Elemental Assassin 04 - Tangled Threads

voice. “Sorry to scare you, but I’m here to take you home to your father.”
    Natasha was calmer than I’d thought she’d be. Or maybe she’d been through so much already in the last twenty-four hours that she was just in shock about it all. Instead of screaming and trying to get away from me, she sat still and thought about my words.
    “My—my daddy sent you? Really?” Her voice was no more than the barest whisper, and I had to strain to hear her.
    I nodded. “He sure did, sweetheart. Now, let’s get you out of here before more of those bad men come this way. I need you to be a good girl for me and not make a sound. Okay? If you do that, we’ll both be fine, and you’ll be back with your daddy real soon. I promise you that, and I always keep my promises.”
    Natasha stared at me for another minute before slowly nodding. I was mildly surprised that she was willing to go with me so easily, but people always said kids were smarter than you thought. Maybe Natasha realized she didn’t have a lot of options. Or maybe she’d heard LaFleur and the others talk about exactly what they had in store for her.
    Either way, I didn’t hesitate. I got to my feet and held out my blood-spattered hand. After another moment of staring at me, Natasha reached out with her own cold, pale, trembling fingers and took mine. I pulled the little girl to her feet, and the blankets fell away from her body.
    To my surprise, she still had on clothes—a pair of long-sleeved blue flannel pajamas. Whoever had taken her had stopped long enough to let her put a pair of slippers on her feet. The fluffy foam shoes were shaped like green frogs, of all things.
    I examined what I could see of the girl’s body. She had a puffy bruise on one cheek and some nicks and scrapes on her hands, but otherwise seemed to be in good shape.
    “Natasha, has anyone … hurt you while you’ve been here?” I asked in the kindest voice that I could.
    I needed to know if maybe she was bleeding somewherethat I couldn’t see, if she had other injuries I hadn’t noticed. Injuries that might slow us down, that might mean the difference between our getting out of here or not.
    “No,” she whispered. “They were waiting until the lady with the flower tattoo told them that it was okay. Some of them—touched me, though.”
    That was horrible enough, but at least she’d been spared the horrors of being raped by Mab’s minions.
    “I’m so sorry for that,” I said, pulling her over to the broken window. “More than you’ll ever know. But I need you to not think about that right now, okay? Just concentrate on me and do exactly what I tell you, all right?”
    Natasha stared at me with her blue eyes. “Okay.”
    There wasn’t any time to waste, so I climbed out through the broken window, reached back inside, and helped Natasha do the same. Her blue pajamas were far too light for the kind of shadow skulking that I’d had in mind, but I’d just have to make do. I always did.
    Slowly, oh so slowly, I led Natasha away from the railcar. It seemed as if even more men had arrived while I’d been killing the girl’s two captors, and the rail yard was swarming with people. They huddled around the depot, moved in between the railcars, and walked back and forth with supplies like busy little worker bees all scurrying to keep their demanding queen happy.
    Which, of course, made it all the more difficult for the two of us to slip out of the train yard undetected. Several times I had to push the girl flat on the ground and cover her light pajamas with my black, bloody clothes, in hopes that the giants walking by would just see another shadowpooling on the gravel and not the two people trying to hide in it. But it worked, because the men walked on by and went about their business.
    And Natasha was a trooper. I didn’t know if she was in shock or completely traumatized or just one extremely brave little girl, because she never screamed, not even when I pushed her down onto the hard gravel that shredded her soft pajamas and dug into her hands and face. We’d made it about halfway across the yard when she looked down and saw the rust-colored stains on her pajamas—blood from the giants that had transferred from my clothes to her. She let out a little whimper then, but I grabbed her hand and pulled her along before she could think too much about the blood, where it had come from and the fact that she’d seen me kill the men it had once belonged to.
    Finally, after