Stepping off the bottom rung of the ladder, I snapped my cave light on and clipped it to my belt. The light illuminated what looked like a perfectly normal stretch of sewer, from the water-stained brick of the walls to the unrecognizable sludge thinly coating the concrete floor. I drew my .45 and started forward, holding it in front of me in the classic television cop position. I was trying to keep my nerves in check. I knew what direction I was going, thanks to Sarah (and my compass). All I needed to do was get there without freaking out. And hopefully without encountering any more unwanted lizard-men. I’m not normally one to run from a fight, but if I could avoid this one, let’s just say I wouldn’t be sorry.
Fifteen minutes later, I’d walked probably half a mile into the dark beneath the city, descending gently all the while, and I hadn’t seen anything bigger than a rat. (Not that the rats weren’t plenty big. New York seems to take pride in trying to produce the largest rodents the world has ever seen. Fortunately, with size comes intelligence, and most of them took one look at my expression and scattered.) I was starting to think I was on a wild-goose chase when an air current wafted up from the depths and addressed my nose with an aroma that had absolutely no business being in the sewer:
The sweet scent of pine resin mixed with molasses.
Piyusha was somewhere ahead of me. Somewhere in the dark. Gritting my teeth, I adjusted my grip on the gunstock and kept walking.
The sticky-sweet smell of Piyusha’s blood got stronger as I descended, becoming harder to ignore with every step. Part of me took careful note of the strength of the smell, analytically trying to figure out whether Madhura blood contained some chemical compound that made it smell stronger as it dried. Maybe it worked as a deterrent to predators, or as an attractant for some natural prey? (Not that Madhura have much I’d call “prey” outside of donuts, Snickers bars, and cotton candy.) Lots of cryptids have blood with interesting qualities, at least from a human standpoint. Cuckoos bleed antibiotics; giant swamp bloodworms bleed a gummy slime that attracts damn near any predator you’d care to name; incubi and succubi bleed something that’s basically an open call to fornication. It’s all part of the barely-comprehensible circle of cryptid life. Disney it’s not, but it definitely keeps things interesting, especially when Mom forgets to label the plasma in her medical emergency kit.
It was easy to regard the smell of Madhura blood as a relief, given the sewer-stink alternatives … as long as I didn’t think too much about what the strength of the smell meant. If Piyusha had been human, losing this much blood would have killed her for sure. Not knowing much about Madhura physiology, I just had to hope she had more reserves than a human girl her size.
Hope died when my foot hit something soft. I looked down and met Piyusha’s staring, sightless eyes with something from the strange, empty country that sits between sorrow and disappointment. She was naked, with black runes sketched down the length of her body in what looked like it was probably Sharpie. It hurt my eyes if I tried too hard to focus on them. I holstered my gun before pulling my phone from my pocket, and whispered soft apologies as I took blurry digital photos of her corpse. I didn’t know enough about her culture to know if this was considered desecration, but I needed to document those runes. Maybe Dad could tell me what they meant. Whatever it was, it wasn’t anything good. Nothing written in Sharpie on a corpse ever is.
Once I was done with the unpleasant task of photographing Piyusha’s body, I tucked the phone away and knelt, beginning the even more gruesome task of examining her wounds. Whoever took her had slit her throat just below her jaw, covering the runes on her chest and collarbones with a gummy-looking veil of watery red blood. There wasn’t enough blood for that to have been the wound that killed her; she’d already been bled almost dry by that point, probably via the slashes running down the length of her forearms and calves. I just hoped she’d been numb before they cut out her heart. It was a small thing to hope for, given the obvious and undeniable violence of her death. It was the only thing I had left to hope.
Her expression was a mixture of terror and raw confusion, like she hadn’t been able to believe what was happening to her. I blinked back tears as I reached down and brushed her eyelids closed. There was still a faint, lingering warmth to her skin, but not much; she’d been dead for a while.
“I’m so sorry, Piyusha,” I whispered. “If I’d known this was going to happen, I wouldn’t have left you alone. I’m so, so sorry.”
She didn’t answer me. There are ghosts in the world—my Aunt Mary is one of them, and she’s a lot of fun at parties—but they almost never result from ritual sacrifices. That kind of death commits the soul to something else altogether, and doesn’t leave anything behind. I just had to hope that stopping the bastards who’d done this would free Piyusha to move on to whatever afterlife waits for the Madhura.
I straightened, wiping tears from my eyes with the back of one hand. I couldn’t move her alone, and I wasn’t going to make her brothers come down into the dark. Maybe Ryan could help. Tanuki are stronger than they look, even when they’re in their human forms; he’d probably be able to shift her without any real—
Something hissed ahead of me. My head snapped up, shoulders locking as I took in the vulnerability of my position. Retreat was probably the best approach in this situation. I could return to collect Piyusha’s body, with Ryan to back me up and, more importantly, I wouldn’t wind up dead in a sewer.
The hissing started up behind me, even louder than the hissing from the front, just before the hissing started from the sides. Okay. Maybe I wasn’t going to be retreating after all.
I didn’t want to open with gunfire in an enclosed space until I knew exactly how many opponents I was dealing with. Since I lost my telescoping baton the last time I tangled with the Sleestaks, I’d been reduced to sharp things. That’s okay. I like sharp things. I reached back and drew the machete from behind my backpack with one hand, drawing the flensing knife from my belt with the other. Nice, sharp, and capable of hitting bone in a single thrust if I was using it correctly. If I ever wanted to see daylight again, I’d damn well better use it right.
“Well?” I asked the hissing darkness. I couldn’t see anything in the area illuminated by my halogen light, but there was a lot of sewer I couldn’t see at all. They had the advantage. “Are we going to do this thing, or what?”
The darkness boiled, and out of it came the servitors. There was no posturing this time; they moved with the speed of striking cobras, coming too fast for me to count. This gang was at least as large as the one Dominic and I fought off together, and that had been a close victory. If I couldn’t find an escape route, the best I could hope for would be a swift and reasonably painless death. Piyusha’s body provided a mute, horrifying example of what the worst would be.
I launched myself into a high kick, my toe catching the lead servitor in the chin as I slashed out to either side with my respective weapons. I felt, rather than saw, the machete find a target, hacking deep into scaled flesh. The flensing knife hit nothing but air, but at least it drove back the attacker on that side, giving me a little more space in which to maneuver. None of the servitors went down. That would have been too much to hope for.
My lead foot finished its arc, hitting the floor just in front of the servitor I’d kicked. He looked dazed. I took advantage of the hole in his guard, bringing my other leg up and kneeing him firmly in the groin. Whatever mutagenic process created the servitors, some attributes of their mammalian origins remained intact; as soon as my knee hit his nuts, he doubled over, allowing me to bring my machete down across the back of his neck. He toppled.
I was still wrenching my machete free when a tail snaked out of the darkness behind me and wrapped noose-tight around my neck, jerking me backward. My hand lost its grip on the machete handle, leaving me with nothing but the flensing knife, which I didn’t dare start waving around my own throat. I dropped it instead, frantically clawing at the tail that was in the process of choking me. Air had suddenly
become a much more valuable commodity than weaponry.
My fingernails couldn’t find traction on the scales covering the servitor’s flesh. One of my nails caught and tore, the sharp flare of pain barely distracting from the all-encompassing pain in my neck. My vision was starting to blur around the edges as oxygen deprivation set in. I kicked and thrashed, but my feet didn’t make contact with anything. Suffocation is one of those things you just don’t learn how to fight through. Big problem, that.
A female voice spoke suddenly from up ahead in a language that I’d never heard before. It managed to be sibilant and fluid at the same time, like choral music written for snakes. The hissing around me stopped, replaced by confused clicking. The tail around my throat didn’t loosen. I continued to struggle, but I was losing strength, and without the leverage to break the hold, I wasn’t going to have much time to be curious about what was happening around me.
The woman spoke again, still in that strange snake-song language—but this time I recognized my name in amidst the trilling hisses. There was a distinct note of command to whatever she was saying. The clicking grew stronger, and the tail around my throat let go, sending me toppling to the ground. I managed to hit my knees and catch myself, preventing gravity from dropping me face-first onto Piyusha’s body. My right hand hit her shoulder, fingers sinking into her flesh. I shuddered and scrambled to my feet, grabbing my machete and wrenching it free before I turned to look toward the woman who’d ordered my release.
Candy was standing in the opening of a connecting tunnel, the fingers of her left hand pressed up against her cheek. She was staring at the servitors around me with enormous eyes glistening with tears. I’d never seen a dragon princess cry before.
“Candice?” I rasped, and looked quickly around me. There were at least a dozen servitors, all of them watching her with the focused intensity of a snake wondering whether or not to strike.
“Don’t make any sudden moves,” she said, following it with another sentence in that strange sibilant tongue. “I don’t know how much they actually understand me, and I can’t hold them forever. Just … start walking toward me, and try to look like you’re not worried.”
“Right.” Talking hurt my throat, so I stopped there. My flensing knife was on the ground near a servitor’s foot. I stooped to grab it, and the servitor hissed at me, causing me to flinch back. He didn’t make any hostile moves, so I kept moving, making my slow way toward Candy.
“Can you run?” she asked. One of the servitors took a step forward, and she snapped something harsh and hissing at him. He stopped before stepping back to his original position, looking oddly chagrined. I didn’t know reptiles could look chagrined.
“I think so,” I answered. “What are you saying to them?”
“I’m telling them they have to listen to me, because I speak the language of dragons,” she said, not taking her eyes off the servitors. “It’s an instinctive language. They weren’t born dragons, but they should get some of the language through the blood when they’re changed.”
“Should?”
“It’s not like anyone’s been able to test this for a long time, you know.” She cast a brief glance my way, an oddly bitter look in her eyes. “Dragons are extinct, remember?”
“I remember.” I slid the flensing knife into my belt, keeping hold of the machete. “Now what?”
“Now we run.” She grabbed my wrist, hissing a final command at the servitors before she turned and hauled me down the tunnel she’d emerged from. My lungs still hurt from my near-suffocation. I ran anyway.
Candy hauled me along for the length of the tunnel, until we emerged through a door in the wall into what was clearly a working subway tunnel. Rumbling in the distance made it sound like there was more than one dragon sleeping underneath the subway. Letting go of me, she pulled a smart phone from her pocket and glanced at the screen before motioning for me to follow her down the tracks.
“The next PATH train comes through in ten minutes,” she said, not looking back. “Hurry up if you don’t want to catch it.”
“Wait—what? I thought we were in the subway.”
“The PATH and the subway are different systems. Sometimes they connect. Both of them have trains.” Candy did look back this time, since that made it easier to look at me like I was an idiot. “Nine minutes.”
I hurried.
The Port Authority Trans-Hudson service runs trains between New York and New Jersey, under the Hudson River. They have a much more limited network than the main subway system, but they still get people where they’re going and, more importantly, their trains will still squash you flat as a bug on a windshield. On the plus side, because their service is more limited, we were less likely to wind up flattened by a train that wasn’t keeping to the schedule Candy had in her phone. That was something, anyway.
I stuck my machete back into my backpack, where I wouldn’t frighten any late morning commuters. I didn’t need to worry. The platform at the Christopher Street PATH station was deserted when Candy and I scrambled up onto it. She looked around, satisfying herself that we were alone, and dug into her pocket again, this time producing a MetroCard. “Here.”
“What—?”
“Everyone knows you think you’re too good to ride the subway, so I know you don’t have one, and you’re going to need it.” She started walking toward the exit gate, giving me a chance to really look at what she was wearing: designer yoga pants, black, a silk tank top, also black, running shoes, and a sleek ponytail. In New York, that’s the sort of thing you wear when you don’t want to be noticed.
“Hang on.” I hurried to catch up. “Were you following me?”
“Did you think I just stumbled over you down there? I’m not that into sewers.” Candy turned to glare at me. “Of course I was following you. You don’t get to tease us with the idea that there’s a dragon somewhere in New York and then go running off after it. We don’t trust you. You need to be watched.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” I asked.
“The Nest.” Candy shook her head. “You’re coming home with me. My sisters want to talk to you. They don’t believe me when I say that you’re not going to hurt the dragon.”
A bored-looking transit cop leaned against the fare gates, presumably to make sure we weren’t carrying any dead bodies or trying to break anything. The bruises forming around my throat didn’t even rate a change in his expression as he watched us exit the platform. I waited until we were up the first flight of stairs before asking, “So you saved me because you don’t trust me?”
“I saved you because you’re the best chance we have of actually finding the dragon. Whether I trust you or not is immaterial. He needs us.”
“For what?” I asked. The look she shot me made me immediately regret the question. Her expression was a complicated mixture of longing and anger and resentment, and I couldn’t even begin to unravel it.
“You’re coming to the Nest,” she said firmly, as we stepped off the last flight of stairs and into the tunnel connecting the PATH and subway systems. Grabbing my wrist again, she began hauling me along. “After that, you can ask me all the questions you want.”
I needed to tell Piyusha’s brothers that she was dead. I needed to tell my family that I was alive. I needed to go home and take care of my injuries before I went looking for more injuries to go with them. I needed to do a lot of things.
A dragon princess had saved me from the Sleestaks underneath Manhattan, and she’d done it by speaking to them in a language I didn’t even know existed. If I was going to find the dragon before Dominic did—and before the snake cult had time to do to more cryptid girls what they’d done to Piyusha and the others—I needed to understand why she’d been willing to do that. What were the dragon princesses to the dragons, really? We’d been asking that question for years, but it was always very academic, something to ponder when you didn’t really have anything else to do with your time. Suddenly that “very academic” question might be the answer to everythin
g.
“I hate the subway,” I muttered.
Candy cast a smugly vicious look in my direction. “I know,” she said.
For the second time in a single day, I started down into the darkness beneath New York City. At least this time, all I’d have to deal with were the people who rode the subway.
Nineteen
“Learning something new about the world in which we live is always a wonderful thing. Unless you’re learning what a wendigo looks like from the inside.”
–Evelyn Baker
The Meatpacking District, which is nicer than it sounds
WE POPPED OUT OF THE SUBWAY in the Meatpacking District, a rapidly-gentrifying neighborhood that used to be devoted almost entirely to, you guessed it, meat. (There are still working slaughterhouses there which is both a real blessing to the city’s cryptid community and something for the tourist bureau to work as industriously as possible on hiding. Somehow, “come to New York for all your goat-slaughtering needs” just doesn’t have the right ring to it.) The lunch crowd was out in force, clogging the sidewalks with tourists and well-dressed business people out to grab a quick bite before diving back into the fast-paced world of whatever kind of job you need to pay for real Manolo Blahnik patent leather heels. I swallowed my drool, resisting the urge to clock a yuppie and make off with her shoes. There wasn’t time to mug passersby for their clothes, no matter how much they were abusing them by grinding the heels against the pavement.
Not that I was one to talk. Candy was impeccable, as always, but my clothing was covered with an exciting mix of sewer slime and three kinds of blood—Neapolitan gore. I could probably pass Piyusha’s blood off as maple syrup, and the blood from the lizard-men as some sort of tar. My own blood couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than what it was, especially since several of my smaller wounds were still leaking. People recoiled as I passed, expressions reflecting everything from confusion to horror. I didn’t stop to reassure them. As long as I kept following Candy, who clearly knew where she was going, it wasn’t likely that anyone would ask if I needed help, and that was good; the last thing I needed at the moment was a Good Samaritan. For one thing, I was too damn tired. The events of the last few days were starting to catch up with me and, no matter what happened with the dragon princesses, I was still going to need to tell Piyusha’s brothers that she was dead.
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