There was a tall, neatly-groomed man standing in my hall with an automatic crossbow in his hands. It was loaded, and aimed at my stomach. He raised an eyebrow questioningly. “Is that how you say hello now?” he asked.
“Uncle Mike!” I didn’t lower my pistol. “What’s the password?”
“There is no password,” he replied. “If you need a password, you’re probably already dead, and that makes it a moot point. Now get in here before you scare the neighbors.”
I beamed, clicking the safety on my pistol into place before replacing it in its holster and stepping through the open door. The mice—who had been obeying my edict never to let themselves be seen from the hall, and were consequentially plastered against the wall just inside—cheered loudly. “What are you doing here?” I asked, while I closed and locked the door. I sniffed the air. “Is that pot roast?”
Uncle Mike just looked at me, eyebrow still raised.
Oh, right. “Before you scare the neighbors” was the first half of the family passcode. “I mean, the neighbors don’t scare easy,” I said. “I’m pretty sure they’ve seen it all before.”
“Your father called me and said you needed backup,” he said, finally lowering his crossbow. “And yes, it’s pot roast. I figured you’d be going largely nocturnal for the duration of the shit that’s about to hit the fan, and there’s no such thing as too much readily available protein.”
“Hail!” chorused the mice. “Hail the High Priest of Goddammit Eat Something Already!”
I grinned. “See, I almost didn’t need to get a passcode from you. The pot roast would have been effective proof of identity.”
“Yes, but if you hadn’t confirmed my identity, I would have shot you on general principle,” said Uncle Mike. Then he smiled. “Come over here and give me a hug, or I may shoot you anyway.”
I went over there and gave him a hug. It wasn’t an unpleasant experience. Uncle Mike—full name Michael Gucciard, a cryptozoologist from the Chicago area who specializes in water-based cryptids—was large, solid, and an excellent hugger. He also wasn’t related to the family in any biological sense, but anyone who puts up with as much of our crap as he does should get to be an honorary relation, or at least get hazard pay. (Being an honorary relation is why he’s only a High Priest, and not a God. If you want to be a God, you need to bang a Priestess, and Aunt Lea wouldn’t approve.)
“Where’s Aunt Lea?” I asked, pulling away. I paused. “Please tell me she stayed home.”
“She stayed home,” he said reassuringly. “I love your family, and you know there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for your father, but the day I bring my wife into the path of a Covenant purge is the day the papers report on my mysterious drowning.”
I relaxed slightly. “Good.” Like so many cryptozoologists, Uncle Mike had fallen in love with his work—specifically with an Oceanid he met in Palm Beach. The Covenant had a history with Oceanids. It wasn’t a pretty one. Then again, the Covenant didn’t have a pretty history with anyone, so far as I could tell.
“Your security is terrible,” Uncle Mike informed me, pleasantries apparently completed. “I picked the locks in under a minute. No one came out to see what I was doing. I even passed someone in the downstairs hall, and he asked if I was heading for the second floor, since he didn’t want to carry a misdelivered newspaper all the way up the stairs.” He scowled briefly. “It’s a miracle you’re still alive.”
“I tell myself that every day,” I said. “Where are you staying?”
“Here, at least for tonight,” he said, in a tone that left no room for arguing.
I looked around my postage stamp of an apartment and considered arguing anyway. “Where?” I asked.
“There’s a couch,” he said. “I fold.”
“Uncle Mike—”
“Your father gave me a précis on the whole situation, Verity, including your on-again, off-again boyfriend.” He fixed me with a stern eye. “I’m the last person who’s going to tell you who you should be dating—”
“Yeah, at this point, everybody else has already had their shot,” I muttered.
“—but if you think I’m going to leave you alone while he and his compatriots run loose in this city, you got another think coming. If it were up to me, we’d be relocating to somewhere more secure. We may have to do that anyway, but I figured I’d hear your game plan before I started packing your bags for you.”
“That’s very considerate, thank you,” I said dryly. “Do you want the update, or do you want to lecture me some more about how lousy my apartment is?”
To my surprise, he grinned. “Honey, I live in Chicago. I understand that this is a perfectly reasonable apartment for someone on your budget. But your security is shit, your neighbors are basically cannon fodder, and there’s no one close enough to help if things get bad. We shouldn’t stay here.”
“You’re right.” Even the admission hurt. Not as much as the one that came after it: “Dominic knows where I live. He’s known for a while now. I can’t trust him not to tell the Covenant where to find me.”
There was a pause while Mike looked at me, trying to figure out whether I was serious. Finally, deciding that I meant what I was saying, he asked, “There a reason you haven’t moved house already? Aside from wanting to be here to see my smiling face—and that’s a lousy reason, by the way, since you didn’t know that I was coming. I don’t recommend trying to convince me of that one.”
“This has all happened really fast, and I didn’t totally believe it until this morning,” I said. I shrugged. “Besides, where are we supposed to go? I can’t stay with Sarah, that’ll just put her in the line of fire. The dragons won’t have me, and I’m pretty sure my boss would kill me herself if I tried sleeping at work.”
“Don’t you still dance with that goat-sucker guy?”
“You mean James?” In my alternate identity as Valerie Pryor, professional ballroom dancer, I was usually partnered with a very sweet, very gay chupacabra. He didn’t mind that I kept guns under my tango costume, and I didn’t mind that he occasionally turned into a semi-reptilian quadruped and went hunting deer in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Like any partnership, our association was based on mutual trust. I trusted him not to sell me out to the Covenant. He trusted me not to shoot him in the head.
“Yeah. He lives around here, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, he does, and if I tried to hide at his place when I potentially had the Covenant of St. George on my tail, his husband would kill us both. Dennis puts up with a lot for James’ sake, but there are limits.” I paused. “I need to call him anyway, and tell them both to get out of town.”
Mike sighed. “You’ve made a pretty good mess for yourself, kiddo. Isn’t there anywhere you could go that the Covenant doesn’t know about?”
“Wait—maybe.” I started toward the living room, mice dodging out of the way of my feet as I walked. “The dragons used to have a Nest in the old meatpacking district. They’d been living there for more than a century, and that means they must have managed to ride out previous purges. The place is essentially a fortress.”
“Sounds great,” he allowed. “But where are the dragons now?”
“They couldn’t get their husband out of the cavern he was asleep in, so they’ve relocated to be closer to him,” I said. “They seem perfectly happy down there.” Then again, they were female dragons in the presence of the first male anyone had seen in centuries. Between that and the heaps of gold they’d been amassing since they arrived in North America, they had everything they could possibly have needed.
“Great. You think they’ll let you use this Nest?”
“I may have to sell a kidney to pay what they’re going to ask for it, but there’s a chance.” I ran a hand through my hair, leaving it sticking up in untidy spikes. “I need to call home and give Dad an update on the situation. You want to listen in, so I don’t have to
do it twice?”
“Just put the phone on speaker,” he said. “I’ll take care of the pot roast while you deliver the bad news.”
“Thanks, Uncle Mike,” I said—and I meant it. Having another person with combat training standing next to me made the odds feel a little less imbalanced, and a little more survivable. Maybe I was kidding myself. But there’s nothing wrong with some healthy self-delusion once in a while, especially when there’s an ancient organization of monster hunters involved. Since my boyfriend was one of the monster hunters, and they considered my family a type of monster, I figured I was entitled to a double dose.
With the mice swarming around my feet and periodically cheering for no good reason that I could see, I finished trekking to the living room. It was time to bring the rest of the family up to speed. And when that was done, I could start packing.
Nine
“I know that we’re supposed to be the better people and all, but sometimes I just want to stop playing nice and start playing for keeps.”
—Alice Healy
A semilegal sublet in Greenwich Village, twenty minutes and a lot of shouting later
“OKAY, DADDY,” I said, over the sound of my mother and father yelling at each other, and my little sister yelling at no one in particular. Sometimes I think Antimony yells just so she won’t feel left out. “Daddy? Okay. I’m hanging up now. Uncle Mike says the pot roast is almost ready, and I haven’t had anything to eat today.”
“Why are you eating pot roast?” demanded Antimony. “It’s not even lunchtime yet!”
“We’re probably going nocturnal for the duration, and shut up. You think cold pizza is a breakfast food,” I said.
“Only if you put Captain Crunch on it,” she replied.
There was a moment of silence as all of us considered this. Even the mice stopped their chattering, although they were probably less horrified than reverent. Finally, my mother said, “I want you to listen to your uncle, Verity. I know you’re supposed to be doing your journeyman studies, and I wouldn’t dream of impinging on your independence, but there’s being independent, and then there’s being stupid. If you get yourself killed, I’ll never forgive you.”
The idea that she wanted me to just hand my city over to Uncle Mike stung. Still, she was probably right, and so I forced the rancor from my voice as I said, “I know, Mom. We’re going to relocate soon—and no, I’m not telling you where we’re going. I’ll keep in touch via email as much as I can.”
“I’ve left a message for your grandmother, but I haven’t heard back yet. She’s in one of the border worlds right now, and she may not get back in time to help you,” said Dad. He didn’t push the issue of where we were going. He knew as well as I did that when you try to drop off the grid, the fewer people who know your location, the better. “The same goes for your Aunt Mary. The routewitches say they’ll notify her if she pops up on their radar, but . . .”
“It’s okay, Daddy. I have Sarah, the gang from work, and Uncle Mike. We’ll be fine.” My paternal grandmother, Alice Price-Healy, spends most of her time wandering around various parallel dimensions looking for her missing husband, Thomas Price. The rest of us are pretty sure he’s dead, but try telling that to a woman who’s abandoned everything she ever cared about for the sake of bringing her true love home. As for Aunt Mary, we know she’s dead—she’s been a crossroads ghost since she was run off the road in 1937. Not that it’s slowed her down any. Like Uncle Mike and Aunt Lea, she’s not actually a relative, but she fills the same ecological niche, and ghosts are always fun at Halloween parties.
“I’m still not happy about leaving you there on your own,” Mom said.
“I know, Mom, but I really do need to go, or we’re not going to have time to eat before we have to go and negotiate for a new place to hole up. Email if you’re sending anyone else. I won’t be here to meet them.”
We exchanged our farewells—even Antimony sounded worried about my well-being, which was sort of terrifying—and I ended the call, triggering more cheering from the mice. This discussion was probably about to become a permanent part of their religious canon—the Holy Ritual of the Phone Call Home. I sighed, but I didn’t tell them to shut up. This sort of thing was the whole reason I had a colony in Manhattan with me.
Mice—especially intelligent, tool-using mice—are hard to kill, and it would practically take a nuclear strike to wipe out the entire colony. If things went wrong and I didn’t make it out of the city, the Aeslin mice who lived with me would be my little black box. They would tell my family what happened, because they would be the only ones who’d been there.
With that particularly cheerful thought in mind, I turned and walked back to the kitchen, where Uncle Mike was busy carving his roast. I stopped in the doorway, not wanting to crowd the large man with the knife. “Did you hear all that?”
“Every word,” he said, and held his knife out toward me, a chunk of steaming red meat impaled on the tip. “It’s too bad we can’t get Mary out here. She’d be great for recon work.”
“Right up until she got exorcised,” I replied, and plucked the piece of roast from the knife, popping it into my mouth. I made appreciative noises as I chewed, and flashed him a thumbs up.
“Pot roast is easy,” he said, dismissing the praise. He still looked pleased. “You should try my lasagna.”
I swallowed. “Maybe next time we have a few days in the same place without the specter of imminent death looming overhead.”
“That’d be a change, huh?” He opened a cupboard, and frowned. “Where do you keep your Tupperware?”
“I mostly live out of takeout containers,” I said. “I don’t even know if there is Tupperware.”
“I don’t know how you haven’t starved to death, I honestly don’t.” He pulled a roll of tin foil from the cabinet above the stove. “What’s our next move?”
“Head for the Freakshow. A bunch of the dragons work there. I can ask them about renting the old Nest.”
“How much authority do they have?”
I smiled a little, leaning over to snatch another piece of roast. “Well, one of them is the current Nest-mother and first wife of their male, so I’d say they have plenty of authority.”
Mike paused and blinked at me. Finally, he said, “When you decide to mess with the status quo, you don’t think small, do you?”
“Not really.” Prior to discovering William asleep under Manhattan, everyone in the cryptozoological community had assumed that the dragons were extinct, and that the dragon princesses were the cryptid equivalent of oxpecker birds—a species of symbiotic hangers-on who had evolved to live alongside the dragons, and didn’t know what to do with themselves once their hosts died off. Finding out that dragon princesses were really female dragons changed everything . . . except for the dragons themselves, who continued on their single-minded path toward total control of the world’s gold supply.
Now that the old Nest wasn’t necessary for the safety of the Manhattan colony, Candy would probably let us use it, as long as we paid what she considered a fair price. If we talked to her at the Freakshow, I could get Kitty to arbitrate, and make sure that Candy’s “fair price” didn’t wind up being something that would bankrupt my entire family for the next hundred years.
“You Price girls, I swear.” Mike produced a loaf of bread from one of the brown paper bags clustered on the counter. “I’m going to pack some roast to go and make a few sandwiches. You’re too thin. Then we should get moving. I want to be out of here by nightfall.”
“Works for me.” We’d have to come back to the apartment at least once. I wouldn’t be crushed if I wound up leaving the majority of my possessions behind—it would sting, but I’ve done worse. There was no way that we could move the mice without having a place to move them to.
And there was no way we could move the mice at all without their permission. I turned and walked down
the hall to the linen closet, leaving Mike to his roast. The mice who had been in the living room followed me, cheering again as I opened the closet door.
Most of the closet was taken up by a modified Barbie Dream House. All the windows had been punched out and replaced by wooden scaffolding, which twisted around and around the house like a ribbon around a maypole. The pink paint was entirely gone, covered by a thick coat of gunmetal gray nail polish. The mice had done that part themselves. All I provided was the heavy lifting.
I knelt, putting myself on a level with the top windows of the Pantheistic Cryptid Mouse Dream House. “I request audience with the Head Priest,” I said. “I don’t have any cheese, or cake, but there’s pot roast in the kitchen, and we’ll share.”
For once, there was no cheering. Instead, the mice sat silently, and more tiny rodent faces appeared in the other windows, all of them waiting to see what was going to happen next. Finally, a white-whiskered mouse with a squirrel’s skull atop his head stepped laboriously out onto the scaffold in front of that top window.
“Your audience is granted,” he squeaked, in a voice that used to be sonorous—by mouse standards, anyway—and now barely carried past the lintel of the closet. “What do you require, O Arboreal Priestess?”
Aeslin mice live a long time by normal rodent standards, but their lives are short by human standards. I remembered when this Head Priest was young and vital, and full of potentially blasphemous ideals. I grew up, and he grew old. There would be a new Head Priest soon. That knowledge made me deeply sad. “The Covenant of St. George is here,” I said.
He nodded. “I know. The God of Questionable Motivations is one of theirs, at least in body, if not in heart or mind.”
I decided not to think about that too hard. “They know where we live. They have this address.”