The Poacher with the black and red neck tattoo stared down at me with deep-set eyes the color of dried blood. My mouth went dry and tiny beads of sweat broke out along my hairline. I refused to acknowledge the fear. No way was I giving him the satisfaction.
“You’ve got legs. Use them,” he snapped, a rank odor of stale beefy jerky chasing his words.
I gagged again. This time the bile actually rose in my throat. Anticipating that I was going to throw up, the Poacher shoved me backwards to ensure his new boots were out of the splash zone.
Don’t get sick. Don’t get sick. Breathe through your mouth.
Sheer willpower was all that prevented the cheeseburger from the King’s Pub from making a reappearance.
“Pint!” Tattoo-neck hollered.
The soft pitter patter of feet sounded behind me. I whirled to face the new threat, nearly face-planting in the process. Between the wooziness and restricted motion in my arms, which were still cuffed behind my back, my movements were awkward and clumsy. My feet became tangled and I pitched forward, the marble floor and my head on a collision course. Tattoo-neck caught my elbow and jerked me upright.
The girl with the pixie haircut, the ruthless one who’d used James as a punching bag, was descending a long, curved wooden staircase. With her milk-white complexion and so-black-it-was-nearly-blue hair, she appeared otherworldly. Well, if other worlds had tiny child ninja assassins. She was lithe and graceful on her feet, practically floating down the last several steps and across the foyer to join us. Midnight blue eyes swept me from head to toe, a curious half-smile on her cupie-doll mouth.
“Yes?” she asked in a melodic voice that made her sound much younger than she had while barking orders earlier.
“This one’s awake.”
“Is that right? Am I blind? No. I’m not,” Pint hissed as she continued her in depth study of every inch of my person. The intense scrutiny was off-putting and I had to work hard not to squirm.
“Want me to dose her again?”
Pint tilted her head to one side and narrowed her gaze.
“No,” she said after a long pause. “She’ll behave, won’t you?”
I glared at the tiny Poacher and refused to respond to her taunting.
Pint’s tinkling laughter echoed throughout the foyer.
“The obstinate ones are my favorite.” Her lips parted in a wide grin. “Breaking their will is so terribly thrilling.”
This time when the nausea swept over me it had nothing to do with the foul smelling Poacher and everything to do with the terror Pint’s words invoked. How exactly did these people plan on breaking my will? Actually, screw that. I didn’t give a shit. I needed to get the hell out of here, wherever here was, before I ever found out the answer to that question.
Pint leaned towards me, her face so close that I could count the freckles on her cheeks.
“If you get sick on me, you will be tremendously sorry. Do I make myself clear?”
The more Pint tried to bully me, the more I want to hit her. And now that she was so close to me, the urge to lash out was nearly impossible to suppress.
With only two opponents, the odds of fighting my out of this situation should have been decent. Add in my slow reflexes and generally compromised central nervous system and those odds diminished considerably. Plus, of course, the immobility of my arms had to be considered. Also, I had no idea where I was and whether more Poachers were close by.
Better to be safe than sorry. Wait for the right opportunity. You’ll probably only get one chance, ever.
Pint wrapped her hand around my arm. Black painted nails, filed sharp as knives, bit into my skin as I was pulled towards the staircase she’d come down earlier. I scanned the foyer, my gaze sweeping from floor to ceiling, reaching every nook and cranny as I committed the floor plan to memory.
Doors: Five visible. One behind me—front door? Two on my left. One on my right. One underneath the staircase—basement? Storage closet? Windows: Two. Both rectangular, on either side of the front door, stained glass, can’t see through. One set of stairs leading to an upper level. House?
An umbrella stand/coat tree at the bottom of the stairs caught my eye. Three umbrellas with pointy metal tips hung from the branches like Christmas ornaments. Jackpot.
“Don’t bother,” Pint trilled, as if reading my mind.
Could she read minds? Willa had said that the Monroes had Talents in their organization. Maybe some of the other Poaching groups did too. Then I remembered how Pint had called us ‘filthy twits’ in the park. Yeah, definitely not Talented.
I kept my expression neutral and said nothing.
I was purposely dragging my feet now, buying my muddled brain more time to analyze the situation and predict possible outcomes. I still didn’t like my odds, but I was getting desperate. Wherever Pint was taking me most likely had more security and bars.
My planned actions were rash. Born of fear. And ultimately stupid.
James.
The thought made me hesitate. Even if I defeated both Pint and Tattoo-neck, broke out of my cuffs, and escaped, James would still be a prisoner. He’d been caught trying to protect me. No way was I leaving him behind. At the very least, I owed him that much.
Light Manipulation. Turn invisible, search the house for James. Leave together. First, take Pint and Tattoo-neck out of the equation.
We were at the bottom step.
Now or never.
As we walked away from him, Tattoo-neck’s beady eyes bore into the back of my skull like twin drill bits. The sensation gave me the chills.
Shake it off. Concentrate.
Pint began to ascend the stairs.
Now. Do it now.
With my Telekinesis I yanked one of the umbrellas free from the stand and used it like a golf club, with Pint’s head as the ball. The makeshift weapon made a thwacking sound when it connected with the girl’s skull. Pint emitted a startled scream as she pitched forward, releasing my arm and landing spread-eagle on the staircase.
Tattoo-neck’s boots pounded across the foyer floor. I spun just in time to see him draw the gun from a holster at his side.
“Live or die, Chrome! Choice is yours! Don’t make a bit of difference to me, I get paid either way,” the Poacher shouted.
The umbrella was already sailing through the air towards my next victim. It slammed down hard on Tattoo-neck’s gun hand. He dropped the weapon, which skated across the smooth marble floor and was lost beneath a velvet settee. Behind me, Pint groaned. I brought the umbrella down across Tattoo-neck’s face. He raised his hands to fend off the blows, attempting to grab hold of the umbrella and stop the assault. Every time his fingers touched the vinyl, I yanked my weapon back from his reach.
In a single breath, it was like a rug had been pulled out from beneath my feet. One second I was standing, the next I was flat on my stomach. The air rushed from my lungs and I was left gasping and floundering on the floor. A weight slammed into the small of my back, pinning me down. Knobby knees ground into either side of my ribcage. Pint. She wound a chunk of my hair around her fist and pulled. I bucked, trying to throw her off, but the girl was resilient and clung to me with all her strength. She used her hold on my hair to force my head to one side.
“You’re even more daft than you look,” Pint hissed, bending low to look me in the eye.
A trickle of blood was leaking from her right nostril. I grinned. Maybe I was going to lose this fight, but at least I’d done some damage along the way.
Can’t lose. Only chance. Don’t waste opportunity.
Weak with fatigue and desperate with the knowledge that my one shot at freedom was all but lost, it was near impossible to think straight. Pint was pulling so hard that strands of my brown hair were snapping under the pressure. Tattoo-neck was still battling the umbrella. But with my concentration divided between the two, it was only a matter of time before I lost control of the weapon. Once that happened…. Well, I just couldn’t let that happen.
G
o invisible.
Pint was attached to me, so she would still know where I was, but it might surprise her enough to give me the upper hand.
I concentrated, diverting just enough energy from my Telekinetic powers to my Light Manipulation. An instant later, I was disembodied. Mostly. But mostly, as it turned out, was sufficient to temporarily stop Pint’s assault. I rolled to the side, Pint’s legs still wrapped around my waist. With our positions reversed, I jumped and dove backwards, slamming Pint against the ground. She let loose a strangled cry, a mixture of pain and rage. The vice-like grip squeezing the breath from my body finally loosened. The second time I smashed Pint against the marble was the charm. Groaning, she lost her hold on me. I tucked my head and somersaulted forward, using the momentum to carry me all the way to my feet.
Not one to throw in the towel, Pint didn’t let a pesky concussion keep her down. She too was on her feet a second later, eyes crazed and unfocused as she blindly searched the surrounding area for me. She reached for the gun at her waist and began indiscriminately firing shots into thin air. Avoiding the bullets was easy since none came anywhere near where I was crouched behind the umbrella stand.
“Show yourself!” Pint screeched. Her precisely styled pixie cut was mussed, clumps of inky black hair sticking out from the sides of her head like an insect’s legs. Her clothes were torn and rumpled and the blood dripping down her chin made her look like a vampire who’d just finished a meal.
In the scuffle with Pint, I’d lost control of the umbrella and it was now in two pieces, both lying harmlessly at Tattoo-neck’s feet. His face was swelling rapidly and he had a cut near his left temple. That at least made me smile.
“This is your fault!” he screamed at Pint. “We shoulda dosed her!”
“Shut your gob and find her!” Pint yelled back.
“There!” Tattoo-neck exclaimed, excitedly pointing towards my hiding place. “I seen something move by the brolly stand! I’d swear it.”
I looked down. My form was flickering in and out of view.
Run. Doorway. Now.
But I was too slow, had waited a beat too long. Or maybe Pint was simply too fast. The bullet was arcing through the air, trajectory set for a collision course with my chest, before the shot rang in my ears.
Dumbstruck by how quickly the tides of fortune kept changing, I stared down at the long, metal dart lodged directly above my heart.
Heat swept over my body like a tsunami, overtaking my chest, moving down my arms, over my stomach, and into my legs, a smooth journey that left me numb in its wake. Now you know what Miami Beach felt like, the thought came from nowhere, but it felt right. And the water had me spinning, churning around and around. No, not water, the room. The room was spinning. Or maybe it was me. That was it, I was spinning. More accurately, I was weaving from side to side like a drunk. My knees hit marble and my brain didn’t register any pain.
That’s nice, I thought. They had soft marble installed here.
I slumped forward, sending the umbrella stand clattering to the ground with me not far behind.
“Next time maybe you’ll listen to me,” I heard Tattoo-neck say as the darkness crept into my peripheral vision.
“Oh that’s just aces, you git. If you hadn’t allowed a brolly to beat you about the head, there wouldn’t have been any trouble at all,” Pint shot back.
“What about you? You’re the one who got in an argy-bargy with her, you should’ve had her. She bested you, she did,” Tattoo-neck insisted.
“Hit her again.” Pint snapped. “This time I want to be certain she remains dormant.”
Large spots of color obscured my vision. The bickering Poachers were little more than silhouettes. I could tell by the darkness approaching that one of them was coming over. A hand shoved my head to one side. The barrel of a gun pressed hard against my neck, directly over the carotid artery. I felt the dart pierce my skin and another wave, this one smaller but faster, rushed over my body, breaking at my toes. They tickled for a moment, before I couldn’t feel them at all.
Too soon. Should’ve played it safe a little longer. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Poachers: two. Kenly: zero.
“ANOTHER ONE, PINT?” The voice was female, accent faint and Scandinavian.
“Last one, Mole,” Pint replied.
“Is that her work?” the other woman asked.
My first thought once I regained consciousness was to keep my eyes closed. They were likely to say more if they thought I was still unconscious. Time felt distorted, and I couldn’t determine if I’d been out for ten minutes or ten hours. Ten days could’ve been an option for all I knew, but I had a feeling they wouldn’t spare me from experiencing the auction. The only thing I was certain of was that I’d been feigning sleep for fifteen minutes.
When I’d first started to come around, I was in a wide hallway lined with oil paintings of ascot-wearing men and corseted women in gilded frames. Pint was pushing me in an old-fashioned wheelchair. My wrists were cuffed to the armrests, ankles chained to the footrests. But that wasn’t the worst part.
The worst part? Pint sang the entire way. And that tiny little person could not sing. Besides the fact my ears were screaming from what equated to mental torture, her screeching made it difficult to hear the subtle changes as we moved from wood to carpet, carpet to marble. Background noises—music, wallscreens, muffled conversations, passing footsteps, all of it—were also hard to identify over Pint’s irritating melody.
One thing I knew for sure—the house was enormous. More like a compound than a house, really. By my estimation, we’d traveled approximately a quarter of a mile through winding hallways, down three separate elevators, and never left the interior.
Letting my head lull to the side, I peeked up at Pint through the slits of my eyelids. It took all of my willpower not to grin. There was a fist-sized knot on Pint’s temple, a bruise blossoming under one of her eyes, and faint smears of dried blood on her cheek. And that was my work.
Talia and Donavon would be really proud.
I was surprised and a little relieved when the thought of Talia invoked only an intense longing for my former life without any accompanying anger. For the first time since she abandoned me, I actually wanted to see my mentor. I was glad for her all-knowing voice inside my head, instructing me, guiding me. Glad that my brain had carefully catalogued every scrap of her advice and was pulling it up when it was applicable and desperately needed. Glad that I had it all to rely on when making decisions that I was clearly ill-equipped to make on my own. Though even with her advice, nearly every choice I’d made since arriving in London had been the wrong one. That was evident by my current predicament—they’d all led me here.
“She’s practically immune to the sedative and the neutralizer,” Pint was saying. After our final trip down an elevator, we’d stopped. I’d closed the small gaps in my eyelids, ready for scrutiny. “Don’t worry, though. I gave her three times the normal dosage of the neutralizer downstairs. She’ll be dormant for a good while. Sedative should wear off soon, though. Figured you’d want the bitty awake for her cleanup.”
Fingers snapped in front of my face and I bit down on the inside of my cheek, trying not to react. A muscle twitch, a facial tick, something gave me away. I was about to open my eyes and admit that I was conscious, when a palm imprinted on my cheek.
My eyes snapped open and Pint’s nose was nearly touching mine.
“Think you’re clever, do you? Think you have us fooled? Don’t be absurd. I know what you are.”
I held my breath. She knew I was Created.
Shit. Totally shouldn’t have used both Telekinesis and Light Manipulation in front of them. Big mistake. Big mistake. Huge.
“You’re absolute rubbish,” Pint continued in a low voice. “Slummy Chrome rubbish. Just because you’ve managed to get on for this long without being pinched does not make you special. Go on, be smug as you like now. Once you’re up on that auction block, you will tremble and sob, just the same as the rest of t
he rubbish we put up there.”
It took all my willpower to keep a blank face. I would not let her rattle me. I would not show fear. I would not lose hope.
Pint straightened.
“You know what, Mole? I’ll take her through cleanup myself. I really should be more hands-on with the process.”
A tall, solidly built woman—maybe a long-lost Viking?—with a long blonde ponytail came into view. She peered at me, as if examining a wild dog, and arched her bushy eyebrows. A scar sliced through the left one, giving the impression that she had three caterpillars instead of two crawling across her forehead. “Are you sure?” she asked my miniature captor.
“Positive,” Pint sneered.
Next to the other woman, Pint appeared even smaller than before. Thinking of the tiny terror she’d been when we were fighting, I had to remind myself that appearances are often deceiving. I’d underestimated her downstairs and she’d come out on top. That would not happen again.
Pint pushed me across the room to a set of double glass doors and left me sitting several feet back from them while she approached. She spread her feet shoulder width apart, arms down by her sides, palms facing the glass.
“Initializing scan,” a pleasant female voice said.
Biometric security features, I noted. Up until this point, Pint had used physical keys to open all locked doors. While those would be difficult to procure, at least they could be stolen. Or the locks could probably be jimmied. Or shot out, if I was going maverick-style. But a full-body scan? These doors would be much harder to get back through.
Engage now? Once you go through there’s no coming back.
I looked around. Unfortunately, between my limbs being cuffed, the mini menace standing right next to me, her face and her ego still bruised from our earlier fight, and a Viking four feet away, this clearly wasn’t the right time. And if I had another opportunity, I didn’t want to ruin it by being hog-tied, or whatever the next stage of precautions would be.