Midnight Blue-Light Special (29 page)

Unbidden, the image of my grandmother rose in my mind’s eye, hair spiked with some unnamable goo from some equally unnamable hell-thing that she’d just killed, a sour expression on her face. “You call yourself a Price girl? Get up. Fight. Don’t you give up like this. That’s something a Covenant trainee would do, and you’re better than them.”

When all else fails, talk to yourself. “My feet hurt,” I informed her.

“I carried my father’s dead body out of the woods when I was bleeding out from Apraxis stings,” she countered. “If you can’t walk, you crawl. Show me what you’re made of, girl, or I’ll start thinking you’re a cuckoo left in place of my real granddaughter.”

It wasn’t really Grandma, but my imagination definitely talked like her. “Yes, ma’am,” I said, and shifted to my hands and knees. My imaginary grandmother smiled before she disappeared. I smiled back.

And then I started crawling.

The beam was rough and splintery in addition to everything else; I’d barely gone five feet before my knees were bleeding. I was going to need more than a tetanus shot when this was all over. Still, I was moving, and that was better than I’d been managing a few minutes before. Infection was something to worry about after everything else was taken care of, like the three Covenant agents who knew my name and face.

I was going to have to kill them. I couldn’t see any way around it. Maybe not right now—right now, escape was a bit more of an immediate priority—but there was no way I could let them live. I’d never be safe again if they were out there, and if I wasn’t safe, I couldn’t go home. I might be able to go and hide with Grandma Baker in Ohio, but the rest of my family would be lost to me. The Covenant has taken too much away from us since the day that we decided we had to leave. I wasn’t going to let them add me to the list.

Maybe it was a flimsy justification for murder, but we’ve always argued that cryptids deserved equal treatment with humans, and I was raised to believe that a cryptid who represented a clear and present danger to another sapient species had to die. Predators don’t get a free pass just because it’s in their natures. The Covenant agents were predators. I was their prey. Fighting back didn’t make me a bad person. It made me someone who was willing to practice what I preached, and treat them like any other dangerous creature. If they lived, I, and a lot of innocent cryptids, would die. So they had to die. End of story.

The beam terminated where it met the wall, joining with the rest of the building’s support structure. I stood again, gritting my teeth against the pain in my feet, and pressed my hands against the wall as I leaned sideways to examine the window. My heart sank as I realized that there were no latches, no hinges, no way to open it at all. The windows were made to let in light, not fresh air. It made sense; who would be climbing up here to open them? I mean besides a naked girl with bruised feet and a stolen knife, of course

I looked up to where the window frame met the ceiling. The Covenant was up there, searching for me. Somewhere above them, the roof was up there, too.

I only had one shot at getting out of here, and that meant finding a way up. Assuming I could manage it. That was a big assumption: I knew nothing about the warehouse where I was being kept, other than that it had a large downstairs, and a second floor . . . I paused, suddenly feeling like an absolute idiot.

I knew nothing about the warehouse, except that it was a
warehouse
, and it was built before they had cheap and dependable elevator technology. That meant all the floors would need to be connected by some sort of hatch system, to enable them to move things from one floor to another. I turned and started scanning the ceiling, looking for the telltale outlines of a removable panel. I found what I was looking for about halfway across the room: a square where the cobwebs didn’t quite match the ones around them, maybe due to drafts blowing down through the ceiling/floor. More tellingly, that was one of the only patches not used to anchor anything at all, and there were no beams crossing in the space below it. That had to be one of the transportation hatches.

Now the only challenge was getting to it. I could crawl and risk shredding my hands and knees further when I might still need them, or I could try to walk. Neither option seemed like it was a particularly good one, and so I went for the better of two evils: I would walk. Maybe that would make my feet go numb enough that I’d be able to escape without tripping. If it didn’t work, well. I’d find another way. I took a deep breath, centering myself as I found my balance, and began walking slowly down the beam toward the hatch.

Balance beam was a part of my earliest gymnastics classes. I always excelled, because I had no fear of falling. This was different. If I fell, there was nothing I could use to catch myself, no convenient handholds or ways to redirect my inertia. I walked slowly, all too aware of how much space stretched between me and the floor. I didn’t look down. That would have been suicide, and all appearances to the contrary, I’ve never particularly wanted to make a splash when I died.

Step by painful step, the hatch came closer. I was almost there when a door slammed behind me and I froze, only long practice at navigating rooftops and high places keeping me from losing my balance.

“—she not be there? There’s no way she made it out of this building!” The voice was Margaret’s.

“You’re right, and she’s not going to get past us.” Robert. That was actually a good thing. Peter might be the one who’d been most willing to harass me, but he wasn’t the planner of the bunch. If he was the one guarding the second floor, my odds had just improved. “The front door is locked. The back door is locked. The basement has been sealed off for years. She’s trapped.”

“I hate her.” There was a note in Margaret’s voice that might have been grudging respect, under different circumstances.

Robert actually laughed. “Not for nothing, but I bet she’s not too fond of you, either.”

Please don’t look up. Please, please don’t look up.
I remained frozen on my beam, listening as they passed below me. I was filthy enough that I would probably blend into the ceiling by this point, but that didn’t mean I needed to start tempting fate. I was so focused on keeping still that I was barely even breathing.
Just keep going.

“Has there been any sign of De Luca?” Robert asked the question calmly, almost casually, like it was of no real importance.

“No. You were right. The little whore turned him traitor,” snarled Margaret. “He’s just as bad as she is.”

“Peace, Margaret. We’ll catch him next, and deliver them both to our superiors. He’ll have a great deal of explaining to do.” The footsteps stopped almost directly below me. I forced myself not to move. In a way, my damaged feet were almost a blessing. If I hadn’t been hurt, I would almost certainly have run.

“What is it?” asked Margaret suspiciously.

“I just don’t understand how we could have lost her like this.” The footsteps didn’t resume. “There’s no way out of this room. There’s nowhere she could have run. But she’s gone, all the same. It’s impossible.”

“Nothing’s impossible,” said Margaret.

“Apparently not,” said Robert.

The footsteps started again. I waited until I heard a door slam on the far end of the room before relaxing enough to start breathing. I still counted silently to a hundred before I peeked over the edge of the beam . . .

. . . and found myself looking straight down into Robert Bullard’s smiling face.

“Gotcha,” he said.

I straightened up, and bolted for the hatch.

Pain is a powerful motivator. So is panic, and when the panic is extreme enough, even pain can find itself set by the wayside. I forgot about the ache in my feet, the distance between me and the ground, and everything else in my hurry to reach the only chance I had of getting to the second floor. Below me, Robert was barking orders to Margaret, who was no doubt figuring out her own route to the rafters. But since neither of them could fly, I still had a few minutes, and I was going to use them for all that I was worth.

The beam didn’t run directly under the hatch—that would have made it difficult to use—but it came close enough. I grabbed one of the vertical supports, leaning out as far as I could without losing my footing, and thrust my other hand into the cobwebs until it banged against the ceiling. The wood shifted slightly. I hit it again, harder, and felt it lift up.

That was all I needed. When I hit it the third time, I twisted and rammed my fingers into the opening I had created before the hatch could fall back down. Then I let myself swing out, praying frantically to every god that I could think of as I scrabbled to get a grip with my other hand. Robert was still shouting, and I could hear a rattling, scraping sound that meant Margaret was probably halfway to the top of the chains by now. This was my only shot. I swung, grabbed for the narrow lip created by my fingers—

—and caught it.

There was no time to dangle, no matter how stunned I was. I immediately began pulling myself upward, digging my nails into the wood and shoving as hard as I could to bump the hatch out of my way. It left splinters in my wrists and arms. I kept shoving. At this point, after everything, a few splinters were among the least of my worries.

Cobwebs filled my mouth and eyes as I pushed the hatch open enough to get my head through. That was the last bit I needed to get sufficient leverage; I twisted around, grabbing the top of the hatch, and blindly pulled myself up into the second floor. The hatch slammed shut as soon as I pulled my feet loose. Choking and gaping, I clawed the cobwebs out of my eyes, trying to clear them. I was filthy. I was almost free.

I was wiping the last of the cobwebs away when I heard the characteristic sound of a gun being cocked from directly behind me. “Now isn’t this a lovely little turn of events?” asked Peter Brandt.

Shit.

Twenty-three

“Don’t you worry about whether you failed your family. Family loves you, no matter what. Worry about whether you failed yourself. As long as the answer’s ‘no,’ then there’s still a chance that everything else will be okay.”

—Alice Healy

On the second floor of a warehouse somewhere in Manhattan, facing down a member of the Covenant of St. George

P
ETER’S EYES TRAVELED
the length of my naked, filthy body, a smirk twisting up his lips. He lingered on my breasts for a moment before flicking to my right bicep. “Nice knife,” he said.

“Yeah, I got it from a real asshole,” I said. I didn’t move. The gun—
my
gun—in his hand told me that moving would be a bad idea. “I have an idea. How about you look the other way while I jump out the nearest window?”

“I have an idea. How about I hold you here while my colleagues come up the stairs, and this time, we make sure you don’t get away?” His smirk turned dark around the edges, transitioning from an implied threat to a very real one. “We want to take you home alive. But ‘alive’ doesn’t mean the same thing as ‘intact,’ and you’ll do a lot less running away without feet.”

“Mutilation? Really? That’s where you’re going with this? I guess you people have stopped thinking of yourselves as the good guys.” I glanced around while I spoke, looking for something I could use as an escape route. There were windows on the wall, no more than twenty feet away. All I had to do was reach the windows, and I’d be scot-free.

I made my decision in that moment. Maybe it wasn’t the bravest decision I could have made, but it was the only one that made sense. If the Covenant took me back to Europe, I’d tell them everything, and I’d be lucky if they killed me when they were done. No matter what else happened, I couldn’t leave this warehouse in their custody. I gathered what little strength I had left, saying one more silent prayer to whoever might be listening, and launched myself at Peter.

He shouted something that I didn’t quite make out, distracted as I was by the sound of the gun in his hand going off at the same time. A sharp pain punched through my stomach, sending duller shock waves through the rest of me. I did my best to ignore it. I had more important things to worry about, like yanking the knife off my bicep—cutting the shoelaces I’d been using to hold it there in the process—and jamming it into his shoulder as my momentum carried me into him. It wasn’t a fatal wound, but it distracted him for a few precious seconds as he shouted, grabbing at the blade. I grabbed the sides of his head, breathing in to steady myself.

He had time to give me one last, utterly stunned look before I was twisting hard to the left, turning his face away from me. There was a sharp snapping sound, and then he was collapsing, the dead weight of his body pulling him out of my hands. He took the knife down with him. I didn’t try to retrieve it.

I did scramble to grab my gun from his suddenly limp fingers, clamping one hand over the hole in my stomach to keep anything I needed from sliding out. It was a relatively small hole, thank God; if I’d been packing something with a larger caliber, I’d probably already be dead. As it was, the gut wound would definitely kill me if I didn’t get it taken care of fast, but for the moment, it was definitely a distraction from the pain in my feet. Maybe I’d get
really
lucky, and shock would set in.

Maybe not.

Robert and Margaret must have heard the gunshot. I didn’t know where the door was, or whether it even had a lock, so I didn’t bother looking; I just turned and started half-running, half-limping toward the nearest window. I’d shoot it out if I had to. I’d do whatever it took to get out of this damn building. I’d die in the open air. If that was the closest I could get to a happy ending, then so be it. It was better than the alternative.

The door banged open when I was still only halfway there, accompanied by the sound of running footsteps. “Freeze!” snarled Robert.

I didn’t freeze. What was the worst thing he could do, shoot me? I was losing blood fast, and the room was starting to go dark around the edges. One more gunshot wouldn’t do anything but finish the job. As long as he couldn’t take me alive, I won.

“No,” said Margaret. Her tone was different, much more anxious . . . and her accent was gone. She sounded American. “You freeze.”

“Margaret?” Robert, on the other hand, sounded utterly puzzled. The footsteps stopped. Thank God. “What are you doing?”

“I’m holding a gun to your head,” said Margaret reasonably. No—not Margaret. It was Margaret’s voice, but it wasn’t Margaret speaking. The tones and accent were all wrong. “Verity? Stop running. I don’t know how long I can hold her.”

I stopped running. I was so tired I could barely breathe. I still managed to turn and smile wanly at the scene behind me: Margaret Healy, the woman who’d lost her anti-telepathy charm, holding a gun against the temple of Robert Bullard.

“Hello, Sarah,” I said.

Sarah contorted Margaret Healy’s lips into a wan smile. “You know, if you were bored, we could have gone to the ballet or something.” Servitors appeared from behind her, making their serpentine way into the room. Robert’s eyes tracked them, his expression never changing.

“I’ll keep that in mind for next time.” I raised the gun I’d reclaimed from Peter Brandt, aiming it squarely at Robert’s chest. My hand was shaking so badly that I was afraid I’d miss my target, something I hadn’t needed to worry about since elementary school. I removed my other hand from my stomach, using it to steady my elbow.

Margaret—Sarah—gasped. “Verity, you’re
hurt
.”

“Yeah, single gunshot wound to the abdomen. It hurts like a bitch and I’m losing a lot of blood here, so if you’re not the only member of the cavalry, this would be a great time to bring in reinforcements.” The servitors were good for looking intimidating, but without a dragon to give them orders, they weren’t going to be good for much beyond that. I didn’t know why she didn’t have a dragon with her, and I didn’t have time to worry about it. Spots were starting to appear around the edges of my vision.

“You’re going to die here,” said Robert. He sounded surprisingly calm, considering the situation he was in. “All of you. And you, witch, wherever you are, we’ll find you. You’ll pay for what you’ve done.”

It took me a moment to realize that he was talking to Sarah. I actually laughed a little, snorting indelicately through my nose. “Oh, dude. She’s not a witch. Witches are
way
less dangerous.”

“Cuckoo to you, too,” said Margaret/Sarah, digging the barrel of her gun a little deeper into Robert’s temple. “Verity, can you walk?”

“I don’t really know.” Honesty is sometimes the best policy. “I do know I wouldn’t get very far if I tried. So I’m sort of opposed to trying.”

“Verity!” She sounded genuinely upset. No real surprise there. “I can’t hold her for much longer. She’s
fighting
me!”

“I didn’t know you could hold someone like this at all. It’s a new trick for you.”

“It was Kitty’s idea.” Margaret/Sarah’s face contorted like she’d been punched. “She’s fighting me
hard
, Very. Come on. We have to get you out of here before I lose her. Please.”

“Yes, do run,” said Robert. “You’ve killed one of us already. You’ve shown us where our weaknesses are. We’ll find you. And when we do, you’ll wish to God that you’d let us take you here and now. Or you could surrender. Let us treat your wounds, tell us where to find your witch, and submit to the mercy of the Covenant.”

“I wasn’t aware that we were in the business of mercy,” said Margaret, all cold fury and hate. Her voice was her own again, all traces of Sarah gone as she pulled her gun away from Robert’s temple and swung it toward me. I widened my stance, trying to cover both of them at once. It wasn’t going to work, and I knew it. From the satisfied gleam in her eyes, so did she. “You’ve befouled my mind, you little bitch. Do you know what that means?”

“It means you lose,” said Uncle Mike, stepping through the doorway behind her and aiming his crossbow at the back of her head. Istas was only half a step behind him, deceptively sweet-looking in a little pink pinafore. Her hair was pulled into girlish pigtails and tied off with white bows. She was smiling. That’s never a good sign with Istas.

“You’re outnumbered,” I said, with as much bravado as I could muster. “Drop your weapons. I promise we’ll be more fair to you than you were going to be to me.”

“No,” said Margaret, and cocked back the hammer on her gun—

—only to freeze as Istas calmly reached forward and fastened one rapidly expanding hand (already better classed as “a paw”) over the gun, completely engulfing both it and Margaret’s hand. “You may fire,” said Istas, as if she were conferring some great favor. “I will remove your entire arm a moment later, but you may fire.”

“I’d really rather she didn’t,” I said. The black spots were spreading. I teetered, catching myself at the last minute, and kept aiming my gun at Robert. “We have to . . . we gotta . . . this has to end. They can’t walk away from this.”

“But we can’t kill them, either,” said Dominic. He appeared in the doorway behind Uncle Mike. His face was set in a blank, expressionless mask. It didn’t waver as he looked past the heads of the Covenant agents to me, filthy, naked, and bleeding all over the warehouse floor. “If we kill them, the Covenant sends more.”

“We win,” said Robert.

Istas squeezed Margaret’s hand. Margaret yelped, unable to help herself. “I am not so sure of that,” said Istas. “There is a difference between ‘living’ and ‘retaining all your limbs.’”

“They can’t leave,” said Uncle Mike. “They know who Verity is. It’s not safe to let them go.”

“So they can’t live and they can’t die.” It was taking everything I had just to keep myself upright. “Oh, and here’s one more for you: Dominic can’t stay here if we send them home. They’d never forgive another defection.” There was no way to win. There was no way to get out of this with everyone still standing.

“No. But they might be willing to bury a traitor.” Dominic stepped around his former colleagues and crossed to where I was standing. He took the gun from my hand, aiming it at Robert as he slid an arm around my waist, holding me up. I let myself sag into him.

Then I realized what he’d just said. “What? No! No. We’re not going to kill you.” I wanted to pull away and glare at him. I didn’t have the strength.

“I wasn’t going to ask you to,” said Dominic. “Sarah?”

“I’m here.” Sarah stepped up behind Uncle Mike, moving into the room on silent feet. “Istas, let go of Margaret’s hands. Robert’s anti-telepathy charm is attached to his medal of St. George. Take it off him.”

“Yes,” said Istas. She released Margaret—although she didn’t release Margaret’s gun, and from the way Margaret groaned as Istas yanked it away, she broke at least one of Margaret’s fingers in the process—and turned toward Robert. To his credit, he didn’t flinch when Istas reached for his throat with her vast, taloned paw. The chain on his medal snapped easily when she pulled on it. Istas looked at the medal curiously for a moment, then shrugged and tucked it into the neckline of her dress.

“Sarah . . .” I said.

“It’s all right, Verity.” She smiled at me, uncertainly. “I can do this.”

“I don’t know . . .”

“We have no choice,” said Dominic softly. He tightened his arm around me. “They have to live. I have to die. I can’t let them endanger you, or your family. This is the only way.”

“But Sarah . . .”

“Trust her,” said Dominic.

I closed my eyes. “Okay.”