Damsel[ed]: Rescue Required (#3 of the Damsel[ed] Series)

Chapter Seventeen: Time

Cut me some slack here. I fight. As fiercely as a teen drowning in his own sweat can.  I kick, land a hit in the soft flesh of my opponent's belly. Ram my elbow into the rib-cage with a hard crack to the sensation of jelly yielding around bone. Surprisingly painful, too.

My attacker gnashes their teeth together with a hiss of air. Behind me, stacked brooms hit the floor in a bump-bump-bump of aluminum on slimy floor, I try to scream, I really do. But as soon as I draw up a gasp of hair, a hard thwack across the base of the skull has my head smashed down into a blue plastic bucket. My nose is pressed flat and my mouth fills with blood. Kind of hard even to speak, let alone scream. I'm pinned down by fingers digging into my neck, holding my face to the bleach-smelling plastic as I squirm and shout "Spit, spit, spit, spit, spit!"

"Sorry!" The voice is murky to throbbing ears. "Sorry. Didn't mean to hurt you, Angelos. But you can't let anyone know we're here."

My brain is mush. It takes seconds for me to recognize that sweet, peppy voice. A whole minute for me to still my squirming.

"Sarah?" The nice Syndicate lady who phoned in an anonymous tip that had the city shut down during Owl's charge. I like Sarah and Ivy. Really. But it's hard to sound excited with your bloody face mashed at the bottom of a bucket. "You scared me."

"You scared me! And Ivy!" The pressure across my neck lifts. I jerk my head up to shifting stars and blurs of blue light, like a million Neptunes are orbiting around my eyeballs. Ivy's sitting across the pile of fallen brooms, bent forward and clutching her stomach. She raises her head, flicking her ponytail against her shoulders. Her eyes meet mine and narrow.

"Sorry," I murmur. "But, you know, you shouldn't fake-kidnap someone with a history of being kidnapped." I spit a big bloody glob into the bucket. Ivy rolls her eyes and flips me off to Sarah's nervous laughter.

"Old habits die hard. But that's not what we're here to talk about."

I shake my head. My cupped hands are filling up with black blood, but the sting in my mouth hurts far less than the truth. A truth that jabs and coils inside me like bramble vines. I can't even take out two friendlies. In a fight with my dad's guys, I'm screwed.

"It's isn't?" I snap, hissy. I don't consider myself a catty person, but after being beaten up by the two nicest people in the history of niceness, I could give Gats a run for his money. "Please enlighten me." I roll my wrist in a flourish. Sarah shakes her head, blue-gray eyes soft in the light trickling under the door.

"You sound like Fallout."

My bloodied teeth are bared. "Don't compare me to that freak."

"Don't be a brat." Sarah glowers. "Freak."

My pulse pounds in my left temple. I made a mistake, saying that. We're all freaks here, and if Sarah was more anger-prone, I'm sure she'd have my teeth for calling Fallout that. Freaks. Spraypainted on monuments, printed on picket signs. They aren't supers, they're just...

"Jerk, I mean." My face goes hot. Her arms are crossed over a heaving chest and I rush to fill the silence before she uses it to scold me. "It's not him being a super that makes him evil and weird and scary." I spit into the bucket again and run my tongue over my incisors. They're wobbly. "I'm Sorry." And I am.

Sarah lifts her fingers to her face, inspecting her cuticles.She scratches one with her thumbnail. "Whatever. You're just grumpy we're here. Messing up your perfect high school life."

"Huh?" My voice is a squeak.

Her eyes are dull. "You're not an average high schooler."

"Yeah." Don't you think I know that? Do you think I'm stupid? Of course, I'm not an average high schooler. Average highschoolers don't watch their mothers get run through with swords. Average highschoolers don't live with an evil entity trying to take over their body. Average highschoolers don't get kidnapped every freaking Tuesday.