That brought the conversation to its second screeching halt in as many minutes, as everyone turned to stare at the gorgon. Carol blushed, ducking her head slightly while radiating embarrassment. She was telling the truth about her hair; the individual snakes were stretching toward the mouse, their mouths open and their tongues scenting the air.
“This just gets better and better,” muttered Ryan. I didn’t disagree.
Uncle Mike ignored them all in favor of focusing on what mattered—the plan—rather than what didn’t—everything else. “We’ve got half a dozen volunteers from Verity’s resident Aeslin colony. They’re going to go in, scout the place for traps, and report back. That lets us get a feeling for the lay of the land before we put ourselves in harm’s way.”
“You mean she wasn’t just bragging when she said she had a colony of Aeslin living with her?” asked Kitty.
Dominic snorted. “Bragging? No. Complaining vociferously? Almost certainly. While she is quite fond of her resident rodents, she seems to enjoy complaining about them as she does little else.”
“The family has coexisted with Aeslin mice for generations, which brings us to the one possible flaw in this plan,” said Uncle Mike. “We don’t know for sure that this Margaret woman doesn’t have a colony of her own. It seems unlikely, given the Covenant’s stance on cryptids, but the original colony was harbored before the family defected.”
“If we encounter heretics while on the search for our brave Priestess, we will smite them down with the Fury of a Thousand Angry Rolling Pins!” squeaked the mouse.
“Don’t know what that means, really. I’ve got to assume it’s pretty dire, since it’s coming from a talking mouse,” said Uncle Mike. “Now I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m going to go and rescue my niece from the Covenant of St. George. Who’s with me?”
“I am,” said Dominic.
“It will be a pleasing diversion,” said Istas.
“Verity’s my friend,” said Ryan.
“These people give humans a bad name,” said Angel.
“We’re with you,” said a voice from the back of the room. I turned to see Priscilla standing in the door to the hall. She must have been speaking for the dragons while Candy’s pregnancy kept her confined to the Nest. More dragons stood to either side of her, both the European and Chinese varieties. Several of the lizard-like servitors that Verity insisted on calling “Sleestaks” were behind them. All of them were holding weapons.
“All right, then,” said Uncle Mike. He sounded pleased. Who wouldn’t be, when they had just been handed their very own cryptid army? “Now we’re cooking with gas. Let’s go get Verity back.”
This time, when the mouse cheered, so did everybody else. One way or another, it was time to go and face the Covenant of St. George. Hang on, Verity, I thought, wishing there was any chance at all that she was in a position to hear me. We’re on our way.
Just hang on . . .
Twenty
“I’ll never understand why people think kidnapping is a good way to solve their problems. Near as I can tell, it just makes more problems that you need to solve, and who are you going to kidnap then?”
An unknown location in the city of Manhattan, returning to our original narrator, who has just regained consciousness after a nasty blow to the head
I KNEW THREE THINGS even before I opened my eyes: that I was somewhere enclosed, probably no larger than a bathroom stall, that someone had changed my clothes—nothing was riding the way it should have, which probably meant my weapons were also gone—and that I was in serious trouble. Then I raised my aching head, opened my eyes, and added a fourth thing to the list: wherever I was, it was pitch-black. No natural or artificial light, and I’m not a bogeyman, I can’t see in the dark.
Well, shit, I thought. I was smart enough not to say it out loud. There was no point in letting my captors know I was awake before I absolutely had to.
The last thing I remembered was Margaret Healy’s gun slamming into the back of my head, and the meaty, deadweight sound of my body hitting the rooftop. Not the sort of thing I like to go to sleep on. I’m more of the “dance until you can’t feel your knees, two or three rounds of really fun sex, wine cooler, bed” school of thought. Still, we all have to work with what we’re given in this life, and what I’d been given was a crazy cousin from England who seemed to think my skull was a piñata.
At least she hadn’t managed to hit me hard enough to make the candy come out. I could turn my head easily enough, and while I couldn’t see a damn thing, I was reasonably confident that it was due to a lack of light, not because she had somehow knocked my optic nerves offline. I sat up a little straighter. The gesture caused the chains holding my wrists to the wall to pull up tight, clanking faintly.
“Damn,” I whispered, not bothering to internalize it this time. I hadn’t even realized I was chained until I tried to move. That was an amateur mistake—I should have assumed I was bound the second I woke up, and planned accordingly.
Not that there was much I could have done in the dark, presumably unarmed, and with a head sore enough to make me suspect concussion. Maybe I was being hard on myself . . . and maybe that didn’t matter, since Margaret and her goons weren’t going to go easy on me just because I wasn’t feeling at the top of my game. I took a deep breath, ignoring the sick swimming sensation in my head, and tugged against the chains that bound me. There was barely a foot of give, and by chaining me to a wall, rather than tying me to the chair that I was sitting in, the Covenant had managed to deny me the leverage I might have otherwise used against them.
My left leg was free. My right leg wasn’t. That made sense, too. It didn’t totally immobilize me, and if they wanted me to stay functional for any length of time, they were going to want me to have some capacity for movement. Enough to keep the blood flowing at least, since bedsores and gangrene are nobody’s friends.
That was a sobering thought all by itself. People who plan to kill you quickly don’t worry about tying you up so that you can still move enough to keep your circulation good. People who plan to torture you for everything you can tell them about your family and the cryptids you’ve spent your whole life protecting do. And if what I knew about the Covenant was accurate, they wouldn’t view torturing me as a bad thing. God told them it was all cool, as long as when it was over, they got to kill a dragon or two.
Antimony suggested once that we should all carry suicide pills, just in case a situation like this one came up. Alex and I both laughed at her. I told her that there was no way I’d ever let a situation like this one be a problem. “I’ll die before I let myself be taken that way”—those were my exact words. Yet here I was, captive for the second time since I arrived in New York, and this time it wasn’t just a harmless little snake cult intending to use me as a virgin sacrifice. This time it was the Covenant of St. George.
Worse, this time it was family. And as many people have pointed out over the years, there’s nobody in this world who can hurt you like family can.
I took a few deep breaths to calm myself down before carefully tugging on each of the chains in turn, looking for differences in how they moved. The Covenant was pretty good at chaining people up; I had to give them that. I doubt I could have done a better job. (Antimony probably could, but that’s because Antimony focused on keeping people as far away from her as possible, and when she couldn’t do that, she liked to be sure they’d stay where she put them.)