I upgraded the glower to a glare. She regarded me in perfect calm.
Dammit. The best way to keep yourself from doing something grossly self-destructive and stupid is to avoid the temptation to do it. For example, it is far easier to fend off inappropriate amorous desires if one runs screaming from the room every time a pretty girl comes in. Which sounds silly, I know, but the same principle applies to everything else.
If I let her talk to me, Lasciel would propose something calm and sane and reasonable and effective. It would require a small price of me, if nothing else by making me a tiny bit more dependent upon her advice and assistance. Whatever happened, she’d gain another smidgen of influence over me.
Baby steps on the highway to hell. Lasciel was an immortal. She could afford patience, whereas I could not afford temptation.
It came down to this: If I didn’t hear her out and didn’t get out of this mess, Rawlins’s blood would be on my hands. And whoever was behind the slaughter around the convention might well keep right on escalating. More people could die.
Oh. And I’d wind up enjoying some kind of Torquemada-esque vacation with whichever fiend had the most money and the least lag.
When a concept like that is an afterthought, you know things are bad.
Lasciel watched me with patient blue eyes.
“All right,” I told her. “Let’s hear it.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
We plotted, the fallen angel and me. It went fast. It turns out that holding an all-mental conversation gets things done at the literal speed of thought, without all those clunky phonemes to get in the way.
Barely a minute had passed when I opened my eyes and said very quietly to Rawlins, “You’re right. They’ll kill you. We have to get out of here.”
The cop gave me a pained grimace and nodded. “How?”
I struggled and sat up. I rolled my shoulders a little, trying to get some blood flowing through my arms, which had been manacled together underneath me. I tested the chain. It had been slipped through an inverted U-bolt in the concrete floor. The links rattled metallically as they slid back and forth.
I checked Crane at the noise. The man kept speaking intently into his cell phone, and took no apparent notice of the movement.
“I’m going to slip one of these manacles off my wrist,” I told him. I nodded at a discarded old rolling tool cabinet. “There should be something in there I can use. I’ll cut us both out.”
Rawlins shook his head. “Those two going to stand there watching while we do all that?”
“I’ll do it fast,” I said.
“Then what?”
“I kill the lights and we get out.”
“Door is chained shut,” Rawlins said.
“Let me worry about that.”
Rawlins squinted. He looked very tired. “Why not,” he said, nodding. “Why not.”
I nodded and closed my eyes, slowed my breathing, and began to concentrate.
“Hey,” Rawlins said. “How you going to slip your cuffs?”
“Ever heard about yogis, out east?”
“Yogi Berra,” he said at once. “And Yogi Bear.”
“Not those yogis. As in snake charmers.”
“Oh. Right.”
“They spend a lifetime learning to control their body. They can do some fairly amazing stuff.”
Rawlins nodded. “Like fold themselves up into a gym bag and sit inside it at the bottom of a pool for half an hour.”
“Right,” I said. I followed Lasciel’s instructions, sinking into deeper and deeper focus. “Some of them can collapse the bones in their hands. Use their muscles and tendons to alter tensions. Change the shape.” I focused on my left hand, and for a moment was a bit grateful that it was already so badly maimed and mostly numb. What I was about to do, even with Lasciel’s instruction, was going to hurt like hell. “Keep an eye out and be ready.”
He nodded, holding still and not turning his head toward either Crane or Glau.
I dismissed him, the warehouse, my headache, and everything else that wasn’t my hand from my perceptions. I had the general idea of what was supposed to happen, but I didn’t have any practical, second-to-second knowledge of it. It was a terribly odd sensation, as though I were a skilled pianist whose fingers had suddenly forgotten their familiarity with the keys.
Not too quickly, murmured Lasciel’s voice in my head. Your muscles and joints have not been conditioned to this. There was an odd sensation in my thoughts, somehow similar to abruptly remembering how to tie a knot that had once been thoughtlessly familiar. Like this, Lasciel’s presence whispered, and that same familiarity suddenly thrummed down my arm.
I flexed my thumb, made a rippling motion of my fingers, and tightened every muscle in my hand in a sudden clench. I dislocated my thumb with a sickly little crackle of damaged flesh.
For a second, I thought the pain would drop me unconscious.
No, Lasciel’s voice said. You must control this. You must escape.
I know, I snarled back at her in my mind. Apparently nerve damage from burns doesn’t stop you from feeling it when someone pulls your fingers out of their sockets.
Someone? Lasciel said. You did it to yourself, my host.
Would you back off and give me room to work?
That’s ridiculous, Lasciel replied. But the sense of her presence abruptly retreated.
I took deep, quiet breaths, and twisted my left hand. My flesh screamed protest, but I only embraced the pain and continued to move, slow and steady. I got the fingers of my right hand to lightly grasp the manacle on my left wrist, and began to draw my hand steadily against the cold, binding circle of metal. My hand folded in a way that was utterly alien in sensation, and the screaming pain of it stole my breath.
But it slipped an inch beneath the metal cuff.
I twisted my hand again, in exactly the same motion, never letting up the pressure, working to encompass the pain as something to aid me, rather than distract.
I slipped an inch closer to freeing my hand. The pain became more and more intense despite my efforts to divert it, like an afternoon sun that burns brightly into your eyes even though they’re closed. Only a moment more. I only needed to remain silent and focused for a few more seconds.
I bore the pain. I kept up the pressure, and abruptly I felt the cold metal of the cuff flick over the outside of my thumb, one of the few spots on my fingers where much tactile sensation remained. My hand came free, and I clutched tightly to the empty cuff with my right hand, to keep it from rattling.
I opened my eyes and glanced around the garage. Crane paced back and forth in conversation on his phone. I waited until his back was mostly turned to move. Then I rose and slipped the chain through the U-bolt on the floor, until the circle of the cuff pressed against the bolt. I was still tethered by a chain perhaps a foot long, but I moved as silently as I could and reached out with my throbbing left hand for the wheeled tool cabinet.
I had trouble getting my fingers to cooperate, but I slipped the cabinet open. The tools inside it had been there for a long time-several years, at least. They were spotted with rust. I could only see about half the cabinet from where I crouched, and there wasn’t anything there that could help me. I hated to do it, but I felt around the unseen portion of the cabinet with my clumsy fingers. I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to feel a tool even if my fingers found it, and even more frightened by the knowledge that I might knock something over and draw attention.
My hand shook, but I felt through the cabinet as quickly and lightly as I could, starting at the top and moving down.