“You have to let people make their own mistakes. If you don’t, they’re never going to grow, and you’re never going to get the chance to say I told you so.”
—Enid Healy
Waking up in an unfamiliar place, still clothed, which is a nice change, but tied to a chair, which isn’t
THE ROOM WAS DARK.
That wasn’t much of a surprise—virtually every time I’ve been taken captive, I’ve woken up in a dark room, which is marginally better than the other popular option, “room lit by blinding floodlights, probably filled with the looming shadows of your captors”—but it was a bit of a relief. If they had me in a dark room, it meant they didn’t want me to see where they were hiding, and they were at least ensconced enough to be prepared to take prisoners. And yeah, sometimes it’s a good thing if your enemies have had time to dig in like ticks. Makes it easier to decapitate them when you dig them out.
The propofol had done its job, and they must have hit me with something else in the bargain; I had no idea how much time had passed between the bookstore and now. Judging by the knots on my wrists, ankles, and calves, it had been long enough for them to carry me out of the bookstore and to a secured location, put me down, and really take their time getting me tied up. Propofol was the best drug I knew of for knocking people out quickly, but it wore off in less than ten minutes when injected; it had to have taken longer than that for them to move me to wherever this was and tie me up. Okay, so say they were working with something that had been spiced up a little somehow. That might explain the lack of headache or pain at the injection site: if you’re taking people captive instead of killing them, you’d want them to be cogent as soon as they woke up.
So, propofol, but not alone, even if they were still calling it that. Maybe fentanyl or some kind of benzodiazepine? Since I was waking up here and not back in the slaughterhouse with Thomas glaring at me and Sally saying I’d missed all the fun, I thought it was fair to say that whatever this was had a relatively short half-life, or they’d given me a lower dose than they’d intended to—another thing my weird form of coincidence has been known to influence, often to my detriment, since there have been times when I wanted the painkillers to last as long as the pain did, not cut out midway through whatever was going on. Whatever.
Call it at most somewhere between thirty and forty-five minutes. That was sufficient time for Ryan to have forced his way out of the vents, returned to bipedal form, and gone looking for the others. Say that took fifteen minutes . . .
All the scenarios I could run ended with “and the rest of my people will be here very, very soon,” and that didn’t leave me with long for my part in things.
“Hello?” I yelled, trying to sound at least a little querulous, like I wasn’t sure what was going on, like they might have taken the wrong woman after all. I hadn’t actually identified myself, just reacted to aggression with aggression, and that’s a very New York thing to do, Price or not. But even the toughest New Yorker isn’t going to be thrilled to be drugged in a bookstore bathroom and tied to a chair in a dark room. “Hello, is there anybody there?”
No answer came. I was starting to think I’d need to get to work freeing myself from the chair—it was going to have to happen anyway, might as well get started—when a rectangle of light appeared on one wall, violently bright in the darkness. I squinted my eyes shut and turned my face away from the opening door, making a small sound of protest. I hate this part.
“You’re awake,” said a voice I recognized as Margaret Healy. “Even sooner than I thought you’d be. You’re a sturdy one, traitor. I’ll have to put that in my notes.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, injecting a quaver into my voice.
One really nice thing about having been outside this dimension for so many years: if I’m not carrying my backpack, I don’t have much on me. When they’d searched me, and I knew they’d searched me, they would have gotten an assortment of knives, none of which I was particularly emotionally attached to; a garrote that they might have mistaken for a simple loop of wire; my Metro card; a multitool; my wedding ring; and my mother’s revolvers. Of those, the only things I needed to get back were the ring and the revolvers. The rest was utterly replaceable, and none of it could be used to identify me. My bluff wasn’t going to work, but at least it might buy me a little time.
“You expect me to believe that?” She reached up, pulling a chain, and the ceiling light came on to illuminate the room.
It was small and boxy, with cement walls that seemed to be lightly sloped, like we were in the middle of a giant tube. Looking up, I couldn’t find any corners where they hit the ceiling, just a smooth, continual blend. Definitely a tunnel of some sort. We were probably underground.
Well, wasn’t that just dandy? New York has a lot of underground to be lost in. Between the subway and the currently active sewer system, you’re already looking at miles, and that’s before you start checking old blueprints for the stretches that have been sealed off and forgotten. New York has a thriving bogeyman community because of those tunnels, and some people say there are hide-behinds down there, too, although that one’s more difficult to prove. If we were underground, this was going to be harder.
“I don’t know what to expect you to believe,” I said. “You attacked me in a bathroom! I was just minding my own business!”
“If you want to do this the hard way, we can absolutely do this the hard way.”
She turned as if to leave the room. But she didn’t turn off the light, and that was something of a relief. I don’t have a problem with the dark, and I knew where the door was now, which would certainly make things easier. At the same time, I didn’t really want to be stumbling around in the darkness if I didn’t have to.
“Where are you going?” I asked, careful to whine.
She stopped. “Either you’re one of the people we’ve been looking for, or you’re not, and we’ve just abducted an innocent woman,” she said, voice chillingly calm. “Either way, you have to know you’re not leaving here alive. A little time to think about what that means should make you a lot more accommodating. You’ll talk, when you get hungry enough, or when the ropes get tight enough. What you say then will be a lot more honest, and a lot more educational, than whatever it is you might decide to say now.”
Margaret didn’t turn around as she let herself out of the room, closing the door again behind her.
I let my head hang backward until I was looking at the ceiling, still squinting against the light. “Wow, Mom, thanks again for whatever awesome weirdness you brought to the gene pool,” I said. “Between this lady and Dad, it’s pretty clear that uncut Healy genetics really suck.”
That didn’t explain Grandpa, but maybe he was the exception that proved the rule. The Covenant had to be keeping the family around for a reason. Whatever: it didn’t really matter now. Either way, I needed to get out of this chair, and I didn’t have any good way to cut these ropes. They hadn’t been kind enough to leave me with a knife or a convenient length of exposed pipe. Instead, it was just me, and a chair, and an empty room.
When in doubt, improvise. I know how to take a hit, whether it’s being delivered by a person or the floor. I also knew from the speed with which Margaret had come to check on me when I started yelling that the room wasn’t soundproofed. I took a deep breath and began singing “The Wheels on the Bus” as loudly as I could.
No one came busting in to ask me to stop, which meant they were either ignoring me or out of earshot. I kept on singing, and when the song ran out, transitioned to “The Bog Down in the Valley-o.” Still, no one came, and that song has been known to annoy dead people.
(I mean that literally. I once got Mary to threaten to go haunt someone else’s house by singing it for too many repetitions in a row. It is a song with a powerful potential for driving people out of their minds.)
Still singing, I rocked back until I felt the front legs of the chair leave the floor. The fools really had left me this unsecured. They’d tied me up and they’d taken away my weapons, and assumed that would be good enough.
Too bad for them. Still singing, I pushed off against the floor as hard as I could, and kept singing as I toppled over backward. I stopped singing when the impact knocked the breath out of me, and resumed as I struggled to free myself from the wreckage of the chair. They just don’t make chairs the way they used to.
I blame IKEA. Never tie a kidnapping victim to anything a college student can afford.
So now I wasn’t tied to a chair, but I was still tied up, and sitting in the splintered wreckage of a chair wasn’t that much of an improvement. The chair legs were still attached pretty tightly to my own, which wasn’t great either. I squirmed until I could reach them, then pulled the remains of the chair legs out of the loops around my ankles. This created space. Bending my right leg back at an uncomfortable angle, I was able to work my fingers into the slack I’d opened up and work the knot slowly free.
I straightened my leg out again, pins and needles already beginning to shoot from my ankle up to my knee as blood flow returned to the area that had been tied off, and repeated the process with my left leg. With both legs untied, I was able to maneuver myself first into a crouch, and then fully upright.
The room I was in was mostly featureless, with only the chair I’d destroyed and a few shelves around the edges. I was still wearing shoes, which was nice—I wouldn’t have liked getting a splinter in the sole of my foot—and so I walked toward the shelves, looking for something that would give me a sharp-enough edge to work the rope against. The ropes on my ankles had been pretty standard hardware-store nylon, tough enough to tie a woman up, not tough enough to handle focused and continuous friction for a sustained period of time. I was assuming the rope on my wrists was the same. That kind of rope works mostly because skin gives way long before nylon does, which makes squirming out of them a very painful and potentially disabling activity. A good cutting edge, on the other hand, changes everything.
The shelves were mostly empty, which didn’t help, since my hands were still tied behind me, and I couldn’t get the knots to my mouth without dislocating both shoulders—not the best way to go into a potential fight. On the third shelf, though, I hit paydirt.
The shelf itself was empty, but the outside edge of one support was weathered enough to have developed the beginning of a rough cutting surface. It was speckled with rust, and I’d need a tetanus shot if I slipped and broke my skin, but it would do. I turned around and backed into it, beginning to saw away at the ropes holding my wrists together.
So far, my “get yourself taken captive and let the others find you and the abducted kids at the same time” plan was working great, except for the part where I didn’t have any indication that I was in the same place as the missing dragons. And the part where there was no sign that the rest of my group was in the process of finding me. Honestly, that would have been a little unnerving, if I hadn’t been locked in a small, mostly empty room: they could have been ten feet away and almost to my rescue.
The room wasn’t soundproof. They couldn’t be fighting right outside the door without my noticing. But everything else was still on the table.
With a final snapping sound, the ropes dropped away. I pulled my hands in front of me, rubbing my right wrist with my left hand to restore the circulation. Okay. So it had been an impulsive plan, and I could probably have taken more time to think it through. It’d been a while since I could rely on having backup when I was in the field. Not since Laura and I were in college together, really. I hadn’t gone back to Buckley until my grandfather died, and Thomas had already been locked in his house by then, leaving me with no one to depend on.
Yeah. Relying on my team was going to take some getting used to, and I looked forward to getting better at it. I kept rubbing my wrists and resumed searching the room, stepping as quietly as I could near the door. The space was longer than it was wide, if I called the door one “end” of the room.
There was another door at the opposite end.
I paused when I found it, then tested the knob. It turned, which answered the question of whether or not I was going to head on through. The door swung open without a sound, which implied better structural maintenance than I’d been expecting from this place.
The room on the other side was completely dark, apart from the square of light cast by the open door. No windows, no lights, no way to break up the blackness.
I had recently been drugged, I didn’t have any weapons, tools, or arcane foci with me, and I certainly didn’t have any glucose gel. That made activating any of my dwindling supply of remaining tattoos a terrible idea. Sometimes terrible ideas are the best ones I have. I pressed two fingers to the inside of my left arm, seeking out the star I knew was tattooed there. It was the second in what had originally been a line of four; the first had already been discharged.
“Light, please,” I said, voice low, and closed my eyes as a wave of dizziness swept over me.
Thomas says the reason he never suggested tattooing me when he’d still been house-bound and unable to keep me safe was one of practicality: I wasn’t a sorcerer; my system wasn’t built to carry and channel magic the way his was. And since I didn’t have any power reserves for the spells tied to my tattoos to use, they found their fuel in other places. Sugars and electrolytes, mostly, which could leave me dizzy, off-balance, and even unconscious if I tried to pull off something really big without proper planning.
The man who’d actually proposed tattooing me had been an honorary uncle at the time, and one of the few people I’d truly trusted to help me on my search for my missing husband. Look how that worked out. Naga is dead, killed by Thomas when we discovered that some of the mental conditioning Naga had been ordering on me had included an inability to pull the trigger if he was on the other end of the bullet, and when this batch of tattoos is used up, I’m not going to be getting any more. Which is probably for the best, considering what they do to me, but I’ll be honest: I’m going to miss the ability to play all-purpose tool when working alone.
Good thing I don’t have to work alone much anymore. I opened my eyes, shaking off the dizziness. Small light spells never hit that hard, which was a large part of why I was still standing. My skin was emitting a soft, continuous glow, making me about as subtle as a lightning bug during mating season, but lighting up the room in front of me enough to let me see that it wasn’t a room at all. It was a short hallway, the walls closer in than the walls of the room I was currently in, ending at another door. I stepped inside, easing the door closed behind me. My loud singing and the sound of the chair smashing against the floor hadn’t attracted any curious Covenant agents, but that wasn’t something I could expect to last forever.
There’s using your luck, and then there’s depending on your luck. One of them is a tool; the other is a very elaborate means of committing suicide. I stepped carefully down the hall, watching the floor for signs of tripwires or pressure plates, and stopped when I reached the second door. Holding my breath to cut down on extraneous sounds, I pressed my ear against it.
Someone was crying.
Someone very young, if the timbre of their sniffles was anything to go by; they weren’t wailing, but they were whimpering, a slow, steady stream of small, deeply unhappy noises. That settled it. I stepped back just enough to test the knob and, finding this one unlocked as well, opened the door.
The room on the other side was roughly the same size as the one where I’d been held, but looked smaller, thanks to the cages against the walls. They were the large, foldable kind sold by pet stores for short-term kenneling of aggressive dogs, each one big enough to hold a small child or a good-sized canine.
About half of them were occupied, three by golden-haired little girls in scruffy secondhand clothing—not a sign of neglect in dragon kids, since the urge to hoard gold kicks in so young that they would probably already have viewed buying anything nicer as a waste of money—and the other five by large reptiles about the size of Komodo dragons, if Komodo dragons came with wings. All eight of them looked at me warily, unsure how to react to the sight of a glowing human woman. The expressions of fear and dread on their little faces hurt.
The realization that they were all caged alone hurt even more. They’d been allowed to stay in the same room, but they’d been separated all the same, unable to pile together for comfort. Oh, I was going to take great pleasure in beating the living crap out of the people who’d taken them.
“It’s all right,” I said, holding up my hands as I stepped farther into the room. “Pris and William sent me.”
Hopefully, invoking the names of the people I’d come to assume were the leaders of the local Nest would help, and it did, with a few of the kids. One of the girls stopped crying, and one of the little boys stopped mantling his wings, although he remained pressed against the side of the cage. I moved toward him first. He hissed, loud and angry.
“I can let you out, if you promise not to bite me,” I said, kneeling. “Do you know where they took the woman who was with you? Cara, I think her name was?”
“No,” sniffled one of the girls. “They put us in cages and they took her. They said we should get used to it, because we’re just animals, and they wouldn’t be doing us any favors if they acted like we were anything else.” Her evident offense grew with each word, until she sounded more angry than scared. That was a good thing. I gave her an approving nod, then focused on the latch for the boy’s cage.
The latches had been modified to keep them from being opened by captive children with clever fingers, but they were no match to an adult outside the cage with a background in lock-picking. In short order, I had the first cage open and moved away to let the little boy inside scurry free, not blocking him or moving to touch him in any way. He ran for the farthest corner and pressed himself there, hissing violently.
“It’s okay, Kris,” said one of the girls. “I think she’s part of Miss Verity’s family.” She turned enormous blue eyes on me and asked, with a slight challenge in her voice, “Aren’t you?”
“I am,” I assured her. “My name’s Alice. What’s yours?”
“Ariel.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Ariel.” I moved to her cage, repeating the process of getting it open. “I’m going to get you all out so you can take care of each other, and then I’m going to ask you to stay here while I go and find Miss Cara and make sure she’s all right.”
“As soon as it’s safe.”
Her face fell. “It’s not ever going to be safe, Miss Alice. We’re not people. We don’t get to be safe.”
“Oh, sweetie, never believe anyone who tells you that you’re not a person. You’re people, all of you, and you deserve to be safe. You’re not human people, and I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing, since it was human people who put you in these cages.” I opened the door, and she crawled out on her hands and knees. I shifted to the side, making it easier for her to get out without accidentally brushing against me. Dragons generally aren’t big on touching humans.
Ariel straightened once she was out of the cage, whirling to throw her arms around my neck in a brief hug. Dragons may not be big on touching humans, but scared children frequently are, and “child” came before “species” right now. I put a hand against her back as she hugged me, returning her embrace without trapping her, and silently vowed to kill anyone I had to in order to make sure this wasn’t going to happen again.
Ariel pulled away and I let her go, moving on to the other cages. Very shortly, all the dragon children were free, and piling up in the corner as I had expected, becoming a tangle of limbs, tails, and wings. I straightened.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I said. “If anyone comes in here while I’m gone, you have my permission and encouragement to bite them as hard as you can. Don’t give them the chance to cage you again.”
“Miss Cara says biting is wrong,” said one of the other girls.
“And normally, Miss Cara is right about that,” I said. “But right now, you’re being held against your will, and that changes the rules enough to make biting just fine. You bite anyone who tries to put you into a cage, you got me?”
The children nodded in ragged chorus, and I nodded back.
“Good. I’ll be back.”
The only door into this room was the one I had arrived through. I walked back toward it, and several of the children moaned as they realized the light was going with me. I stopped, looking back at them.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t have any way to leave the light here with you, and it’s not safe for you to come with me. Just pretend it’s bedtime. Tell each other some nice stories, and get cozy, and I’ll be back as soon as I can, I promise.”
They muttered in discontent but made no further objections as I let myself out of the room, heading back the way I had come.
So: I was loose. I was unarmed. I knew where the children were. I knew that by now, Ryan had to be following our trail back to this location, which meant that I had backup on the way. Until then, I was in some sort of underground space with between three and five Covenant agents, none of whom realized who they actually had on their hands.
I smiled grimly as I made my way through the dark back to the room where I’d started.
Wasn’t this going to be fun?