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.

  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?”

  “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.”

  “Alice is right,” said Thomas. “We’ll be right there.”

  He offered his hand. I took it, and he tugged me along, away from the gaping Bell, over to where Istas was restraining Margaret. Sally was still keeping the other guy—we’d need a name for him eventually—pinned to the floor with her length of pipe, but both Ryan and Dominic had joined the cluster around my distant cousin, who was watching them with a mix of fear and defiance that would have been impressive even if she hadn’t been pinned to the wall by something that looked like it had escaped from a Hammer horror production. Istas was snarling, showing her substantial teeth, and Margaret, despite having wet herself earlier, wasn’t crying.

  Ryan and Dominic were clearly trying to intimidate—not that they needed to bother with a waheela right there, although it was nice that they were still making the effort—but Dominic, as the only one with hands small enough to have searched her, was keeping those hands to himself. He looked relieved at my approach.

  “We were friends, once,” he said. “I would much prefer not to be the one to violate her person.”

  “I’ve never seen you before in my life,” Margaret snapped.

  That tracked with her believing I was Verity, after the way Sarah had scrambled her brain. “We were never friends,” I said. “Istas, hold her still.”

  Istas growled, a sound I took as agreement, and I moved forward, briskly patting Margaret down. Nothing. My second search was more thorough, and peppered with occasional apologies as I had to fold bits of her clothing down or pull them aside in order to check them. Enemy combatants still deserve basic respect, even if they wouldn’t extend the same to you. And since I had woken up fully clothed, I had to assume they’d been more polite about that sort of thing than most.

  I found the anti-telepathy charm under the band of her bra, held in place by a pair of safety pins that I unclipped in order to pull the charm free. It was such a small thing. She glared at me like she thought looks could kill as I took it away.