“Get the gun,” I said, moving to grab Sarah’s bags. “Do you have any duct tape?”

“Why would I have duct tape?” Sarah asked. She dropped the vase. It landed without breaking, rolling to bump to a stop against the base of the couch. “Is she dead? Did I kill her?”

“No, but she’s going to have one hell of a headache.” I trotted over and shoved Sarah’s bags into her hands before dropping to my knees next to Margaret, producing a roll of electrical tape from my own bag. “Duct tape would have been better, but this will hold her for a while. You have four minutes to grab anything else you want from this place. We will not be coming back here. Understand?”

“I understand,” whispered Sarah, and ran for the dining room table.

I learned the basics of tying up—or taping up—an unconscious opponent when I was still in elementary school, mostly by using my siblings for practice. I flipped Margaret over and got to work, moving a little slower than I would have if I hadn’t been searching her for weapons at the same time. She was armed for bear. Acid-spitting, fire-breathing bear. If I hadn’t already known she was a relative, the number of knives I took out of her coat would have made me suspicious.

Even with that complication, I had her bound in less than a minute and a half. I shrugged my backpack off and began cramming her weapons into it, pausing only long enough to be sure the guns were resting on empty chambers and nothing was bugged or tagged with tracers. The last thing I did was remove her necklace: a thin disk of what looked like pure copper floating in a vial of water mixed with crushed herbs.

I heard a gasp behind me before Sarah thought, I can feel her in the room now.

“Swell—I was right. It’s an anti-telepathy charm.” I shoved Margaret’s necklace into my pocket. “They’re more prepared than I wanted them to be.” Someone had been telling stories. Dominic was no longer a friendly.

“What are we going to do?” Sarah whispered.

“Run.” I stood. “She’ll be pissed when she wakes up. We’ll exit through the kitchen. We can hail a cab and have them drop us at the 9th Street PATH Station.”

“And from there?”

“From there, we walk.” I turned to face my terrified cousin, ignoring the blood relative who was lying unconscious on the floor. At the moment, Margaret was the least of our problems. There were two more Covenant operatives in the area—three, counting Dominic—and for all I knew, they were both in the hotel. “Come on, Sarah. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

I managed to shove Sarah’s two smaller laptops into the suitcase. She held onto the third one, hugging it like a teddy bear. We took the service elevator down to the first floor, where Sarah babbled something about an angry ex-boyfriend waiting for her in the lobby to the supervisor on duty in the kitchen. The supervisor, a tough-looking African-American woman with the sort of eyes that have seen all the dark things a city has to offer, might have believed us even without Sarah’s telepathic push backing up the story. We were two women alone, and we were obviously scared, even if I was doing my best not to show it. Sarah was just the icing on the cake of conviction. The supervisor nodded at the right places, frowned at the right places, and showed us the route through the kitchen to the back door. She didn’t ask why we didn’t want to call the police. Odds were good that she had her own answers for that, and that they weren’t much better than our reality.

Sarah was crying by the time we made it outside, huge, crystalline tears running down her cheeks. She was beautiful when she cried, since her face never got flushed and her eyes never got red. She just cried, a pale doll of a girl with eyes that seemed too big for her face. We walked along the back of the hotel—running would have attracted too much attention—to the nearest corner that wasn’t visible from the lobby. A cab pulled up almost immediately. We didn’t even need to hail it. Sarah’s semi-audible waves of distress took care of that part.

Much as I hate cabs, Sarah’s not a runner, and even if she were, we couldn’t risk the Covenant having their third operative stationed somewhere at roof level. If we were followed back to the Nest, we’d be sitting ducks. I ushered her into the vehicle as quickly as I could.

“9th Street PATH,” I said, once we were safely in the cab with the doors closed and the subtly tinted windows between us and the rest of the city.

The cabbie looked dubious—an unusual reaction from a New York City cab driver, but that was traveling with Sarah for you. It’s harder for her to keep certain things under control when she’s upset. The poor guy was probably already starting to think of her as his niece, or his best friend’s daughter. “Are you sure you don’t want to go somewhere safer?” he asked. “Like the police, maybe?”

“The PATH station,” whispered Sarah. Then, more loudly, she added, “Please.”

It was the “please” that did it. The cabbie hit the gas and we rocketed away from the curb, merging into the traffic as it flowed past the Port Hope Hotel. I gritted my teeth and forced myself to watch the sidewalks for signs of pursuit.

Sarah, breathe, I thought, as soothingly as I could. You need to calm down, or you’re going to convince this guy that you’re his long-lost daughter, and we’re going to wind up being taken home for comfort and casserole.

I could have done with a little comfort, and I never turn down a good casserole. Having grandparents from the Midwest will do that. But this was not the time, and there was no reason to start dragging innocents into the line of fire.

I’m trying, said Sarah, her mental voice barely above a whisper. That woman . . .

I know. I put my hand on Sarah’s knee. She shuddered and slumped against me, resting her head on my shoulder. I wanted to tell her to watch the street, to keep scanning for anything that looked out of place. I didn’t. I couldn’t. Sarah may be a part of the family, but she’s not a fighter. She’s never had to be. I didn’t know how to tell her that was going to have to change.

The cabbie dropped us at one of the entrances to the 9th Street PATH station, making one last attempt to convince us to go somewhere safer before he allowed me to pay his fare and drove away. Sarah had a tendency to stiff cabbies—not intentionally; she just never thought about needing to pay them—but I didn’t want this guy to remember two upset girls who got a ride out of the goodness of his heart. Anything I could do to make us less unusual was worth doing.