Game of Cages

“Damn,” I said. “You’re a pain in the ass.” I wrenched the stun gun out of her hand. One of the metal leads was broken. I doubted it still worked. “Hold still, or I’ll use this on you.”

She didn’t. The thick ski jacket made it tough to control her. If she didn’t settle down, I was going to have to either let her go or hurt her. I laid the stun gun against the back of her neck and shouted at her to be still.

She answered in her native language, whatever it was. I couldn’t understand, but I knew she wasn’t asking how I take my tea. I tossed the broken stun gun away.

The ghost knife was nearby. I could feel it. I reached for it and it flew into my hand.

Ursula grunted from the effort of trying to throw me off. In a few moments she would have her knees under her and I’d have another fight on my hands.

I slid the ghost knife through the back of her head. She didn’t react at all. The spell was supposed to “cut ghosts, magic, and dead things”; it could destroy the glyphs that sustained spells, cut through inanimate objects, and damage people’s “ghosts.” I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but everyone else I had cut with it had stopped trying to kill me. Why didn’t it work on Ursula? Did she not have a “ghost,” whatever that was?

Ursula nearly bucked me off. She was still cursing at me, and I had no way to control her except by throwing punches.

I wasn’t going to do that. I had fought in the street for the Twenty Palace Society. I had broken into homes and burned them to the ground. I had shot men in cold blood. But I wasn’t ready to punch this woman.

She kept thrashing. “Let me go,” she said, her voice vicious with rage. “I have to check on Armand.”

“No one is going to hurt Armand, not if he’s worth so much.”

She kept fighting me. I wasn’t getting through.

I was going about this all wrong. I leaned close to her and spoke quietly. “This isn’t his home, is it? If it was, he’d have come back here as soon as he was free.” She stopped struggling, although her breathing was still harsh. “I came here to see if he’d return to the people who loved him. But he won’t, will he?”

A low moan escaped her throat. I kept talking. “You love him, I know you do. But now that he has his freedom, he’s never coming back. He doesn’t want to be your prisoner anymore. All these years you’ve kept him trapped in this little room, giving him your love, and now you know what he’s always wanted.”

She made a terrible, heartrending sound. It was the sound a mother might make over a dying child. I let her buck me off.

We both scrambled to our feet. She looked at me, her eyes brimming with tears. Then she looked at the Plexiglas cage, turned, and ran out the door.

I looked around one more time. The place made my skin crawl. I’d spent time in prison, but this disturbed me in ways I wasn’t ready to think about.

I heard Ursula shouting outside. I hurried to the window. She was lumbering toward the house, screaming and pointing back to the cottage. Back to me.

CHAPTER FOUR

Damn. I raced out the door. The tree line wasn’t far, but I didn’t want to run into the woods. Not when Catherine’s car was in the other direction.

The ATV had a key in it. I grabbed a bungee cord from behind the seat and strapped the handlebars down. Then I started it up and sent it on its way.

As I came around the edge of the cottage, Ursula ran through the servant’s entrance of the house and slammed the door behind her.

I sprinted down the hill toward the house. I had nearly reached the doorway, still stupidly planning to follow her inside, when the back light turned on. She had roused the house faster than I expected.

The corner of the building was just a few yards to my right. I ran around it and ducked out of sight, staying in the muddy tracks Biker and his two killers had made.

The only tool I had was my ghost knife, but I was pretty sure I could crack a steering column with it. Unfortunately, the cars in the garage were on the other side of the house. Horace had distracted me before I could disable them, but I couldn’t get to them right now. I could have gone around the front, but if the guard at the main entrance had been replaced, that wouldn’t turn out well.

I peeked around the corner. Six Fellows streamed through the back door, each carrying a shotgun. They fanned out across the yard, one particularly fat one moving toward me. Dammit. The ATV had overturned on a tree root across the yard; hadn’t they noticed it?

I leaned away from the corner of the house. The tree line was not close enough for me to risk it, especially considering how much noise I’d make in the undergrowth. I’d end up like Biker, a rotting corpse with a bullet in my back. But there was a basement window at my feet. I dropped to my knees in the freezing mud and cut through the latch. The window opened toward me, but the gap was too narrow for me to fit through. The man with the shotgun would come around the corner at any moment. I cut both hinges and slid through the opening, pulling the frame in after me.

The basement was pitch-dark, except for the yard light shining through the narrow windows along the ceiling. I landed on something flat and solid. It didn’t tip over and crash onto the floor. I pressed the window frame in place —it was upside down and didn’t fit properly, but I tried to hold it absolutely still.

The fat man in the parka walked in front of the window. His puffy face was already red from the cold, but something in the way he scanned back and forth made me wary. He was calmer than the others. More in control.

Luckily, he was looking toward the trees opposite the house, not at his feet.

My ghost knife was in my back pocket, but I wasn’t sure it would work on him any better than it had on Ursula. Was it running out of power, or did she have a protection spell? My ghost knife didn’t feel any weaker, and it had cut the window readily enough.

Someone shouted, “There!” and the fat man trotted back toward the others. I blew out a long, relieved breath and fitted the window, carefully squeezing it into the jamb. A strong wind would knock it out again, but I planned to