84.

  I came back to my senses after perhaps a minute or two. My vision unblurred, and strength began to return to my muscles. Whatever they had sprayed me with was fast-acting but not long-lasting. I groaned, feeling dizzy and sick. The van was moving, or attempting to at least, at breakneck speed. My nausea wasn’t helped by being thrown around in the back of the van as the driver swerved and slammed the brakes constantly.

  I could hear cars honking and sirens going off. That meant we were probably still somewhere in the Mulberry Estate or nearby. I imagined the traffic would be horrendous with the amount of police and gang activity in the last 24 hours. Roads would probably have been shut and blockaded. Blocking off roads and forcing everyone onto main thoroughfares was one of the police's favorite tactics to try and keep peace in the Boroughs and it caused absolute gridlock.

  The van driver was banging on their horn now. I blinked again and shook my head. The bag hadn't been tied around my head, so with a few jerks, I was able to throw it off. I took a deep breath and assessed the situation. It didn't take very long; I had been drugged, kidnapped, and thrown in the back of a van with my hands and feet bound.

  "Okay, now what?" I thought. I looked down at my feet and saw that they had been zip-tied, but as I felt the bindings around my wrist, I realized my hands had been cuffed. "Okay, I could do something with that," I muttered.

  Survival instinct and the urge for freedom overpowered my fear and anxiety. I had to escape. The fact that they hadn’t just killed me meant they must be taking me to Brick. A suicidal part of me thought that was actually a good thing. Probably the quickest way to find Brick was to be captured by him. Then the more sensible part of me realized that finding Brick of my own volition and being dragged there hogtied as a sacrifice were two very different things.

  It took a lot of awkward shuffling around, and for the first time in my life, I was thankful both for the fact that I wasn't particularly tall and I was rather scrawny. I was able to tuck my bound legs all the way up to my chin and slide my hands underneath them.

  I sighed and fought down the urge to vomit as the driver careened around a corner, before looking down at the cuffs.

  They were fairly standard police issue ones, but they were old-school; they didn't have the chip-locking mechanism that could only be unlocked via RFID chips. These were just simple turn-and-lock ones. I quickly patted myself down and then wormed my fingers into my inside pocket opposite to where the Wrist Rocket was and pulled out the Pigeon King's Lockpicking Feather. I grinned in the darkness and silently thanked the maniacal pigeon before breathing a small amount of will into the feather, watching it stand up straight to attention. I slid the end of the feather into the lock and willed it to do its thing. The feather came to life in my hands and began furiously picking the lock. It took perhaps three or four seconds, and the manacles fell open. I grinned and thanked the Pigeon King again before tucking the feather safely away in my inside pocket.

  I looked down at the zip ties around my ankles and, for a horrifying moment, realized I didn't have a single sharp cutting object on me, nor did I know any spells for cutting things. I groaned and closed my eyes. How the hell had I been fighting an international criminal Syndicate and didn't even have a knife?

  In a moment of frantic desperation, I grabbed hold of the zipties and yanked on them with all my strength. I achieved nothing but cut the circulation off to my fingers. I growled in frustration and banged my head against the panel of the van. The van screeched as the brakes were slammed and I was thrown forward, and almost knocked senseless.

  I had to get out of here. These people were serious and I didn’t even want to contemplate what horrors awaited me if Brick got his hands on me. Silently, I began going through my inventory that I could potentially use to break the zip ties. After a few seconds of thought, I looked down at my gloves. I’d melted my way through three pairs of them by now with the Shock Rune.

  Gritting my teeth, I stretched my feet as far apart as I could, and then held the copper plate to the zip tie. I channeled energy through the Runes and they crackled to life. It took much longer than I thought it would, with the van constantly shifting and throwing me about. The acrid smell of melting plastic burned my nostrils and I could feel the searing heat through the glove, scorching my knuckles, before the zip tie finally gave way and popped open. I sighed deeply and stretched my legs. Okay, my limbs were free. Now I just needed to free the rest of me.

  Now, how was I going to do that? There was no lock on the inside of the van for me to pick. I pulled down my see-in-the-dark goggles and felt around as the van lurched from side to side. Usually, these vans had an inside release just in case anyone ever got stuck inside. As I felt around, I found that whoever had kidnapped me had snapped off that quick release. I swore under my breath. Just from the way they had gassed and bagged me, I knew I was dealing with professionals, and they wouldn't give me such an easy way out.

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  Well, if you can't do it smart and you can't do it quietly, then your only option is to be loud and dumb. I held onto a piece of exposed metal work within the van to steady myself and began to load Bang Rocks inside the rear door panel. I tried to pack them as close to the center as possible, hoping to blow out the lock, and then, I guess, I would leap from the back of a speeding van. That couldn't go wrong, could it? But I pushed that out of my mind. I had to solve one problem at a time.

  I loaded 7 Bang Rocks into the van door, unsure if they had reinforced it or not. This didn't feel like a normal working van; it felt heavier, thicker somehow, and I knew I'd only get one shot at this. If I tried it and it didn't work, then whoever was driving the van would know I was loose back here, and I couldn't imagine that would end well for me. I walked as far away from the explosion as I could, pressed against the wall, took my Wrist Rocket out, and then loaded in a pellet. I took a deep breath and stretched my neck. Here we go.

  And then the back of the van exploded. Thinking back on it now, there were two moments of impact. Something rammed the back of the van and that set the Bang Rocks off. The doors exploded. The entire van flipped. I don't know if you've ever been in a spinning vehicle before, but it's a bizarre whirlwind. Your whole vision turns into a vortex, a cyclone spinning around and around while you're just the poor pinball inside being bounced around and thrown in circles. I don't know how far the van went, but it felt like I was rolling and smashing off the sides, the ceiling, and the floor of the van for ages. It was probably only seconds, but it could have been the rest of my life.

  There were a few seconds of silence. I didn't know if that was genuine or if I had knocked my head so bad I'd lost my hearing. But I wasn't unconscious, or if I had been, it was very brief, and my limbs all still moved. That survival instinct kicked in again as I smelled smoke. Being trapped in a petrol-powered car that was on fire was probably the last place you wanted to take a quick nap.

  I crawled hand over hand towards the distant street lights at the mouth of the van, and then I heard gunfire. First, it started with a few shots of semi-automatic pistols, but then came the chatter of fully automatic guns, and then the long burst of a real machine gun, like a military-grade one. Shots were being fired back and forth across the street, and it was only then my numbed and confused brain put together that someone had rammed us, and now they were attacking my kidnappers. Even as befuddled as I was, it was pretty easy to assume that my rescuers were not the good guys either.

  I crawled out of the van and saw two groups dressed in military wear: black combats, black turtlenecks, armour plate carriers on their chests, and heavy military weaponry in their hands. My kidnappers were huddled behind the carcass of the smoking van, while the attackers had pulled two cars across the street and were using them for cover as they took potshots at each other. I just kept crawling. A thought crossed my mind to summon the Cloaking Charm, but I knew I had nowhere near the level of focus or energy left to conjure it. So instead, I just crawled on my hands and knees away from the wreckage, and nobody noticed me.

  The gunfire kept going off behind me. I heard men and women screaming orders at each other. Someone was shouting for a reload, someone else was screaming they'd been hit, and all the while, gunfire kept going off. So I just kept crawling and no one shot me.

  I found myself in a side alley that was more puddle than anything else. I pulled myself into a sitting position, my knees drawn up to my chest just inside the mouth of the alley, taking deep, desperate breaths, trying to figure out what was broken and what just hurt. I decided my entire body hurt, and there was no point in trying to sort out specifics right now. I just had to get away, but I had no idea where I was or how far I'd come. Even if I figured that out, it meant I still had to go back into the Mulberry Estate, and the Estate was crawling with thugs, assassins, mercenaries, and probably police at this point. I couldn't afford to be captured by any of those groups.

  More gunshots tore through the air making me cringe against the wall. Sirens blared. I clamped my hands around my spinning head.

  I didn't know if I had it in me to keep going. The last 48 hours had just been one physical and mental trauma after another. I was exhausted, barely able to count the amount of injuries, both physically and mentally, that I'd suffered. I hadn't even really registered that I fought an 18-foot nightmare monster, let alone gone hand to hand with one of London's most dangerous mercenaries. Or that I set a pigeon army on a group of mercenaries or that I was currently being chased halfway around South London by roving packs of money-hungry murderers… or the fact that I got a police officer killed. I pulled my balaclava off and buried my face in my hands. I would have cried then if I wasn't so afraid of how much it would have hurt my chest and my body to do so, so I just sobbed tearlessly, wincing in pain. What was I going to do now? I just wanted to go home. I just wanted my bed.

  And then I heard a meow. It was soft, almost ethereal, and I looked up and saw the black cat. It had to be the same cat, the one that got shot in the alleyway trying to protect me. It had the same silvery eyes and the same strange unearthly allure to it, but I'd seen that cat die. It was standing in the alleyway about halfway down, looking over its shoulder at me, and it meowed again. I could have sworn it nodded its head down the alleyway. The thing had a pull that I'd never felt before, and I slowly dragged myself to my feet and followed it numbly into the darkness.

  I’d seen that cat die… hadn’t I?