“First off? I suggest we go and find the Madhura that lives in this area. She may know something.”
“The what?” He looked at me blankly.
I almost had to laugh at that. “Oh, man. For a big, bad dragon hunter, you sure have a lot to learn. Come on.”
We found our Madhura behind the counter of a tiny café called “Gingerbread Pudding.” She was a petite, attractive woman of Indian descent, wearing a sapphire blue T-shirt and a bright red apron embroidered with “Come catch me! Be a Gingerbread Fan!” Her thick black hair was bound into two long braids that dangled over her shoulders as she served a slab of dark brown gingerbread and a cup of hot chocolate to a customer, smiling all the while. The Madhura are attracted to sweet things. They thrive on honey the way dragon princesses thrive on gold, or bogeymen thrive on information. Working in a place that specialized in desserts was probably close to her inborn idea of Heaven.
Dominic eyed the Madhura with evident bewilderment as we waited for our turn to approach the counter, nostrils flaring slightly as he detected the distinct spiciness of her pheromones. A happy Madhura is close to irresistible. It’s part of what’s kept them alive for so long. “What is she?” he asked, voice pitched low.
“Madhura. They’re originally from the Indian subcontinent. They used to be worshiped as gods and goddesses of plenty, because they always knew where the honey was.” We took another step forward as the line advanced. “They’re harmless, they’re friendly, and they usually know what’s going on.”
His expression darkened. “I don’t believe we share the same definition of ‘harmless.’”
I dug an elbow into his side. “Just shut up and let me talk.”
He glared but fell silent as the last customer collected his purchases and went to take a seat, letting us step forward. The Madhura turned her smile in our direction, saying, “Welcome to Gingerbread Pudding. I’m Piyusha. What can I get for you today?”
“Whatever you think is good, and some information.” I did my best to look harmless as I offered a return smile, and said, “My name’s Verity Price. This is my … friend … Dominic. We wanted to talk to you, if we could.”
Piyusha’s smile froze in place as she glanced between us, finally saying, “Verity Price? As in…?”
“Yes. I’m trying to figure out what’s going on. Please?” Dominic was still glaring. I dug an elbow into his side. He grimaced. “I promise we won’t take up too much of your time.”
“All right.” Piyusha nodded toward a door marked “Employees Only.” “Head in the back. I’m going to get one of the other girls to take the counter, and I’ll be right with you.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said, and took Dominic’s hand, towing him along with me as I followed Piyusha’s instructions. The people who had been in line behind us grumbled darkly as she slipped out from behind the counter, leaving them temporarily without a server. The door between us and the café swung shut, and we were left alone.
Piyusha was true to her word: she came into the small employee break room about eight minutes later, carrying a tray loaded with two slices of frosted gingerbread, two large mugs of chocolate milk, and a small plate of graham crackers and honey. She took a seat across from us at the card table that dominated the break room, putting down her tray so that the gingerbread was oriented toward me and Dominic, while the crackers and honey were closer to her.
“Now,” she said, focusing her attention on me, “to what do I owe the honor of the attention of your family?”
“We want information about the dragon,” said Dominic, his tone barely short of rude.
Piyusha froze in the act of reaching for one of her graham crackers, simply staring at Dominic. Finally, she allowed her hand to drop to her lap and looked to me once more, asking politely, “Is he a member of your family, or is he a member of the Covenant?”
“The latter.” Seeing the burgeoning panic in her eyes, I added, “But he’s promised not to hunt anyone who helps us in our investigation unless they become an active threat to the local human community.” That was a transition that would mark them for a hunt by my family, as well as by the Covenant. No matter how much we may like a cryptid, once they start hunting people, they have to be put down. That’s part of the service we provide to the local ecology of the places we live.
Dominic glanced at me, frowning. I kicked him under the table. We’d discuss the promises he hadn’t actually made but was damn well going to adhere to later, after I’d calmed down our friendly neighborhood Madhura.
“I … see,” said Piyusha, relaxing marginally. She picked up one of her graham crackers, dipping it into the honey. “I’m not the most connected in this city. I work in a dessert café, y’know? But I do hear things, sometimes. Things that aren’t always all that nice.” She looked between us, still spinning her graham cracker in the honey. “You swear he’s not going to come back here and hunt me?”
“I swear. If he does, he’s the one endangering the ecosystem, not you.”
Piyusha relaxed further. “You should try your gingerbread. It’s really good. Secret café recipe, people have the stuff shipped all over the place, because you can’t get it anywhere else.”
“Cool. Thanks.” I picked up my fork, using it to slice off a sliver of gingerbread. Dominic grudgingly did the same.
That seemed to have been the last piece Piyusha needed to convince her that we weren’t intending to set her on fire. “Like I said, I’m not the most connected person around, but what I’ve heard is that not everyone who’s leaving is actually, y’know, leaving. Some of them just disappear. No notes, no forwarding addresses, nothing.”
“Well, that happens,” I said. “Especially with news of the Covenant being in town getting out—”
“Does it usually happen with the lamia?”
That stopped me. The lamia are sort of like centaurs, if you expand your definition of “centaur” to include “body of the world’s biggest fucking snake.” They’re more clannish than the dragon princesses, with even better reason. They can’t blend in human society, and their endothermic metabolisms mean that they’re weak and disoriented whenever the weather gets too cold. “Safety in numbers” is the lamia creed … and no lamia I’ve ever known or read about would abandon their nest without a damn good reason.
Seeing my confusion, Piyusha pressed, “How about the hidebehinds? Four of them have disappeared.”
“How can you tell?” I asked automatically. Then I shook my head. “Sorry. That was flippant and speciesist. I just … why hasn’t anybody told me this?”
“Maybe because there’s a member of the Covenant in town? I mean, you brought him here. To me. You led him to me.” Piyusha worried her lower lip between her teeth before adding, “It sort of creeps me out.”
“Madam, I assure you, I could have found you on my own,” said Dominic, frostily.
Piyusha met his eyes straight-on, squaring her shoulders. “Would you like to bet on that?”
“This is fun, but it’s not helpful,” I said. “Do the ones who’ve disappeared have anything in common? Species, geographic location, anything?”
“They were all female, and they were all unmarried or unmated,” said Piyusha. She worried her lip again, and then added, “Some went missing during the day, and some went missing at night. A few were regular customers. I’ve been thinking about getting out of town.”
“That just might be a good idea.” I pulled my wallet out of my bag and produced a business card, setting it on the tray next to her graham crackers and honey. “Call me if you need anything, or if you find anything else that might help us figure out what’s going on. If it really is a dragon—”
“I’ll call you,” said Piyusha. Looking at her face, I could almost believe she meant it. She picked up the card, laughing nervously as she tucked it into her pocket. “My brothers aren’t going to believe that I met a real Price. Sunil’s convinced you people are just fairy tales.”
“We don’t get enough happily-ever-
afters for that,” I said.
Piyusha’s expression sobered. “No, I guess you wouldn’t.” She glanced at Dominic. “That’s all I know. I’m sorry I couldn’t help more.”
It wasn’t hard to catch her drift. “Don’t worry. You’ve helped more than enough. Hasn’t she?”
“Yes,” said Dominic. He managed to make the word sound like it pained him.
I stood. “We won’t take up any more of your time. You’ll call?”
“I’ll call,” Piyusha said firmly.
We exchanged polite farewells as Dominic rose, and she walked the two of us to the door, waving off my offer of payment with a laugh that only sounded slightly forced. I found myself liking her more by the moment. Through the glass, I saw her returning to her place behind the counter. Then we walked away, and I never saw her alive again.
Eleven
“If you offered me the chance to do it all over, knowing what I know now, after the things I’ve seen … I’d shoot you in the head. That ain’t the kind of thing you ask a lady.”
—Frances Brown
The sidewalk outside Gingerbread Pudding, a dessert café with good taste in servers
DOMINIC’S RESTRAINT SURPRISED ME; he waited until we couldn’t be seen from the café’s front window before grabbing my elbow and jerking me into the nearest alley. The maneuver was sudden enough to throw me temporarily off-balance, and I stumbled against him, giving him the leverage he needed to get hold of my upper arms. His fingers dug in hard enough to pin my arms to my sides, without quite holding hard enough to hurt me. I appreciated that. I wasn’t really in the mood to break his jaw.
“You presume too much, woman,” he hissed, eyes narrowed. “How dare you? That inhuman thing—”
“Her name is Piyusha,” I said. I made an effort to keep my tone level and reasoned. “She’s a Madhura. She has a human life span. She has no physical advantages. She’s not a predator. Since she’s an unmarried female, she’s probably living with her parents or siblings, and working in the café because the day-olds contain sufficient sugar to keep them all in good health. She’ll marry when she meets a male who smells right. Wherever they live, the whole neighborhood will benefit, because the milk won’t spoil, the bread won’t go stale … hell, living near a Madhura even retards tooth decay.”
His fingers loosened, a confused expression crossing his face. The confusion passed quickly, replaced by pure fury as he clamped down again, harder than before. “Witch!” he spat. “You’re trying to twist my mind with your propaganda.”
It was the confusion that did it.
When my family left the Covenant, they told us we were wrong, that we had no idea what we were doing—that we were traitors not only to “the cause,” but to the entire human race. There’s one thing I’ve never encountered, either in the accounts I’ve read of the departure or in the reenactments of the Aeslin mice: confusion. The members of the Covenant were absolutely convinced of their truth, every step of the way. But Dominic … he might not agree with me, he might never agree with me, but the confusion I sometimes saw in his face told me there was a chance. And if there was a chance, I was going to take it.
“Propaganda? What, you mean I’m trying to make you listen to reasonable arguments about why you shouldn’t go killing people in my city?” He was starting to cut off circulation to my arms. I squirmed. “Okay, how about this: let go of me, or I’ll knee you in the balls.”
Dominic let go.
I took a step back, smoothing imaginary wrinkles out of my shirt with the heels of my hands before crossing my arms and falling into a casual, hipshot position. Guys hate it when girls look at them like they don’t matter. Dominic appeared to be no different; he scowled at me even harder. “Look, I get that we’re on different teams most of the time, but we’ve agreed that having a dragon get loose in New York would be bad for everybody. You need to get it through your head that not every cryptid is actually evil. A lot of them serve important ecological functions.”
“Bull—”
“My great-great-grandparents left the Covenant because Dr. John Snow discovered the mechanism by which cholera was able to spread through England.”
The change of topics appeared to completely baffle him. That was reasonable; it was a bit of a non sequitur if you don’t know the family history, and I was betting the Covenant had never put Great-Great-Grandpa Healy’s actual reasons for leaving into the record. “What?”
“Cholera is a bacterial infection spread through polluted water.” I took a step toward him, arms still crossed. “It didn’t start getting bad until the 1800s, which a lot of people attribute to the increase in the population of the world’s cities. The worst outbreak anyone had ever seen occurred in 1832, when it killed a truly ridiculous number of people in London and Paris.” He was still looking baffled. I took mercy. “The last known unicorn in France was killed in 1831.”
That put Dominic on more familiar ground. “Unicorns are feral beasts. They kill—”
“I know the stats on unicorn kills.” One more step closed the distance between us. He didn’t grab me. I didn’t knee him. “Unicorns cleanse the water in the areas where they live. Cholera comes from tainted water. A unicorn in the wild will kill one, maybe two people a year. A cholera epidemic kills thousands. So, yeah, when John Snow’s findings were published, my family had some questions, and when we were told ‘it doesn’t matter, we’re doing God’s work,’ we left. Still think it’s propaganda?”
“I…” Dominic stopped. “They’re monsters.”
“Some of them are, sure. But by any objective measure, so are lions, and tigers, and bears. What do you think the sapient cryptids, like Piyusha’s family, think about you?”
There was a long pause before he said, “I don’t know.”
“That may be the first totally honest thing you’ve said to me.” I unfolded my arms, sticking out my hand. “Hi. My name’s Verity Price. I will forgive you for the rooftop snare and the dead ahools and the attitude problem if you’ll forgive me for kicking your ass if you try to hunt anybody who isn’t actively threatening my city. Deal?”
Looking faintly amused, Dominic took my hand and shook, twice. “Deal. Although I’m actually forgiving you for making the attempt. I’m not as certain of your success as you are.”
“That’s fair.” I reclaimed my hand, stepping back out of his personal space. “So you’re the guy with the record books. Is there anything in them about dragons having a thing for unmarried women?”
“Only in that a village in the process of trying to placate a dragon was likely to use virgins as the main course.” Dominic shook his head. “I don’t know whether that means they actually demanded them…”
“… or whether the village elders just figured nobody would miss a few virgins. Got it. I’ll ask my dad. He may know.” And then I’d ask the dragon princesses. I was willing to introduce Dominic to a few members of the cryptid community while we were getting the ball rolling, but if I brought him near the princesses, they’d disappear in a heartbeat. If there was actually a dragon in the city that would be the last thing we wanted. “In the meantime, we need more information.”
“I can contact my superiors and request that any information about the dragons not presently included in the primary records be sent for my review. It may take a few days.”
I gave him a sidelong look. “Won’t that make them suspicious?”
“Dragons are extinct, remember?”
“I swear, if you’re trying to pull a fast one and call down an air strike—”
“Would I have bothered informing you of my suspicions?” Dominic tucked his hands into his pockets, studying the alley wall. “I don’t want to trigger an assault unless I have to.”
“Why not? I thought that’s what you were trained for?”
“There are … complications.”
“Complications like what?”
He cast a sidelong glance in my direction. “How quickly can you get yourself, and everything
you claim to be protecting, out of this city?”
That stopped me. Until that moment, I hadn’t really considered the fact that Dominic—annoying, overbearing Dominic, who’d spoiled my shot at Regionals—might actually be trying to help. I eyed him. “What’s in it for you?”
“I don’t get the Covenant spoiling my first solo mission.” Dominic shrugged. “They’re very big on initiative. They’re also very big on claiming credit. If it’s a dragon, I want to be the one who finds it, not the one who reports it and winds up with a footnote in the official records.”
“What about that whole ‘I don’t want to start as a failed dragon slayer’ thing?”
“I said I wanted to find it. I didn’t necessarily say I wanted to prod it with a sharp stick.”
I could have kissed him for that. “See, I’ll just be happy if I don’t get eaten.” I paused, considering, before asking, “Are you going to be cool about the fact that not all cryptids are the bad guys here?”
“For the moment, I’ll allow it.”
“Okay. Then I’ve got someone we should talk to.”
Dominic quirked an eyebrow. “Oh? And who’s that?”
“My cousin.”
The disapproving eyes of the concierge tracked us across the lobby of the Plaza Athenee, a five-star establishment whose suites cost more per night than I made in a month of waiting tables at Dave’s. It was the sort of place where they’d film movies, if the management didn’t consider Hollywood film crews too déclassé to trust near their marble floors. Even the air tasted like money, a delicate blend of expensive perfumes and unobtrusive all-natural cleaning products.
“What are we doing here?” hissed Dominic.
“I told you, we’re visiting my cousin.” I stopped in front of the elevators, smiling at the operator—yes, the real, live elevator operator—responsible for keeping the buttons from soiling our dainty fingertips. “Penthouse, please. Sarah’s expecting me.” It wasn’t entirely a lie. I didn’t call ahead, but once a cuckoo is telepathically attuned to someone, they can “hear” them coming a quarter of a mile away. I haven’t been able to sneak up on Sarah since I was eleven.