“Seriously,” I said. “Throw me.”
Pax shook his head in pantomime disbelief. Then he knelt, forming a basket with his hands. I shoved the gun into the back of my dress, anchoring it as best I could, before running at him, my heels like gunshots on the polished stage floor.
My foot hit his hand and I was in the air, launched by all the force an eight-foot, four-hundred-pound Ukupani could generate.
Please realize what I’m doing, I thought. Please follow this lead.
I couldn’t blame them if they didn’t. I wouldn’t blame them if they didn’t, because I would be dead, and dead women aren’t usually big on slinging blame around—well, except for a few of my relatives.
The sound of me hitting the side of a giant snake from another dimension was surprisingly mundane, the same dry slap I used to hear when my father dropped a leg of lamb on the counter. I’d expected something more exciting. There wasn’t time to dwell on it: I had to scramble to get a handhold on its rough-edged scales, cutting up my fingers in the process. Another thing to worry about later. Right now, I had a giant snake to worry about.
Gunfire from the other side of the snake told me Alice had seen me move, and was reacting accordingly. Dominic was more of a knife man—a fact that was reinforced a few seconds later when the snake suddenly hissed and whipped its head around, so fast that I was sent flying.
This is it, I thought, as my body inscribed an arc through the air. This is how I die.
Malena dropped from the ceiling above me, wrapping her arms around my waist as she fell. The sudden added weight dragged me down, and we both landed, with a thump and a grunt, on the judges’ table. It collapsed underneath us, dropping us at the feet of a stunned Adrian.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I demanded, pulling away from Malena and staggering upright. “Run!” I kicked off my heels and followed my own advice—although sadly, I was going in the wrong direction. If Adrian was smart, he’d be heading for the door as fast as his legs could carry him. I was heading for the giant fucking snake.
At least I wasn’t doing it alone. My fall had put me on the side of the stage with Dominic and Alice. They’d pulled back to the wings, out of the snake’s direct line of sight, and they beckoned Malena and me forward as we ran.
Dominic broke cover when we got close, grabbing my wrist and dragging me the rest of the way to temporary safety. “Are you hurt?” he demanded.
“Later,” I said, pulling my hand away and drawing my gun for a second time. “We need to stop this thing.”
“How?” asked Brenna. She was farther back in the shadows, where I hadn’t noticed her at first. She looked terrified, and there was blood on the front of her previously spotless dress. It was the first time I’d seen her look anything less than perfectly groomed.
Oddly, seeing her shaken made me think of something. “Does Osana have a cellphone?”
Brenna blinked. “Yes.”
“Good. Call her. Tell her Clint’s our magic-user, and he needs to be stopped. There are so many dragons in this place, there shouldn’t be any problem restraining him.”
“Anders was the one who finished the ritual,” said Malena.
“Anyone could have finished it once it was that far along,” I said, unable to suppress the stab of betrayal accompanying the words. “Anders spends too much time dancing to have done the necessary research. Clint recruited him. Both of them.” Had he been trying to recruit me? I sort of thought he might have been.
“I’ll call her, but she’s not going to risk my sisters for this,” said Brenna.
“Tell her if she does, I will move heaven and earth to get you that baby.” It felt like I was bargaining with things that weren’t mine to give, and I’d feel bad about that later, when this was over and we were still alive. Right here, right now, I needed everything I could get.
Brenna’s eyes widened. “Got it,” she said, and retreated, presumably to make her call.
I turned to the others. “We have to stop it.”
Alice nodded grimly. Dominic just looked at me. Then, with no warning, he grabbed me by the shoulders, pulled me close, and kissed me.
Maybe it was the mortal peril, and maybe it was the adrenaline, but that might have been the best kiss I’d ever had.
When Dominic pulled away, his eyes were bright and his breath was coming a little too fast. “Do not die,” he said, and his words were a plea and a command, all at the same time. “Do whatever must be done, but do not die.”
“Same to you,” I whispered.
“This is fun and all, but let’s go see where on a giant snake we can stuff a grenade,” said Alice.
We turned.
The snake was still swaying, tongue flicking constantly. Anders had stopped painting with Lyra’s blood and moved to Clint’s side, both staring at the snake with expressions of proprietary satisfaction. This was their terror, their great accomplishment, and they were planning to enjoy it.
I still didn’t know if they could control it, and I wasn’t waiting around to find out. “The scales were rough but graspable; I think I could climb it, if nobody stabbed it while I was on the way up.”
“Gunshots seem to hurt it less, maybe because it’s so damn armored,” said Alice. “I can distract it without making it thrash. Then you see about feeding it something it won’t like.” She held out a grenade.
I took it and stuffed it down the front of my dress. It wasn’t like I had anyplace else to put it. “Great, let’s do that. Malena, think you can make it up with me?”
Malena stared at me like I’d just grown a second head. “Are all humans this suicidal, or are you a fringe case?”
“My mother always said I was special. Dominic—”
“I will help your grandmother. Do not die.”
I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my voice as I said, “Enough people are dead already. Now move.”
We moved.
I ran for the snake like I was being timed, leaping at the last moment and grabbing hold of the rough scales on the side of its body. Malena didn’t jump. She just slipped back into her quadruped form and swarmed up the snake, talons finding grips where I would have sworn there were none. I struggled to hold on, before realizing there was a better way.
“Malena!”
She knew. Immediately, she knew, and climbed back down, moving to cling to the snake next to me. I swung over to cling to her back, locking my left arm around her neck while I dug the grenade out with my right hand. Malena climbed.
I looked behind me. Dominic and Alice were on the stage, shooting at the great snake’s body as they ran around it. They were fast. It was faster. It tensed to strike, and then recoiled, nearly knocking us off. I twisted. There was Pax, still in his half-and-half form, burying his teeth in the snake’s side. It hissed like a steam engine getting ready to explode and tensed again. Alice and Dominic resumed their shooting. It was like a terrible game of whack-a-mole, and I found myself feeling almost bad for the snake. It hadn’t asked to come here. It was just an animal, doing what animals do, and we were doing our best to kill it.
At the same time, there was one thing the Covenant of St. George got right, all those years ago. When your choice was kill or die, kill was the only answer worth giving.
Malena climbed higher, moving from side to side to avoid the worst of the thrashing. I leaned close to her ear.
“When we get to the head, I’m going to climb off, and you’re going to run,” I said. “I’ll try to feed it the grenade.”
Malena grunted. Whether it was from exertion or because her face was currently too distorted to allow for human speech, I couldn’t tell.
“I’ll find my own way down,” I assured her. “It’ll be fine.”
This time, I didn’t need a translation for her grunts. Profanity is the universal language.
The snake thrashed a
nd squirmed beneath us, presenting a difficult climb as only a living thing truly could. I held on for dear life, until we had reached the head, and it was time to put my terrible, awful, no-good plan into effect.
Letting go of Malena was harder than I expected. I rolled onto the top of the snake’s skull, and it hissed, irritated by the fact that something was touching its head. It pulled back, nearly knocking me off. I grabbed the ridge over its left eye at the last second, anchoring myself.
If it started shaking, I was going to fly. That couldn’t happen.
“Hey, big guy,” I said, pulling the pin from my borrowed grenade. “How’s it hanging?”
The snake hissed. I let go of the eye, letting gravity pull me down the length of its nose. I was going to get one shot at this. If I missed, well. It wasn’t going to matter much to me, after that. It would matter to my family, and to everyone else the giant snake killed before someone took it down.
I fell.
The natural urge of the falling human is to claw at empty air, looking for purchase, some miraculous rescue from the force of gravity. I’ve been falling recreationally for most of my adult life. I did no such thing. Instead, I pulled my arm back and chucked the grenade into the snake’s open mouth before balling myself up to minimize my area of impact and giving myself over to the inevitable.
Fifteen feet was enough of a drop that I’d break an ankle if I tried for a normal landing. It was still short enough that I might be okay, if I got lucky about where I landed. I clung to that thought. I might be okay.
There was an explosion above me as the grenade went off, and warm wetness splattered over the world, marking the giant snake’s demise. That was a good thing. I had succeeded.
Then I hit the edge of the stage, and stopped thinking about anything but pain, even as the stage shook from the impact of the snake’s body, which fell beside me and mercifully not on top of me.
“Verity!” Dominic’s shout was loud and terrified.
I opened my eyes and pushed myself up on one hand, trying not to look as sick and disoriented as I felt. “Anybody get the number of that freight train?”
“You’re alive!” Dominic dropped to his knees, wrapping his arms around me and setting off a whole new cascade of exciting agony.
“Your ex-partner isn’t,” said Malena. I turned toward the sound of her voice. Her dress was shredded, but she was relatively clean, presumably because she’d been outside the blast radius when the grenade went off. She wrinkled her nose before continuing, “Snake landed on him. Asshole deserved it.”
“Clint!” I pulled away from Dominic, scrambling to my feet. Everything hurt. I had never let that stop me before. “Where is he?”
“Here.”
Alice sounded pleased with herself. As well she should have; she was standing over Clint’s body, tying his hands behind his back. She beamed when she saw me looking her way. “Hi, baby girl. I’m going to take this back to my home base with me, if that’s okay. I have some friends who have strong opinions about pulling endangered super-snakes through the walls of the world.”
I blinked. “Oh. Okay.”
Pax came trotting up. “We have a problem.”
“Of course we have a problem. Is there ever a time when we don’t have a problem?” I looked at him. “What’s the problem?”
His face was a grim mask, streaked with blood and lacerated where he’d been sliced by the snake’s scales. “We’ve been on the air this whole time.”
Slowly, I turned to the nearest camera. The red light was on. The red light had never gone off.
“Oh,” I said.
“We need to get out of here,” said Malena.
“Too late,” I said. Dominic and Alice had both appeared on camera. Even if the Covenant didn’t include any fans, someone would put this on the Internet. Someone would already have put this on the Internet. The Covenant would watch. They would see.
They would know we were still out there.
As if in a dream, I walked toward the camera, reaching up with one hand to pull my wig off. It was so sodden with blood that it felt like a dead animal in my hand. I dropped it and kept walking.
Then the red light was right in front of me, and I was looking straight into the lens. I pulled the gun from the back of my dress.
“My name is Verity Price,” I said, enunciating each word clearly and distinctly. “This is my continent. Stay the hell out.”
The sound of my gunshot was somehow softer than the sound of the lens shattering.
Silence fell.
Epilogue
“Everything changes.”
—Frances Brown
A cavern underneath Manhattan, surrounded by dragons
Two weeks later
OSANA AND CANDY WERE LOCKED deep in negotiations, the members of their respective Nests milling around them. The L.A. dragons were trying to act like they weren’t awed and speechless in William’s presence, while the Manhattan dragons were trying to act like they weren’t prepared to commit murder to protect their husband. Good times all around. I was sticking close to William, staying out of the way and observing the chaos without involving myself in matters that didn’t involve me.
“This is really okay with you?” I asked, for what must have been the tenth time.
William chuckled. “Yes,” he said, in a cultured English accent that would have sounded perfectly reasonable coming out of a human man, but was a little weird coming from a lizard the size of a Greyhound bus. “This is as it has always been for us. I was sold shortly after I was hatched, to a Nest capable of sustaining me. Our ways may seem odd to you, but I assure you, they’ve worked for a long time.”
“I believe you,” I said. I was leaning against the cavern wall, trying to look casual and hide how much the descent had taken out of me. I was still healing after my fall from the giant snake. I’d managed to crack my pelvis when I hit, in addition to leaving bruises along the length of my legs and hips. It was a good thing the rest of the season had been canceled after our little “special effects display.” There was no way I would have been able to dance.
Adrian was in a lot of trouble with the network, since we’d violated more than a few FCC rules during the fight—but the show’s ratings had been spectacular, and he was going to be all right. He was a human cockroach. He always found a way to come out ahead.
“Are you well, Miss Price?”
“As well as I’m going to get.” I closed my eyes.
Malena and Pax had gone home to their respective families, melting back into the therianthrope communities they belonged to. Pax would be fine. He could live in the water until all this blew over. I was more concerned about Malena, but she’d assured me she’d be okay, and I was choosing to believe her. She had my number if things got bad.
As for Clint . . . Alice had taken him with her when she went back to whatever dimension she called “home” in between trips, and something in her eyes had told me that I didn’t want to ask for any details about what was going to happen to him there.
I had my own problems. My parents had been understanding about my spur of the moment decision to essentially declare war on the Covenant. That didn’t mean they knew what was going to happen next. Dominic and I were in New York to make introductions between the two groups of dragons, and so we could check in with my contacts, warning them that trouble might be coming, and setting up a network for notifications in case the Covenant came looking.
My Valerie ID was well and truly blown. I hadn’t even been able to go to Lyra’s funeral, since she’d never officially met “Verity Price,” and my showing my face in public could have brought the Covenant down on my head. I’d had to leave her to be buried without me, and could only hope she was at peace. Aunt Mary hadn’t been able to find any ghosts in the theater, so there was that. Maybe Lyra had been able to move on.
Maybe.
r /> As for Dominic . . . a hand touched my shoulder. I opened my eyes and offered him a weary smile. “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know it would take this long.”
“It will take as long as it takes,” he said. “Kitty sends her regards, and has agreed to host a meeting tonight at her club. I told her we’d be there.”
“Of course we will.” I pushed myself away from the wall, only wincing a little. “This is our job.”
I’d warned the Covenant to stay out of North America, and I’d meant every word. I glanced at the sea of dragons around us, intelligent cryptids who only wanted to be allowed to live their lives in peace. Humans were a much greater danger. Humans summoned snake gods and killed their own kind. Cryptids just wanted to go a little longer without becoming extinct.
If the Covenant came here, if they pushed the issue, we’d fight. And we’d win. That was the only acceptable outcome for this particular competition.
Dominic smiled at me wryly as he slipped an arm around my waist.
“Yes,” he said. “I suppose it is.”
Price Family Field Guide to the Cryptids of North America
Updated and Expanded Edition
Aeslin mice (Apodemus sapiens). Sapient, rodentlike cryptids which present as near-identical to noncryptid field mice. Aeslin mice crave religion, and will attach themselves to “divine figures” selected virtually at random when a new colony is created. They possess perfect recall; each colony maintains a detailed oral history going back to its inception. Origins unknown.
Basilisk (Procompsognathus basilisk). Venomous, feathered saurians approximately the size of a large chicken. This would be bad enough, but thanks to a quirk of evolution, the gaze of a basilisk causes petrification, turning living flesh to stone. Basilisks are not native to North America, but were imported as game animals. By idiots.