Midnight Blue-Light Special i-2

by Seanan McGuire

  “Of course I—” Margaret’s voice cut off mid-sentence, followed by a shout that was half-wordless exclamation, half-profanity. I heard her running toward the false room. Only one set of footsteps; Robert wasn’t moving, and until he moved, neither was I.

  “So we lost you already, did we? Clever little thing. I’ll have to arrange for additional containment measures when we get you back. And we will get you back, Verity Price. You can be certain of that.” He spoke like he knew that I could hear him—and maybe he did. If there was only one way into the warehouse, he’d have noticed me going by. That meant I had to be in the main room, somewhere.

  That didn’t mean I had to make things easy for him. I slipped farther back behind the wall of boxes, hooked my fingers onto the first available handhold, and started climbing.

  Most humans think flatly. It’s not a criticism: humanity evolved when monkeys left the trees, and—as a whole—we haven’t been all that eager to go back. Most people rarely look much higher than their own line of sight. More importantly, most people stop climbing when they get out of elementary school. Robert might expect me to seek higher ground, but he wouldn’t expect me to do it silently—and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from years of free running, it’s how to ascend without making any noise.

  I stopped once I was ten feet off the ground, moving sideways until I found a cleft between two boxes that I could wedge myself into without making myself visible. And then I waited.

  It wasn’t a long wait. “She’s gone!” shouted Margaret.

  “I gathered as much,” said Robert. His voice was closer now. I didn’t move. “What happened?”

  “I can’t be sure—Peter’s out cold—but it looks like she somehow convinced him to unchain her, and then walloped the holy hell out of him.”

  “She improvises well. We’ll have to remember that.” Robert stepped suddenly around the edge of the wall of boxes, visible from my current position only as a flicker of motion in my peripheral vision. I froze in my hidey-hole, trying not to breathe. “Her robe’s here.”

  “She left her robe?” Margaret sounded incredulous. “What good did she expect that to do her?”

  “It’s white. White would stand out in here. It was the right choice, assuming she’s not worried about running around naked.” Robert raised his voice, calling, “You can come out. We understand why you ran away, and we’re not angry, but there’s no way you’re getting out of here. You may as well make things easy on yourself, and stop hiding before we come looking for you.”

  Biting back the snarky replies took an almost physical effort. I succeeded. The pounding ache in my feet helped. If they’d done this to me when they weren’t angry, what would they do if they got me back?

  Robert sighed audibly. “It’s going to be like that, is it?” He started walking away, presumably moving toward the boxes along the next wall. “You know, I’d really hoped that we were making progress, Verity. I know we’ll never be friends, but I wanted you to know that we respect your willpower.”

  I held perfectly still as I began counting down silently from ten. Sure enough, I had just reached four when a flicker of motion betrayed Margaret creeping cat-silent into the narrow space between the boxes and the wall. She was looking for me, and so I did the one thing that I could do: I didn’t move. Without my bathrobe and in this degree of shadow, my hair and skin would look like they were all one color. I just hoped that it would be the color of the box that I was huddling against. I could climb—climbing was mostly a matter of digging in with my toes and forcing my way past the pain—but I wasn’t going to place bets on my being able to run any time soon.

  “Where is she?!” Peter’s voice blasted into the warehouse, loud and sudden enough that I nearly flinched. I managed to restrain myself, the large muscles in my thighs jumping frantically as I struggled not to panic. “Where’s that little Healy bitch? I’ll strangle her with my bare hands!”

  “Your interest in doing things with your bare hands is how we lost her in the first place,” snapped Robert. His voice was a whip crack in the quiet of the warehouse. Margaret was still creeping along, moving like she thought there was no chance I’d have seen her. I pressed myself deeper into the crevice, barely allowing myself to breathe as I watched Margaret inch her way along.

  In the movies, this would be where I inevitably had to sneeze, triggering an exciting chase scene. In the movies, I wouldn’t be stark-ass naked, and I’d have a machine gun or something, not a single stolen knife. I didn’t sneeze, and below me, Margaret moved on by, still searching for my hiding space. When she looked up, the shadows—faithful to the last—made me look like just another part of the wall. God bless the limitations of the human eye.

  She passed out of my sight, her footsteps moving to join the others.

  “She must be in the upstairs,” said Robert.

  That was news to me. I hadn’t realized there was an upstairs.

  “Well, let’s go get her,” snapped Margaret. “We need to get her back into custody, now.”

  “I’m going to kill her,” said Peter.

  “No,” said Robert. “You’re not. We’re going to enlighten her. I think you’ll find that she enjoys that far less.”

  The three of them moved off together. Their footsteps faded into silence, until I finally heard a door close in the distance. I still stayed where I was for another five minutes, measuring the time by counting off the steps of a proper Viennese waltz in my head. Finally, I was satisfied that I was alone, and I allowed myself to unlock my shoulders, sagging into a sitting position on the box where I’d been standing.

  I was alone, naked, practically unarmed, and terrified. I might not have much time, but I had long enough. Bending forward to press my forehead against my knees, I closed my eyes, and cried silently until the tears ran out.

  When I was sure that I was done leaking, I unfolded and stood, not bothering to wipe my cheeks. These assholes from the Covenant wanted to play? Oh, we’d play. And they’d lose.

  Twenty-two

  “Never forget that I loved you, and I did the best by you I could. You can forget everything else about me, but please. Don’t forget that.”

  —Enid Healy

  Hiding from the Covenant of St. George in a warehouse somewhere in Manhattan

  THE FIRST THING I needed to do was find a way out that didn’t involve going past the Covenant. There’s nothing dignified about racing naked across the rooftops of Manhattan—for one thing, without a bra, I was going to wind up in a world of pain, and that didn’t even start to go into the situation with my feet—but that wasn’t going to stop me. If I had an exit, I was going to take it. The trick was going to be finding that exit without coming out into the open.

  I carefully extracted myself from my position between the boxes and began climbing again. Higher ground helped my nerves. Margaret and the others wanted me alive, for the moment, and that meant they’d be reluctant to shoot me; it’s never a good idea to shoot someone you’re not intending to kill, no matter how good of a shot you think you are. That’s something I learned from my grandmother, and she’s the best shot I’ve ever known. “Even when you’re aiming for the hand, you’d best assume you’re shooting to kill,” was what she’d said, and she was right. Shooting to wound was only a few inches from missing your target entirely, and a different few inches from killing them. Assuming the Covenant had similar training (a big assumption, but I had to go with something), they’d try to use other means of getting me down.

  Besides, once I was high enough, they’d be even less likely to see me without my wanting to be seen, and there was something to be said for that. I didn’t want them to take me alive. I didn’t want to die, either. That meant I needed to escape.

  The boxes were piled high enough that I could see the rafters overhead, but not so high that I could reach them. I couldn’t even jump with any assurance that I’d hit my target—not with my feet in their current condition—and a misjudged landing could send the enti
re stack of boxes toppling. That wouldn’t be exactly what I’d call “subtle,” and it would bring the Covenant rushing back to find me, instead of wasting more time searching the upstairs.

  I wish to hell I had some backup, I thought grimly, frowning at the unreachable rafters. That triggered a whole series of thoughts I’d been trying to avoid—like why couldn’t I feel Sarah if we were still in Manhattan? I should have been able to tune in on her “static,” even if she was too far away to communicate telepathically. I wasn’t wearing Margaret’s anti-telepathy charm anymore. Hell, I wasn’t wearing anything anymore. It wasn’t likely that Sarah would have left town while I was unconscious. So where was she?

  If Sarah was unlikely to have left town, the Covenant was even less likely to have found her without me to lead them to her hiding place. She was a cuckoo. She was probably terrified by whatever feedback she picked up when Margaret knocked me out. That would have been enough to activate her automatic defenses, and once those were up, they’d never be able to catch her. That meant they were still blocking her telepathy somehow. It was the only explanation for her ongoing radio silence.

  There was no way they’d have been able to telepathically shield an entire warehouse. The resources required would have been massive, and it would have meant bringing in several witches, if not a witch, a sorcerer, and some variety of exorcist. So they had to be telepathically shielding me. I wasn’t wearing anything . . .

  But that didn’t mean I hadn’t been forced to swallow anything. I put a hand on my stomach, feeling suddenly queasy. Okay, Verity, settle down, I thought sternly. Even if you ate it, it’s not poisonous. They wanted to bring you back to the Covenant alive, and that means they’re not going to have fed you any mercury-based charms.

  Oh, I hoped I was right about that. Sure, keeling over because I’d been poisoned would be a dandy way to prevent myself from telling them any of the family secrets, but it wasn’t exactly on the top of my “to do” list for the day. (It wasn’t a guarantee of my silence, either. The phrase “dead men tell no tales” doesn’t hold that much water in my family. We know a lot of ghosts. My Aunt Mary died years before I was born, and no one, living or dead, has any idea how to shut her up.)

  I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself down, and went back to looking for things that could help me get up into the rafters. The boxes weren’t high enough, and I didn’t want to start rearranging them—there was no telling how heavy they were, or how many of them were rotten on the inside. That left the hooks that hung from the ceiling. I looked at them, assessing the distance I would have to leap. If I could just grab hold before I fell, I could climb the chain to reach the rafters. Tetanus would be a risk, but hell, in my line of work, tetanus is always a risk.

  “Only die once,” I muttered (that wasn’t quite true, either), and started climbing back down the boxes. It was a stupid plan. It was a potentially suicidal plan. It was the only plan I had, and so I intended to go for it. Never allow for the possibility that you might fail, and you’ll succeed just because the universe is too embarrassed to admit that it painted you into a corner.

  My feet hurt worse than ever by the time I reached the floor. Every bend of my toes was agony, and putting my weight down on my heels was like standing on hot coals. Ballet helped with that. After years of pointe classes, where bleeding toes were considered a status symbol, a little bruising wasn’t going to slow me down. I hit the ground running, a naked blonde streak heading as fast as I could for the false room that had been my prison, and would now hopefully be my salvation.

  As long as I didn’t slow down, I could use the pain in my feet to motivate me. I was going to pay for that as soon as I stopped—the limits of the human body are something that I am intimately familiar with—but for the moment, adrenaline and inertia were both on my side. I assessed the pain as I ran, letting it serve as its own diagnostic engine. The bruising was as bad as I’d thought it would be, maybe a little worse, but that was all. It didn’t feel like they’d actually managed to crack any of my metatarsals, which was a relief. Bruising was going to be a lot easier to work around than broken bones.

  I didn’t slow down as I approached the side of the false room. Instead, I aimed myself for the doorway, leaping at the last moment to grab the top of the frame. I let my own momentum carry me into a forward jackknife, then whipped myself backward and flipped up onto the roof. I landed silently, my bare feet actually helping with the action.

  “If you wanted to keep me, you shoulda broken my fingers,” I murmured. Then I straightened, turned, and started running again before my feet could fully realize that I had stopped. This time when I jumped, I launched myself into empty air.

  For a moment, I was flying, arms outstretched, like a Lady Godiva superheroine aiming for the sky. Then my hands hit the big metal hook dangling from the ceiling. I grabbed hold, clinging as tightly as I could while the force of my leap sent the whole chain swaying. The extra ten feet of height I’d been able to gain from the false room had been enough to boost me to the necessary level. Thank God. If this hadn’t worked, I probably would have wound up with a broken leg, and that would have been a lot harder to work around.

  The chain creaked as it swayed, but quietly; it was too heavy to get up any real momentum, and that was keeping the noise down. For the moment.

  “Gonna need a tetanus shot when all this is over,” I muttered, and began climbing up the still-swaying chain, heading for the ceiling. It was time to get out of sight.

  * * *

  The less said about my trip up the filthy, rusty, incredibly cold length of chain, the better, except that the whole experience left me with a lot of respect for Antimony’s trapeze classes. Not that she was usually into climbing chains—ropes were more her thing—but my arms were aching by the time I reached the rafters, and my shoulders felt like they’d been scooped out and replaced with mashed potatoes.

  Once I was at the top of the chain, I had to actually pull myself up onto the main support beam, another task that was easier said than done. It was bigger around than the span of my arms, the sort of old, solid construction that was supposed to outlive the city itself. I finally managed to hook my foot into the loop that secured the chain to the beam, scrabbling up the side of the wood and collapsing, facedown, onto it. What were a few splinters in sensitive places after everything I’d already been through?

  Answer: damn uncomfortable. I stayed where I was for longer than was probably a good idea, wincing as the feeling came slowly back into my arms. Once I was sure that I could move without sending myself plummeting to the floor, I sat up and looked around me.

  The beam where I was seated was covered in a thick layer of grime, cobwebs, and rat droppings. I was naked in the middle of a major health hazard. The filth was at least reassuring, confirming that no one else had been up here in years, if ever. The Covenant wasn’t likely to start looking for me in the rafters until they got really desperate, and by that point, I would hopefully be long gone. There was less than seven feet of space between me and the ceiling; if I stood on my tiptoes, I could have brushed my fingers against it. Assuming I would have wanted to. The cobwebs were even worse up there, creating a hanging shroud of grime.

  The big beams, like the one I was starting to think of as mine, were spaced evenly down the length of the warehouse. Smaller beams connected them, creating almost a network of catwalks that someone without a fear of heights could use to traverse the building easily. Best of all, they connected to the windows that were set high into the walls. All I had to do was get there, get the windows open, and get out. Emboldened by what looked like the nearness of my escape, I stood.

  Only years of hard training and harder discipline kept me from screaming as I put my weight back on my bruised feet and promptly fell down again. I managed to grab the edge of the beam before I could roll off into space. I clung for dear life, curling into a ball and sobbing into the dirt. This moment had been coming since I escaped; I’d known it was coming, had seen and catalo
ged the signs. You can only keep running on a bruise for so long. Still, I had refused to believe that my body would betray me like this while I was still in danger. Like the idiot I sometimes was, I’d allowed myself to believe that I could just keep running, and fall down when it was safe.

  It wasn’t safe. It was a long damn way from safe. But I was still falling down.

  My tears turned the grime against my cheek into a horrible, foul-smelling mud that smeared on my face. I struggled into a sitting position and tried to wipe it away, but only succeeded in smearing it down my chin and all over my hand. That just made me cry more. I was dirty, I was alone, and I was hurt too badly to be doing this by myself.

  It was funny, really. I’d always known that I wasn’t going to have a long and peaceful life; that sort of thing is reserved for people who think the monster under the bed is just a story, and who run away from the sound of screaming, not toward it. Somehow I’d always expected to die so fast that I wouldn’t even realize it was happening—a broken neck, like my great-grandmother, or a swarm of Apraxis wasps, like my great-grandfather. Maybe even sucked into a portal to another dimension, like Grandpa. But no, my choices had to be “tortured to death by the Covenant” or “starved to death in the rafters of an old warehouse.” Talk about a rock and a hard place.

  My tears gradually ran out, replaced by a hollow feeling in my chest. My parents would never know what happened to me. My mice wouldn’t even be able to give a full accounting. I’d be one more branch lopped off the family tree, with nothing to show that I’d ever been alive.