Page 2 of Bound By Prophecy (Descendants)

I shook my head. Glanced at the chain hoist that attached my harness to the warehouse wall. “No,” I started, but the girl wasn’t looking at me now. She was watching the door.

The sirens were getting closer. And something else, a muffled buzzing.

“They’re coming here?” I asked.

The girl turned back to me, nodded. I was struggling to find my focus, to sway her to co-operate. She seemed a bit panicked, but for the wrong reasons.

“Here.” I tilted my head up to indicate my bindings. “Untie me. I will help you find her.”

Her eyes narrowed and her mouth screwed up as she considered my proposition.

The sirens were at the gate.

“Two minutes,” I warned. “It’s the only way you’ll find her.”

Car doors slammed. She knew I was right.

I had her.

And then she was gone. “Wait,” I shouted, “where are you going?”

She didn’t look back as she ran across the open floor. She moved with such unrestrained fervor, I half expected her to slam into the wall. As she reached up, she pulled a screwdriver from her back jeans pocket, and pried the lever that held my chain.

An instant later, I slammed into the concrete floor.

Fire spread through my shoulder, but the pounding in my head was replaced with the reverberations of a small, clanging bell. Tingling prickled my limbs a moment before I realized my feet were being jerked, and the twinkling lights flashing against blackness were the first indication to my brain that I couldn’t see anything. The tingle turned to pinpricks and the ringing in my ears quieted as I tried to bat my eyelids open.

The jerking at my feet ceased.

“Can you stand?”

Her face was in my line of sight again, this time sideways.

“Gll…tthhh,” I answered.

She grimaced.

The girl reached down to grab my arm, and the fire increased tenfold. I said something like, “Aaaaah,” and she let go.

Apparently, I’d managed to keep from busting my skull against concrete by shifting my head sideways during the fall, but had taken the brunt of the hit on my shoulder, which was likely now broken.

The girl was pulling up on my other side. “Come on,” she hissed, “we have to go.”

Two deep male voices echoed off the exterior walls of the warehouse.

“Now.”

She yanked hard against me, and eventually my instincts kicked in. Or at least adrenaline. I was up, nearly falling forward before being pulled behind her toward a short flight of metal grate stairs. My right arm swung limp behind me; I was completely unable to support it since my other arm was held within her considerable grip.

As we climbed, I glanced behind us, saw a shadow through the open warehouse door, and then stumbled on the threshold of a back entrance as I was dragged into daylight.

The murky water of the bay lay only thirty yards before us, but I was abruptly jerked sideways and led down the deck through a narrow pass between two storage containers. At the end of the pass, the girl stopped dead to peer around the containers. I leaned forward, heaving in breath. Before I got two searing lungfuls, she was off again, my forearm firmly in her grasp.

I was about to complain, or free myself to lie down, when she slid into a shed.

She pushed me down beneath a boarded window, and I leaned back against the shed wall, half hidden from view of the door as she held it open a fraction of an inch to watch for our would-be pursuers.

It was dim in the shed, and the thin line of light put most of her in shadow. I looked away, quickly surveying our surroundings. An unused maintenance shed, shelves now empty of anything of worth. Dust silhouettes decorated the walls, outlining empty nails that once held pliers and wrenches and spools. A few lengths of wire scattered the floor, along with years-old paper and trash.

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