Midnight Blue-Light Special

  Cobwebs filled my mouth and eyes as I pushed the hatch open enough to get my head through. That was the last bit I needed to get sufficient leverage; I twisted around, grabbing the top of the hatch, and blindly pulled myself up into the second floor. The hatch slammed shut as soon as I pulled my feet loose. Choking and gaping, I clawed the cobwebs out of my eyes, trying to clear them. I was filthy. I was almost free.

  I was wiping the last of the cobwebs away when I heard the characteristic sound of a gun being cocked from directly behind me. “Now isn’t this a lovely little turn of events?” asked Peter Brandt.

  Shit.

  Twenty-three

  “Don’t you worry about whether you failed your family. Family loves you, no matter what. Worry about whether you failed yourself. As long as the answer’s ‘no,’ then there’s still a chance that everything else will be okay.”

  —Alice Healy

  On the second floor of a warehouse somewhere in Manhattan, facing down a member of the Covenant of St. George

  PETER’S EYES TRAVELED the length of my naked, filthy body, a smirk twisting up his lips. He lingered on my breasts for a moment before flicking to my right bicep. “Nice knife,” he said.

  “Yeah, I got it from a real asshole,” I said. I didn’t move. The gun—my gun—in his hand told me that moving would be a bad idea. “I have an idea. How about you look the other way while I jump out the nearest window?”

  “I have an idea. How about I hold you here while my colleagues come up the stairs, and this time, we make sure you don’t get away?” His smirk turned dark around the edges, transitioning from an implied threat to a very real one. “We want to take you home alive. But ‘alive’ doesn’t mean the same thing as ‘intact,’ and you’ll do a lot less running away without feet.”

  “Mutilation? Really? That’s where you’re going with this? I guess you people have stopped thinking of yourselves as the good guys.” I glanced around while I spoke, looking for something I could use as an escape route. There were windows on the wall, no more than twenty feet away. All I had to do was reach the windows, and I’d be scot-free.

  I made my decision in that moment. Maybe it wasn’t the bravest decision I could have made, but it was the only one that made sense. If the Covenant took me back to Europe, I’d tell them everything, and I’d be lucky if they killed me when they were done. No matter what else happened, I couldn’t leave this warehouse in their custody. I gathered what little strength I had left, saying one more silent prayer to whoever might be listening, and launched myself at Peter.

  He shouted something that I didn’t quite make out, distracted as I was by the sound of the gun in his hand going off at the same time. A sharp pain punched through my stomach, sending duller shock waves through the rest of me. I did my best to ignore it. I had more important things to worry about, like yanking the knife off my bicep—cutting the shoelaces I’d been using to hold it there in the process—and jamming it into his shoulder as my momentum carried me into him. It wasn’t a fatal wound, but it distracted him for a few precious seconds as he shouted, grabbing at the blade. I grabbed the sides of his head, breathing in to steady myself.

  He had time to give me one last, utterly stunned look before I was twisting hard to the left, turning his face away from me. There was a sharp snapping sound, and then he was collapsing, the dead weight of his body pulling him out of my hands. He took the knife down with him. I didn’t try to retrieve it.

  I did scramble to grab my gun from his suddenly limp fingers, clamping one hand over the hole in my stomach to keep anything I needed from sliding out. It was a relatively small hole, thank God; if I’d been packing something with a larger caliber, I’d probably already be dead. As it was, the gut wound would definitely kill me if I didn’t get it taken care of fast, but for the moment, it was definitely a distraction from the pain in my feet. Maybe I’d get really lucky, and shock would set in.

  Maybe not.

  Robert and Margaret must have heard the gunshot. I didn’t know where the door was, or whether it even had a lock, so I didn’t bother looking; I just turned and started half-running, half-limping toward the nearest window. I’d shoot it out if I had to. I’d do whatever it took to get out of this damn building. I’d die in the open air. If that was the closest I could get to a happy ending, then so be it. It was better than the alternative.

  The door banged open when I was still only halfway there, accompanied by the sound of running footsteps. “Freeze!” snarled Robert.

  I didn’t freeze. What was the worst thing he could do, shoot me? I was losing blood fast, and the room was starting to go dark around the edges. One more gunshot wouldn’t do anything but finish the job. As long as he couldn’t take me alive, I won.

  “No,” said Margaret. Her tone was different, much more anxious . . . and her accent was gone. She sounded American. “You freeze.”

  “Margaret?” Robert, on the other hand, sounded utterly puzzled. The footsteps stopped. Thank God. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m holding a gun to your head,” said Margaret reasonably. No—not Margaret. It was Margaret’s voice, but it wasn’t Margaret speaking. The tones and accent were all wrong. “Verity? Stop running. I don’t know how long I can hold her.”

  I stopped running. I was so tired I could barely breathe. I still managed to turn and smile wanly at the scene behind me: Margaret Healy, the woman who’d lost her anti-telepathy charm, holding a gun against the temple of Robert Bullard.

  “Hello, Sarah,” I said.

  Sarah contorted Margaret Healy’s lips into a wan smile. “You know, if you were bored, we could have gone to the ballet or something.” Servitors appeared from behind her, making their serpentine way into the room. Robert’s eyes tracked them, his expression never changing.

  “I’ll keep that in mind for next time.” I raised the gun I’d reclaimed from Peter Brandt, aiming it squarely at Robert’s chest. My hand was shaking so badly that I was afraid I’d miss my target, something I hadn’t needed to worry about since elementary school. I removed my other hand from my stomach, using it to steady my elbow.

  Margaret—Sarah—gasped. “Verity, you’re hurt.”

  “Yeah, single gunshot wound to the abdomen. It hurts like a bitch and I’m losing a lot of blood here, so if you’re not the only member of the cavalry, this would be a great time to bring in reinforcements.” The servitors were good for looking intimidating, but without a dragon to give them orders, they weren’t going to be good for much beyond that. I didn’t know why she didn’t have a dragon with her, and I didn’t have time to worry about it. Spots were starting to appear around the edges of my vision.

  “You’re going to die here,” said Robert. He sounded surprisingly calm, considering the situation he was in. “All of you. And you, witch, wherever you are, we’ll find you. You’ll pay for what you’ve done.”

  It took me a moment to realize that he was talking to Sarah. I actually laughed a little, snorting indelicately through my nose. “Oh, dude. She’s not a witch. Witches are way less dangerous.”

  “Cuckoo to you, too,” said Margaret/Sarah, digging the barrel of her gun a little deeper into Robert’s temple. “Verity, can you walk?”

  “I don’t really know.” Honesty is sometimes the best policy. “I do know I wouldn’t get very far if I tried. So I’m sort of opposed to trying.”

  “Verity!” She sounded genuinely upset. No real surprise there. “I can’t hold her for much longer. She’s fighting me!”

  “I didn’t know you could hold someone like this at all. It’s a new trick for you.”

  “It was Kitty’s idea.” Margaret/Sarah’s face contorted like she’d been punched. “She’s fighting me hard, Very. Come on. We have to get you out of here before I lose her. Please.”

  “Yes, do run,” said Robert. “You’ve killed one of us already. You’ve shown us where our weaknesses ar
e. We’ll find you. And when we do, you’ll wish to God that you’d let us take you here and now. Or you could surrender. Let us treat your wounds, tell us where to find your witch, and submit to the mercy of the Covenant.”

  “I wasn’t aware that we were in the business of mercy,” said Margaret, all cold fury and hate. Her voice was her own again, all traces of Sarah gone as she pulled her gun away from Robert’s temple and swung it toward me. I widened my stance, trying to cover both of them at once. It wasn’t going to work, and I knew it. From the satisfied gleam in her eyes, so did she. “You’ve befouled my mind, you little bitch. Do you know what that means?”

  “It means you lose,” said Uncle Mike, stepping through the doorway behind her and aiming his crossbow at the back of her head. Istas was only half a step behind him, deceptively sweet-looking in a little pink pinafore. Her hair was pulled into girlish pigtails and tied off with white bows. She was smiling. That’s never a good sign with Istas.

  “You’re outnumbered,” I said, with as much bravado as I could muster. “Drop your weapons. I promise we’ll be more fair to you than you were going to be to me.”

  “No,” said Margaret, and cocked back the hammer on her gun—

  —only to freeze as Istas calmly reached forward and fastened one rapidly expanding hand (already better classed as “a paw”) over the gun, completely engulfing both it and Margaret’s hand. “You may fire,” said Istas, as if she were conferring some great favor. “I will remove your entire arm a moment later, but you may fire.”

  “I’d really rather she didn’t,” I said. The black spots were spreading. I teetered, catching myself at the last minute, and kept aiming my gun at Robert. “We have to . . . we gotta . . . this has to end. They can’t walk away from this.”

  “But we can’t kill them, either,” said Dominic. He appeared in the doorway behind Uncle Mike. His face was set in a blank, expressionless mask. It didn’t waver as he looked past the heads of the Covenant agents to me, filthy, naked, and bleeding all over the warehouse floor. “If we kill them, the Covenant sends more.”

  “We win,” said Robert.

  Istas squeezed Margaret’s hand. Margaret yelped, unable to help herself. “I am not so sure of that,” said Istas. “There is a difference between ‘living’ and ‘retaining all your limbs.’”

  “They can’t leave,” said Uncle Mike. “They know who Verity is. It’s not safe to let them go.”

  “So they can’t live and they can’t die.” It was taking everything I had just to keep myself upright. “Oh, and here’s one more for you: Dominic can’t stay here if we send them home. They’d never forgive another defection.” There was no way to win. There was no way to get out of this with everyone still standing.

  “No. But they might be willing to bury a traitor.” Dominic stepped around his former colleagues and crossed to where I was standing. He took the gun from my hand, aiming it at Robert as he slid an arm around my waist, holding me up. I let myself sag into him.

  Then I realized what he’d just said. “What? No! No. We’re not going to kill you.” I wanted to pull away and glare at him. I didn’t have the strength.

  “I wasn’t going to ask you to,” said Dominic. “Sarah?”

  “I’m here.” Sarah stepped up behind Uncle Mike, moving into the room on silent feet. “Istas, let go of Margaret’s hands. Robert’s anti-telepathy charm is attached to his medal of St. George. Take it off him.”

  “Yes,” said Istas. She released Margaret—although she didn’t release Margaret’s gun, and from the way Margaret groaned as Istas yanked it away, she broke at least one of Margaret’s fingers in the process—and turned toward Robert. To his credit, he didn’t flinch when Istas reached for his throat with her vast, taloned paw. The chain on his medal snapped easily when she pulled on it. Istas looked at the medal curiously for a moment, then shrugged and tucked it into the neckline of her dress.

  “Sarah . . .” I said.

  “It’s all right, Verity.” She smiled at me, uncertainly. “I can do this.”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “We have no choice,” said Dominic softly. He tightened his arm around me. “They have to live. I have to die. I can’t let them endanger you, or your family. This is the only way.”

  “But Sarah . . .”

  “Trust her,” said Dominic.

  I closed my eyes. “Okay.”

  Cuckoos are natural memory manipulators. It’s part of how their power works. They fit into the world without leaving a seam, and that means they have to insert themselves, retroactively, into the lives of every person they meet. It’s an autonomic function most of the time, something that just happens around them, as easy and as natural as breathing. Sarah spent her days working to keep that very thing from happening; she wanted to be known and cared about for who she really was, and not because everyone she met decided that she was their long-lost sister, daughter, or best friend from college.

  Even autonomic functions can become intentional, if you’re willing to work for it. I opened my eyes to see Sarah standing in front of Margaret and Robert, her eyes glowing such a brilliant white that it actually chased the black spots away from the edges of my vision. Margaret looked terrified. Robert looked resigned, like this was the fate he had been preparing himself for since the day he reached American soil.

  “You’ll pay,” he said, in a calm, quiet tone. “We found you once, and we can find you again. Eventually, your whole stinking family will have to pay for your crimes against the Covenant, and against humanity.”

  “Maybe that’s true,” I said, letting myself slump against Dominic. “But you know what? You won’t be the ones to come looking for us.”

  “Hold them up,” said Sarah. I think I’m the only one who heard the tremor in her voice.

  Istas grabbed Robert while Uncle Mike lowered his crossbow and grabbed Margaret. Sarah reached out and touched their foreheads, making skin contact. Skin contact always made it easier for her. The Covenant agents went limp.

  That seemed like a good idea. I couldn’t feel my feet anymore, and I was so tired. I stopped fighting to keep myself upright at all. Staying awake and on my feet didn’t matter. We’d done it. The Covenant didn’t know—wouldn’t know—that the family survived. There would be no purge of Manhattan. We’d won, and that meant that I could rest.

  The last thing I heard was Dominic shouting my name. Then there was nothing but the white glare from Sarah’s eyes, chasing away the shadows, and I fell into the light . . .

  . . . only to fall back out again as Dominic shoved me away, grabbing the gun from my hand in the same motion (didn’t he already have my gun? Something was wrong, and I couldn’t tell what it was anymore . . .). Sarah was on the floor, clear fluid leaking from a hole at the center of her forehead, and Margaret was somehow free, her own gun aimed at Dominic’s chest. “Traitor!” she shouted, and fired.

  For some reason, the servitors were gone. For some reason, nothing moved to stop her when she pulled the trigger. Something should have stopped her. Instead, Dominic staggered back, making a sharp barking noise as the bullet slammed through his collarbone. Then he raised my gun and fired three times, aiming for Margaret, who ducked easily out of the way. One bullet went into Uncle Mike. The other two went into Istas. I knew from past experience that two bullets weren’t going to do much but slow her down.

  Slowing her down was more than enough. The force of the bullets knocked her backward and allowed Robert to break free. He spun around, pulling a knife from his belt, and drove it into her throat. Istas keened like a wounded animal, and fell. And all this before I could hit the floor.

  I landed hard, my head bouncing off the wood before I managed to catch myself. I raised my head, squinting, in time to see Margaret shoot Dominic again. This time, her aim was better, befitting a Healy girl: she grouped her shots at the center of his chest, three holes appearing i
n the fabric of his shirt. He looked surprised. Then he fell, too.

  (This is wrong, this is wrong, we don’t lose like this, this is wrong . . .)

  I tried to scream, but the air wasn’t there. Margaret smiled as she turned toward me, raised her gun, and pulled the trigger again.

  And then there was nothing at all.

  Twenty-four

  “Don’t you dare leave me, baby girl. There’s been enough dying. Mind your momma, now, and stay.”

  —Frances Brown

  Waking up in an unknown location—but at least it isn’t a warehouse somewhere in Manhattan, being held captive by the Covenant of St. George, which makes it a definite improvement (also, not dead)

  “NOTHING” LOOKED a lot like the glaring white of an active cuckoo’s eyes. I opened my eyes. The unrelenting whiteness didn’t go away, although it did change forms, becoming the overhead lights which were shining directly down into my face. I groaned and tried to block the light with my arm, only to discover that the various tubes connected to my body made that impossible.

  They don’t usually connect tubes to dead people. Not unless they’re preparing them for embalming, and this wasn’t a funeral home. It didn’t smell right for that. I blinked, abandoning my efforts to cover my face. The glare got a little more manageable as my eyes adjusted. Only a little, though. I blinked again, finally settling for squinting through my eyelashes as I tried to get a handle on where, exactly, I was—other than “not dead.”

  The memory of being shot the first time, by Peter, was still very vivid and real. The memory of being shot the second time, by Margaret, was already fading like a bad dream. “Dammit, Sarah,” I muttered, and twisted in the bed enough to look around.

  It was a small room, with walls painted a cheery shade of eggshell blue and trimmed in even cheerier yellow. Various machines beeped quietly to themselves, monitoring my vital signs. I followed one of the tubes in my arm up to an IV stand, where a bag of clear liquid was presumably responsible for keeping me hydrated. That also explained the weird pinching sensation at my groin; I’d been out for long enough that they’d needed to catheterize me to keep me from wetting the bed. Always the sort of thing a girl wants to wake up to.