“Go where?” asked Darryl.

“Wherever he took Mercy, I imagine,” she said. “I’ll let you know when he contacts me.”

3

Mercy

And here I am, standing naked before the unlocked freezer door.

TO GIVE MYSELF ANOTHER CHANCE TO THINK, I FOLDED the nasty rags that a day ago had been comfortable schlepping-around-in-the-house-and-playing-pirate clothes. Now they could have been costuming for a zombie movie—or, I supposed, a particularly bloody pirate adventure. I tucked my underwear inside the shirt.

I took another look at my ribs, but there wasn’t so much as a scar left behind. That was some healer Bonarata had. He’d used her on me when he’d thought I was powerful, that he might turn me into an ally. I wouldn’t let his earlier care delude me into believing that he didn’t, now, think that it would be more convenient to have me dead.

I was achy and sore but nothing too bad. My wrist, where the cuff, the witch’s bracelet, had poked little holes in my skin, was itchy, but the dots were smaller than they had been. When I touched my toes, when I jogged in place, nothing hurt enough to interfere with my movement. Even the shaky, light-headed feeling had mostly subsided. Maybe it had been the lingering effects from being unconscious for so long, or maybe it was a side effect of the cuff’s magic. I was good to go.

Part of me wanted to wait. I knew what I faced, more or less. In many ways, my whole childhood and adolescence had consisted of pitting my wits and thirty-five-pound coyote self against werewolves, some of which weighed north of three hundred pounds. All that experience told me that my chances were pretty much even against Bonarata’s werewolf. Even odds weren’t really very good odds against death-by-werewolf.

But most of one summer, the Marrok’s terrifying son Charles had taken me on as a student, though I hadn’t realized that was what he’d done until many years later. At the time, I’d thought it was a punishment for wrapping the Marrok’s new car around a tree.

Right now, Charles’s voice rang in my ears, as if it had curled up into some corner of my mind until I needed it.

“If you are taken by your enemies,” he said, “don’t wait to escape. The hour you are taken is when you will be at your strongest. Time gives them the opportunity to starve you, to torture you, to break you and make you weak. You have to escape as soon as you can.”

Pretty intense stuff to say to a teenager you were teaching to do oil changes and rotate tires, but Charles was like that. It was part of what made him so scary.

Standing in front of the metallic door, I wondered if he’d had some prescience, some vision of me in my present circumstance—or if he’d just been passing on advice because everyone should know what to do if they were kidnapped. With Charles, it was hard to tell. His advice was good; now was the time to attempt to escape.