No Promises, page 3
I still didn’t see an opening. But I was going to need to find one soon, if I wanted to make it out of this with my body intact. “Don’t forget that iron inhibits healing, even for someone like me. Do enough damage, and you might kill me accidentally. And if you do, your agents will keep dying. Because I’m not the one killing them.”
“Don’t worry. I intend to be very careful with you. And we have a long way to go before I allow you to die. Did you think I was exaggerating about peeling your skin from your bones?” The dagger dug deeper—then abruptly receded. She wiped it on her pants and tucked it away. “But not with this.”
She stood and strode out of the room. I wasn’t about to waste the brief freedom from her scrutiny. I immediately started trying to struggle free. But she had endured the touch of the metal long enough to tighten the chain past the point where I could loosen it. I couldn’t even reach my watch—not that it would have done me much good, with my limbs still bound in iron.
No, I wasn’t going to be able to fight my way free. The more I thought about it, the more certain I was that I only had one chance of getting out of this.
I didn’t like it. But it would be better than dying here. I had already died more than enough for one lifetime.
Vicantha returned to the doorway, and my brief window of opportunity passed—not that it had been much of an opportunity to begin with. She took a breath to steel herself before forcing herself through the door. In her hand, she was holding the twin to the iron knife she had brought upstairs with her earlier. She had torn a scrap of fabric from the bottom of her shirt and wrapped it around her hand. Not that it seemed to be doing much good—her hand moved stiffly, like she no longer had full control of the muscles. I hoped that would work in my favor, since little enough else was.
She squatted beside me again. “How many of them did you bring down to this room?” She wasn’t even trying to keep the rage out of her voice anymore. “Which of these weapons did you use on them?”
If she hadn’t believed me the first few times I had told her the truth, saying it again wouldn’t change anything. So I stayed silent. I wasn’t quite ready to commit to my single idea. Not yet. Not until I was sure I wasn’t going to find something better.
“If you won’t tell me what you did to them, I’ll have to use my best guess. Was it something like this?” She dug the tip of the iron knife under my skin, under the cut she had already made, and peeled another strip of skin away.
I barely felt it rip free. I was too consumed with the touch of the metal against muscle and vein, and the iron dust spidering through my blood. I bit my teeth shut on a scream, but only succeeded in transforming it into a low, deep whine. Like the dog she had accused me of being.
It would have to be now. Before I lost the ability to think. I wasn’t going to find a better solution. “Wait,” I choked out.
Vicantha paused, and let the knife hover half an inch above my chest. “Ready to talk already? That was fast. Although nothing less than I would have expected from a human.”
“I’m not human,” I ground out. I sucked in a breath through frozen lungs, still deep in the grip of that one shallow cut. “But I do have resources in the human world. Money goes a long way toward smoothing one’s path here, and for the past seventy-five years I’ve been selling historical artifacts I’ve ‘discovered’ from the centuries I’ve lived. Not only that, I know a lot more about this world than you do from your TV shows.” I had to pause to draw in another gulp of air. “I didn’t do what you’re saying I did. Torturing me won’t change that. Keep it up for long enough, and I’ll start lying to you—a then you’ll be further from the truth than you were before.” I paused for half a second before my next words, reluctant to commit myself to this path even now, half an inch away from the alternative. “Let me go, and I can help you.”
Another bluff. Most of it, at least. I didn’t have the first clue how to find her missing agents. I had lived a long life, it was true, but those centuries had only taught me two things about the human world: how to get myself killed by doing stupid things, and how to live a life of luxury by making smarter decisions. But the last part was true, as far as it went. I could help her. As limited as that help might be. And I would—for as long as it took me to buy myself a moment of inattention from her, so I could slip away.
For a second, Vicantha looked like she was considering my offer. Then she shook her head. “Stalling again. I warned you not to do that.” She lowered the knife.
I thrashed against my bonds, my body no longer under my control. But I managed to retain enough presence of mind to speak. “What if I’m telling the truth?”
The knife paused a fraction of an inch from my flesh. “You’re not. I’ve seen the evidence. Including this room.” But I thought I detected the slightest hint of doubt in her voice. And she hadn’t cut me again yet.
I took advantage of the reprieve, and pressed on. “But what if I am? What if you can’t get anything useful from me? What’s your backup plan? Do you have one?”
I knew I wasn’t imagining her hesitation now.
She brought the knife up to my neck. I tried not to flinch back as the tip met the hollow of my throat. I didn’t succeed.
“If I let you go,” she said, inches from my face, “you will help me find them?”
I tried to speak as though I didn’t have a poisoned knife at my throat. “I have resources and knowledge at my disposal that you could find very useful.”
The knife pressed deeper, not quite breaking the skin. “Say it,” she challenged.
I smiled through the pain. “You’ve done your research.”
It was like I said—the fae couldn’t lie. It was nearly impossible for them to force an untruth from their lips, and if they did manage it, their own magic would turn on them and consume them from the inside. I had never seen it happen, but from what I had been told, it was a crueler death than iron poisoning. I had felt the first stages of it, and that had been more than enough.
Me, on the other hand… I could lie all I wanted. As long as it was in a purely informal capacity. What I couldn’t do was break my word. If I went back on a contract, written or verbal—and my magic stretched the definition of “contract” far too much for my liking—I would meet the same fate. And only fulfilling my promise would keep the sickness from killing me. A couple of close calls early on had taught me that the hard way.
“Promise me,” said Vicantha. “Promise me you will find Mab’s missing agents for me.”
“I can’t promise that.”
“If you’re telling the truth,” said Vicantha, wincing as though it caused her physical pain to admit that possibility, “you have no control over whether they’re dead or alive. But you can promise me you’ll get me answers. Or I can go back to carving those answers out of your flesh.”
“What I mean is, I don’t know if I’ll be able to find the information you’re looking for. This isn’t my area of expertise.” I didn’t want to admit to that. I didn’t want her to decide this deal wasn’t worth her time. I had already gotten too close a look at the alternative. But I wanted to be eaten alive by my own magic even less.
“I thought saving lives was what you did,” Vicantha said with a sneer. “Everyone who knows your name knows you inherited your father’s sickness.”
“I don’t do that anymore. And in any case, I have no desire to save any agents of the Winter Court. Or Summer, either. What is there to save? The fae are soulless bundles of cruelty and spite, wrapped in mortal skin.” Not the brightest thing to say to someone who was holding me at knifepoint. The double dose of iron dust must have compromised my judgment.
Either that, or hearing her bring up my past mistakes had rattled me that much.
“Say that again,” said Vicantha, “and I’ll slit your throat now and see if the stories about your healing capacity are exaggerated.”
“If they are, you’ll have lost your only lead.”
“If what you want me to believe is true, and you know nothing about the disappearances, I won’t have lost anything of importance. And I will not have you disrespecting the lives of my people—the people you probably killed.” Her voice was getting louder. “You dare to call us soulless? We have sacred fire running through our veins. Your greatest accomplishment was crawling out of the primordial ooze. When one of you gets a taste of spiritual power, you’re forced to keep it in chains so it won’t destroy you. And yet you’ll die again and again to save human lives, but refuse to lower yourself to do the same for one of us?” Her anger rose in a hot spiral, filling the room like a tangible thing. If this place hadn’t been suppressing her magic, she would have blown me away in a hurricane by now.
One slip of the tongue, one brief loosening of the leash I held on my centuries of resentment, and I was losing her. And possibly my chance of making it out of this alive. “One lead,” I gasped, before the knife could pierce my skin. “I promise you. I’ll find you one lead that will get you closer to finding Mab’s missing agents.”
She pulled the knife away. I couldn’t stop myself from letting out an audible sigh of relief.
“One lead,” she repeated. “Within a day.”
I shook my head. “It’ll take me most of a day just to get to Massachusetts. You’ll have your lead inside of a week.”
“Three days.”
I didn’t like it. But the look in her eyes told me I wasn’t going to get a better offer. “Three days,” I agreed.
“And you will not harm me.”
“I will not intentionally harm you,” I said. “Not before I give you the information I promised.”
Vicantha raised an eyebrow. “Are you planning on attacking me afterward?”
“I don’t know what you’re planning after I hand over whatever I find,” I said. “I have to be ready for anything.”
Vicantha frowned in thought. The seconds stretched by. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the knife in her hand.
Finally, she nodded. “I accept.”
At her words, I felt the verbal contract settle over me like a weight.
I held out my wrists to her. “You can start by letting me out of these chains, so I can check my accounts. Just in case I can see where those false records came from. After that, I’ll book a flight.”
She wrapped the scrap of fabric tighter around her hand before she started undoing the chains. She eyed me warily as she loosened the bonds, like she thought I might attack now that she didn’t have a weapon in her hand. But she wasn’t in any danger. If I killed her, I wouldn’t be able to give her the information I had promised, which meant I would have no way of avoiding a horrible death of my own.
“How will I be able to contact you once I’m in Hawthorne?” I asked. “I doubt you have a cell phone—too much iron.”
Vicantha paused, letting the length of chain slipped from her fingers. “Were you under the impression that I would let you do this unsupervised?”
“I’m on your leash now, whether you’re there to watch me or not. The promise is binding.”
She shook her head. “I don’t trust that you haven’t left yourself a way to wiggle out of it.”
If only I had. Maybe if I hadn’t been weak from pain and the poison in my veins, maybe if she hadn’t been holding a knife to my throat, I would have been able to think of a loophole to work into my words. But I had been desperate, and I had given her exactly what she had asked for.
But telling her that wouldn’t convince her. “Did you fly here?” I asked instead.
“Do you mean on an airplane?”
I blinked. “Is there an alternative?”
“I didn’t fly,” she said, without answering the question. “There’s a minor Faerie portal a couple of hours from here, for those who know how to convince it to open.”
“Then let me explain airplanes to you,” I said. “They’re gigantic tubes of metal, and once a plane takes off, there’s no way out until you land. A flight to Massachusetts should take around twelve hours, if I’m remembering my geography correctly. If what I know about the fae is true, by the end of that time you’ll feel like you’re the one getting your skin peeled off. How do you feel standing in this room? How do you think you would feel after twelve hours?”
She gave a full-body shudder. “I do what I must do in Mab’s service.”
“Go through the portal,” I urged. “Meet me in Hawthorne. That way you won’t be half-dead when you get there. You’ll be in a lot better shape to track down those missing agents.” And maybe, by the time I touched down in Massachusetts, I would have found that loophole she thought was hiding in my promise.
For a second, I thought she might say yes. But then her eyes hardened with resolve, and she shook her head. “You’re not leaving my sight until your promise is fulfilled.”
It had been worth a try. I held out my wrists again, reminding her to finish freeing me, and resigned myself to the prospect of a long and unpleasant flight.
Chapter 3
A flight attendant, concern creasing her face, leaned down and held out a vomit bag to Vicantha. She was the third one to do so. Face green and eyes half-shut, Vicantha shook her head in silent refusal. From the look of it, she was biting her lip too hard to answer out loud.
The flight attendant waited another few seconds, then tucked the bag away and continued down the aisle, casting one last worried look over her shoulder at us. I gave her what I hoped was a reassuring smile, although it wasn’t easy. I might not have been as sensitive to the metal surrounding us as Vicantha, but that didn’t mean I was having an easy time of it. There was a reason I hadn’t left Hawaii in years, and it wasn’t just because the climate suited me.
I wasn’t sure Vicantha even noticed the flight attendant was gone. Her eyes had closed all the way now, but I knew she wasn’t sleeping. If she had been, she wouldn’t have been able to dig her fingernails that deeply into her legs.
I might have felt more sympathy for her if I hadn’t been her prisoner.
The one bright side to this was, we weren’t stuck in economy class. I stayed off planes whenever possible, but when I was forced to fly, it was first class all the way. But all the extra legroom in the world couldn’t make up for the suffocating ache of the thick metal walls to all sides. Not only that, but someone had thought it was a good idea to turn the air conditioning up as high as it would go, and I had the misfortune of sitting directly under a vent that was stuck in the “on” position. Cold, stale-smelling air had been blasting me in the face since I had sat down almost half a day ago.
Vicantha had used her magic to get herself through security. Lucky for us both, she had air magic, which tended to confer a gift for illusions and other mental magics along with the ability to throw people around with gusts of wind. The brief bite of my iron knife had done a little damage—her magic was still weak enough to make the security agent scrutinize her ID for a few seconds too long. But she had shrugged off the injury better than I had expected, well enough to get herself through the security line—and camouflage my watch for me so I could walk through without incident. I suspected in the iron dust in my blood was still suppressing my magic enough that it wouldn’t have been a problem if I had needed to take it off, but in a crowded airport, I hadn’t wanted to take the risk.
The injury was still hurting her, though—I could tell every time she shifted her arm. The walls of the plane were inhibiting it from healing. That had to have been contributing to her general misery. But there was nothing I could do for her—and even if I could have, I saw no reason to offer her any help. She had chosen to get on this plane. She had chosen to make me a prisoner of my own words. As far as I was concerned, she had earned every consequence of those choices. And yet, even though I tried to muster up some small sense of vindictive pleasure when I looked at her suffering face, I couldn’t. Even with the wounds she had given me still throbbing under my shirt. Even with the weight of my promise pressing down on my soul. I had no desire to see her in pain. All I wanted was to get out of this with body and soul intact, and get back to my life.
And I wasn’t any closer than I had been when I had stepped onto the plane. I frowned at my laptop, which I had open on the tray in front of me. Back at the house, I had decided to save precious time by grabbing tickets for the next flight out and going over my accounts while I was in the air. Free wifi—another benefit to first class. I had hoped to find an answer in the mountains of aliases and transactions and dollar amounts. But I had gone over everything by now, and while I had discovered the false transactions that had sent Vicantha after me, that didn’t give me any clue as to who had set me up, or why. All I could say for sure was that the transactions she had seen did actually exist. On paper, I was a rent-paying resident of Hawthorne, Massachusetts, as well as a frequent visitor.
Which only left me more confused than I had been before.
Just finding the transactions had taken some doing. The payments had all been made from an account I had forgotten I had—one I had only used once, to transfer money from my previous main alias to this one, once that former version of myself had lived long enough for his longevity to start looking suspicious. It was no surprise that someone had managed to get into it without my noticing. I hadn’t so much checked the balance in decades.
It looked like someone had transferred a large sum of money into the account six months ago, then used it to rent the apartment and by the flights in question. Among other things. There were restaurant bills, tickets for a couple of plays in Boston, the works. Whoever had set this up, they had been thorough. Not only that, they had set me up from the beginning. The false transactions had started a few days before what Vicantha had given as the date of the first disappearance.
My other accounts, of course, told a different story. When I had realized what kind of counterevidence I had at my disposal, I had applauded myself silently for my expensive tastes as I had tilted the laptop toward Vicantha—who had still been able to keep her eyes open at that point—and shown her restaurant bills from closer to home, charges from high-end clothing stores, and a few tickets for museums and scuba-diving expeditions from the times I had gotten bored and decided to play the tourist game. But Vicantha hadn’t been impressed. As she had pointed out, if both sets of records existed, there was no way of knowing which ones were real and which were the fakes. My argument that no one with fae blood would set foot on an airplane unless they had no other choice didn’t do much to sway her. It didn’t help that she had been doing plenty of swaying of her own by then, rocking back and forth and clutching her stomach. The longer the flight dragged on, and the worse she felt, the worse her mood became.
