Page 86 of Backpacking through Bedlam

“That’s . . . our stuff.”

“You took my stuff.” I reached for a shoebox, opening it to reveal my mother’s guns. “But you didn’t take it very far, so maybe I don’t have to kill you.”

He cringed. Some Covenant strike team. I lowered the box, giving him a critical look.

“Did they give you boys any training before they tossed you out into the field?”

“Ma’am, I’m a Bell,” he said, halfway desperately. “I was never supposed to be in the field. They only sent me to New York because they’d heard rumors about a real dragon being found in the area, and they wanted a proper researcher to confirm the identification. I should never have been here.”

“Tell you what, I’m feeling generous, since all my knives are here.” A soft buzz had appeared at the back of my head, heralding the approach of a telepath who knew me. “Run. Run now, Mr. Bell, and maybe the people who are on their way here to retrieve me won’t catch you.”

He hesitated, and in that moment of hesitation, his face hardened, and he stood just a little straighter. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” he said. “I know what your family does. You lead good Covenant men astray. I’m not doing anything you ask me to.”

Out in the hall, I heard a door slam open, and the sound of shouting, followed by the roar of some unspeakably great beast. Sally was getting a real education into why everyone with any sense was afraid of the waheela. Something else snarled under Istas’s roar. Oh, good. Ryan was here too.

“Too late,” I said, gathering knives from the box and beginning to tuck them away in my clothing. “If you’d run when I told you to, I could probably have made a case for treating you as a hostile noncombatant. Now, I’m afraid, you’re going to be firmly on the ‘bad guys’ list.”

“Alice!” Thomas didn’t sound panicked so much as, well, urgent, like he needed me to answer him right now or he was going to tip over some invisible edge into being genuinely concerned.

“That’s my ride,” I said, and walked toward the door where Bell still stood frozen, face a mask of terror. I nudged him out of the way. “Hang out here, smart guy, and you’ll see what you just bought yourself in a minute.”

The hallway was chaos. Istas, now in the massive wolf-bear shape she called her great-form, had Margaret by the middle and pinned against the wall. The woman was clearly too terrified to squirm, or to scream. She was staring at Istas, eyes huge in a colorless face, and the front of her jeans was suspiciously dark. I guess all the field training in the world doesn’t teach you how to deal with being picked up and slammed into things by an angry waheela.

Sally and Ryan were over by the man I’d put on the floor, the one looming in his much, much larger bipedal tanuki form rather than the adorable woodland creature I’d shoved into a bookstore vent, the other crouched with a length of metal pipe she’d acquired somewhere pressed across the man’s throat.

Dominic was ahead of all of them, standing in the doorway of the room where I’d been kept until I woke up, and Thomas was at the end of the hall, walking with calm, perfect deliberation. He had rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, the cuffs precisely folded into place, and the sight made me wince a little. I’d scared him more than I’d expected to.

“Alice,” he said, shoulders slumping in visible relief as he caught sight of me. Then he tensed again. “Ryan told us what happened. What in the world would possess you to allow yourself to be taken?”

“They were coming,” I said. “Either it was just me, or it was both of us. I didn’t have time to get into the vent.”

“You’re not alone anymore.” Somehow, he was standing right in front of me. I hadn’t noticed either one of us moving. “You can’t just run off into danger because you trust yourself to be good enough to wriggle out of it. You scared me half to death.”

“I knew you’d find me, and I knew they weren’t going to hurt me. At least not immediately.” The first part was truer than the second, but that didn’t matter just yet. “If coincidence arranged for Margaret showing up in the same bathroom, it wasn’t going to let them be smart enough to put a bullet between my eyes.”

“Alice . . .” He made my name half a moan, half a sigh. “I know you hate being told to be careful, and in truth, I hate to ask it of you. But I wish you’d try for my sake, if nothing else.”

“I found Cara and the kids.” Thomas’s eyes widened. He didn’t look surprised. He’s known me long enough that surprise is no longer his first response when I say that something absolutely improbable has happened. “None of them are injured, although they’re all shaken up a bit, and I wouldn’t expect them to be very fond of humans for a while. These people are amateurs.”

“Not what I would normally expect from a Covenant field team, but perhaps standards are slipping,” he said gravely, and looked past me to where Bell still stood frozen in the doorway. He lifted an eyebrow. “You seem to have missed one.”

“Nah. Didn’t miss him. I tried to get him to run away, but you know how you Covenant boys are: stubborn to the last.”

Thomas cracked a smile at that, looking briefly, almost unwillingly amused. “Yes, we do have classes on being stubborn.”

The static of approaching telepath was getting stronger, becoming almost a crackle. I touched my temple, giving Thomas a curious look.

“Someone,” he said, “seems to have broken the anti-telepathy charm on at least one of these charming individuals, and while parts of this hideout are well-shielded enough that she didn’t find the dragons, she picked up on you as soon as you left those areas. Sarah can see the exposed individual now. She’ll be just behind us. We were following your trail when Istas stopped and said we weren’t alone. We turned around, and there was Sarah, walking along behind us. I don’t know how she reached us so quickly.”

“I have some ideas,” I said. I might actually know more about true Johrlac than Thomas did, at this point, which was a little weird to think about. Not as weird as thinking about Sarah having reached even half that level of control over what her species was capable of, but something being weird has never been enough to render it untrue. “So she’s coming?”

“She’s coming. Sally? How’s it coming with those charms?”

“You said to look for little glass disks, right? Well, we found one, on the dude. The lady’s still holding out on us.”

“Impressive, given that Istas has her against a wall. I don’t know many people stubborn enough to act against their own best interests while a waheela has them pinned.”

“She’s a Healy,” I said. “Not the same branch as me, thank God, but a Healy, and we breed for stubborn.”