Out the window. Grabbing the nearest waitress by the shoulder, I gasped, saying with what I hoped was believable panic, “I wait tables at Dave’s. I called in sick tonight, and the boss’ asshole assistant just walked in. Is there another way out of here?”
Her initial irritation died when I invoked waitress solidarity. “The fire escape’s behind the DJ,” she said. “If he says anything, tell him Liz sent you.”
“Thank you, thank you!” I let her go and turned to run for the DJ. If I hurried, I just might make it before things got bloody.
If there was going to be gore, I wanted it on my own terms.
The DJ was so caught up in his groove that he never even looked up as I ran past him, shouldered open the fire escape door, and slipped out into the hot Manhattan night. Since the club was below street level, the fire escape was actually a steel stairway leading up to the street behind the club, which was narrow and grubby enough to have been considered an alley anywhere else in the world. Manhattan is not a city with space to spare.
I grabbed the rail and pulled myself along, careful to keep my heels from hitting the steps. Stealth isn’t one of my strong suits, but it has its place. Not that I needed to try all that hard; the music inside was loud enough that it was thumping through the wall, providing the outside world with a skeletal downbeat.
The street behind the club ran between two other, larger streets. As I watched, the ghoul came walking along the sidewalk, hand in hand with his date-slash-dinner. I tensed, ready to run after them. I never had the opportunity. The woman tugged at the ghoul’s arm, possibly in reaction to something he said, and started leading him toward the street where I was waiting.
It’s always nice when the thing you’re hunting decides to walk straight into an ambush. I waited for them to get close enough that he wouldn’t be able to run without me catching him. Then I stomped up the steps, my earlier attempts at stealth abandoned in favor of making as much noise as possible. “There you are, you pig!” I shouted, leveling a finger at his chest. “Cindy told me she saw you here, but I thought she was just fucking around with me again. How dare you?!”
The ghoul stared at me with gratifying surprise. His nightly order of club kid takeout, on the other hand, stepped away from him like he’d been set on fire. That wasn’t a bad idea. Too bad I didn’t have any matches. “You have a girlfriend?” she demanded, ignoring me in favor of glaring at the ghoul.
“Girlfriend?” I echoed, planting my hands on my hips. “Honey, he’s married.”
That was all I had to say. “You asshole,” she said witheringly, and slapped him hard across the face before turning to stalk away, all drunken indignation. She’d be back on the dance floor within ten minutes, hunting for a guy who wasn’t cheating on someone. I know the type. Hell, I’ve been the type, when I wasn’t working.
The ghoul watched her go, his shocked expression transforming slowly into anger. He swung his head around to face me, eyes narrowed. “You just made a big mistake, little girl. I wasn’t in the mood for blonde tonight.”
“Aw, too bad for you.” I simpered, tucking my hands behind me in a cutesy-pie gesture that concealed the act of drawing the knives from the back panel of my bustier. “See, this is how things are going to work tonight. I’m going to tell you to get out of town, just as fast as you can, and you’re going to agree with me. Won’t that be fun?”
“I have a better idea,” said the ghoul, and grinned. It was a horrible sight. Most of his teeth were blackened and broken, some all the way down to the gum line. He’d grow a new set in pretty short order—ghouls are like sharks, they’re constantly teething—but for the moment, he was basically gumming his victims to death. Not a good way to go. “I’m going to make sure there’s not enough of your body left for your family to identify.”
“I bet you say that to all the girls.” Not the most original line in the world, but originality is secondary to not getting eaten when I’m in the field. I pulled my hands from behind my back and fell into a relaxed starting position, knives ready for throwing. “Come on, big guy. Let’s dance.”
A flicker of consternation crossed his face as he took in my reaction. Then it faded, and he lunged.
You’d think the predators of the world would eventually learn that it’s not a good idea to charge the sort of person who brings throwing knives to a dance club. Then again, if they were smart enough for that, they’d be smart enough to figure out that eating humans is a bad idea. You need meat, go to a steakhouse. You need it raw, go for sushi. But if you think your local nightclub is the place to go for an easy meal, you’d better be ready to pay for it. My first knife caught him in the forearm while he was in mid-lunge. My second knife killed what little was left of his forward momentum when it hit the inside of his leg, just above his left knee.
He went down hard.
Ghouls are badass hunters when all they’re dealing with is drunk, unarmed party girls, but they’re no match for somebody who knows what she’s doing. He was still trying to decide whether he wanted to clutch his knee, his arm, or both when I delivered a hard kick to his ribs, rolling him onto his back. I promptly placed one foot on his breastbone, keeping him there.
“Hi,” I said, pulling the gun from my thigh holster and aiming it at his face. “We haven’t been properly introduced. I’m Verity, and you’re leaving.”
“What are you, Covenant?” he snarled.
“Worse,” I said, pressing my weight down a bit harder on his chest. He moaned as my steel-tipped heel bit into his skin. “I’m a Price. You’re interfering with my ecosystem. Two choices, buddy. Out of the city and off the humanitarian diet, or down into the sewers to feed the mole people. What’s your preference?”
Naturally, he chose to live another day, swearing he’d never touch living human flesh again. We’d never tangled with him before, so the family code said I had to let him off with a stern warning. If we heard about him so much as thinking the words “long pork” ever again, we’d come down on him so hard he’d barely have time to shit himself before he shuffled off this mortal coil. I was feeling generous, and he hadn’t actually managed to bleed on me. I told him he had forty-eight hours to get out of New York City entirely.
My name is Verity Price. I’m a cryptozoologist. And this is why I can never get a goddamn date on a Saturday night.
Two
“There’s no such thing as a normal life. Some lives are just more interesting than others, and we shouldn’t judge people for being boring.”
—Evelyn Price
A semilegal sublet in Greenwich Village, the next morning
THE SOUND OF CHEERING filtered through the bedroom wall and across the edges of my consciousness, disrupting a really pleasant dream about teaching Christian Bale to dance the samba. Groaning, I rolled over and pulled the pillow over my head. The cheering didn’t stop.
“Oh, come on,” I muttered, trying to burrow into the mattress. All I wanted was ten more minutes. Just ten more minutes, and the chance to finish teaching Christian where I wanted him to put his hands…
The cheers rose to a fever pitch, becoming impossible to ignore. I yanked my head out from under the pillow, pushing myself onto my elbows as I shouted, “If you make me come out there, you’re gonna be—”
Something smashed.
“—sorry.” I let myself fall back to the mattress, going as flat as I could. Becoming one with the bed didn’t help. “It’ll be fine, Very,” I said, imitating Mom’s perpetually upbeat tone. “It’s just a splinter colony. You’ll barely even know they’re in the apartment. Besides, you know they love you. How are they going to feel if you go off and abandon them?”
Another smash. Another cheer. I sighed, dropping back into my own voice as I answered myself, “Probably better than I feel about them breaking all the dishes.”
The clock on the bedside table said it was almost seven o’clock in the evening; I’d been in bed less than six hours, and I was definitely feeling it. Three hours of club crawling, t
he fight with the ghoul, and two more hours at the club before hitting the studio for my morning workout and rumba class had taken its toll, leaving me with the strong desire to stuff wads of cotton in my ears and try to steal a few more hours of sleep.
I might have done it, too, if there’d been any point. It was almost seven; I had to be at work by nine. That’ll teach me to swap shifts with Kitty.
I slid out of bed and started for the hall. “Somebody’s dying for this,” I announced to anyone who might be listening. The cheering from the other room continued. No one was listening.
Finding a decent apartment in Greenwich Village on a ballroom dancer-slash-cocktail waitress’ salary seemed like an impossible dream until Mom got involved. She pulled some strings and found a Sasquatch who was preparing to go on a year’s vacation with some Canadian cousins. The Sasquatch had been open to the idea of subletting as long as I promised to get the bathroom plumbing fixed and didn’t touch her collection of Precious Moments figurines. As if I’d want to?
Still, it was a nice apartment in a good location for six hundred a month plus utilities, and that’s an occurrence about as common in New York City as a herd of unicorns—maybe slightly rarer. Fixing the bathroom wasn’t hard, even if I’m still having nightmares about the hairballs the plumber snaked out of the shower drain. Protecting the breakables required boxing them up and storing them in the very back of the bedroom closet, where threats, bribery, and begging would hopefully be enough to keep grabby little paws at bay.
You could’ve said no, I told myself, and stepped around the hall corner into the kitchen.
Another great cheer arose.
“HAIL THE COMING OF THE ARBOREAL PRIESTESS!”
For what felt like the tenth time since the cheering started, I groaned.
A stranger stepping into the apartment’s tiny, nigh-claustrophobic kitchen would probably have stepped right back out again. A stranger with rodent-centric phobias would probably have skipped stepping in favor of running screaming out of the apartment, because the counters on both sides of the room were overflowing with a teeming sea of furry, multicolored bodies. Mice.
Technically mice, anyway, or at least close enough for taxonomical work. One could argue that most household rodents don’t wear tattered tribal clothing made from scraps of fur and fabric. One could argue further that most household rodents don’t wave weapons jubilantly over their heads when people come into the room. As far as I’m concerned, all that proves is a lack of imagination on the part of most household rodents.
Not even a sea of cheering mice could keep me from noticing the broken glass and gummy bears covering the kitchen floor. “Didn’t we talk about this?”
“HAIL!”
“That isn’t an answer.” I planted my hands on my hips. “Was there a reason for shoving the gummy bears off the counter? Did they tell you they were suicidal? On second thought,” I raised a hand, palm out, “don’t answer that. If the candy is talking, I don’t want to know.”
“The container blocked the Sacred Route of Celebration!” announced one of the junior priests. The bright blue streaks dyed in the fur on his head marked him as a modernist, a member of the class of priests who believed in updating the Teachings to fit the new generation. Sadly, that often translated to “breaking things.” “It required adjustment!”
“Yeah, well, ‘adjustment’ isn’t supposed to wake me up.” I eyed the refrigerator with longing. A sea of broken glass separated us, and I wasn’t sure where I’d left my shoes. Probably under the bed again… “I thought there weren’t any celebrations today.”
“There are no annual celebrations today, Priestess,” replied a tawny-furred female in full regalia. At least she had the good grace to sound apologetic. “Today’s celebration is held every eight years, to mark the union of the Noisy Priestess to the God of Things That It Is Almost Certainly Better Not to Be Aware Of.”
“Oh, crap.” I slumped against the doorframe, mashing the heels of my hands into my eyes. It didn’t make the mice shut up. “You’re celebrating Grandma and Grandpa getting together, aren’t you?”
“HAIL!” confirmed the mice.
“Great.”
Back home, Mom keeps a master calendar that details the religious observances of the Aeslin mice, with every feast, festival, celebration, and day of mourning carefully annotated. I never understood why she bothered. Living with my own splinter colony has given me perspective. It’s not anal retentiveness that fuels Mom’s calendar. It’s self-preservation.
Aeslin mice can make anything—anything—into a religious observation, and once they do, they cling to it for as long as the colony survives. The main body of the current colony has been with my family for seven generations. Individual Aeslin come and go, but the memory of the colony is very, very long.
“How long does this particular celebration last?” I asked, already afraid of the answer.
“Only the length of time between the leaving of the family home and the arrival at the graveyard, Priestess,” said the tawny mouse.
“You mean the family home back in Michigan?”
“Yes, Priestess.”
“Jesus.” That could mean anything between “an hour” and “three days.” Anything longer than three days is usually a festival instead of a celebration, but that’s not a hard rule. I straightened up. “Here’s what we’re going to do.” The Aeslin watched with their customary attentiveness, a tiny congregation of furry bodies hanging on my every word. It would have been creepy if I hadn’t been so used to it. “I’m going to take a shower.”
“Hail the shower!”
“When I get back, you’re going to have all this glass cleaned up, because if I don’t get something to eat before I go to work, I’m going to look into getting a cat. And not,” I held up my hand again, “because I want to provide meat for the next feast. Understand?”
“Yes, Priestess,” said the blue-streaked mouse, echoed by a half dozen others. That would have to be enough. I was powerless to stop the celebration—nothing short of nuclear war can stop an Aeslin religious observance once it starts—but they understand the need to keep their Priestesses placated. They’d have the kitchen floor clean by the time I got back.
Life as the chosen religious figure for a colony of cryptid mice can be a lot of things, but it’s definitely never boring.
The apartment’s bathroom made the kitchen look spacious, and made me deeply grateful for the fact that I possess the sort of flexibility only achieved through years of hard physical training. I’m probably one of the few people in the world who doesn’t have a problem showering while standing on one leg and pointing the toes of my other leg toward the ceiling. Drying off still required straddling the edge of the half-sized tub and praying I wouldn’t slip. The entire process was enough to make a girl dream of human dry cleaning, and wonder how in the hell the apartment’s usual super-sized occupant ever managed to fit into the stall.
The steam fogging the mirror kept me from needing to face the bags under my eyes until it was time to apply enough foundation to keep me from looking like I was actually dead. I have the sort of farm-girl complexion that tans fast and pales even faster, which means my current nocturnal schedule leaves me looking like I’m a little under the weather all the time. It’s all part of the standard family genetic package, along with the cryptid mice and the generation-spanning blood feud. Price Girl version twelve, now with real salsa-dancing action. I’m five-two, with blue eyes, white-blonde hair, and a cheerleader smile—just your basic girl next door, assuming your girl next door comes spring-loaded with seventeen ways to kill a man. Which implies a pretty interesting neighborhood that most people probably don’t want to visit.
Seventeen ways to kill a man is an average, by the way. I only have about six ways to kill a man when I’m fresh out of the shower, and I’m an underachiever in that regard. Antimony usually has twenty-six ways to kill a man, at least last time I checked.
My little sister is special.
The glass and gummy bears were gone by the time I finished getting dressed, putting on my makeup, and working enough gel into my hair to keep it from getting out of control. Even cropped punky-pop-star short, it has a mind of its own, probably because I have to shove it under a wig whenever I attend a dance competition. But that’s the deal I made with my folks: Verity Price will never have a dancing career. Valerie Pryor, on the other hand, can dance as much as she wants, as long as the real work keeps getting handled. When it’s cryptids versus the cancan, the cryptids win, or I go back to Oregon.
The mice had disappeared along with the mess. Hopefully, that meant they were taking their religious holiday into the hall closet where it belonged. What was the point of converting a Barbie Dream House for them if they weren’t going to use it? The stupid thing took up most of the closet, and that meant I had to hang my coat and half my stage costumes on a rack in the front room, which wasn’t any bigger than the rest of the apartment. Not that I would’ve resented the inconvenience if the Dream House would just do what it was supposed to do and keep the mice contained.
Muffled cheering came from the closet. I let out a relieved breath. The colony would stay occupied for however long their celebration was slated to last, which meant I could worry about food instead of worrying about them.
The fridge was divided into two distinct sides: mine, and the mice’s. My shelves were essentially empty, holding a half-empty bottle of store-brand cola, a package of stale tortillas, two containers of takeout Chinese from the previous week, and a stick of butter I was pretty sure was there when I moved in. The mice, on the other hand, had an assortment of imported cheeses, several jars of Mom’s homemade jam, and—most tempting of all—half a chocolate cake from the bakery down the block. Flourless chocolate cake, with bittersweet fudge icing.
I stared longingly at the cake before muttering a curse, grabbing the tortillas, Chinese food, and butter, and slamming the refrigerator door. The mice have a sixth sense when it comes to cake. They’d swarm if I so much as touched the plate, religious observances temporarily superseded by the desire to demand baked goods. No amount of cake was worth that sort of chaos this soon after getting out of bed.