“I’m going to kill her,” said Peter. He still sounded strained, but at least he was managing words now, and sentences. I probably hadn’t done any permanent damage. He turned a glare on me. “I’m going to kill you.”
“I heard you the first time,” I said dismissively, and looked back to Robert. “You’re not going to win. You can intimidate me as much as you want, but you’re not going to win.”
“I’m sorry,” said Robert. “We already have.”
He supported Peter with one arm as he led the other man out of the room, and closed the door behind them. Once again, the sound of the lock engaging came from the wrong wall, like they had some sort of speaker set up just to disorient me. I waited for the click, and then forced myself to mentally replay the first verse and chorus of Lady Gaga’s “Lovegame”—roughly thirty seconds of music. When that was done, I allowed myself to glance up, and smile.
The lights were still on.
Don’t get me wrong: I can get a lotdone in total darkness. Blind fighting is a part of the standard training package where I come from, and there was a whole summer where I wasn’t allowed to eat any meal I couldn’t prepare blindfolded. (Lessons from that summer included “never let Verity make spaghetti with a blindfold on” and “never eat anythingAntimony prepares with a blindfold on.” How she got the blessed cedar ash into the oatmeal is something the world may never know.) But at the end of the day, I prefer working in the light, and it’s hard to case a room that you can’t see.
Robert Bullard said that I was giving myself away with every word I said—or didn’t say. Fine. This room was doing the same thing, and I didn’t even need to ask it questions. All I needed was the luxury to look around.
For one thing, the walls were matte white, with no staining or discoloration of any sort. My chains weren’t bolted to anything that I could see; they passed through holes cut into the wood. That, combined with how little leverage I had, told me I was in a false room, probably constructed in the middle of something much larger. Each wall was about five feet long, giving my captors room to move, but not giving me much opportunity to get away.
I hadn’t been able to see much through the open door when Peter and Robert arrived, but what I’d been able to see gave me the impression of industrial gray. Either my false room was in a shipping container, or we were in some sort of unused factory or warehouse. I’d never actually been shipped anywhere—that was one exciting life opportunity I’d worked hard to avoid—but I was reasonably sure that I would have been able to feel the pull-and-roll of the tides moving the ship if we’d been at sea. So no matter which option turned out to be the right one, we were staying in one place.
For now. If there was one thing I knew for sure, it was that complacency is a killer. I had to assume that they’d be moving me at any moment, and putting me in a false room opened the potential for moving my surroundings with me. I needed to get these chains undone. But how? Most of the common cons wouldn’t work on these people; they were the ones who taught them to my family in the first place. If I faked a stomach ache, they’d force charcoal and Pepto-Bismol down my throat until I stopped. If I faked demonic possession, they’d just dump holy water over my head. And so on, and so on. Getting them to untie me was going to take something totally new and original, something they’d never seen before.
It was really a pity that I had absolutely no idea what that something was.
As for fixtures, there weren’t many; this wasn’t a place they were planning to keep me long-term, not if they wanted me to stay functional, and the setup argued for them wanting me to last. The chains were thick and solid—they must have brought those with them, because the chair I was sitting on was a piece of crap that looked like it was originally from Ikea. It was bolted to the floor. I leaned forward enough to study the bolts. They were generic hardware store issue, nothing special or unique. The Covenant was improvising. That was good for me. I can improvise with the best of them, and I’ve always gotten high marks for my freestyle.
The lights on the ceiling were more generic hardware. The false room had taken work, but they hadn’t been ready to put someone into it. Not yet. There was bound to be a weak spot somewhere, and I would find it . . . later.
My head hurt. I was chained to a wall. I was going to need to eat, and pee, before too much longer. But for the moment, there was nothing I could do, and so I closed my eyes, cleared my mind, and let myself slip slowly into the restorative arms of sleep. Never fight tired if you don’t have to, and never let a captive recover their strength if you have any other choice. I was following the rules. Margaret wasn’t. And when she came back to resume her little question-and-answer session, she was going to find out just how important some rules really are.
Twenty-one
“Blood is one thing, but that’s not all that goes into family. The family you choose is the family that really matters. They’re the ones who’ll keep you standing.”
An unknown location in the city of Manhattan (but it’s probably a shipping container or a warehouse)
THE SOUND OF FOOTSTEPS woke me from my doze. I cracked my eyes open just far enough to test the quality of the light. It hadn’t changed. There were no windows in my little room, so the passage of time wouldn’t affect things, but they also hadn’t turned off the lights, or tried setting up an interrogation rig. That was good. I stayed comfortably limp, waiting to see who was approaching me, and what they wanted. I didn’t have to wait for very long.
“Are you asleep?” demanded Margaret. She sounded incredulous. Out of all the things she was expecting from me, this was apparently at the bottom of the list.
I raised my head, yawning. “I was,” I said. “Now I’m not. Maybe you should try it sometime. You might be less cranky.”
“I am not cranky,” said Margaret.
“You could’ve fooled me.” She was dangerous, employed by the Covenant of St. George, and I was totally at her mercy. I probably shouldn’t have been taking pleasure in tormenting her. At the same time, she sort of reminded me of my sister—a shorter, slimmer, more potentially murderous version of my sister—and I hadn’t been able to torment Antimony in person for way too long.
And as long as I kept thinking of things in those terms, I wouldn’t completely lose my shit. Maybe I was going to get away. Maybe I wasn’t. Either way, I could keep irritating the Covenant until they killed me. It was a small thing. It was the only thing I currently had.
Margaret narrowed her eyes. “Your continuing insolence won’t do you any good. You’re going to pay for your sins, and I will personally commend you, body and soul, into the arms of the Lord.”
“What sins are those, exactly?” I leaned back in my chair. “I’m sorry I hit you and stole your stuff, but you’re the one who picked the lock in the first place. I was just acting in self-defense.” I wasn’t the one who’d hit her. I didn’t feel like reminding her of that fact.
“You are charged with consorting with demons, conspiracy to betray the human race, and corruption of the innocent.”
“That’s a whole lot of ‘C,’” I said, through lips that felt suddenly numb. I’d been expecting two of her trumped-up charges. The third . . .
“Consorting with demons” meant “working with cryptids, rather than shooting them on sight.” “Conspiracy to betray the human race” meant basically the same thing, with a side order of not shooting any cryptid who looked like they might someday accidentally be a danger to humanity. Like Istas, who had never hurt anyone who didn’t hurt her first—that I was aware of, anyway, and I try to judge people by what I see, not what I suspect—but had been perfectly happy to slaughter snake cultists with extreme prejudice. By the standards of the Covenant, I was a traitor just for letting her kill the people who’d been intending to kill us. But “corruption of the innocent . . .”