Page 85 of Backpacking through Bedlam

I couldn’t let that happen. I sighed instead, and turned to face the door where I’d heard voices before, counting down silently from ten.

I had barely reached six before the door flew open and Margaret spilled into the hall, followed by one of the men from the bathroom. I gave them a concerned look, shaking my head like they’d done something to direly disappoint me.

“You’re not very good hosts,” I said. “I’m absolutely sure I had my mother’s guns when you knocked me out. I didn’t say I was okay with bondage, and I’m definitely not okay with robbery.”

Margaret gaped for a moment before recovering herself and saying harshly, “You’re not supposed to be out here.”

“I sort of got that from the way you tied me to a chair. Again, consent? Did you ever consider that maybe it was an important part of a new relationship? Because that was not the quality of either rope or hospitality to which I have become accustomed.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You traitors think you run this continent.”

What would Verity do in this situation? I tried to channel the spirit of my endlessly irreverent granddaughter, and decided she wouldn’t take these people seriously in the slightest.

“No, sweetie, I know we run this continent.” I lifted one hand, studying my fingernails with exaggerated care. As always, they were trashed. My last manicure was sometime in the 1990s. I looked back to Margaret, who was visibly reddening at the snub. I lowered my hand. “Y’all are the ones who put us here. You gave us this continent. And we don’t do take-backs. So just give me my guns and get the fuck out of New York before this goes badly for you, okay?”

“You messed with my head the first time I fought you. You really think I’m giving you a weapon?”

Yeah, she definitely thought I was Verity. That probably wouldn’t be as flattering to my granddaughter as it was to me, but Verity never needed to know about it.

“I think the weapon in question was mine to begin with,” I said, reasonably enough.

“Peg, she’s glowing,” said one of the men. “How is she glowing?”

“They really don’t teach you people anything before they send you out into the field to get yourself slaughtered by the first bigger dog to come trotting down the block, do they?” I was starting to feel a little bad for them. They were shifting their weight from foot to foot like they were afraid of the consequences if they made the first move. This wasn’t Margaret’s first rodeo. I was pretty sure it was theirs, and beating the crap out of them wasn’t going to be enough of a challenge to make me feel better.

Field-tested or not, they’d been competent enough to capture an innocent woman and the children she was supposed to be shepherding, all for the crime of looking human when they actually weren’t. I shifted my weight, finally falling into a fighting stance. No more of them seemed to be coming. It was just these three. Three on one isn’t the best odds, but when it’s one competent agent and two untested newcomers versus me, they get a whole hell of a lot better.

“We going to do this, or what?” I asked. “Because I have things I need to be doing, and the longer we stand here yapping, the harder it’s going to be to finish them on a schedule.”

With a shout that was half battle cry and half incoherent rage, Margaret charged for me, throwing a punch at my chest. I stuck out one arm as I pivoted to the side, clotheslining her and sending her crashing into the nearest wall, clutching her throat and choking. A good clothesline uses your opponent’s momentum against them effectively enough to take them out of the fight, and Margaret had run right into that one. What was the Covenant teaching these kids, anyway? Any of my grandchildren would have dodged that by the time they were twelve, even Artie and Sarah, and they were mostly noncombatants.

Taking Margaret out hadn’t removed her boys from the fight. The larger of the two lunged for me, clearly going for a grapple. I danced backward, evading his grasp, and tried to sweep his feet out from underneath him. This one, at least, had encountered the concept of dodging at some point, because he evaded the hit and delivered a knee to my midsection, doubling me over. The second man darted in, grabbing me by the hair.

That was fine. I’ve always had excellent core strength. I straightened as fast and hard as I could, using his grip on my hair as a guide for where I should slam my head. The sound it made when it impacted with his nose was as satisfying as it always was. There’s something about the crunch of breaking cartilage that just gets me.

He reeled backward, losing his grip on me, and I whirled, grabbing his shoulders and holding him in place as I brought my knee up twice in quick succession: one hit to the belly, one to the balls. When I released him, he crumpled, moaning, to the floor, and I turned to the first man, smiling a bright, almost-feral smile.

He shied away, which may have been the first sensible thing he’d done since the bathroom. “Hi,” I said, stalking toward him. My lip had split somewhere in the middle of that little tussle; I wiped the blood away with the back of my hand, but couldn’t stop it from trickling into my teeth. That just made me smile wider, wanting to treat him to every last terrible drop of me. “You helped abduct me. I don’t like being abducted.”

His response was to dig something out of his pocket and brandish it at me. “Back, witch!”

Even if I’d been a sorcerer, I doubted there was any sort of talisman small enough to fit in a pocket that could have been used to ward me off. I still cocked my head, looking at the object in his hand. It looked like a rabbit’s foot, albeit one wrapped in braided cord and adorned with a handful of charms. One of them, a glass disk with something liquid at its core, was recognizable as an anti-telepathy charm. The rest were mysteries to me.

He thrust it at me again, clearly expecting it to do something. And to be fair, it did. It pissed me off.

Snatching the thing out of his hand, I threw it on the ground and stepped down as hard as I could, grinding my heel over the glass disk until I heard a small but satisfying crunching sound. I looked up at his face, finding him staring at me with shock.

“Margaret’s not in charge of the Covenant here in New York, is she?” I asked. I turned to Margaret, still gasping against the nearest wall. “You got demoted because you kept losing, and now you’re mad about it, but they gave you the newbies. That’s why we weren’t sure whether there were three teams or four, and why there’s no one else here. You’re not supposed to be working independently. You went rogue and snatched some kids, and kept them secret because you wanted to deliver the dragons to your bosses to prove that you could still do the job.”

She didn’t have the air to answer me, but the glare she shot my way was more than answer enough.

“What the fuck ever.” I threw up my hands and stalked past the one man I hadn’t already incapacitated, heading into the room where they’d been holed up before Cara so unceremoniously alerted them to our presence.

It was a small room, very similar to the one where I’d woken up, only instead of a woman tied to a chair, it had a folding card table in the middle, complete with cards. They’d been playing a game at some point, recently enough that they hadn’t cleaned up after themselves just yet. The shelves against the curving walls were more crowded, with a variety of objects I assumed were their kit. They should really have stopped to grab more of it before coming out into the hall.

“Um.” That was the man whose little toy I’d taken. I glanced back over my shoulder at him. He was standing in the doorway, watching me warily. “Can you move away from that shelf, please, scary glowing lady?”

“Why?”