“I’ll go first,” I said as I turned and drew the plastic veil aside.
The smell that came wafting out into the hall was enough to make my stomach turn. I’d been the one to request that the room be sealed off without cleaning, to give me a better idea of what I was dealing with. Suddenly, I thought I might regret that decision.
Streaks of long-dried blood warred with cheerful pastels for ownership of the walls inside the maternity ward. Most of it was red, although there were a few streaks of green, purple, and even shiny-clear breaking up the crimson monotony. Patches of the original cartoon murals showed through the gore, representing a cartoon cryptid wonderland, with dozens of happy cryptid and human children gamboling through a paradise of acceptance that hadn’t existed in millennia, if it ever existed at all. Sarah blanched.
“Verity . . .”
“I know.” Even the thickest splotches of blood had been given time to dry. I touched one, and it flaked away on my fingertips. “If the pattern holds, it’s still nearby.”
“Oh, goody. Have I mentioned recently how much I hate it when you say things like that?” Sarah glanced nervously around. “I’m not picking up on any other minds in this room. We’re alone in here.”
“That’s a start.” There was a closed door on the far wall. I pulled the pistol from the back of my jeans, holding it in front of me as I walked cautiously forward. “Stay where you are.”
“You don’t need to tell me twice,” said Sarah.
The door swung gently open when I twisted the knob, revealing the darker, seemingly empty room beyond. I squinted into the gloom, seeing nothing but a few sheet-draped tables and what looked like an old-style apothecary’s cabinet. My flashlight beam bounced off the glass, refracting into the room where Sarah and I stood.
“Looks like it’s all clear,” I said, starting to turn back to Sarah. “We should keep on movi—”
Something roughly the size of a Golden Retriever—assuming Golden Retrievers had massive, batlike wings—burst out of the dark behind the door and soared into the room, shrieking loudly. Sarah added her own screaming to the din, ducking and scrambling to get under one of the gore-soaked tables. I stopped worrying about her as soon as she was out of sight. The creature would forget she was there almost instantly, if it had managed to notice her in the first place. The cuckoo: nature’s ultimate stealth predator, and also, when necessary, nature’s ultimate coward.
The creature continued its flight across the room, giving me time to take solid aim on the space between its wings, and get a good enough view to make a hopefully accurate guess at what it was. It could have been your average attractive older Filipino woman, assuming you liked your attractive older women with wings, claws, fangs, and—oh, right—nothing below the navel. Where her lower body should have been was only a thin, pulsing layer of skin, providing me with a nauseatingly clear view of her internal organs.
My brother owed me five bucks. When I’d described the thing that was supposedly attacking downtown maternity wards to him over the phone, he’d barely paused before saying, “There’s no way you’re dealing with a manananggal. They’re not native to the region.” Well, if the thing that was flying around the room wasn’t a manananggal, nature was even crueler than I’d originally thought.
“Hey, ugly!” I shouted, and fired. Shrieking, the manananggal hit the wall, using her momentum to flip herself around and start coming back toward me. I fired twice more. As far as I could tell, I hit her both times. It didn’t slow her down one bit. I dove to the side just as she sliced through the air where I’d been standing, that unearthly shriek issuing from her throat the entire time.
“I fucking hate things that can’t be killed,” I muttered, rolling back to my feet. The manananggal was coming back for another pass. That was, in a messed-up kind of way, a good thing. Mentally, I shouted, Sarah! Go find her legs!
My cousin stuck her head out from under the table, eyes wide. You’re kidding, right? came the telepathic demand.
No! Hurry! I fired at the manananggal again, keeping her attention on me. It wasn’t hard to do. Most things focus on the person with the gun.
I hate you, said Sarah, and slid out from under the table, using the sound of gunfire and screaming to cover her as she slipped through the open doorway, into the dark beyond.
The manananggal are native to the Philippines, where they live disguised among the human population, using them for shelter and sustenance at the same time. They spend the days looking just like everyone else. It’s only when the sun goes down that they open their wings and separate their torsos from their lower bodies. That’s when they fly into the night, looking for prey. Even that could be forgiven—humanity has made peace with stranger things—if it weren’t for what they prey on.
Infants, both newly-born and just about to be born. The manananggal will also feed on the mothers, but only if they’re still carrying or have given birth within the last twenty-four hours. Weak prey. Innocent prey. Prey that, in this modern world, is conveniently herded into maternity wards and hospital beds, making it easy for the manananggal to come in and eat its fill. As this one had been doing, moving in a rough circle through the local maternity wards, slaughtering humans and cryptids with equal abandon.
She’d been getting sloppier, and her kills had been getting more obvious. That was a bad sign. That meant the manananggal was getting ready to find a mate and make a nest . . . and that was something I couldn’t allow to happen.
I’m a cryptozoologist. It’s my job to protect the monsters of the world. But when those monsters become too dangerous to be allowed to roam free, I’m also a hunter. I don’t enjoy that side of my work. That doesn’t mean I get to stop doing it.
The manananggal seemed to realize that her tactics weren’t getting her anywhere. With a ringing scream, she hit the wall again, and then turned to fly straight at me, her arms held out in front of her as she went for a chokehold. I ducked. Not fast enough. Her claws raked across the top of my left bicep, slicing through the fabric of my shirt and down into my flesh. I couldn’t bite back my yelp of pain, which seemed to delight the manananggal; her scream became a cackle as she flew past me, flipped around, and came back for another strike.
I put two bullets into her throat. That barely slowed her down . . . but it slowed her enough for me to get out of her path. She slammed into the wall, hard. I tensed, expecting another pass. It never came. Instead, her wings thrashed once, twice, and she sank to the floor in a glassy-eyed heap, brackish blood oozing from the gunshot wounds peppering her body.
Breathing shallowly, I moved toward the body. She didn’t move. I prodded her with the toe of my shoe. She didn’t move. I shot her three more times, just to be sure. (Saving ammunition is for other people. People who aren’t bleeding.) She didn’t move.
“I hate you,” announced Sarah from the doorway behind me.
I turned. She held up the canister of garlic salt I’d ordered her to bring, turning it upside-down to show that it was empty.
“Legs are toast,” she said. “As soon as I poured this stuff down her feeding tube, the lower body collapsed.”
“Oh. Good. That’s a note for the field guide.” I touched my wounded arm gingerly. “This stings. Do you remember anything about manananggal being venomous?”
Sarah grimaced. “How about we ask the nurse?”
“Good idea,” I said, and let her take my arm and lead me away from the fallen manananggal, and the remains of the last infants she would ever slaughter.
This is how I spend my Saturday nights. And sadly, these are the nights I feel are most successful.
Two
“Treat your weapons like you treat your children. That means cleaning them, caring for them, counting on them to do the best they can for you, and forgiving them when they can’t.”
—Enid Healy
The Freakshow, a highly specialized nightcl
ub somewhere in Manhattan
A WEEK HAD PASSED since the manananggal incident, giving me sufficient time to file my reports, update the family field guide (this just in: manananggal are venomous), and pay two follow-up visits to St. Giles’ Hospital, where Dr. Morrow and the Caladrius nurse (whose name turned out to be Lauren) were happy to patch me up free of charge. The manananggal’s claws didn’t even leave a scar. I had resolved a threat, and saved a bunch of babies—and their mothers—from being eaten. Not bad for a ballroom dancer from Portland.
I hit the stairs leading down from the nightclub roof almost five whole minutes before my shift was scheduled to start. For me, that’s practically getting to work early, especially these days. We had a little snake cult incident last year, and the city’s cryptids are still all worked up about it. That’s meant more mediation, more handholding through interactions with the human world, and, unfortunately, more hunting, since some of the more predatory types of cryptid took the destabilization of Manhattan as an invitation to move in and start chowing down on the locals. It seems like I’m out on the streets every other night, teaching some idiot that you don’t act like that in my city.
Candy was standing by the base of the stairs, eating a ham and gold leaf sandwich. (It’s a house special. Angel calls it “the Adam Lambert,” and serves it with a pickle and a shot of Goldschläger. Bartenders are weird.) “You’re late,” she called, as I went blowing past her like my shoes were on fire.
“I have five minutes!” I shouted back, and kept on running until I hit the dressing room, and dove into chaos.
Picture a medium-sized room, maybe twenty feet by twenty feet square. Now add standing lockers cannibalized from a high school gym, with the requisite long wooden benches stretching between the rows. Great. Now add half a dozen women, all of them jockeying for position at the single long mirror lining one wall, and you’ll have some idea of what I was walking into.
Sometimes I think I’d rather deal with a herd of angry unicorns than a bunch of women trying to get themselves ready for work. “I’m here,” I announced to no one in particular as I walked past the throng and made my way between two racks of lockers to my assigned spot. The “real world skills” I’ve learned from my years of struggling to launch a dance career are mostly limited to things like putting on mascara on a moving bus, but I definitely know better than to come between an amateur kick-line and their own reflections.
I opened my locker and tossed in my bag before starting to squirm out of my street clothes. Five minutes was cutting it close for getting into my uniform and putting on my makeup. I’d done it before, but that didn’t mean I could waste time watching the clown car antics unfolding in front of the mirror.
The dancers and cocktail waitresses fighting for space squabbled like wet hens as they applied lip gloss, fixed their eye makeup, and tried to keep from being bitten by Carol’s hair, which was making its usual attempt to escape from her elaborate beehive wig. Carol stuffed the tiny serpents back into the weave as quickly as they slithered free, but it was a hopeless fight—like all lesser gorgons, she was seriously outnumbered by her own hair.
Under normal circumstances, Carol would have had at least three feet on either side of her, since only Marcy was willing to sit any closer. Marcy’s an Oread, and her skin is way too thick to be punctured by anything as plebeian as a snake bite. That was under normal circumstances, not during shift change. During shift change—especially shift change to the night shift—real estate at the mirror was too valuable to leave open just because you might wind up getting chomped on by a cocktail waitress’ hairdo.
Distraction makes you careless. One of the new girls squealed and jerked away from Carol, clutching her hand to her chest. I sighed as I fastened the last few snaps on my uniform bodice and pulled on my ruffled cancan skirt. Once that was done, I grabbed the at-work first aid kit from my locker and walked over to the mirror.
“I’m so sorry, tomorrow’s feeding day, they’re all cranky,” Carol was saying to the girl her hair had taken a chunk out of—a wide-eyed human whose normally coppery complexion was underscored with a sudden sickly pallor. Carol kept stuffing as she spoke, trying to get the snakes back into her wig. They weren’t cooperating. Her agitation was transmitting itself to them, and they were beginning to writhe and snap wildly, making her blonde beehive wig pulse like a prop from a bad horror movie.
“Here, Carol.” I pressed my emergency can of Mom’s gorgon hair treatment into Carol’s hand. She shot me a grateful look. Neither of us really understands why a mix of concrete dust, eggshells, and powdered antivenin has a sedative effect on the snakes, but it doesn’t hurt them, and it keeps them calmer than anything else we’ve been able to come up with. Carol gets three cans a month. I get one in the same shipment, for emergencies just like this one.
The new girl was still sitting there, looking terrified. I tried to remember who’d recommended that we hire her. Humans are great dancers, but most of them really aren’t all that comfortable with the cryptid world—and there’s good reason for that. You need to worry about a lot in a normal chorus line; being bitten by the other girls’ hair isn’t on the list.
“You.” I pointed to another of the new girls, a green-haired siren with eyes only a few shades lighter than her heavily hairsprayed curls. “Take her to the manager’s office. There’s antivenin in the fridge there.”
“Okay,” said the siren, the whistling sweetness of her voice betraying her anxiety. She took the bitten girl by the elbow, pulling her away from the mirror. “Come on, Nye. Let’s get that taken care of.”
The bubble of silence that followed their departure held for only a few seconds before the room exploded back into its previous level of chaos. The hole at the mirror left by the siren and her human friend was almost instantly filled. That’s show business for you.
Marcy dusted Carol’s hair with sedative powder as Carol shoved the suddenly-passive little snakes back into her wig.
A quarter of the mirror had been claimed by four of the gorgeous blondes we spent centuries calling “dragon princesses” before we learned that, no, they were just the female of the dragon species. Three equally gorgeous Chinese girls were crammed in there with them, all of them doing their makeup with grim precision. They were visiting representatives of another dragon subspecies. They were in town to grill William—the dragon who lives under downtown Manhattan, and yeah, I’m still pretty flipped out about that—about whether any of their males might have survived, and, like all dragons, they were happy to spend their off hours making a few extra bucks by waiting tables.
(Dragons take avarice to a religious level, but they have good reason; their health and reproduction depend on the presence of certain precious materials. European dragons need gold. Their Chinese counterparts seemed to have a similar affection for jade and pearls, although some of what I’d been able to overhear implied that they actually created pearls somehow, which definitely gave them a financial leg up. What can I say? I’m a cryptozoologist, and we didn’t write our books on cryptid biology by being too polite to eavesdrop.)
“Are we good?” I asked.
“We’re good,” said Marcy, shoving the last of the sedated snakes under Carol’s wig. “Thanks for the save.”
“It’s no big deal,” I said, although a quick glance at the clock told me that it was actually a very big deal indeed. I was due on stage with the rest of the chorus in less than three minutes. I stuck two fingers in my mouth and whistled sharply before shouting, “This is not a drill, people! Hairspray down, high heels on, and anyone who breaks a leg before intermission is going to answer to me!”
The already hectic dressing room exploded into motion as everyone scrambled, double-time, to get ready for the cue that was about to crash down on us. I dashed back to my locker, grabbing the few pieces of costume still in need of application, and took off for the stage. Anything I couldn’t put on while I was running was just
going to have to wait until I got a break.
There’s no business like show business. And thank God for that.
A little background, in case it’s still needed: my name is Verity Price, and I’m a journeyman cryptozoologist, currently studying the sentient cryptid population of New York City and the surrounding area. This turns out to pay surprisingly poorly, since most people don’t believe cryptids exist, and those who do believe in them usually fall into one of two camps—either “kill it with fire” or “I wonder how I can use that freak of nature to make myself buckets and buckets of money.” Neither of these is helpful when what you’re trying to do is observe and assist a cryptid population, and so I, like every other member of my family, make do with whatever jobs my admittedly non-standard skill set can help me hold onto. That brought me, in a roundabout way, to Dave’s Fish and Strips, a tits-and-ass bar that was billed as a “nightclub for discerning gentlemen.”
Dave was a bogeyman. He probably still is, since no one’s managed to kill him yet—at least as far as I know, and given how we parted ways, I would expect his killers to send me a nice “you’re welcome” card. Anyway, when I came to town looking for gainful employment, serving cocktails in a cryptid-owned establishment seemed like the best of all possible worlds. I could study the urban cryptid population both in and out of the workplace, allowing me an unparalleled view of their social structure, and I could make a little money at the same time.
I mean, really, it was all going pretty great until Dave decided to sell me to a snake cult before skipping town. They say nobody’s perfect, but there’s having a few flaws, and then there’s selling your employees as human sacrifices. That sort of thing is just uncool.
The whole “human sacrifice” thing didn’t pan out, and I returned to find Dave gone and the strip club abandoned. Since he wasn’t technically dead—not until I get my hands on him, anyway, and who knows when that might be?—the rest of the city’s bogeymen got to decide what would be done with his property, and they settled for turning it over to his niece, Kitty. She’d been touring with her boyfriend’s band when things really got nasty, and didn’t find out that her uncle was missing until she came to ask for her old job back. Maybe Dave left the deed in her name, or else her boyfriend was really good at fabricating paperwork, but either way, talk about your welcome home presents.