Verity, why is she asking all these questions? She should have believed us. Why can’t Isee her?

I don’t know,I thought back. See if you can make her leave. We need to get you out of here.

“I guess the weather does what the weather wants to do,” said Sarah weakly.

“I suppose that’s true.” I heard Margaret take another step. “Is Valerie still here? I wanted to see if she had any other suggestions for places where I might go to do a little stargazing.”

“No, she had to leave,” said Sarah. “I’ll tell her that you were sorry to have missed her.”

“Left? Really? That’s amazing, since I had a splendid view of the front of the hotel while I was on the roof, and I didn’t see her going out.”

“It must have been while you were going down the stairs.”

“That’s still quite impressive timing. I’ll have to ask my colleague who was sitting in the lobby this whole time whether he saw which way she went. I’d love to see her again.” I didn’t need to be able to see Margaret’s face to know what it looked like. Her tone was one I’d heard before, from my sister, my mother, my grandmother. It would be accompanied by an almost feral smile, one that implied the speaker would think nothing of ripping your throat out with her teeth. A dangerous expression for a dangerous girl.

“That’s probably a good idea,” said Sarah, in a small voice.

“Unless you’dlike to tell me where she went.”

Verity!

I gritted my teeth, forcing myself to stay where I was. Is she actually threatening you? Or is she just asking pointy questions and waiting to see whether you crack? Do you see any weapons?

Not yet—it’s just questions—but I still can’t read her.

Shit. The Covenant has wards against sorcery, witchcraft, and the various psionic powers. Telepathy isn’t common, but empathy is, and a ward against one will go a long way toward blocking the others. Sarah wasn’t going to get any readings off Margaret, and Margaret wasn’t going to be as affected by Sarah’s particular brand of mind-fuck as she should have been.

Try and make her leave,I said, keeping my mental voice as reassuring as I could. I didn’t know how well it was working. Sarah’s the telepath, not me; there was no telling how much interference she was going to pick up from my own panic. The staff will smuggle us out of here if you can make her leave.

“I don’t know where Valerie went,” said Sarah. Her voice was barely shaking. I have never been so proud of her. “Why don’t you go ask your friend? He can probably tell you which way she turned when she left the hotel.”

“Doesn’t she live around here?”

“No. New Jersey. She was just visiting me for the day.”

“Ah. Well, if you see her, can you let her know that I—”

The sound of the theme from Dance or Diesuddenly blared from my front pocket. I fumbled for my phone, hitting the “mute” button, but it was already way too late.

“What was that?” asked Margaret, all pretense of friendly curiosity gone. She was a hunter, and she had just received confirmation that her prey was nearby.

“My phone,” said Sarah, hopelessly.

“If that was your phone, what’s that on the couch? You have two cell phones? That seems a bit excessive, don’t you think?” I heard Margaret turn and start to walk. “You sure your friend left? Seems a little odd that you’d hide her from m—”

There was a heavy smacking noise, followed by the thump of Margaret collapsing to the floor. I poked my head around the wall. Sarah was standing with her legs braced wide, a decorative vase in her hands, panting in what I recognized as terror. Margaret was sprawled facedown on the carpet in front of her. The fall had hiked both her coat and blazer up in the back, revealing the gun she had tucked between her shirt and pants.

“Get the gun,” I said, moving to grab Sarah’s bags. “Do you have any duct tape?”

“Why would I have duct tape?” Sarah asked. She dropped the vase. It landed without breaking, rolling to bump to a stop against the base of the couch. “Is she dead? Did I kill her?”

“No, but she’s going to have one hell of a headache.” I trotted over and shoved Sarah’s bags into her hands before dropping to my knees next to Margaret, producing a roll of electrical tape from my own bag. “Duct tape would have been better, but this will hold her for a while. You have four minutes to grab anything else you want from this place. We will notbe coming back here. Understand?”

“I understand,” whispered Sarah, and ran for the dining room table.

I learned the basics of tying up—or taping up—an unconscious opponent when I was still in elementary school, mostly by using my siblings for practice. I flipped Margaret over and got to work, moving a little slower than I would have if I hadn’t been searching her for weapons at the same time. She was armed for bear. Acid-spitting, fire-breathing bear. If I hadn’t already known she was a relative, the number of knives I took out of her coat would have made me suspicious.

Even with that complication, I had her bound in less than a minute and a half. I shrugged my backpack off and began cramming her weapons into it, pausing only long enough to be sure the guns were resting on empty chambers and nothing was bugged or tagged with tracers. The last thing I did was remove her necklace: a thin disk of what looked like pure copper floating in a vial of water mixed with crushed herbs.

I heard a gasp behind me before Sarah thought, I can feel her in the room now.

“Swell—I was right. It’s an anti-telepathy charm.” I shoved Margaret’s necklace into my pocket. “They’re more prepared than I wanted them to be.” Someone had been telling stories. Dominic was no longer a friendly.

“What are we going to do?” Sarah whispered.

“Run.” I stood. “She’ll be pissed when she wakes up. We’ll exit through the kitchen. We can hail a cab and have them drop us at the 9th Street PATH Station.”

“And from there?”

“From there, we walk.” I turned to face my terrified cousin, ignoring the blood relative who was lying unconscious on the floor. At the moment, Margaret was the least of our problems. There were two more Covenant operatives in the area—three, counting Dominic—and for all I knew, they were both in the hotel. “Come on, Sarah. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

I managed to shove Sarah’s two smaller laptops into the suitcase. She held onto the third one, hugging it like a teddy bear. We took the service elevator down to the first floor, where Sarah babbled something about an angry ex-boyfriend waiting for her in the lobby to the supervisor on duty in the kitchen. The supervisor, a tough-looking African-American woman with the sort of eyes that have seen all the dark things a city has to offer, might have believed us even without Sarah’s telepathic push backing up the story. We were two women alone, and we were obviously scared, even if I was doing my best not to show it. Sarah was just the icing on the cake of conviction. The supervisor nodded at the right places, frowned at the right places, and showed us the route through the kitchen to the back door. She didn’t ask why we didn’t want to call the police. Odds were good that she had her own answers for that, and that they weren’t much better than our reality.

Sarah was crying by the time we made it outside, huge, crystalline tears running down her cheeks. She was beautiful when she cried, since her face never got flushed and her eyes never got red. She just cried, a pale doll of a girl with eyes that seemed too big for her face. We walked along the back of the hotel—running would have attracted too much attention—to the nearest corner that wasn’t visible from the lobby. A cab pulled up almost immediately. We didn’t even need to hail it. Sarah’s semi-audible waves of distress took care of that part.