“Katherine Smith,” she said. “You can call me ‘Kitty,’ everyone else does.”
“Michael Gucciard,” he responded. “You can call me Mike. Thank you for having me here.”
She raised an eyebrow. “I had a choice?”
Mike laughed, reclaiming his hand. “Well, ma’am, technically I suppose you could tell me that my services were not required at this time and follow it up by asking me to get the hell out of your city. But that might be a bad idea, given the rest of the situation. I don’t think the Covenant of St. George is going to be that easy to get rid of.”
“If only,” said Kitty. She turned to me. “What’s the favor?”
“The Covenant knows where I live,” I said, not bothering with prevarication. “I need to move someplace secure, where I won’t be endangering anyone else—which means I can’t stay here. Can you help me convince Candy to let me rent the old Nest for the duration?”
“What?” Kitty stared at me. “This is your favor? You want me to help you negotiate with a dragon? Are you planning to sell a few kidneys to help finance this little plan?”
“I found them the first male they’ve seen in centuries. I’m hoping that will keep the interest rates down. As for the rest, that’s where you come in. They’ll give me a fairer deal if you’re sitting in on the negotiations.”
Kitty snorted. “Says you. I know bogeymen have a reputation for striking a hard bargain, but there’s loan-sharking, and then there’s whatever it is the dragons do.”
“You employ most of the dragons in the city. If they piss you off enough, they don’t get paid anymore. Besides which, if the Covenant catches me and starts putting me through information extraction, they might find out where the new Nest is. More importantly, they might find out about William.” I bared my teeth in something that bore very little resemblance to a smile. “I think the dragons would really prefer that I not be that easy to catch, don’t you?”
“Remind me never to play poker with you,” said Kitty. She turned and walked back to her desk, where she hit a button on her phone. “Daisy? It’s Kitty. Can you please find Candy and send her to my office? Verity’s here, and we need to talk about something.”
“Sure thing, Kitty,” said Daisy.
Kitty removed her finger from the phone. “All done,” she said. “Now we just have to wait.”
We didn’t have to wait for long. Invoking my name and the phrase “we need to talk” in the same sentence had obviously been enough to light a fire under Candy, because she came speed walking down the hall toward Kitty’s office less than five minutes later. She was wearing street clothes, rather than her waitressing gear: yoga pants, an Old Navy tank top, and a pair of scuffed sneakers that were probably bought off the back of a truck somewhere in the Garment District. Dragons don’t believe in spending money on things like brand name clothing. Not when they could be spending money on more important things, like gold.
Not that they need nice clothes to be devastatingly gorgeous. Whatever quirk of evolution decided that dragon females should look like human women really went all-out on their physical design: I’ve never seen a dragon who didn’t look like a super model, although they tend to be a modern size ten to fourteen, which makes them a little less high fashion than they were fifty or five hundred years ago. Since dragons only want to attract human men long enough to empty their wallets, I’m not sure the dragons have noticed—or that they really care. Candy was characteristic for her species, with a curvy figure, long, naturally golden hair, enormous blue eyes, and the sort of roses-and-cream complexion that has launched a thousand cosmetic campaigns.
She was also, judging by the way her belly curved under her tank top, at least two months pregnant. “That’s why you’ve been keeping your corset on all the time lately, isn’t it?” I asked, indicating her middle. “You don’t want it to interfere with your tips.”
Candy glared at me. From her, that was practically a warm welcome. “Who is this?” she demanded, jabbing a finger at Mike. Then she turned her glare on Kitty. “I’m not on duty yet. You have no right to claim my time.”
“I started paying you for today as soon as I called for you,” Kitty smoothly replied. “And any time you spend talking to Verity is not coming out of your breaks or lunchtime. Talk long enough, you could get paid for hours of doing basically nothing. Don’t you think that’s worth coming on the clock a little early?”
“Normally, I would love to improve relations with the dragons by helping you get money for nothing and your kicks for free, but I don’t have hours to do basically nothing,” I said, flashing Kitty a grateful look. “Candy, this is Michael Gucciard, my uncle. He’s here from Chicago to help me deal with the Covenant while they’re in town. We’d like to get them out of town before anybody gets hurt. I need your help.”
Candy eyed me suspiciously. “What kind of help did you have in mind?”
“I want to rent the old Nest.”
Whatever answer Candy had been expecting, it wasn’t that: her eyes widened, genuine shock showing through before her expression hardened again and she snapped, “Absolutely not. It’s out of the question.”
“Why?”
“What if the Covenant follows you there? Then what?”
“It’s not connected to your new Nest in any way. There’s not even a tunnel between the two of them. You’re not going to move back there, not with William stuck under the city, and you’re not going to find a way to move William while the Covenant is in town. Dominic knows where I live, Candy, and that means that the Covenant knows—I hope he won’t tell them, but I can’t be sure.” I looked at her earnestly. “If you want me to be here to fight the Covenant for you, I need to be sure that they can’t just stroll in and take me out. That means I need to be somewhere safe. Secure. Solid. I need the Nest.”
“It’s ours,” she snapped.
“I don’t want to buy it. I just want to rent it.”
“And you’re going to rent it to her, Candy, for a reasonable amount,” said Kitty suddenly. We both turned to look at her. “It’s a large building, entirely uninhabited—say five thousand a month? Would that be acceptable to the both of you?”
“Well—” I began, doing a quick mental review of my finances. I was supposed to be self-sufficient while I was in New York, but this was the sort of thing where I could get money from my family if I needed it. The only question was how much, and how fast.
“It’s fine,” said Mike.
I felt a flash of resentment. I should be grateful that he was helping with my plan, but this was my city, and I didn’t need him taking over. I forced the resentment down just as quickly as it came. Pride is for people who can afford it.
“Good,” said Kitty. “Candy? You’re the Nest-mother. Is five thousand a month acceptable?”
Candy glowered. “She can’t stay forever,” she said.
“Six-month lease with an option to renew if the Covenant is still in town at the end of that period,” said Kitty.
If the Covenant was still in town in six months, there wouldn’t be a Nest for me to rent. That kind of stay would mean that the purge was well and truly in progress. The dragons might survive, if they went underground fast enough, sealed all the doors and got lucky in every possible way—because they couldn’t run, could they? Out of all the dragons in the world, the dragons of Manhattan were the ones with something they had to defend.
“No,” said Candy coldly. “No, she can’t have our Nest. Six months is too long. Six hours is too long.”
Something inside of me snapped. Without a safe place to go, I was as good as done—and while I’m not quite arrogant enough to think that Manhattan was doomed without me, the cryptid population was going to be in a lot more trouble if they had to wait for the next wave of defense to arrive. Assuming the family even sent another team. Assuming they didn’t just call one ally and one daughter a big enough p
rice to pay, pull Sarah out, and wash their hands of the matter.
We’re not heroes. We’re not gods, no matter what the mice may think. We’re just people trying to do a job, and that sometimes means admitting that the job is too big to finish. I’d be added to the family history as one more soul we couldn’t save, and the rest of them would go on trying to survive. That’s what we do. That’s what we’ve been doing since Alexander and Enid Healy walked away from the Covenant of St. George.
Sometimes I get awfully tired of just surviving.
“How far along are you, Candy?” I asked quietly. She flinched. “I’m guessing you’re about eight weeks. Nearing the end of your first trimester. Do dragons have trimesters?”
“We carry the eggs for six months, and then we incubate them for six more,” she said, voice just above a whisper.
“Do you want the Covenant to find your eggs? I bet they’d be fascinated. They haven’t had dragon eggs to play with in so long. Oh, and there’s your sisters to think about. I mean, back in the day, there was no way to really tie you guys biologically to the males of your species. That level of sexual dimorphism is really unusual outside of deep sea fish. But science doesn’t play favorites. The Covenant has science, too. They’ll crack a couple of those eggs open, find some scaly little boys and pink-skinned little girls, and then they’ll figure it out. You’ve survived because they haven’t been hunting you. They haven’t considered you worth hunting. How do you think the league of dragon hunters will take it when they find out that they’ve been ignoring their mission statement all these years? I think it’ll be like Christmas for their twisted little hearts.”
Candy glanced frantically at Kitty, who shook her head.
“You want me to tell her to stop being mean, I can tell,” she said. “I’m not going to do that, because she’s not being mean. Mean would be threatening to call the Covenant on you if you didn’t do what she wants. She’s just pointing out that being stubborn for the sake of being stubborn doesn’t get you anything but killed.”
“Why are you on her side?” demanded Candy.
“Because, Candice, I’d like to live,” said Kitty. She planted her hands on her hips and glared. Her Sesame Street pajamas undermined her intimidation factor a bit, but her gray skin and subtly inhuman bone structure balanced it. “I know you don’t like the Prices, although I sort of thought we were getting past that, with the whole ‘here, have your scaly Prince Charming’ stunt they pulled last year. I don’t care. You’re going to let Verity use your Nest as long as she needs it, as long as the Covenant is here in town. I’m going to pay you five thousand dollars for every month that she’s there. And you’re not going to say one more bad word about it. You’re just going to go back to your sisters and your husband and let them know that the Prices are moving in.”
Candy stared at her. Then she stiffened, and said coldly, “I never thought you’d side with humans over your own kind, Kitty.”
Much to everyone’s surprise, Kitty burst out laughing. “Seriously, Candy? Seriously? You’re going to pull the cryptid solidarity card on me? Honey, you’re not even a mammal. Verity is a closer relative of mine than you are, and frankly, I will side with whoever keeps me, and the rest of the city’s bogey community, breathing. Understand me?”
“Yes,” said Candy coldly. She turned to me. “I’ll go get you the keys. It may take a while. I hope you don’t shoot me for making you wait.” Then she turned and stomped off down the hall, not looking back.
I sighed. “That could have gone better.”
“I’ve done a lot of negotiating with dragons,” said Kitty. “Trust me, no, it couldn’t have. Besides, now you’ve got a place to go. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Can you send Ryan over with the keys when Candy finally comes back? I need to go pack.”
“Sure,” said Kitty. “And Verity—trust me. It’s going to be okay.”
I laughed a little. “At least one of us thinks so.”
Ten
“Bang bang. You’re dead.”
—Frances Brown
The Meatpacking District, which is nicer than it sounds, inside a converted warehouse (which is a more pleasant way of saying “slaughterhouse”)
THE HIDEBEHIND GLAMOUR that had once hidden the true contents of the converted slaughterhouse that held the dragons’ Nest was gone. We had been able to see the true structure of the building from the minute we walked through the front door. (This had been more difficult than I expected it to be, since the dragons’ overpriced bodega was also gone, and that was the only easy ground floor entrance to the slaughterhouse courtyard. Luckily, Mike and I had both been picking locks since before we could tie our shoes, but it would have been nice to have a little warning.)
The power still worked—that made sense, since it wasn’t like the dragons had ever been paying for it in the first place—and after flipping a few dozen switches, we were able to get a good idea of what we were dealing with: a huge, two-story building with a ground floor that consisted almost entirely of one enormous room. The gold that used to fill the place was gone, taken by the dragons when they moved to their new home beneath the city. The patched-together carpet was still on the floor, but that was about it. There was no furniture, and whatever illusion the building might have possessed of being something other than a part of the industrial wasteland had departed with the dragons.
Stairs led to the offices on the second floor, which were arrayed all the way around the edges of the room. The layout was left over from the original slaughterhouse design, letting the occupants of those offices look out on the livestock waiting to be put to death below. Charming stuff, and the reason I was vaguely afraid of being haunted by the ghosts of hamburgers past while we were staying at the Nest. A waist-high rail ran along the walkway to keep people from plummeting to their deaths, presumably out of sorrow for the cows, sheep, and other victims of the slaughterhouse assembly line. There were enough offices that we could each have one as a bedroom, with another to use as an armory, and another for the mice. Even after all that, there were easily half a dozen offices standing empty, and we hadn’t even looked at the basement.
The mice were thrilled about having an entire office for their Barbie Nightmare House. It must have been an incredible step up after being confined in a single closet. They had started arranging raiding parties as soon as I put them down. All the raiding parties were armed with tiny spears, crossbows, and swords. There would be no rats left in the slaughterhouse by morning, and the mice would feast for days.
It can be easy to forget that Aeslin aren’t cute Disney cartoons come to life. They’re vicious fighters when they have to be, and they’ve survived in a world filled with bigger, meaner, better-armed creatures by being smart and absolutely ruthless. That’s something else they have in common with our family. Prices and Aeslin always, always shoot to kill.
“Verity!”
“Coming!” I stepped out of the office we’d given to the mice, walking to the rail and looking down. Ryan and Mike were on the main floor of the slaughterhouse, piling my meager possessions—mostly weapons and clothing—around the coolers and gear boxes Mike had brought with him from Chicago. “What’cha need?”
“Do you own a bed?” asked Mike. He somehow managed to shout without sounding like he was shouting. Probably a skill developed to make it easier to talk to sea monsters who didn’t feel like coming to shore, but didn’t want to be yelled at, either.
“Not here,” I said. I sat down on the walkway, squeezing through the gap between the bars intended to keep us from plummeting to our deaths. Then I turned, hooking my toes against the base of the rail, and leaned backward. This resulted in my dangling about eight feet off the floor. Mike and Ryan watched this process without comment. “I left my bed back in Portland.”
“Got it. We’re going to want to pick up some inflatables, maybe a bean b
ag chair or something. Things we can carry in without attracting attention.” Mike returned to surveying my belongings, for all the world like I wasn’t dangling from the walkway behind him. I leaned forward again, grabbed the lowest bar of the railing, and tucked my knees, bracing against the side of the walkway in a sort of horizontal squat before letting my feet drop. “I think we’ve got enough food to hold out for a few days—did you know there’s a full kitchen?”
“I guess they couldn’t replace that with gold,” I said, hand-walking my way over to the nearest of the support beams holding up the walkway. It was like the monkey bars on my elementary school playground, only without as many yard monitors waiting to tell me that it wasn’t ladylike to climb. “Thanks again for helping us get moved in, Ryan.”
“Yeah, about that—it wasn’t purely altruistic.” The therianthrope bartender moved toward me as he spoke, lacking Uncle Mike’s skill at shouting without shouting. “I wanted to ask you for a favor.”
“Name it.” I had reached the pillar. I grasped it firmly with my knees and let go of the rail, flipping so that I was facing toward the floor. With this accomplished, I began climbing carefully down.
“Istas and I were wondering if maybe—what the hell are you doing?”
“I’m going to assume that wasn’t your original question. What I’m doing is figuring out the tactical shape of the room. Most of the time, if I can’t shoot something in the first thirty seconds of dealing with it, my style of staying alive involves being able to go up as much as possible. So knowing what will and won’t support my weight is important.” It was also fun, and extremely relaxing. I needed to relax. This wasn’t going to end overnight.