The Long Way Down (Daniel Faust #1)(38)
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We rode in silence for about half an hour. I kept my mouth shut in part to avoid further shocks, and in part hoping my captors would let something slip. They were pretty good at impersonating statues. After their little exchange, all I heard was breathing and the thump of bad tires against bad road.
I ruled out Nicky. These guys were good but they weren’t that good, and none of Nicky’s people would have made an outburst like the girl had. Someone connected to the Kaufman brothers, then? It might not even be a current grudge. God knows I’d made enough enemies in my time, but not many of them had the resources or the guts to pull off a daylight kidnapping.
I experimentally flexed my wrists against the zip-ties. No good. If they’d handcuffed me, it would be a different story, but I wasn’t getting out of the tight plastic strips without a sharp surface and a really good angle.
There was a certain strange comfort in being utterly helpless. With no avenue of escape and no options, my breathing slowed, burying my panic under quiet contemplation. Obviously I was in serious danger, and the man’s last words hinted that they were taking me on a one-way trip with an unhappy ending, but I wasn’t dead yet.
I counted turns, getting a feel for the speed of the van, in the hope of figuring out where we were headed. Their wheelman was too good for that. I gradually realized that he was zig-zagging across the city, looping around entire blocks and making random turns, a pattern to throw off anyone following the van and make a mess of my internal compass in the process.
Eventually the van slowed, gravel crunching under the wheels, and came to a stop.
“I’m cutting the ties off your legs,” the man said, “so you can walk. You kick me, I fry you. Understand?”
I nodded. He sounded a little too eager to use the stun gun again. The sliding door rattled open. Hands hoisted me to my feet and helped me out of the van, down onto the gravel. I trudged forward, steered by a beefy hand on my shoulder, gripping hard enough to make my bones ache.
The surface underfoot changed from gravel to hard concrete, a metal door clanging shut behind us. A warehouse, maybe?
“We shouldn’t be doing this,” the girl said.
“Shut up, Melanie. He’s gonna get what’s coming to him. That’s final. We all agreed.”
“We didn’t all agree,” she said. “You and him agreed and bullied the rest of us into it.”
“You’re still here, though.”
“Trying to talk some sense into you, yeah.”
We walked down a long, smooth ramp. Dripping water echoed under the faint rattling of chains and the murmur of hushed voices. The man shoved down hard on my shoulder, planting me in what felt like a metal folding chair. Two pairs of hands quickly tied me down, leashing my ankles to the chair legs.
I squinted as the hood yanked away and a dangling light-bulb flared in my eyes. As my vision swam back into focus I made out dirty faces and ragged clothes, maybe a dozen people gathered on the workshop floor of a derelict factory. Machines rusted on broken tracks, the dying afternoon light streaming in through cracked skylights twenty feet above our heads.
They weren’t all human. Maybe none of them were. As my gaze swam over them, their features warped as if maintaining a human face took constant effort. I saw flashes of broken fangs in lopsided mouths, patches of ratlike fur, scales, and glimmers of hungry yellow eyes.
Cambion, I thought, slumping in my chair. Because I didn’t have enough problems this week.
I spotted the girl who’d spoken in my defense right away. Melanie hovered at the edge of the crowd, looking hesitant and guilty. She was maybe nineteen and unlike the others, who mostly looked homeless and half-starved, she bore the markings of a suburban girl who bought her punk couture from Hot Topic. The emo mop of neon-blue hair was a nice touch.
The halfblood with the stun gun loomed over me, a bruiser whose veins popped and rippled over his muscles like tiny snakes under his skin. “That’s right, Dorothy,” he said, “you ain’t in Kansas anymore.”
I looked up at him, dumbstruck.
“Really?” I said. “Of all the badass things you could have said, that’s the line you decided to go with? Look, here’s a homework assignment for you: go and rent some vintage Schwarzenegger flicks, learn how to—”
This time he pressed the stun gun against my rib cage. He was considerate enough to wait to talk until I stopped twitching and flopping.
“Not so funny now, are ya?” He jabbed the plastic wand toward my face. “Not so funny now!”
“Enough,” a voice rasped from the back of the crowd. The cambion parted, looking fearful as a familiar face approached my chair. The toe-eater. Great. “Before the sorcerer dies, does he have any last words?”
“Yeah,” I said, pointedly glancing at the girl before looking back to him. “Why are you doing this? I mean, you’re a hobo whack job who thinks mages taste like Twinkies, I get that, but some of your buddies here actually seem lucid. What’d I ever do to you?”
The cambion with the stun gun stroked it against my cheek, his finger resting on the trigger. “You put us back in chains, motherf*cker,” he growled.
“We were free!” the toe-eater cried, baring his cracked and yellowed teeth. “We! Were! Free! No rules, no rules, and you ruined us!”
The cambion around him nodded, murmuring their assent, but they looked more frightened than anything else.