Page 84 of Backpacking through Bedlam

—Mary Dunlavy

Opening the door between me and the rest of a Covenant team, ready for a fight

THE DOOR OPENED EASILY—APPARENTLY, these folks had been confident enough in their security (and their furniture) to think there was no point in locking me in. I slipped through into another hallway, this one lit with bare hanging bulbs very like the ones in the room where I’d been held. They could certainly do with investing in a better interior decorator. I’m several decades out of the mainstream, but even I know that “too creepy for the people in Amityville” is not a design aesthetic to emulate.

For all that I was still glowing—and would be until the spell ran its course—it was nice to have the lights on. The amount of light I can put off with a spell is nothing compared to good ambient lighting. I paid careful attention to my surroundings as I moved.

The walls were curved, like all the others had been, although when I looked back, there were actual hard angles in the wall around the door. I was still in the tunnel system, but this tunnel was at a right angle to the little offshoot where I’d been kept with the kids. The fact that they’d put us all that close to together there told me both that they hadn’t been planning on another prisoner, and that they weren’t very accustomed to taking prisoners at all. That would have been a good thing, if not for the fact that it meant they usually just killed people.

Corpses need a lot less in the way of operational security, unless they’ve been infected with something that parodies reanimation, or you have someone on your team with questionable ideas about scientific ethics and a lot of volts of electricity.

There were three doors, apart from the one I’d come through. I stopped to listen at each of them. The first had total silence on the other side. The second had a very soft sound that I couldn’t quite make out, but didn’t seem like anything I needed to worry about. The third had voices, raised enough to be in heated discussion, but not enough for me to make out a damn thing they were saying. I backed away. Door number two it was, then. When in doubt, always delay the open combat as long as possible.

Easing open the second door revealed a room much like the one where I’d been kept, absent the door at the back—this was a terminus, not a passthrough. There was a blonde woman tied to a chair at the center of the room, head bowed, weeping. She looked up as I stepped into the room, narrowing her eyes and glaring at me.

They hadn’t bothered to gag her. I raised a hand, trying to signal her to silence. Maybe it was the fact that she didn’t recognize me from the Covenant team, and maybe it was the part where I was still glowing—something evil monster-hunting assholes don’t tend to do—but she didn’t scream, only sniffled and continued to watch me warily as I closed the door behind myself and made my way across the room to her.

“Cara?” I asked, kneeling by her side.

When she nodded—a small, tightly controlled motion of her head, barely enough to make her hair shift positions—I began working on the knots holding her wrists. “I’m Alice. Verity’s grandmother. I found the children. If you’ll just let me untie you, I can tell you how to reach them.”

“You’re letting me go?”

“Of course I’m letting you go. I’m not in the business of torturing women for my own amusement.” I finished untying her wrists and began unwrapping the rope, freeing her arms. It was a lot easier when I didn’t have to smash the chair in the process. “The kids need someone with them. It’s dark in there.”

Cara wilted in her seat, making no effort to reach for her ankles. “It doesn’t matter anyway. They know where we are now. They’ll just keep coming.”

“So we’ll figure out how to move the rest of you. We’ll—”

“We can’t move William!” Cara clapped a hand over her mouth, eyes going wide as she realized that she had just shouted. She glanced anxiously at the door, clearly waiting for the Covenant to come to investigate the noise. I tensed, waiting for much the same. If they came in here, there’d be no way for me to hide. Not when I was lit up like a glowstick.

The door remained shut. No one came to see what the yelling was about. I untensed, just a little, and started untying her ankles.

“We can’t move William and they know he exists, they know we have a husband, they know where we are, they know how to find us, they’ve been watching us for weeks—” Her voice was low and anxious, her words falling over each other like rocks tumbling in a landslide, each barely leaving room for the next.

“We’ll find a way,” I said. “If we have to, we’ll find a way. My husband is an elemental sorcerer. Fire’s his focus, but I’m sure he’s done some work with stone. I know a Huldra who sings to the trees, but whose wife went to stone when she died. We have the resources. If we bring them all together, we can move your husband to safety—if that’s even what has to happen. I was told they grabbed you while you were moving the kids. That doesn’t mean they necessarily know where the entrance to the Nest is.”

“It’s only a matter of time.”

“Not if we win.” Cara glanced at me, eyes going wide again. I offered her what I hoped would come across as an encouraging smile. “This is a war. Us versus the Covenant. It was always going to be a war, because they were never going to let it be anything else. So we win. We beat them so badly they go back to Europe and never darken our doorsteps again. And we’re going to win, Cara. We’re going to make sure you and your children and your husband will all be safe.”

Maybe I was making promises I couldn’t keep. But I was going to do my best to keep them, no matter what, and that was really all I could do. If it turned out I couldn’t keep my word, we’d probably all be dead, and she wouldn’t exactly be in a position to blame me.

And ugh. That kind of thinking is why it’s always been hard for me to make friends. I finished untying her ankles and straightened, offering her my hands.

After a pause that could easily be attributed to natural draconic reluctance to touch a human, she reached out and took them. I pulled her to her feet. She stumbled a little, ankles probably still sore, before reclaiming her hands and asking, in a soft voice, “Which way?”

“End of the corridor,” I said, pointing. “There’s a light on in that room. It leads to a dark hall, and if you walk straight down it to the end, there’s another door. That’s where they have the kids. They were keeping them in cages. The Covenant was keeping the kids in cages, I mean. I let them out. There’s no light, but at least they have each other.” That suddenly didn’t feel like enough, so I added, “They were all there. The number of kids in the room matches the information I’d been given.”

Cara made a small gasping sound, somewhere between a bark of laughter and a sob, and slung her arms abruptly around my neck. No draconic reluctance here: just the deep relief of an adult caretaker hearing that her charges were safe. There was every chance one or more of those kids was literally hers, although even she might not know it; that’s not how most dragons handle childrearing. They’re more in the “put them all in a big pile, take on a maternal role to all of them at once” category.

I had to wonder whether reintroducing males to the mix had changed that at all. Were the dragons who had scaled sons more inclined to track maternity, even if only for the bragging rights? And that was a question for a later time, when I didn’t have a dragon wrapped around my neck. A took a half-step backward. Cara seemed to remember herself and let me go, looking at me with aching hope in her eyes. Feeling suddenly awkward, I motioned toward the door. “We should probably get moving.”

“Oh!” she said. “Yes. End of hall, door, end of hall, children.”

She took off at something very close to a run. Unlike me, she had no shoes; her feet were almost soundless against the pavement. I followed a little more sedately, concerned about my boots making too much noise, and caught the first door before it could slam.

I wasn’t fast enough to catch the second. She had already vanished into the room where I’d been kept by the time I reached the hallway, and the door swung shut while I was still reaching for it. I froze. There was no way they’d have missed that sound. And the first place they’d look would probably be in the room where they’d put the suspected Healy, meaning they’d run right into Cara.