But that didn’t mean I hadn’t been forced to swallow anything. I put a hand on my stomach, feeling suddenly queasy. Okay, Verity, settle down, I thought sternly. Even if you ate it, it’s not poisonous. They wanted to bring you back to the Covenant alive, and that means they’re not going to have fed you any mercury-based charms.
Oh, I hoped I was right about that. Sure, keeling over because I’d been poisoned would be a dandy way to prevent myself from telling them any of the family secrets, but it wasn’t exactly on the top of my “to do” list for the day. (It wasn’t a guarantee of my silence, either. The phrase “dead men tell no tales” doesn’t hold that much water in my family. We know a lot of ghosts. My Aunt Mary died years before I was born, and no one, living or dead, has any idea how to shut her up.)
I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself down, and went back to looking for things that could help me get up into the rafters. The boxes weren’t high enough, and I didn’t want to start rearranging them—there was no telling how heavy they were, or how many of them were rotten on the inside. That left the hooks that hung from the ceiling. I looked at them, assessing the distance I would have to leap. If I could just grab hold before I fell, I could climb the chain to reach the rafters. Tetanus would be a risk, but hell, in my line of work, tetanus is always a risk.
“Only die once,” I muttered (that wasn’t quite true, either), and started climbing back down the boxes. It was a stupid plan. It was a potentially suicidal plan. It was the only plan I had, and so I intended to go for it. Never allow for the possibility that you might fail, and you’ll succeed just because the universe is too embarrassed to admit that it painted you into a corner.
My feet hurt worse than ever by the time I reached the floor. Every bend of my toes was agony, and putting my weight down on my heels was like standing on hot coals. Ballet helped with that. After years of pointe classes, where bleeding toes were considered a status symbol, a little bruising wasn’t going to slow me down. I hit the ground running, a naked blonde streak heading as fast as I could for the false room that had been my prison, and would now hopefully be my salvation.
As long as I didn’t slow down, I could use the pain in my feet to motivate me. I was going to pay for that as soon as I stopped—the limits of the human body are something that I am intimately familiar with—but for the moment, adrenaline and inertia were both on my side. I assessed the pain as I ran, letting it serve as its own diagnostic engine. The bruising was as bad as I’d thought it would be, maybe a little worse, but that was all. It didn’t feel like they’d actually managed to crack any of my metatarsals, which was a relief. Bruising was going to be a lot easier to work around than broken bones.
I didn’t slow down as I approached the side of the false room. Instead, I aimed myself for the doorway, leaping at the last moment to grab the top of the frame. I let my own momentum carry me into a forward jackknife, then whipped myself backward and flipped up onto the roof. I landed silently, my bare feet actually helping with the action.
“If you wanted to keep me, you shoulda broken my fingers,” I murmured. Then I straightened, turned, and started running again before my feet could fully realize that I had stopped. This time when I jumped, I launched myself into empty air.
For a moment, I was flying, arms outstretched, like a Lady Godiva superheroine aiming for the sky. Then my hands hit the big metal hook dangling from the ceiling. I grabbed hold, clinging as tightly as I could while the force of my leap sent the whole chain swaying. The extra ten feet of height I’d been able to gain from the false room had been enough to boost me to the necessary level. Thank God. If this hadn’t worked, I probably would have wound up with a broken leg, and that would have been a lot harder to work around.
The chain creaked as it swayed, but quietly; it was too heavy to get up any real momentum, and that was keeping the noise down. For the moment.
“Gonna need a tetanus shot when all this is over,” I muttered, and began climbing up the still-swaying chain, heading for the ceiling. It was time to get out of sight.
The less said about my trip up the filthy, rusty, incredibly cold length of chain, the better, except that the whole experience left me with a lot of respect for Antimony’s trapeze classes. Not that she was usually into climbing chains—ropes were more her thing—but my arms were aching by the time I reached the rafters, and my shoulders felt like they’d been scooped out and replaced with mashed potatoes.
Once I was at the top of the chain, I had to actually pull myself up onto the main support beam, another task that was easier said than done. It was bigger around than the span of my arms, the sort of old, solid construction that was supposed to outlive the city itself. I finally managed to hook my foot into the loop that secured the chain to the beam, scrabbling up the side of the wood and collapsing, facedown, onto it. What were a few splinters in sensitive places after everything I’d already been through?
Answer: damn uncomfortable. I stayed where I was for longer than was probably a good idea, wincing as the feeling came slowly back into my arms. Once I was sure that I could move without sending myself plummeting to the floor, I sat up and looked around me.
The beam where I was seated was covered in a thick layer of grime, cobwebs, and rat droppings. I was naked in the middle of a major health hazard. The filth was at least reassuring, confirming that no one else had been up here in years, if ever. The Covenant wasn’t likely to start looking for me in the rafters until they got really desperate, and by that point, I would hopefully be long gone. There was less than seven feet of space between me and the ceiling; if I stood on my tiptoes, I could have brushed my fingers against it. Assuming I would have wanted to. The cobwebs were even worse up there, creating a hanging shroud of grime.
The big beams, like the one I was starting to think of as mine, were spaced evenly down the length of the warehouse. Smaller beams connected them, creating almost a network of catwalks that someone without a fear of heights could use to traverse the building easily. Best of all, they connected to the windows that were set high into the walls. All I had to do was get there, get the windows open, and get out. Emboldened by what looked like the nearness of my escape, I stood.
Only years of hard training and harder discipline kept me from screaming as I put my weight back on my bruised feet and promptly fell down again. I managed to grab the edge of the beam before I could roll off into space. I clung for dear life, curling into a ball and sobbing into the dirt. This moment had been coming since I escaped; I’d known it was coming, had seen and cataloged the signs. You can only keep running on a bruise for so long. Still, I had refused to believe that my body would betray me like this while I was still in danger. Like the idiot I sometimes was, I’d allowed myself to believe that I could just keep running, and fall down when it was safe.
It wasn’t safe. It was a long damn way from safe. But I was still falling down.
My tears turned the grime against my cheek into a horrible, foul-smelling mud that smeared on my face. I struggled into a sitting position and tried to wipe it away, but only succeeded in smearing it down my chin and all over my hand. That just made me cry more. I was dirty, I was alone, and I was hurt too badly to be doing this by myself.
It was funny, really. I’d always known that I wasn’t going to have a long and peaceful life; that sort of thing is reserved for people who think the monster under the bed is just a story, and who run away from the sound of screaming, not toward it. Somehow I’d always expected to die so fast that I wouldn’t even realize it was happening—a broken neck, like my great-grandmother, or a swarm of Apraxis wasps, like my great-grandfather. Maybe even sucked into a portal to another dimension, like Grandpa. But no, my choices had to be “tortured to death by the Covenant” or “starved to death in the rafters of an old warehouse.” Talk about a rock and a hard place.
My tears gradually ran out, replaced by a hollow feeling in my chest. My parents would never kn
ow what happened to me. My mice wouldn’t even be able to give a full accounting. I’d be one more branch lopped off the family tree, with nothing to show that I’d ever been alive.
Well. Almost nothing. I’d managed to sway a Covenant agent over to our side, and that was something we hadn’t done for a couple of generations. Grandma Alice was the last one to accomplish it, and she’d used similar tactics: being cute and blonde and persistent. It was weird to think that she would probably outlive me.
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.
“Gotc
ha,” 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.
Midnight Blue-Light Special Page 29
