Dead Man's Deal The Asylum Tales - By Jocelynn Drake Page 0,128

me standing in front of her. With the end of the key clenched in my fist, I shoved it into her throat, crunching through flesh and her trachea. She gasped, but the sound was more like a bloody gargle. Her hands fluttered helplessly around her throat as she started to crumple to her knees. Grabbing her shoulders, I spun her around and laid her on her back on the stairs. She wouldn’t be visible until someone tried to go to the second floor.

At the back of the house, I heard a brief scuffle and then nothing. By my guess, there were at least two more people in the house, the warlock from the second-floor bedroom and Marceau. If I was careful, I could take both out and then escape, which might buy me more time. If I left someone behind alive, they could alert Fox. But if they were all dead or unconscious, Fox might not find out for a little while.

Carefully heading down the main hall on the first floor, I approached the source of the noise. Common sense said to stay hidden, but the sight in the tiny kitchen stopped me cold. The two men I had been concerned about were lying on the white linoleum floor in a spreading pool of blood. Over them stood . . . kids. Kids holding wands. Except for one. A girl between the age of twelve and fifteen stood over one man holding a blood-splattered baseball bat.

I must have made some noise because all eyes swung to me at the same time while wands were raised in my direction. I knew in that second I was fucked because nothing in this world could get me to attack a kid, let alone kill one to save my own life.

“Gage!” the girl with the baseball bat said with an exuberant laugh. “We were just coming to rescue you!”

I could feel the blood draining from my face at that announcement as my eyes skimmed over each young face. There were five kids gathered in that little kitchen, faces smudged with dirt but all looking at me with an expression of joyous expectation and wariness. Five kids with wands.

Oh God, the runaways had found me.

24

I SAT AT the wobbly folding card table with my head in my hands. The throbbing in my temples had returned with a vengeance at the sight of the five kids determined to “rescue me” when I had been doing my damnedest to make sure our paths never crossed. After checking to make sure that the two warlocks were still breathing, I ushered the kids back outside to a secluded location in what turned out to be the Austrian countryside before we used a teleport spell to return to their secret hideout. The crumbling, abandoned house had no electricity, no running water, and no heat. While a quick look around revealed that it was relatively clean, I knew that they couldn’t stay here, but I wasn’t sure what to do with them.

Lifting my head, I found the oldest of the group and proclaimed leader, Étienne, frowning at me. From what I could get out of him, the seventeen-year-old French teen had escaped from the Tower in Brazil with Paola and Anthony. They had hidden out in Texas for a short time before coming to Low Town, where they were later joined by the baseball-bat-wielding Alice and her brother, James, from the Tower in upstate New York.

For now, we were waiting. It was about an hour before dawn. Luckily, Fox and his cohorts had had me for only a few hours rather than days. If I planned carefully, I could still get Trixie to contact the elves about Gaia and then I could turn my attention to my brother and Reave. Yet, I first had to do something about this little band, and I needed help for that. With some reluctance, I used magic to send a message to Sofie, who was supposed to locate Gideon and send him to me. From what I could tell, neither Étienne nor Paola was fond of my plan. Anthony, or Tony, as he preferred to be called, seemed to smile and roll with it all, while Alice busied herself with tidying the small house and making me a sandwich from their meager pantry. Her younger brother, James, remained silent and close to her at all times.

He was the one who worried me the most. His thin face and large eyes held dark shadows, as if