Backpacking Through Bedlam, page 32
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.”
“And then we can go home?”
“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?
Nineteen
“I swear, if all children have as much sense of self-preservation as Healy children, it’s a miracle anyone ever lives to adulthood.”
—Mary Dunlavy
Opening the door between me and the rest of a Covenant team, ready for a fight
THE DOOR OPENED EASILY—APPARENTLY, these folks had been confident enough in their security (and their furniture) to think there was no point in locking me in. I slipped through into another hallway, this one lit with bare hanging bulbs very like the ones in the room where I’d been held. They could certainly do with investing in a better interior decorator. I’m several decades out of the mainstream, but even I know that “too creepy for the people in Amityville” is not a design aesthetic to emulate.
For all that I was still glowing—and would be until the spell ran its course—it was nice to have the lights on. The amount of light I can put off with a spell is nothing compared to good ambient lighting. I paid careful attention to my surroundings as I moved.
The walls were curved, like all the others had been, although when I looked back, there were actual hard angles in the wall around the door. I was still in the tunnel system, but this tunnel was at a right angle to the little offshoot where I’d been kept with the kids. The fact that they’d put us all that close to together there told me both that they hadn’t been planning on another prisoner, and that they weren’t very accustomed to taking prisoners at all. That would have been a good thing, if not for the fact that it meant they usually just killed people.
Corpses need a lot less in the way of operational security, unless they’ve been infected with something that parodies reanimation, or you have someone on your team with questionable ideas about scientific ethics and a lot of volts of electricity.
There were three doors, apart from the one I’d come through. I stopped to listen at each of them. The first had total silence on the other side. The second had a very soft sound that I couldn’t quite make out, but didn’t seem like anything I needed to worry about. The third had voices, raised enough to be in heated discussion, but not enough for me to make out a damn thing they were saying. I backed away. Door number two it was, then. When in doubt, always delay the open combat as long as possible.
Easing open the second door revealed a room much like the one where I’d been kept, absent the door at the back—this was a terminus, not a passthrough. There was a blonde woman tied to a chair at the center of the room, head bowed, weeping. She looked up as I stepped into the room, narrowing her eyes and glaring at me.
They hadn’t bothered to gag her. I raised a hand, trying to signal her to silence. Maybe it was the fact that she didn’t recognize me from the Covenant team, and maybe it was the part where I was still glowing—something evil monster-hunting assholes don’t tend to do—but she didn’t scream, only sniffled and continued to watch me warily as I closed the door behind myself and made my way across the room to her.
“Cara?” I asked, kneeling by her side.
When she nodded—a small, tightly controlled motion of her head, barely enough to make her hair shift positions—I began working on the knots holding her wrists. “I’m Alice. Verity’s grandmother. I found the children. If you’ll just let me untie you, I can tell you how to reach them.”
“You’re letting me go?”
“Of course I’m letting you go. I’m not in the business of torturing women for my own amusement.” I finished untying her wrists and began unwrapping the rope, freeing her arms. It was a lot easier when I didn’t have to smash the chair in the process. “The kids need someone with them. It’s dark in there.”
Cara wilted in her seat, making no effort to reach for her ankles. “It doesn’t matter anyway. They know where we are now. They’ll just keep coming.”
“So we’ll figure out how to move the rest of you. We’ll—”
“We can’t move William!” Cara clapped a hand over her mouth, eyes going wide as she realized that she had just shouted. She glanced anxiously at the door, clearly waiting for the Covenant to come to investigate the noise. I tensed, waiting for much the same. If they came in here, there’d be no way for me to hide. Not when I was lit up like a glowstick.
The door remained shut. No one came to see what the yelling was about. I untensed, just a little, and started untying her ankles.
“We can’t move William and they know he exists, they know we have a husband, they know where we are, they know how to find us, they’ve been watching us for weeks—” Her voice was low and anxious, her words falling over each other like rocks tumbling in a landslide, each barely leaving room for the next.
“We’ll find a way,” I said. “If we have to, we’ll find a way. My husband is an elemental sorcerer. Fire’s his focus, but I’m sure he’s done some work with stone. I know a Huldra who sings to the trees, but whose wife went to stone when she died. We have the resources. If we bring them all together, we can move your husband to safety—if that’s even what has to happen. I was told they grabbed you while you were moving the kids. That doesn’t mean they necessarily know where the entrance to the Nest is.”
“It’s only a matter of time.”
“Not if we win.” Cara glanced at me, eyes going wide again. I offered her what I hoped would come across as an encouraging smile. “This is a war. Us versus the Covenant. It was always going to be a war, because they were never going to let it be anything else. So we win. We beat them so badly they go back to Europe and never darken our doorsteps again. And we’re going to win, Cara. We’re going to make sure you and your children and your husband will all be safe.”
Maybe I was making promises I couldn’t keep. But I was going to do my best to keep them, no matter what, and that was really all I could do. If it turned out I couldn’t keep my word, we’d probably all be dead, and she wouldn’t exactly be in a position to blame me.
And ugh. That kind of thinking is why it’s always been hard for me to make friends. I finished untying her ankles and straightened, offering her my hands.
After a pause that could easily be attributed to natural draconic reluctance to touch a human, she reached out and took them. I pulled her to her feet. She stumbled a little, ankles probably still sore, before reclaiming her hands and asking, in a soft voice, “Which way?”
“End of the corridor,” I said, pointing. “There’s a light on in that room. It leads to a dark hall, and if you walk straight down it to the end, there’s another door. That’s where they have the kids. They were keeping them in cages. The Covenant was keeping the kids in cages, I mean. I let them out. There’s no light, but at least they have each other.” That suddenly didn’t feel like enough, so I added, “They were all there. The number of kids in the room matches the information I’d been given.”
