Page 82 of Backpacking through Bedlam

Margaret didn’t turn around as she let herself out of the room, closing the door again behind her.

I let my head hang backward until I was looking at the ceiling, still squinting against the light. “Wow, Mom, thanks again for whatever awesome weirdness you brought to the gene pool,” I said. “Between this lady and Dad, it’s pretty clear that uncut Healy genetics really suck.”

That didn’t explain Grandpa, but maybe he was the exception that proved the rule. The Covenant had to be keeping the family around for a reason. Whatever: it didn’t really matter now. Either way, I needed to get out of this chair, and I didn’t have any good way to cut these ropes. They hadn’t been kind enough to leave me with a knife or a convenient length of exposed pipe. Instead, it was just me, and a chair, and an empty room.

When in doubt, improvise. I know how to take a hit, whether it’s being delivered by a person or the floor. I also knew from the speed with which Margaret had come to check on me when I started yelling that the room wasn’t soundproofed. I took a deep breath and began singing “The Wheels on the Bus” as loudly as I could.

No one came busting in to ask me to stop, which meant they were either ignoring me or out of earshot. I kept on singing, and when the song ran out, transitioned to “The Bog Down in the Valley-o.” Still, no one came, and that song has been known to annoy dead people.

(I mean that literally. I once got Mary to threaten to go haunt someone else’s house by singing it for too many repetitions in a row. It is a song with a powerful potential for driving people out of their minds.)

Still singing, I rocked back until I felt the front legs of the chair leave the floor. The fools really had left me this unsecured. They’d tied me up and they’d taken away my weapons, and assumed that would be good enough.

Too bad for them. Still singing, I pushed off against the floor as hard as I could, and kept singing as I toppled over backward. I stopped singing when the impact knocked the breath out of me, and resumed as I struggled to free myself from the wreckage of the chair. They just don’t make chairs the way they used to.

I blame IKEA. Never tie a kidnapping victim to anything a college student can afford.

So now I wasn’t tied to a chair, but I was still tied up, and sitting in the splintered wreckage of a chair wasn’t that much of an improvement. The chair legs were still attached pretty tightly to my own, which wasn’t great either. I squirmed until I could reach them, then pulled the remains of the chair legs out of the loops around my ankles. This created space. Bending my right leg back at an uncomfortable angle, I was able to work my fingers into the slack I’d opened up and work the knot slowly free.

I straightened my leg out again, pins and needles already beginning to shoot from my ankle up to my knee as blood flow returned to the area that had been tied off, and repeated the process with my left leg. With both legs untied, I was able to maneuver myself first into a crouch, and then fully upright.

The room I was in was mostly featureless, with only the chair I’d destroyed and a few shelves around the edges. I was still wearing shoes, which was nice—I wouldn’t have liked getting a splinter in the sole of my foot—and so I walked toward the shelves, looking for something that would give me a sharp-enough edge to work the rope against. The ropes on my ankles had been pretty standard hardware-store nylon, tough enough to tie a woman up, not tough enough to handle focused and continuous friction for a sustained period of time. I was assuming the rope on my wrists was the same. That kind of rope works mostly because skin gives way long before nylon does, which makes squirming out of them a very painful and potentially disabling activity. A good cutting edge, on the other hand, changes everything.

The shelves were mostly empty, which didn’t help, since my hands were still tied behind me, and I couldn’t get the knots to my mouth without dislocating both shoulders—not the best way to go into a potential fight. On the third shelf, though, I hit paydirt.

The shelf itself was empty, but the outside edge of one support was weathered enough to have developed the beginning of a rough cutting surface. It was speckled with rust, and I’d need a tetanus shot if I slipped and broke my skin, but it would do. I turned around and backed into it, beginning to saw away at the ropes holding my wrists together.

So far, my “get yourself taken captive and let the others find you and the abducted kids at the same time” plan was working great, except for the part where I didn’t have any indication that I was in the same place as the missing dragons. And the part where there was no sign that the rest of my group was in the process of finding me. Honestly, that would have been a little unnerving, if I hadn’t been locked in a small, mostly empty room: they could have been ten feet away and almost to my rescue.

The room wasn’t soundproof. They couldn’t be fighting right outside the door without my noticing. But everything else was still on the table.

With a final snapping sound, the ropes dropped away. I pulled my hands in front of me, rubbing my right wrist with my left hand to restore the circulation. Okay. So it had been an impulsive plan, and I could probably have taken more time to think it through. It’d been a while since I could rely on having backup when I was in the field. Not since Laura and I were in college together, really. I hadn’t gone back to Buckley until my grandfather died, and Thomas had already been locked in his house by then, leaving me with no one to depend on.

Yeah. Relying on my team was going to take some getting used to, and I looked forward to getting better at it. I kept rubbing my wrists and resumed searching the room, stepping as quietly as I could near the door. The space was longer than it was wide, if I called the door one “end” of the room.

There was another door at the opposite end.

I paused when I found it, then tested the knob. It turned, which answered the question of whether or not I was going to head on through. The door swung open without a sound, which implied better structural maintenance than I’d been expecting from this place.

The room on the other side was completely dark, apart from the square of light cast by the open door. No windows, no lights, no way to break up the blackness.

I had recently been drugged, I didn’t have any weapons, tools, or arcane foci with me, and I certainly didn’t have any glucose gel. That made activating any of my dwindling supply of remaining tattoos a terrible idea. Sometimes terrible ideas are the best ones I have. I pressed two fingers to the inside of my left arm, seeking out the star I knew was tattooed there. It was the second in what had originally been a line of four; the first had already been discharged.

“Light, please,” I said, voice low, and closed my eyes as a wave of dizziness swept over me.

Thomas says the reason he never suggested tattooing me when he’d still been house-bound and unable to keep me safe was one of practicality: I wasn’t a sorcerer; my system wasn’t built to carry and channel magic the way his was. And since I didn’t have any power reserves for the spells tied to my tattoos to use, they found their fuel in other places. Sugars and electrolytes, mostly, which could leave me dizzy, off-balance, and even unconscious if I tried to pull off something really big without proper planning.

The man who’d actually proposed tattooing me had been an honorary uncle at the time, and one of the few people I’d truly trusted to help me on my search for my missing husband. Look how that worked out. Naga is dead, killed by Thomas when we discovered that some of the mental conditioning Naga had been ordering on me had included an inability to pull the trigger if he was on the other end of the bullet, and when this batch of tattoos is used up, I’m not going to be getting any more. Which is probably for the best, considering what they do to me, but I’ll be honest: I’m going to miss the ability to play all-purpose tool when working alone.

Good thing I don’t have to work alone much anymore. I opened my eyes, shaking off the dizziness. Small light spells never hit that hard, which was a large part of why I was still standing. My skin was emitting a soft, continuous glow, making me about as subtle as a lightning bug during mating season, but lighting up the room in front of me enough to let me see that it wasn’t a room at all. It was a short hallway, the walls closer in than the walls of the room I was currently in, ending at another door. I stepped inside, easing the door closed behind me. My loud singing and the sound of the chair smashing against the floor hadn’t attracted any curious Covenant agents, but that wasn’t something I could expect to last forever.

There’s using your luck, and then there’s depending on your luck. One of them is a tool; the other is a very elaborate means of committing suicide. I stepped carefully down the hall, watching the floor for signs of tripwires or pressure plates, and stopped when I reached the second door. Holding my breath to cut down on extraneous sounds, I pressed my ear against it.

Someone was crying.

Someone very young, if the timbre of their sniffles was anything to go by; they weren’t wailing, but they were whimpering, a slow, steady stream of small, deeply unhappy noises. That settled it. I stepped back just enough to test the knob and, finding this one unlocked as well, opened the door.

The room on the other side was roughly the same size as the one where I’d been held, but looked smaller, thanks to the cages against the walls. They were the large, foldable kind sold by pet stores for short-term kenneling of aggressive dogs, each one big enough to hold a small child or a good-sized canine.