The room at the end of the hall seemed designed to serve as a combination kitchen and dining area, and was larger than the living room at my sublet. Sunil was at the stove, sautéing something in what smelled like more honey. He looked up when we entered. Seeing the look on Rochak’s face, his own face fell, expression fading by inches from mere worry into something utterly empty of emotion.
“Piyusha’s dead, isn’t she?” he asked.
Unable to find the words to answer him, I nodded.
“What happened? Where is she?” His voice was even blanker than his expression, as flat as day-old soda.
“She’s still underground where I found her,” I said, once I could force myself to speak. It was hard to make myself look at him, rather than staring off at some point in the distance—some point that wouldn’t look at me with accusing eyes. “I found her shortly after I went down. I’m … I’m sorry.”
“You just left her there?” asked Rochak incredulously. “You found our sister, and then you just left her? What kind of a monster are you?”
“Rochak, be nice,” said Sunil.
“Why? So they won’t kill us, too?” Rochak glared, hands balling into fists as he looked from me to Dominic and back again. “How dare you leave her behind?”
“I left her behind because I thought you’d like to know what happened to her, instead of sitting here forever wondering if she was going to come home.” I shook my head. “The people that took your sister, they’re … they’re not good people, and she wasn’t the first.”
“We knew that,” snapped Rochak.
“Well, they apparently knew that somebody might come looking for her, because they left guards with her body.” The two Madhura were silent. “Have either of you ever heard the dragon princesses mention something called a ‘servitor’?”
“I … I don’t believe so,” said Sunil, a note of caution creeping into the emptiness of his voice. Rochak glanced at him with clear alarm. Sunil didn’t acknowledge the look as he continued, slowly, “The term isn’t familiar.”
“Your brother seems to recognize it.” I focused on Rochak. “What do you know?”
“Nothing! I—nothing.” Rochak looked away. “It’s not right to leave her down there. We need to recover her. See that she has a proper burial.”
“Which will be easier if we know what’s going to try to eat us when we go down to bring her back for you,” I said. “What do you know?”
“I—”
“It wasn’t the dragon princesses,” said Sunil. All three of us turned in his direction, Rochak looking relieved by his brother’s decision to speak up. “There were some men here about a week ago. Human men. Piyusha waited on their table; she said they were very dismissive of her service, called her a ‘servitor.’ At the time, we thought it was just general unpleasantness. I told her to pay it no heed. People have been casually nasty ever since we moved here.”
“From India?” asked Dominic.
Sunil looked at him like he was an idiot. “From San Jose. Do we sound like we’re from India?”
Dominic glanced in my direction, clearly startled. Apparently, the idea of cryptids being natural-born citizens of a country their species didn’t originate in had never crossed his mind. “I see,” he said.
I kept my attention focused on Sunil. “What did these men look like? And if they were just men, why so worried?”
“Like businessmen. They were middle-aged, they wore suits. They ordered gingerbread, but didn’t eat it. As for my concern … they were here. They knew to come here, and we had no idea that we should be stopping them.” He frowned slowly. “They were servitors?”
“No. But I think they may be controlling the servitors.” If the men knew enough about cryptids to be trying to wake a dragon, they’d probably know how to identify the more common humanoid species. You can tell a Madhura by the sweet smell they use to mark their territory … or, if they’re confusing their territory markers by working in a dessert café, by the taste of their baking. Relief washed over me. “They scouted out your sister a long time before Dominic and I showed up here.”
“Wait.” Sunil raised a hand. “This is the man from the Covenant?”
“She brought him with her, and vouched for his behavior,” said Rochak.
“No harm will come from my hand to anyone in this house.” Dominic’s statement was as abrupt as it was unexpected. I jerked my head around, openly gaping at him. He met my eyes without flinching. “I have made no reports of your existence to the Covenant, and no such reports will be made. I am truly, deeply sorry for your loss. Your sister was a lovely woman. She deserved better.”
You could have knocked me over with a feather. “So, uh,” I said, trying to get my equilibrium back. “I’ll go back down and try to get your sister’s body from the servitors just as soon as I can. Please don’t try to recover her on your own. It’s not safe.”
Just when I thought Dominic couldn’t surprise me further, he managed it. “I’ll bring her back here,” he said. Now all three of us were staring at him. Looking faintly abashed, he said, “It is the least I can do for all the trouble that we have caused you.”
Sunil was the first to recover. “That’s very kind,” he said. “Please don’t feel the need to put yourself out on our account. Your offer is very generous, but my family’s means are small. We can’t afford to pay our debt to you.”
“You misunderstand,” said Dominic gravely. “This is my attempt to begin paying the Covenant’s debt to you.”
There wasn’t anything to say after that. We just stared.
Sunil and Rochak escorted us from the café with a speed that would have been insulting, if they hadn’t just lost a sibling and if I weren’t traveling in the company of a man from the Covenant. They pressed sacks of fresh-baked gingerbread into our hands before closing the door behind us. The characteristic snap of the deadbolt clicking home made it plain that we weren’t going to be invited back inside any time soon.
I shifted my gingerbread to my left hand and grabbed Dominic’s elbow with my right, tugging him down the sidewalk to the alleyway behind the Chinese deli where I’d first caught Piyusha’s scent. It wasn’t a pleasant place to have a conversation, but that was sort of the point; it was disgusting enough to verge on private. There hadn’t even been any homeless people there before, probably because they had a better class of alleys to hang around in.
Perhaps sensing my intent, Dominic allowed himself to be pulled along, shifting his own gingerbread to his off hand in order to make it easier for me. Once we were halfway down the alleyway—far enough from the street on either side that we weren’t likely to be stumbled over—I let go and turned to face him, saying, “Pardon my French, but what the hell was that?”
He raised his eyebrows. “What the hell was what, exactly? There’s been a great deal of ‘that’ today for you to be asking about, and it would be easier to explain if I knew which specific part you meant.”
“The part where you just offered to help a cryptid family.” And promised them, in so many words, that he wouldn’t tell the Covenant about them. That was the part that was really giving me a headache.
“Is it so difficult to believe that I might have had a change of heart?” he asked quietly.
“After all that training you’ve been bragging about since you snared me? Yeah, it sort of is. It’s like watching a classical ballroom dancer start clogging. You can see it, but that doesn’t mean you can actually believe it.”
“I … I’m sorry.” The expression in his dark eyes made him look like the world’s biggest, most heavily-armed puppy. “It’s true that my training has been focused primarily on the more dangerous aspects of the cryptid world—”
“Exactly my point.”
“—and I doubt I’ll ever share your passion for preserving them without question or restraint, but Verity, I’m not blind. These people…” He hesitated, clearly at a loss for words before he continued, “These people are people. Those men were hurt by
the death of their sister. When your cousin made me take her to get your coffee, she didn’t remember to pay, but she remembered to tip, she smiled and was pleasant to the barista, she was trying. I’m not certain what these people are. It’s become increasingly difficult to view them as monsters.”
I blinked, twice, before doing something I’d expected never to do again. Stepping forward, I leaned up onto the toes of my sneakers, and kissed him. Dominic slipped his arm around my waist, providing the stability he needed to lean into me without toppling over. The alley around us smelled terrible. Rats rustled in the garbage lining the walls, and the scum on the pavement made the sewers look like a pleasant vacation spot. It was still one of the best kisses of my life, and when Dominic pulled away, it left me gasping.
“What was that for?” he asked, taking his arm from around my waist.
I smiled a little. “Having a learning curve.”
“Your family still betrayed our sacred order.”
“I can live with that.”
“The servitors are still horrific perversions of nature.”
“I can live with that, too. We’ll have to agree to disagree on the dragon, but hey. Maybe the two of you will get along.”
“I sincerely doubt that,” said Dominic slowly.
“I guess we’ll find out.” I looked up, gauging the time by the narrow strip of sky visible between the buildings. “We’re going to need to do our body recovery fast, or I’m going to be late for work.”
“Your place of employment, is it … I mean, is that where you…” He gestured vaguely in the air, indicating either an impractically short skirt or the sudden uncontrollable need to make jazz hands.
“Yeah, that’s where I got the uniform I was wearing the night you caught me.” I shrugged. “It’s a strip club—and no,” I added, seeing his semi-stricken expression, “I don’t strip. I’m generally a no-nudity zone.”
A small smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “Really.”
“Unless the mice have a ritual that demands I get naked, really.” His smile vanished, replaced by almost comic uncertainty. Even given the gravity of our overall situation, I had to laugh. “God, Dominic, I was kidding. The mice don’t dictate my state of undress. The uniform is how all the cocktail waitresses have to dress. It helps us keep our tips up, and you’d be amazed by how many weapons I can fit under that skimpy little outfit.”
“I look forward to performing a census, but you needn’t worry about timeliness. I can retrieve Piyusha on my own.”
I blinked. “Are you sure? There were a lot more servitors down there with her.”
“I’m sure. You go and do what must be done. I’ll return Piyusha to her family, and then—where should I meet you?”
“I’m not sure what time I’ll be able to get out of my shift; feel free to just head back to the apartment. Sarah will either ignore you completely or kick your ass at chess, and either way, she’ll be happy to keep you busy until I get home.” I thrust my bag of gingerbread at him. “Take this with you. To the apartment, not into the sewers, if you can help it. The fastest way to the hearts of my mice is through their tiny, overactive stomachs.”
“I’ll take it to your apartment before I descend,” he said. “You’re sure you’ll be all right?”
“I’m a Price girl, remember? We’re like the antithesis of damsels in distress. Besides, I’m spending the evening at a strip club, waiting on drunk businessmen and frat boys who don’t know how to pick a watering hole.” I flashed a smile. “I’ll not only be perfectly safe, I may get paid for breaking a few fingers.”
“Good,” he said, and kissed me again. It was a gesture that was becoming pleasantly familiar. He was getting seriously better at it, too. I’d be happy to help him get a lot more practice. “I intend to hold you to that.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said flippantly. “I’m the bad thing that happens to other people.”
Sometimes I think the universe listens for lines like that one, so that it can punish the people who use them. At that particular moment in time, standing in a smelly, deserted alley with a hot Covenant boy and two bags full of the world’s best gingerbread, I found it difficult to care.
That was my first mistake.
Twenty-two
“Never tell anyone to be careful, never ask what that noise was, and for the love of God, never, ever say that you’ll be right back.”
–Evelyn Baker
The roof of Dave’s Fish and Strips, a club for discerning gentlemen, only ten minutes late for work
I HIT THE ROOF OF THE STRIP CLUB at a speed that probably qualified me for the free running Olympic trials. I slowed myself down by using the lip around the edge of the roof as a sort of high-speed balance beam, finally hopping down when I was sure I wouldn’t twist an ankle doing it. All the muscles in my legs were complaining in that happy “feeling the burn” way that meant I’d be able to get through my shift without feeling the need to shove my foot up someone’s ass, largely because I wouldn’t feel like lifting my feet that far off the floor. The rooftop door was unlocked. I opened it and went inside.
Candy and Istas were in the locker room when I arrived. Istas stood in front of the mirror making the final adjustments to her coquettish pigtails. Watching a waheela try to play the Gothic Lolita is so wrong on so many levels that I immediately skipped to Candy, who was involved in the much less worrisome process of applying sparkly pink lip gloss. “Hey, guys,” I said, heading for my locker. “Sorry I’m late.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Candy, flashing me a quick, stiff-looking smile. Guess Mae West told her to play nice.
Istas grunted. All things considered, that was probably the friendlier and more sincere of the greetings. Waheela are solitary creatures, coming into the company of others only when they absolutely have to, for things like reproduction and paying the cable bill. I’ve never been able to figure out what evolutionary advantage they got from being able to turn into humanoid bipeds, since their default big-ass wolf-bear shapes—or, as I like to call them, “please God don’t eat me”—are a lot better suited to their natural habitat in Northern Canada. In her human form, Istas was a cute and curvy Inuit girl with slightly too-sharp teeth and a tendency to talk to people’s jugulars. If she was just grunting, not attacking, she was in a good mood.
“Carol already on the floor?” I hooked open my locker, pulling out my uniform top before hauling my shirt off over my head.
“She called in sick,” said Candy.
I paused in the process of unfastening my jeans. As far as I knew, Carol was unmarried, and lived alone. “Did she actually call in, or did she just not show up?”
Candy shrugged to show her total lack of concern for such nonfinancial niceties. Swearing under my breath, I went back to getting changed. Dave didn’t like the waitresses to appear in the club out of uniform (he said it sent a mixed message; I was pretty sure he just hated not being able to see our tits), and I needed to go into the club if I wanted to find Ryan. He took his duties as bouncer and protector of us girls seriously. I was hoping that would extend to pulling Carol’s emergency contact information and heading over to check on her. Just in case. If she was really sick, she’d probably appreciate some chicken soup and maybe some pinkie mice for her hair. If she wasn’t…
I already felt lousy for going to work while Dominic—a man from the Covenant, for God’s sake—retrieved Piyusha’s body from its resting place beneath the city streets. If Carol had been taken because I didn’t think to warn her about the goddamn snake cult, I was never going to forgive myself.
Twisting my hair roughly into a tangled bun, I secured it with a hair pick that could double as a stiletto and went stomping toward the front of the club. Time to dispatch the tanuki.
Ryan was exactly where I expected him to be this early in the evening: standing by the register chatting with Angel, who was wiping down the bar and trying to hear him over the thumping bass of the current dancer’s personal soundtrack. Sh
e saw me coming before Ryan did. Tucking the rag into her pocket, she straightened up and looked at me anxiously. Once I was in earshot, she asked, “Well, Very? What’s the news?”
“Verity!” Ryan smiled, displaying outsized canines. They were at half-mast; he was in good control of his therianthropy, which was a good thing if I was about to send him looking for Carol. “I wasn’t sure you were going to come in tonight. Candy was saying you’d been out to visit the Nest today.”
I paused to eye his expression. He looked sincere—no surprise there, Ryan always looked sincere—and like he had no idea that a dragon princess wouldn’t just decide to have a Price girl over on a social call. Pushing my misgivings aside, I said, “It’s been one hell of a week, and it’s not getting any better. In the locker room, Candy said Carol was out sick tonight. Do you know if she actually called in to say she wouldn’t be coming?”
“She didn’t,” said Angel. “Dave was pissed when she didn’t show, especially since we’d all been figuring you’d be out. Candy already gouged him for a promise of overtime.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.” I turned to Ryan. “You need to go to Carol’s apartment. You need to leave right now, and you need to go as fast as you can.”
“What’s going on?”
“You know how cryptid girls have been disappearing? Well, there’s a snake cult under the city, and I’m pretty sure they’re sacrificing them to a dragon in order to try waking it up. Not that it cares, since, well, dragons, not all that into the eating of sentient creatures and are you two even listening to me or are you too busy staring like I just grew a second head?” I touched my shoulder automatically. No extra head greeted me. After the week I’d been having, that was something of a relief.
“Dragons are extinct, Verity,” said Ryan.
“And humans don’t fraternize with cryptids, but there’s Angel, and here I am, and somewhere under this city there are a bunch of assholes feeding cryptid girls to a sleeping dragon because they think it’s the way to achieve ultimate cosmic power. Or something like that. I don’t know—I haven’t found the snake cult yet and, when I do, they can explain themselves to me during the pauses.”
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