“Your last name is ‘Price,’ like your paternal grandfather; your first name starts with the letter ‘V,’ which rather limits the possibilities, since there aren’t that many names for women that start at that end of the alphabet.” I must have stiffened. Robert smiled a little. “We all have our training. You give yourself away every time you open your mouth, every time you move. I’ll sort you out from top to bottom while you still think you’re restricting yourself to noncommittal answers and sassing back. I’m sorry about that.”
“If you’re sorry, don’t do it,” I said. “Unlock these chains and let me the hell out of here.”
“Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t do that. The Covenant has a need for your services, Miss Price, and your family took an oath many generations ago to answer when they were called upon. You may not uphold your oath willingly, but you will uphold it. Now please. This would be so much easier if you worked with us, rather than against us.”
“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 lot done 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 anything Antimony 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.”
—Evelyn Baker
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 ch
arged 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 . . .”
Dominic had been on my side all along. I was an idiot.
Margaret pressed her lips into a thin line, glaring at me. “That’s right, you succubus, we know. We know you led Dominic De Luca from the paths of righteousness, just as your ancestress led Thomas Price into sin. He may still be forgiven, but you are beyond saving.”
“You know, if you’re comparing me to Grandma, the one thing we have in common is that we’re both descended from the Healys,” I said, trying to push aside the cold, sick feeling in my stomach. “What does that say about your family, huh? Have you seduced and betrayed anyone recently?”
She didn’t punch me this time. Instead, she slapped me, her palm landing hard and stinging against my cheek. I rocked back in my chair. The manacles dug into my wrists, and I barely managed to bite my lip hard enough to keep from crying out.
“You’re a selfish little bitch, just like everyone else in your tainted bloodline,” spat Margaret. She sounded like she was about to cry. I blinked at her, not saying anything, and she continued, really getting her rant on now: “Do you have any idea what it’s like to grow up knowing you’re descended from traitors? That once you would have had this amazing family legacy, this endless parade of heroes and saviors and saints, but some self-absorbed idiots had to take all of that away from you? You’re an aberration, a monster-loving plague upon the human race! Your parents are no better than you, and we’re going to find them, and we’re going to make them pay until my family name is clean! Do you understand me?”
“I understand that you’re upset,” I said carefully. Also a little obsessive, I thought. “But I’m not your redemption. I’m just a woman who happens to be distantly related to you, and whatever hell the Covenant may have put you through for being a Healy, it’s not my fault. Okay? It wasn’t me who chose to leave, or my parents, or my grandparents. Hell, it wasn’t even my great-grandparents. Isn’t there a statute of limitations on the sins of the father?”
“Yes,” said Margaret coldly. “Even to the seventh generation. You are still responsible for the things they did to our family, and as they can’t pay for them, you will.”
This time, when she slapped me, she was a lot less gentle about it—and she hadn’t been pulling her punches the first time. A thin trickle of blood ran down from my nose, pooling along the top of my lip. I couldn’t wipe it away, and so I simply sat there, glaring helplessly.
“You’re going to tell us everything,” she spat. “How many of you there are, where we can find you, what your defenses are like—everything. And then, when your blasted family is safely in our custody, we can discuss whether or not you should be held accountable for what our ancestors have done.”
“You need a hug,” I said. “Or maybe therapy. Or maybe—I know—you need to be kicked in the throat. How about you unchain me, and I’ll hug you before I kick you in the throat?”
“You’re a violent little thing, aren’t you?” she asked. “Peter told me how shamefully you treated him. I honestly expected more ladylike behavior from you.” As she spoke, I realized that even when she was slapping me, she’d been careful to keep most of her body at an angle that would be virtually impossible for me to kick. She was smart. She learned from the mistakes of others. That just meant that I couldn’t give her time to take notes when the time came for her to make her own mistakes.
“What can I say?” I asked. “Some of us grow up in the care of global terrorist organizations. Others aren’t so lucky.”
For a moment, Margaret actually looked sorry for me. I itched to slap that expression right off her smug little face. “We’re not terrorists. We’re the good guys. And now it’s time for you to start earning that redemption.” She stepped away from me. “Gentlemen, she’s ready. We can begin the interrogation.”
The Covenant’s definition of “interrogation” wasn’t nice. It wasn’t gentle. It also wasn’t going to leave any scars, so I suppose I ought to thank them for that—although it’s hard to thank anyone who thinks that, say, beating the bottoms of my feet with a wooden baton is a sociable thing to do. They weren’t interested in my long-term dance career. They weren’t even interested in my being able to walk normally the next day. What they wanted was information, and they were more than happy to hurt me if it would help them get it.
As I had suspected, Robert was the most efficient of the three. Margaret was happy to help Peter hold me down, and Peter grinned disturbingly the whole time, but it was Robert who kept producing common household tools from his little box. He looked disappointed every time he had to get a new one, like I was letting them down by refusing to break.
“You could end this now, you know,” he said, pulling what looked like a blood pressure cuff out of the box. “All you need to do is tell us your name. That’s all I’m looking for today, is your name. We know your surname is ‘Price.’ Why not buy yourself a bit of a rest, and tell us what your first name is?”
“Go to hell,” I said.
“I’m afraid you’re going to beat me there,” he said. Margaret took the blood pressure cuff, fastening it tight around my upper arm. I tried to squirm away. Robert raised a finger. “This will hurt less if you hold still.”
“Why the hell would I start believing that now?” I demanded.
“Because I might be telling the truth, and wouldn’t it be wonderful if I were?”
I didn’t say anything. I just glared mutely, willing him to fall down dead. Maybe that would have worked, if I’d been Sarah and he hadn’t been wearing an anti-telepathy charm and oh, right. If we lived in a comic book universe where the rules said that the bad people would be punished, and the good people would always come out on top. Too bad we didn’t live in that kind of world. Too bad we never had.
And then the cuff around my arm began to expand, and the needles I hadn’t previously been able to feel began piercing my skin. After that, I forgot about everything but screaming for a little while.
“What’s your name, love?” asked Peter.
I screamed.
“Just tell us your name and this can all be over for now. What’s your name, love?”
I screamed. The more they inflated the cuff, the more the needles dug into my arm. The fact that it was designed to let air slowly out again meant that I never achieved equilibrium; the cuff would inflate, the needles would dig in, the cuff would deflate, the needles would shift positions, and then it would all start again. It was a new, exciting way of hurting someone, and I wanted nothing to do with it.
“What’s your name, love?” asked Peter.
I screamed, and kept screaming, until the sound ran out and I slumped, practically boneless, in the chair. Robert stopped inflating the cuff, letting it collapse with a soft hissing sound. Then he leaned in, wrapped his hand around the now-deflated cuff, and squeezed.
Somehow I found it in myself to scream one last time, wailing like someone’s family beán sidhe. Robert kept squeezing, grinding his hand against the cuff so that the needles danced inside my flesh. His expression was sad, almost disappoi
nted, like he hadn’t wanted any of this to happen.
“What’s your name?” he asked, almost in a whisper.
“V-Verity,” I replied. “Verity Price.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Verity Price,” he said, and took his hand away. The needles were still there, but the sudden reduction in pressure was such a blessing that I started to sob. “Take it off. We have what we need for right now.”
“How is that what we need?” Margaret asked.
Robert smiled. “Verity’s seen the light. She’ll be willing to help us, now, won’t you?”
I couldn’t say anything. I could only sob, and keep sobbing as they gathered their things and left my tiny artificial prison. This time, they remembered to turn off the lights on their way out, and I was left alone again. Well, almost alone; the pain was still there, and was more than happy to be my companion in the dark.
Professional dancers learn to work through pain. It’s a part of the job. We dance on sprained ankles, we dance with broken ribs, we dance on blisters and bunions and broken toes. We are expected to be beautiful machines, capable of holding our form no matter what injuries we’re hiding. All my training told me that I should be able to compartmentalize the pain, and so as soon as I was alone—and as soon as I stopped crying—I began to do exactly that.
First up was an assessment of my injuries. The puncture marks in my right arm were probably the worst; they were still bleeding, and I couldn’t move my arm enough to tell whether there were tears in the muscle. For the moment, I had to assume that they were all superficial, and that I’d be able to climb if I needed to. Anything else was unthinkable.