Page 93 of Backpacking through Bedlam

I pulled myself up straighter. “Alice Healy.”

To my surprise, he smiled. “Not dead after all, are you? You people, you’re like cockroaches. Unkillable.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Nothing’s unkillable forever.”

“If you weren’t holding a gun on me, I’d think that was a threat,” I said, sliding the knife in my hand back into my shirt and reaching around to my belt, for the one thing I always had on me, even when the people I was with would have been happier if I didn’t. “Hey, honey?”

“Little busy, dear,” said Thomas, a note of strain in his voice.

“That’s cool. Remember how I dealt with Daddy’s grave?”

Thomas didn’t answer, but I knew he remembered. Some things you just don’t forget. The man from the Covenant hadn’t pulled the trigger yet, which meant he either wanted to keep us alive and talking for some reason, or was reluctant to escalate because he was worried about losing any of his own team. Luckily for this not turning into an indefinite stalemate, escalation is where I live.

The grenade came loose in my hand without any real resistance. It was a smaller modern one, oblong and designed for use in confined spaces like this apartment, but it would still pack a fairly decent punch. I hurled it past the Covenant operative in the door and hit the ground face-down while he was still blinking, trying to figure out why I was throwing things at him.

Thomas and Sally were both on the other side of the room, out of the range of the shrapnel blast, and I said a silent thanks for that in the half-second I had before the grenade went off and everything was smoke and light.

I counted to five to let the last of the shrapnel land, then bounced to my feet, surveilling the damage. The man with the gun was down, and his visible injuries were bad enough that I didn’t expect him to get up again. The witch was lying on her back, face a bloodied ruin. I still paused to put a bullet in her chest, making sure she wasn’t going to be a threat anymore. That covered my part of the problem.

I turned.

Sally’s opponent was alive but on the floor, slumped against the wall, clutching her arm just below a wound from which blood ran freely. Thomas’s . . . hadn’t been so lucky. That man was flat on his back, knives protruding from his throat and eye socket. Thomas was standing over him, eyes wild, hands clenched. He didn’t seem to have taken in the rest of the scene yet.

Which was a good thing, all told, since it meant the building wasn’t on fire. But Sally . . .

Sally was lying on the floor with her arms outflung, and for a few horrible seconds I couldn’t tell if she was unconscious or dead. There was a single gunshot wound high on the right side of her chest. The man I’d been facing must have fired as I was throwing the grenade. In the chaos of the explosion, I hadn’t even heard the gun go off.

The woman who’d been fighting Sally saw me begin to move across the room. She glared, hatred and confusion in her eyes. “Why did you do this?” she demanded, voice barely above a croak. “We’re trying to save humanity!”

“You kill innocent people and children. You’re murderers,” I snapped, dropping to my knees next to Sally.

Thomas caught the motion and turned, eyes still wild, to see me kneeling next to his adoptive daughter.

“Sally? Sally, hey.” I reached for her throat, feeling for a pulse. The bullet had undoubtedly punctured a lung, but might have missed the heart. Please, I thought distantly, please let it have missed.

Behind me, I heard the woman who was still alive start to say something else, only to stop mid-word in favor of screaming. I didn’t need to look to know what the sudden smell of frying bacon meant, or that Thomas had reached the point of setting things on fire.

Sally had a pulse. It was faint and thready, but it was there. I took a deep breath, closing my eyes.

“Mary,” I said. “I need you.”

Twenty-two

“There is nothing more precious, nor more essential to preserve, than the life of a daughter.”

—Jonathan Healy

St. Giles’s, a cryptid hospital under Manhattan, waiting for news.

MARY HAD COME QUICKLY when called, and together, the three of us had been able to stop the bleeding and get Sally to street level, where Sarah had been waiting with a human cabbie who’d been under the star-struck impression that he was transporting a minor pop star to a secret rendezvous. He wouldn’t be able to identify any of us later, had anyone been left alive to track him down and ask. I didn’t remember calling Sarah. Maybe I hadn’t needed to. Given how much broader her receptive range seemed to be these days, it was entirely possible that she’d just plucked the need out of the air.

And that was a concern for later, when I had the emotional energy to care about anything but getting Sally to help before she stopped breathing. The cabbie had dropped us off by a locked door, covered with a sliding steel grate. Mary looked at us, smiled reassuringly, then walked through to open it from the inside, allowing us to carry the still-unconscious Sally into the hallway on the other side. It was industrial and featureless, gray concrete and white linoleum, and we’d been roughly halfway along it when a pair of chupacabra had come loping out of the distance to relieve us, one carrying Sally around the nearest corner to a stretcher, the other escorting us to a surprisingly ordinary-looking registration desk.

Filling out paperwork never changes very much, and always takes too long. By the time we were done, Sally had been whisked away to an operating room, and we were being checked for injuries and hustled off for chest X-rays after Thomas mentioned the grenade to the doctor who examined us. After that, we were sent to the waiting area until there was news. It was all very mundane and ordinary, which just made it all the more terrifying.

I tried to take Thomas’s hand, and flinched away. His skin was burning, almost hot enough to raise blisters. “Ow,” I hissed, and stuck my finger in my mouth.