Page 92 of Backpacking through Bedlam

“Now, now, I wouldn’t,” I said. Sally eased the broken door closed behind us before sidestepping the man and going to join Thomas. “Are you all here?”

“Eyes on three,” called Thomas.

“We have no valuables,” said the man. He sounded unnervingly calm for someone who was being held at gunpoint by a strange woman who’d just broken into his apartment.

“Not here for your valuables,” I said. He raised an eyebrow in silent inquiry. “Here to kill you so you’ll stop harassing the local cryptids.”

“Ah,” he said. Now he sounded almost regretful, like he’d been hoping I’d have a different explanation for our presence. “Then may I assume you’re human beings? Traitors to your own kind, choosing to side with the monsters in the great war of good against evil?”

“Kid, if there’s good or evil here, the good side is the one that’s not kidnapping children,” I said, voice going flat. “Maybe this isn’t where you try to appeal to my sense of species loyalty.”

“Then why?”

“Because my family staked a claim to this continent and told you to stay out, and we don’t like people messing with our things.”

His face distorted in an instant, becoming a mask of disgust. “Healy,” he spat.

“Price, these days,” I said. “Has been for a while. But yeah, that’s where we started, and we told you not to come back here, and you did what? You came back here. So we’ve come to make you go away.”

I admit, I was halfway trying to bait him into attacking me. I’ve killed a lot of people, of a lot of different species, over the years. I’ve never been in the habit of cavalierly slaughtering humans. It shouldn’t have felt any different. A person’s a person, regardless of where they come from. But it did feel different, like killing humans who weren’t fighting back would somehow make me the kind of traitor to my own species the Covenant wanted to paint me as.

Brains are weird.

“Ah,” he said again. “So there’s no negotiation, then?”

“Not so much.”

“Noted.” And with that he grabbed the edge of the half-filled folding bookshelf behind him—a shelf I had quickly scanned for weapons before dismissing—and pulled it off the wall, shoving it at me at the same time.

I could have fired, and I might even have hit him, but not getting hit by a piece of furniture seemed more immediately important. I dodged instead, losing my shot as he ran, still bent over, to the living room. I jumped over the fallen bookshelf and pursued, plunging into a scene of total chaos.

Sally and a woman with a mop of curly brown hair were backed into one corner next to a bunk bed, the woman swinging what looked like a hardwood club at Sally, while Sally parried with a pair of collapsible batons she’d taken from Verity’s stash. Their expressions were equally grim, and they fought in total silence, ignoring the rest of the room.

That was probably for the best. Thomas had produced a handful of knives from somewhere, and was throwing them at a red-haired man who danced and weaved to avoid being hit, unable to get a solid shot lined up with his crossbow without holding still long enough to take a knife to the throat. As long as Thomas didn’t run out of knives, they’d stay at a stalemate. The third person in the room was standing to one side, in front of the only visible interior door. It was the woman I’d heard speaking Italian before, short, lithe, and dark-haired, and apparently unarmed. Her eyes were even darker than her hair, full of shadows, and I realized with a start that she was the one who’d been supplying the anti-telepathy charms for the group; this was the witch they’d managed to talk into siding against her own kind.

Witches and sorcerers aren’t cryptids, but they might as well be, for the way the Covenant goes after them. For a witch to side with the Covenant isn’t as unusual as it should be: when the monsters that have been hunting you offer to stop if you’ll just work for them, the temptation to go along with it is understandable, if unforgivable.

I could hear the man who’d tried to flatten me with the bookshelf moving around behind the door the witch was blocking. She was smiling distantly at me. It wasn’t a warm expression. I aimed my revolver at her.

“I don’t think so,” she said, and began moving her hands through the air like she was weaving an invisible cat’s-cradle, lips moving in sudden silence.

Umbramancer, then, and emboldened by the strengthening of the pneuma. I recognized those hand gestures from something Laura used to do, when I’d really been getting on her nerves. Laura would never have tried to throw that sort of working into a combat situation, wouldn’t have trusted in her own ability to weave the air. Umbramancers aren’t sorcerers, and the elements don’t dance to their call. And for all that I knew that to be true, I could feel the noose of wind starting to settle around my throat, ready to choke off my breath.

I still had a few seconds, though, so rather than shooting her, I pulled out a knife of my own and flung it into her shoulder just as it started getting difficult for me to breathe.

She dropped her hands but didn’t scream. I could be professionally impressed by that, even as I gasped for breath and pulled out more knives, advancing on her.

“You have to know you’re going to lose,” she said, Italian accent thick and words heavy with pain. “We have the numbers. We have the resources. You have monsters and misguided loyalties.”

“You’re working for people who wouldn’t hesitate to kill you if you stopped being useful to them,” I argued, readying another knife. “Which one of us is misguided here?”

“The one who let herself be distracted,” she said, and smiled sweetly, dropping to the floor as the man she’d been buying time for reappeared in the doorway.

He had a gun now. Bully for him. The gun had a silencer, which probably explained why he thought he could get away with using it. People might not immediately call the police or come to investigate yelling and crashing, but a gunshot was a different story—not that they had been seemed that concerned about waking the neighbors to begin with. Sally was still tussling with her own opponent, both of them aiming blows at the soft parts of the other and parrying as swiftly as they could, while Thomas continued to distract the man with the crossbow. With the wounded witch on the floor, we knew where everyone was.

I just wasn’t sure it was going to help.

“Who are you?” asked the man.