“Jill,” I repeated. “If I cut you free, do you think you can walk?”
She turned away from me. “Is this your new torture?” she demanded.
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I cut her free instead. I wasn’t carrying much in terms of blades, but even my little pocketknife was sharp enough to cut through normal rope with changeling muscle behind it.
Jill stayed perfectly still, clearly still utterly terrified and unsure if this was real.
“Are you a TV fan, Jill?” I asked quietly, hoping for something to break her fugue. The girl jerked in surprise and turned to look at me for the first time.
“What?!” she demanded.
“‘If you can’t run, you walk,’” I quoted to her. “‘If you can’t walk, you crawl,’” I continued, sliding my arms under her before she could resist. “‘And if you can’t crawl,’” I finished, “‘you find someone to carry you.”
I left the knife, hoping that it would throw some confusion into what had happened. If one of the vampires had left it within her reach, she would theoretically have been able to escape on her own.
The Firefly quote seemed to have done the trick, as Jill went limp in my arms, clinging to me as I gently and carefully carried her out of the room. I could hear footsteps on the floor now and moved in the opposite direction—back toward my open window.
I made it to the room I’d entered through before the owner of the footsteps rounded the corner, and gently shoved the door closed with my foot.
Eyeing the window and feeling the cold draft coming from it, I eyed my rescuee. She was still in shock from being suddenly rescued, and weak from her ordeal. She couldn’t take the cold. I could.
I removed my heavy winter coat—a new-bought replacement for the one the shifter had shredded last night—and wrapped the girl in it before she could protest.
“Hold on to me,” I instructed quietly. “I am going to carry you to safety; do you understand? Whatever happens, do not let go.”
The pale blonde nodded, wrapping her arms around my neck again as I tightened the coat around her and then carried her out into the cold. There was no way I was climbing down the ladder with ninety-odd pounds of underfed, blood-drained teenager in my arms, so I took a deep breath and jumped.
I think if she’d had the energy, Jill would have screamed fit to raise an army. As it was, she almost choked me before we hit the ground, the snow and a perfect landing on my part reducing the impact to a “DAMN, that hurts” to my legs.
Two people stared at me in complete shock and I gave them a calm “I know what I’m doing” nod, and then dashed around the corner, out of sight from the hotel.
My apartment was too far away to carry this girl, and right now, I had no idea who I could trust outside of a select few in this city. Carefully putting the girl down and keeping a spare hand on her to reassure her, I called Shelly.
“Shelly, it’s Jason,” I told her when she picked up. “I found our nest, but I have a little problem.”
She sighed. “I’m not here to solve all your problems, Jason,” she told me bluntly. “What happened?”
“They had a living victim in the hotel,” I replied. “I brought her out with me, but I have nowhere to take her.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. “Shelly?” I asked after easily ten seconds had lapsed.
“Your hero complex is worse than Talus’s,” she said quietly. “You are both going to get yourselves killed. And yet I can’t blame you.” She paused. “I can’t get away just now. Where are you? I’ll have someone pick you up.”
I told her the street intersection and alley I was hidden in.
“All right,” Shelly said. “Keep her warm, I’ll make a call and you should have a pickup shortly.”
Shelly hung up on me, and I turned to explain what was going on to Jill, to realize she’d slumped against my shoulder as I spoke on the phone. My momentary fear she’d died on me quickly faded as I realized she was breathing.
Safe and warm for the first time since she’d been kidnapped, the girl had passed out. I laid her gently on the ground, shivering against the cold myself. I’d barely managed to start thinking about using faerie flame to warm myself though when a bright orange Honda pulled up beside me.
The driver rolled the window down and looked at me quizzically.
“Kilkenny?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I confirmed, looking over the small man in the passenger seat. He wore a scarf that covered his lower face, but something seemed slightly off about him.
“Put her in back,” the driver told me. “Take you to colony.”
I obeyed, laying Jill down in the passenger side of the backseat and then slipping into the front passenger seat myself, discreetly observing our driver.
He was perhaps five feet tall, fully clad in winter wear, and the scarf covered his lower face but still revealed his eyes. It was the eyes that gave it away—he was wearing contacts, and when he blinked at me, one slid aside, revealing a lizard like split pupil. That, combined with the mention of the “colony” and the odd accent, led to a simple conclusion.
“You’re one of Talus’s goblins,” I said aloud, eyeing the creature.
“Am,” he confirmed. “Name Krich. Swore to Talus. He save us from—” The goblin lapsed into another language for a few seconds. I realized it was Vietnamese just as he dropped into silence, realizing I didn’t understand him.
“Bad men,” he finished, and returned to silence as he drove us onward. Realizing I wasn’t going to get much more from the man, I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes. Just to rest them. It had been a busy day.
THE NEXT THING I KNEW, Mary and Holly were waking me up and helping me out of the car. In front of us stood a quartet of brownstone buildings standing around a central courtyard. Five or six short people, their gender and species concealed by bulky winter clothing, were with them, helping move the still completely unconscious Jill from the back seat of the Honda.
Mary wrapped her arms around me and kissed me fiercely.
“Shelly called and let us know what had happened—Krich was apparently right there, thank the Powers,” she told me. Speaking of the old goblin, I looked around for him, only to catch him vanishing into one of the buildings.
“I didn’t even get to say thank you,” I said, watching the door close behind him.
“He wouldn’t want you to,” one of the goblins told me, his English perfect. “My grandfather is one of those who negotiated our travel here,” he continued. “He remembers our debt to Talus and your Court very well.” The goblin offered his hand to me. “I am Theino, grandson of Krich, son of Lorn, current Speaker to Outsiders for our clan.” I shook his hand, and he smiled. The smile shifted his scarf, and for the first time I saw why they all wore them—inch-long ivory-white tusks protruded from each corner of the goblin’s mouth.
“Please,” he said, “come inside so we can attend to your ward.”
“Do you have a doctor?” I asked.
“Not one versed in human physiology, I must admit,” Theino told me as he led us into a different apartment building than his father had entered. “Your lady here called her brother, however, and Dr. Clementine is on his way.”
I nodded as I followed the goblin and the two girls inside. “That’s good. She’s lost a lot of blood and is poisoned.”
“I thought vampires always killed when they fed?” Holly asked as the door closed behind us.
“Only the newly turned ones,” I said grimly. “The older ones have the self-control not to—they don’t need to. So, instead, one of them decided to keep this poor girl around as a portable blood bank.”
“We will take good care of her,” Theino promised. “Dr. Clementine will have all the help we can provide.”
“Thank you,” I told the goblin, bowing my head slightly. It wasn’t, after all, him I was angry at.