Istas kept growling, voice taking on a lilt I could only interpret as agreement.

“All right—all right. Just don’t kill me.” Betty moved her shaking hands toward the buckle on the first strap. Then she spun away, producing a pistol from inside her brown cultist robe and emptying the clip into Istas’ chest. Istas howled, and fell. Betty turned back to me, snapping a new clip into place. “You stupid little bitch,” she snarled, leveling the muzzle on my forehead. “I’ve been waiting to kill a member of your family for fifty years. And after you’re dead, every cryptid in this city is going to know that it was you who sold us out, you who told the cultists where to find us. Be proud. You’ve finally killed your family name.” She cocked back the hammer. A gun went off.

It just wasn’t the gun in her hand.

Betty wobbled, raising her hand to the bullet hole in her throat. The shot had gone clean through, missing the major arteries … but really, when you shoot someone in the throat, the major arteries are sort of extra credit. With blood running through her fingers and an expression of utter perplexity on her aging Mae West face, Betty fell, revealing her shooter. Candy stood behind her with soot marks on her face and throat, wearing nothing but a cheap cotton slip, the kind that doesn’t really need to fit to render you decent. She had both hands wrapped around the pistol grip, and their shaking was visible, even from a distance.

“I didn’t know you could shoot,” I said inanely. Candy forced a wavering smile, which fled as several of the servitors went for her, blocking her—and that entire side of the cavern—from my view.

I tried bucking against the straps holding me down, to no avail. The telepathic static was still there, and getting louder. “Sarah?” I shouted, trying to think it as hard as I could at the same time. “A little help?”

We’re on our way, Sarah replied. Candy ran ahead. Are you hurt?

“Not yet!”

We’re almost there. Try not to die.

“Wait, ‘we’?” I bucked against the straps again, trying to get a look at Istas, who hadn’t moved since Betty shot her. “Sarah, what do you mean ‘we’?”

There was no response from my cuckoo cousin. Whatever was standing between us, it was distracting enough that she wasn’t bothering to talk to me anymore. Cultists were running everywhere, and Candy was shouting in the sibilant language of the dragons. It was impossible from my position to tell whether it was doing her any good—but since she was still shouting, rather than screaming while they ripped her to pieces, I was willing to say that it wasn’t doing her any harm.

Shouts rang down the corridor connecting the dragon’s chamber to the room where Istas and I had been brought first, and several of the cultists that fled in that direction came running back like their robes were on fire. I bucked against my straps … and actually slipped upward about an inch. All the blood Betty poured on me before Candy shot her was working like a lubricant, making my skin slippery and making it easier to move against the leather. No one seemed to be coming after me for the moment; I guess with Candy shooting at people and a couple of corpses on the floor, I seemed like the least of their worries. Flexing my feet as hard as I could, I began pulling my legs free.

Working my legs out of the straps was surprisingly easy, now that I was covered in gore and no longer actively worried about being sliced up and offered to a sleeping dragon. I yanked them loose, paused to take a breath, and dug my heels into the base of the gurney, starting to pull myself downward. The blood-slick metal beneath me offered little resistance to the movement. “Amateurs,” I muttered, and twisted my head to the side, slipping it under the strap that had been fastened originally across my shoulders.

With my head free, things got much easier. The band across my chest was loose enough to let me get my hands unpinned, and then it was just a matter of fighting the blood-soaked buckles on the sides of the straps until they came loose. Any inmate in an eighteenth-century asylum would have been able to do it easily. I had a bit more trouble, but compared to what I’d already done, it was a cakewalk.

I slid off the gurney, almost stepping on Betty before I managed to get my balance back. The fight was still staying mostly on the other side of the cavern, so I paused to do the sensible thing: looting the dead. Between Betty’s unfashionable brown robe, the gun she’d been carrying, and the knife originally held by the cultist Istas took down, I was slightly better prepared to fight my way out of the sewers.

Betty’s gun still had three bullets. If I needed them, that would have to be enough.

Istas was sprawled where she’d fallen, still in her hulking canine shape. I crouched next to her, feeling the side of her neck for a pulse. It was steady. I slid my hand down to her chest, where the bullets had hit her; there was very little blood. She might be in shock, but thanks to her physiology, she wasn’t in danger of dying. “I am so asking you to let me give you a physical when we both get out of here alive,” I said. Istas didn’t answer.

I stood, scanning the room for an idea of the direction we’d need to flee in. There were several tunnels leading in and out; presumably, at least one of them would lead to the surface. The servitors were focusing their attentions on Candy. Wiping the worst of the blood from the soles of my feet onto the dead cultist’s robe, I took off running in her direction.

“Verity! On the left!”

I spun without hesitating, shooting the cultist who’d been charging me squarely in the chest. Two bullets left. His eyes widened in surprise, and he fell, momentum carrying him past me to land in a crumpled heap on the floor. It wasn’t until after he’d stopped moving that I realized who’d warned me—Sarah—and that the warning had been verbal, not telepathic. Eyes wide, I turned.

Dominic De Luca was standing at the entrance to the room, flinging knives at cultists with clinical precision. Those he wasn’t impaling had problems of their own, in the form of Ryan, who’d abandoned his human shape for something a hell of a lot more intimidating: a seven-foot-tall raccoon-man with talons longer than most kitchen knives, really sharp teeth, and the ability to block attacks by turning parts of his body into stone. Those were some cultists who were having a seriously lousy day.

Sarah was standing behind Dominic, her eyes so white that at this distance they seemed to glow. One of the servitors charged at the pair while Dominic was throwing a knife in the opposite direction, and she raised her hand, palm-out. The servitor promptly froze.