to know that we’re not all walking into a trap?”

“We employ spies,” said Uncle Mike, dipping his hand into a pocket.

When he pulled it out again, one of the younger mouse priests was standing proudly on his palm. “Hail!” squeaked the mouse.

Silence reigned.

No one’s sure whether Aeslin mice are extinct except for the family colony, or whether they just like their privacy. Whichever the answer, most people have only heard of them in passing, and they’re largely regarded as a weird sort of fairy tale, Cinderella’s mice without the vegetable transport and poor footwear choices. But they’re the only species of talking mouse that anyone has found so far, and so there wasn’t much question about what Uncle Mike was holding. The only question was how.

“Hello, mouse,” said Istas, sounding pleased.

“What the . . . ?” said Kitty.

“Is that an
Aeslin mouse
?” asked Joe.

“My hair is hungry,” announced Carol.

That brought the conversation to its second screeching halt in as many minutes, as everyone turned to stare at the gorgon. Carol blushed, ducking her head slightly while radiating embarrassment. She was telling the truth about her hair; the individual snakes were stretching toward the mouse, their mouths open and their tongues scenting the air.

“This just gets better and better,” muttered Ryan. I didn’t disagree.

Uncle Mike ignored them all in favor of focusing on what mattered—the plan—rather than what didn’t—everything else. “We’ve got half a dozen volunteers from Verity’s resident Aeslin colony. They’re going to go in, scout the place for traps, and report back. That lets us get a feeling for the lay of the land before we put ourselves in harm’s way.”

“You mean she wasn’t just bragging when she said she had a colony of Aeslin living with her?” asked Kitty.

Dominic snorted. “Bragging? No. Complaining vociferously? Almost certainly. While she is quite fond of her resident rodents, she seems to enjoy complaining about them as she does little else.”

“The family has coexisted with Aeslin mice for generations, which brings us to the one possible flaw in this plan,” said Uncle Mike. “We don’t know for sure that this Margaret woman doesn’t have a colony of her own. It seems unlikely, given the Covenant’s stance on cryptids, but the original colony was harbored before the family defected.”

“If we encounter heretics while on the search for our brave Priestess, we will smite them down with the Fury of a Thousand Angry Rolling Pins!” squeaked the mouse.

“Don’t know what that means, really. I’ve got to assume it’s pretty dire, since it’s coming from a talking mouse,” said Uncle Mike. “Now I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m going to go and rescue my niece from the Covenant of St. George. Who’s with me?”

“I am,” said Dominic.

“It will be a pleasing diversion,” said Istas.

“Verity’s my friend,” said Ryan.

“These people give humans a bad name,” said Angel.

“We’re with you,” said a voice from the back of the room. I turned to see Priscilla standing in the door to the hall. She must have been speaking for the dragons while Candy’s pregnancy kept her confined to the Nest. More dragons stood to either side of her, both the European and Chinese varieties. Several of the lizard-like servitors that Verity insisted on calling “Sleestaks” were behind them. All of them were holding weapons.

“All right, then,” said Uncle Mike. He sounded pleased. Who wouldn’t be, when they had just been handed their very own cryptid army? “Now we’re cooking with gas. Let’s go get Verity back.”

This time, when the mouse cheered, so did everybody else. One way or another, it was time to go and face the Covenant of St. George.
Hang on, Verity,
I thought, wishing there was any chance at all that she was in a position to hear me.
We’re on our way.

Just hang on . . .

Twenty

“I’ll never understand why people think kidnapping is a good way to solve their problems. Near as I can tell, it just makes more problems that you need to solve, and who are you going to kidnap then?”

—Frances Brown

An unknown location in the city of Manhattan, returning to our original narrator, who has just regained consciousness after a nasty blow to the head

I
KNEW THREE THINGS
even before I opened my eyes: that I was somewhere enclosed, probably no larger than a bathroom stall, that someone had changed my clothes—nothing was riding the way it should have, which probably meant my weapons were also gone—and that I was in serious trouble. Then I raised my aching head, opened my eyes, and added a fourth thing to the list: wherever I was, it was pitch-black. No natural
or
artificial light, and I’m not a bogeyman, I can’t see in the dark.

Well, shit,
I thought. I was smart enough not to say it out loud. There was no point in letting my captors know I was awake before I absolutely had to.

The last thing I remembered was Margaret Healy’s gun slamming into the back of my head, and the meaty, deadweight sound of my body hitting the rooftop. Not the sort of thing I like to go to sleep on. I’m more of the “dance until you can’t feel your knees, two or three rounds of really fun sex, wine cooler, bed” school of thought. Still, we all have to work with what we’re given in this life, and what I’d been given was a crazy cousin from England who seemed to think my skull was a piñata.

At least she hadn’t managed to hit me hard enough to make the candy come out. I could turn my head easily enough, and while I couldn’t see a damn thing, I was reasonably confident that it was due to a lack of light, not because she had somehow knocked my optic nerves offline. I sat up a little straighter. The gesture caused the chains holding my wrists to the wall to pull up tight, clanking faintly.

“Damn,” I whispered, not bothering to internalize it this time. I hadn’t even realized I was chained until I tried to move. That was an amateur mistake—I should have assumed I was bound the second I woke up, and planned accordingly.

Not that there was much I could have done in the dark, presumably unarmed, and with a head sore enough to make me suspect concussion. Maybe I was being hard on myself . . . and maybe that didn’t matter, since Margaret and her goons weren’t going to go easy on me just because I wasn’t feeling at the top of my game. I took a deep breath, ignoring the sick swimming sensation in my head, and tugged against the chains that bound me. There was barely a foot of give, and by chaining me to a wall, rather than tying me to the chair that I was sitting in, the Covenant had managed to deny me the leverage I might have otherwise used against them.

My left leg was free. My right leg wasn’t. That made sense, too. It didn’t totally immobilize me, and if they wanted me to stay functional for any length of time, they were going to want me to have some capacity for movement. Enough to keep the blood flowing at least, since bedsores and gangrene are nobody’s friends.

That was a sobering thought all by itself. People who plan to kill you quickly don’t worry about tying you up so that you can still move enough to keep your circulation good. People who plan to torture you for everything you can tell them about your family and the cryptids you’ve spent your whole life protecting do. And if what I knew about the Covenant was accurate, they wouldn’t view torturing me as a bad thing. God told them it was all cool, as long as when it was over, they got to kill a dragon or two.

Antimony suggested once that we should all carry suicide pills, just in case a situation like this one came up. Alex and I both laughed at her. I told her that there was no way I’d ever let a situation like this one be a problem. “I’ll die before I let myself be taken that way”—those were my exact words. Yet here I was, captive for the second time since I arrived in New York, and this time it wasn’t just a harmless little snake cult intending to use me as a virgin sacrifice. This time it was the Covenant of St. George.

Worse, this time it was family. And as many people have pointed out over the years, there’s nobody in this world who can hurt you like family can.

I took a few deep breaths to calm myself down before carefully tugging on each of the chains in turn, looking for differences in how they moved. The Covenant was pretty good at chaining people up; I had to give them that. I doubt I could have done a better job. (Antimony probably could, but that’s because Antimony focused on keeping people as far away from her as possible, and when she couldn’t do that, she liked to be sure they’d stay where she put them.)

Okay: so I was chained up, in the dark, with no idea of where I was. I shifted a little, feeling loose fabric around me, and added “wearing a bathrobe instead of real clothing” to my list of problems. The material was rough enough to be cheap, meaning it had probably been purchased from a gift shop, not stolen from one of Sarah’s high-end hotels. My feet were bare. If they’d taken my clothes, they’d taken my weapons. I was as close to helpless as I was ever going to get, and that pissed me off.

Taking another slow breath, I closed my eyes and thought, as hard as I could,
Sarah? Can you hear me?

There was no response, and I realized that even the low-grade telepathic static of her presence was gone. I pushed back a surge of panic. There was no reason to suspect that they’d managed to track Sarah down while I was unconscious, and that meant one of two things. Either I was still under the influence of Margaret’s telepathy-blocking charm, or the Covenant had already moved me out of New York, and I was outside Sarah’s normal broadcast range. She’d be looking for me—they all would—but if I was too far for her to find telepathically, she wouldn’t know what to do. She wouldn’t have another way to start looking. If she was smart (and Uncle Mike would
make
her be smart, if he had to), she was already on a plane back to Ohio to hole up with her parents. Two cuckoos in one house meant the Covenant would never find them, no matter how hard they were looking. Sarah and Angela have been the family escape plan for a generation now.

I realized I was thinking like I was already lost, and I embraced it. It wasn’t the same as giving up; I didn’t expect the Covenant to kill me fast, and the longer they kept me alive, the better my chances became. But if my family thought I was out of reach, they might give up on me, and we might be able to minimize the damage.

There was no way they were going to do that. But it was a nice thought.

There was a soft click from one wall, like a lock was being turned. Nice as it would have been to stare defiantly at the door as it opened, I wasn’t in the mood to have my retinas seared after sitting in the dark for this long; I turned my face to the side. It was a bad choice. The actual door was in the wall I was facing now, and as it swung open, a blast of industrial white light streamed into the room, framing the outline of Margaret Healy.

“I see you’re awake,” she said pleasantly. That was more frightening than any threats she could have made. “That’s good. We’ve got quite a lot to talk about, you and I.”

“You could have invited me to coffee,” I said, squinting as I waited for my eyes to stop watering. “I don’t know how you do things in Europe, but here in America, we usually start our family reunions with something a little less high-impact than assault and kidnapping.”

“You hit me first,” Margaret shot back. Her pleasant tone didn’t waver. “Besides which, you’re not much of one to talk, since the first thing you ever did was lie to me. Where did you leave that girl who was with you? Sandy, I believe you said her name was?”

There was no way I was going to remind her that Sarah was the one who hit her, not me. “She has nothing to do with this,” I said. “She’s just someone I met at a dance class. Leave her alone.”

“That’s the thing about traitors and liars. You can’t believe a word they say. She lied for you. She tried to cover for you. Now why would she do that if she had nothing to do with this?” Margaret flipped a switch next to the door. The overheads came on, filling the room with more light. This didn’t hurt as much. My eyes were adjusting. “Your name isn’t even Valerie, is it?”

“Does it matter?”

Margaret smiled. “Oh, it matters. It matters a great deal. We’ll need to know what name to bury you under, when we’re finally done with you. If you’re worried for your life, don’t be. You’ll be with us for quite some time.”

“I gathered.” I forced myself to relax, trying to look unconcerned. “What makes you think I’m going to talk?”

“I have a better question for you: what makes you think you’ve got a choice?” Margaret lunged across the small distance between us, grabbing my hair before I had a chance to move. She yanked my head back, making it pound even harder. “No one knows you’re here. No one’s coming to save you. You’re going to get what you have coming to you, finally, and you’re going to tell us where to find every other stinking rat in your hole.”

The pain in my head helped me focus on what mattered: she was right. I was her captive, and I was pretty sure the Covenant wouldn’t slap her wrists for using excessive force on me. All the advantages were hers. I put on my best tolerant reality television smile, trying to look like I wasn’t even a little bit concerned about my situation. “Oh, Christ, you’re a metaphor villain, aren’t you? You’re the ratcatcher, I’m the rat, you’re here to exterminate the vermin, is that it? Wow. Do they have a cliché course that they make you guys go through before they release you into the field? Or maybe you’re naturally talented. I mean, that happens, right?”

Margaret’s eyes widened in confused indignation before she let go of my hair and shoved my head hard to the side. My neck audibly cracked. I somehow managed not to squawk. “You may think you’re funny now,
heretic
, but you won’t be laughing for long.”

“You may as well kill me,” I said, aiming for boredom rather than bravado. I wasn’t sure that I was managing either. “I’m not going to tell you anything.”

“Aren’t you?” Margaret smiled. “You’ve already told me plenty.”

My stomach sank. “Oh?” I asked.

“You’re a traitor from a bloodline of traitors, but no Healy has ever been a coward. You wouldn’t be telling me to kill you if you didn’t have something to hide.” Margaret’s smile grew, chilling me. “You’re not the last of your family. And you’re going to tell me where to find them all before I let you die for your sins.”

I was so busy watching her face that I didn’t see her tense her arm until her hand lashed out, her fist catching me square in my unprotected jaw. The lights went out—for me, at least—and for a little while, the world went away again. My last thought before I lost consciousness was that I really,
really
hated this girl.

The sound of the door opening again woke me. I cracked my eyes open just enough to see that the lights were on, and that the person standing in front of me wasn’t Margaret. It was a man, slim, dark, about my height.
Dominic.
The sight of him made me sit up a little straighter and open my eyes all the way, my heart thudding painfully in my chest. Thankfully, I managed to bite my lip before I could say his name.

It wasn’t him. This man was the right height; that was where the resemblance ended. His hair was dark red, not brown verging on black, and his eyes were a cool, implacable blue. His skin was pale, spattered with freckles . . . and he was smiling.

“Why do you people smile all the damn time?” I asked, and was instantly ashamed of how shaky my voice sounded. Head injuries and unknown periods of captivity without food or water will do that to a girl.

“Because, love, you’re our unicorn,” he said. His accent was Irish, and heavier than Margaret’s. “Never thought I’d see the day.”

“Wait, so first I’m a rat, and now I’m a unicorn? If you’re going to be metaphor villains, maybe you should have a meeting first. Come up with a nice theme and stick to it.”

The man clucked his tongue, looking amused. “Oh, you’ve got a mouth on you, don’t you? I hoped you would. You look enough like the family standard that I assumed some other bits might breed true.” He leaned closer and murmured, with evident satisfaction, “You may have thought you were hiding, but you never stood a chance. You look too much like your ancestors.”