My feet were in worse shape. I didn’t think any bones were broken, but both soles were badly swollen and probably just as badly bruised. I wasn’t going to be running anywhere any time soon. I’d just need to find another way.
Apart from that, all I had was a split lip, a bloody nose, some abrasions on my scalp where the hair pulling had gotten overly enthusiastic, and some extremely sore fingernails. They hadn’t pulled any of my nails off, which was a small mercy, given how enthusiastic they’d been about driving slivers of bamboo underneath them. My whole life, I’d been hearing about how torture doesn’t work; torture is never the answer. Well, apparently, our cousins at the Covenant never got that particular lesson. They thought torture worked just fine.
I took a breath, held it until my lungs ached, and breathed slowly out. I could function. I was hurt, but not too badly, and I could function. That was a good thing, because I needed to get away the second I had the opportunity to do so. These people were willing and eager to hurt me in the name of their cause, and when they started asking for information more sensitive than my name, they’d probably be more than happy to move on to more advanced methods of extracting answers. I liked my fingers, and my toes. I wanted them all to stay attached to my body.
And I could no longer be sure I wouldn’t give them what they asked for when the cutting started.
I don’t know how long I sat there in the dark, just breathing, waiting for the throbbing in my feet and arm to die down. When the door finally opened, I didn’t twitch, even though the light burned my eyes. I just stayed in the same position, chin down, slumped as far over as the chains allowed.
“Not so mouthy now, are you?” asked a voice. Peter Brandt.
I allowed myself a brief moment of satisfaction. Of the three, he was the one I’d been hoping would come to check on me. Margaret had a holy crusade. Robert had a job to do. And Peter? Peter had a grudge.
“Please,” I whispered.
“Please? Please what, love? Please mercy? You didn’t show much mercy when you thought you had me. Why should we show any mercy to you now?” Peter crossed the room to my chair. My leg twitched with the urge to be reintroduced to his balls, at speed. I forced myself to keep still. “There’s not any mercy here for the likes of you. We’re going to beat the devil right out of you.”
“Please,” I whispered again. “I need to use the bathroom. I don’t . . . I mean, I don’t want to . . .” I started crying again. It wasn’t hard. All I had to do was press my feet a little harder against the floor and the tears came practically on their own.
Claiming to need the bathroom was an old trick, which meant it had a pretty high chance of failure. But you never succeed if you don’t try, as my dad always says, and it became an old trick because it worked so often. Most people don’t want to deal with prisoners who come pre-soiled. Tears always helped with that sort of thing. Being tiny and blonde means that most people are looking for excuses to underestimate me, and Peter was from the Covenant. He had to consider me inferior, or he’d be admitting that the Covenant might not have the best training program out there.
“What’s to stop you pulling a fast one and trying to get away from me, hmm?”
He was smarter than I’d expected; damn. I sniffled, and said, “My feet hurt so bad I’m not even sure I can walk. How am I supposed to pull a fast one when I can’t even walk?”
“What’s in it for me?”
I almost dropped my subservient posture in favor of taking another shot at his groin. I managed to suppress the rage—barely—and whispered, “Anything you want.” Hopefully, if I couldn’t escape, his “anything” wouldn’t be anything that forced me to kill him any more than I was already planning to.
Peter hesitated. Then, finally, he made up his mind. “Stay there,” he said, and laughed as he walked out of the room.
Oh, I was definitely going to kill that man when I got the opportunity, or at least hurt him a lot. I stayed in my half-hunched position, listening intently to the noises coming from outside my little room. First came the clinking of metal, and then the soft sound of a hasp being turned. He was undoing my chains. My wrists and ankle were still cuffed, but the chains themselves were no longer attached to whatever was outside the walls.
Peter stepped back into the room a moment later. “All right, love. Let’s get you out of here.”
“But how?” I whispered, raising my head. “I can’t . . . I mean, I’m still . . .”
“I’m the man with the solution to your problem.” Peter held up a key, grinning.
I grinned back. “Awesome.”
“What?” His grin faltered, replaced by confusion. “Don’t you get any ideas, now. You’re still—”
“Chained? Yeah, I know,” I said, and lunged.
The chains had approximately a foot of give when they were attached to their anchor. If the false room was at floor level—which it was, because none of my captors had stepped up to enter—that meant that the anchor had to be a minimum of a foot from the opening. I had at least two feet to play with, and I was going to play.
To my surprise, my estimates had been off, a lot, and in the direction that worked for me, rather than against me: I had four feet of slack to play with. The chain was still unspooling when my elbow hit Peter in the chin, followed less than a second later by my knee slamming into his stomach. I wasn’t kidding about how difficult it would be for me to walk on my bruised-up soles, but what I hadn’t mentioned was that they’d been focusing on my instep, not the balls of my feet. As a dancer, the balls of my feet are where I live.
Peter went down like a sack of arrogant Irish potatoes, and I finished the job by slamming my balled-up, manacle-weighted fists into the back of his head. There was a risk I could kill him—that’s always a risk with blows to the head—and somehow I couldn’t find it in me to care very much. He’d been willing to do a lot worse than killing me.
The key was on the floor only inches from his hand. I grabbed it, unlocking the manacles on my wrists and ankle, and shoved it into the pocket of my bathrobe. Then I grabbed his belt, feeling frantically around until I found what I was looking for: the hilt of a knife.
“Thank God,” I muttered.
I took the knife and his shoelaces. Then I turned, and I was out the door.
The false room where I’d been held was set squarely in the middle of a large warehouse that had clearly been used for storage before it was converted into a temporary Covenant base. Old boxes still lined the walls, and there were hooks hanging from the ceiling. They looked disturbingly like giant meat hooks. I paused only long enough to be sure that neither of the remaining Covenant members were coming for me. Then I ran for the nearest wall, moving as fast as my aching body and battered feet allowed.
It’s amazing what a little adrenaline can do. I beat my own personal record for the twenty-yard dash, reaching one of the stacks of boxes and ducking behind it a split second before I heard voices coming from the far end of the warehouse.
“—talk,” said Margaret, her irritation clear even at a distance. “She simply won’t. We don’t work that way.”
“You must stop regarding this woman as a member of your family,” said Robert. “Her limits are not the same as yours.”
“She’s held up fairly well so far,” said Margaret sourly. “Who’s to say she won’t hold out until we get her back to England?”
“If she does that, she’s not our problem anymore. I know you want to be the one who breaks her, but what matters is that she’s broken, not who does it.”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m a child. I know what’s at stake here.” They were getting closer. I pressed deeper into the shadows behind my concealing wall of boxes, trying to assess my options in the rapidly decreasing time I had available. The bathrobe was white, or mostly; the front was more bloodstained than it had been when they first put it on me. It would show up against the
gloom like a beacon. Grimly, I untied the belt and slipped the terrycloth off my shoulders. Naked may not provide much protection from the elements, but a bathrobe never stopped a bullet. I needed to disappear more than I needed to preserve my feeble sense of modesty.
“Do you really?”
I tied Peter’s shoelaces hastily around the hilt of his knife, creating a makeshift cord that would hopefully keep me from going unarmed. I needed both my hands free. I also needed the knife. This was the best compromise I could come up with on short notice. Once I was reasonably sure the knots would hold, I wrapped the cord around my right arm, using it to secure the knife to my bicep. The knots held.
“Of course I—” Margaret’s voice cut off mid-sentence, followed by a shout that was half-wordless exclamation, half-profanity. I heard her running toward the false room. Only one set of footsteps; Robert wasn’t moving, and until he moved, neither was I.
“So we lost you already, did we? Clever little thing. I’ll have to arrange for additional containment measures when we get you back. And we will get you back, Verity Price. You can be certain of that.” He spoke like he knew that I could hear him—and maybe he did. If there was only one way into the warehouse, he’d have noticed me going by. That meant I had to be in the main room, somewhere.
That didn’t mean I had to make things easy for him. I slipped farther back behind the wall of boxes, hooked my fingers onto the first available handhold, and started climbing.
Most humans think flatly. It’s not a criticism: humanity evolved when monkeys left the trees, and—as a whole—we haven’t been all that eager to go back. Most people rarely look much higher than their own line of sight. More importantly, most people stop climbing when they get out of elementary school. Robert might expect me to seek higher ground, but he wouldn’t expect me to do it silently—and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from years of free running, it’s how to ascend without making any noise.
I stopped once I was ten feet off the ground, moving sideways until I found a cleft between two boxes that I could wedge myself into without making myself visible. And then I waited.
It wasn’t a long wait. “She’s gone!” shouted Margaret.
“I gathered as much,” said Robert. His voice was closer now. I didn’t move. “What happened?”
“I can’t be sure—Peter’s out cold—but it looks like she somehow convinced him to unchain her, and then walloped the holy hell out of him.”
“She improvises well. We’ll have to remember that.” Robert stepped suddenly around the edge of the wall of boxes, visible from my current position only as a flicker of motion in my peripheral vision. I froze in my hidey-hole, trying not to breathe. “Her robe’s here.”
“She left her robe?” Margaret sounded incredulous. “What good did she expect that to do her?”
“It’s white. White would stand out in here. It was the right choice, assuming she’s not worried about running around naked.” Robert raised his voice, calling, “You can come out. We understand why you ran away, and we’re not angry, but there’s no way you’re getting out of here. You may as well make things easy on yourself, and stop hiding before we come looking for you.”
Biting back the snarky replies took an almost physical effort. I succeeded. The pounding ache in my feet helped. If they’d done this to me when they weren’t angry, what would they do if they got me back?
Robert sighed audibly. “It’s going to be like that, is it?” He started walking away, presumably moving toward the boxes along the next wall. “You know, I’d really hoped that we were making progress, Verity. I know we’ll never be friends, but I wanted you to know that we respect your willpower.”
I held perfectly still as I began counting down silently from ten. Sure enough, I had just reached four when a flicker of motion betrayed Margaret creeping cat-silent into the narrow space between the boxes and the wall. She was looking for me, and so I did the one thing that I could do: I didn’t move. Without my bathrobe and in this degree of shadow, my hair and skin would look like they were all one color. I just hoped that it would be the color of the box that I was huddling against. I could climb—climbing was mostly a matter of digging in with my toes and forcing my way past the pain—but I wasn’t going to place bets on my being able to run any time soon.
“Where is she?!” Peter’s voice blasted into the warehouse, loud and sudden enough that I nearly flinched. I managed to restrain myself, the large muscles in my thighs jumping frantically as I struggled not to panic. “Where’s that little Healy bitch? I’ll strangle her with my bare hands!”
“Your interest in doing things with your bare hands is how we lost her in the first place,” snapped Robert. His voice was a whip crack in the quiet of the warehouse. Margaret was still creeping along, moving like she thought there was no chance I’d have seen her. I pressed myself deeper into the crevice, barely allowing myself to breathe as I watched Margaret inch her way along.
In the movies, this would be where I inevitably had to sneeze, triggering an exciting chase scene. In the movies, I wouldn’t be stark-ass naked, and I’d have a machine gun or something, not a single stolen knife. I didn’t sneeze, and below me, Margaret moved on by, still searching for my hiding space. When she looked up, the shadows—faithful to the last—made me look like just another part of the wall. God bless the limitations of the human eye.
She passed out of my sight, her footsteps moving to join the others.
“She must be in the upstairs,” said Robert.
That was news to me. I hadn’t realized there was an upstairs.
“Well, let’s go get her,” snapped Margaret. “We need to get her back into custody, now.”
“I’m going to kill her,” said Peter.
“No,” said Robert. “You’re not. We’re going to enlighten her. I think you’ll find that she enjoys that far less.”
The three of them moved off together. Their footsteps faded into silence, until I finally heard a door close in the distance. I still stayed where I was for another five minutes, measuring the time by counting off the steps of a proper Viennese waltz in my head. Finally, I was satisfied that I was alone, and I allowed myself to unlock my shoulders, sagging into a sitting position on the box where I’d been standing.
I was alone, naked, practically unarmed, and terrified. I might not have much time, but I had long enough. Bending forward to press my forehead against my knees, I closed my eyes, and cried silently until the tears ran out.
When I was sure that I was done leaking, I unfolded and stood, not bothering to wipe my cheeks. These assholes from the Covenant wanted to play? Oh, we’d play. And they’d lose.
Twenty-two
“Never forget that I loved you, and I did the best by you I could. You can forget everything else about me, but please. Don’t forget that.”
—Enid Healy
Hiding from the Covenant of St. George in a warehouse somewhere in Manhattan
THE FIRST THING I needed to do was find a way out that didn’t involve going past the Covenant. There’s nothing dignified about racing naked across the rooftops of Manhattan—for one thing, without a bra, I was going to wind up in a world of pain, and that didn’t even start to go into the situation with my feet—but that wasn’t going to stop me. If I had an exit, I was going to take it. The trick was going to be finding that exit without coming out into the open.
I carefully extracted myself from my position between the boxes and began climbing again. Higher ground helped my nerves. Margaret and the others wanted me alive, for the moment, and that meant they’d be reluctant to shoot me; it’s never a good idea to shoot someone you’re not intending to kill, no matter how good of a shot you think you are. That’s something I learned from my grandmother, and she’s the best shot I’ve ever known. “Even when you’re aiming for the hand, you’d best assume you’re shooting to kill,” was what she’d said, and she w
as right. Shooting to wound was only a few inches from missing your target entirely, and a different few inches from killing them. Assuming the Covenant had similar training (a big assumption, but I had to go with something), they’d try to use other means of getting me down.
Besides, once I was high enough, they’d be even less likely to see me without my wanting to be seen, and there was something to be said for that. I didn’t want them to take me alive. I didn’t want to die, either. That meant I needed to escape.
The boxes were piled high enough that I could see the rafters overhead, but not so high that I could reach them. I couldn’t even jump with any assurance that I’d hit my target—not with my feet in their current condition—and a misjudged landing could send the entire stack of boxes toppling. That wouldn’t be exactly what I’d call “subtle,” and it would bring the Covenant rushing back to find me, instead of wasting more time searching the upstairs.
I wish to hell I had some backup, I thought grimly, frowning at the unreachable rafters. That triggered a whole series of thoughts I’d been trying to avoid—like why couldn’t I feel Sarah if we were still in Manhattan? I should have been able to tune in on her “static,” even if she was too far away to communicate telepathically. I wasn’t wearing Margaret’s anti-telepathy charm anymore. Hell, I wasn’t wearing anything anymore. It wasn’t likely that Sarah would have left town while I was unconscious. So where was she?
If Sarah was unlikely to have left town, the Covenant was even less likely to have found her without me to lead them to her hiding place. She was a cuckoo. She was probably terrified by whatever feedback she picked up when Margaret knocked me out. That would have been enough to activate her automatic defenses, and once those were up, they’d never be able to catch her. That meant they were still blocking her telepathy somehow. It was the only explanation for her ongoing radio silence.
There was no way they’d have been able to telepathically shield an entire warehouse. The resources required would have been massive, and it would have meant bringing in several witches, if not a witch, a sorcerer, and some variety of exorcist. So they had to be telepathically shielding me. I wasn’t wearing anything . . .
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