“Can I help you?” inquired a flat, utterly nonhelpful female voice. The speaker’s air of disdain was enhanced by a broad Ohio accent, making her sound like the stereotypical bored secretary from a bad sitcom.
I fell backward onto the bed, relief wiping the tension from my neck and shoulders. “Hi, Mom. It’s Very. How was the Underworld?”
“Verity!” The disdain vanished in an instant, replaced by Mom’s more customary brand of good cheer. My mother: one of nature’s pep squad team captains. “How are you, honey? Your father said you were having some boy troubles.”
The image of Dominic De Luca’s face if he heard his presence referred to as “boy troubles” was enough to make me snort briefly with laughter. “Well, he’s Covenant, and he’s male, but I’m not sure that’s the way I’d phrase it,” I said. “When did you get home?”
“Just this morning. I’ve barely had time to rinse the brimstone out of my hair.”
“There was actually brimstone this time?”
“Not literally, but close enough. There was this acidic slimy stuff that ate through the straps on our packs like they were sugar candy. Didn’t melt skin or hair, though, so I can’t complain overmuch.”
I heard the faint resignation in her tone, and placed a guess: “No luck this time, either, huh?”
“None,” she said. “I know she says she’s sure he’s still out there somewhere, but Very, I’m just not convinced. She was so certain that this was going to be the time we brought him home … maybe it’s time she moved on.”
“I’m not sure that she can.”
Mom sighed. “To tell the truth, honey, neither am I.”
Every family has their tragedies. My family has about a baker’s dozen, starting with the death of my great-grandmother and increasing in unpleasantness from there. Grandpa Thomas is probably the worst of the lot. Somehow, he managed to get himself linked to one of the planes in the Underworld, probably by trying to pull off some sort of spell from the “no, really, don’t do this” section of the family library. He spent years trying to sever the connection, sometimes on his own, sometimes with help. They never succeeded, and Grandma Alice was pregnant with my Aunt Jane when that link finally yanked him out of this dimension and into that one … wherever that one is. Grandma’s been looking for him ever since. After forty years of chasing rumors and half-coherent clues across the dimensions, I don’t know if she remembers how to do anything else.
Mom cleared her throat, breaking the melancholy silence that had grown up between us. “You didn’t call to talk about this, though, did you? What’s going on, Very?”
“Can you get Dad on the other line? I’d rather not go over this more than once if I can help it.”
“Sure thing, sweetie; just hang on a second.” There was a soft scraping sound as she set the receiver against her shoulder, and she shouted, sounding somewhat muffled, “Kevin! Pick up the phone! It’s Verity!”
The line clicked as Dad picked up the extension in his office, saying, “Verity! How was your dance contest this morning?”
“It was a tango competition, and it was fine, until it got interrupted by an act of Covenant.” I put an arm across my face, blocking out the light, if not the distant chatter of the mice. “Dominic decided the best way to get hold of me was to infiltrate the hall, stuff my partner in a coat closet, and get me disqualified for bringing an unregistered dancer onto the floor. Good times all around.”
A long silence greeted this announcement. Finally, carefully, Dad asked, “Verity, has the Covenant blown your cover?”
“You mean ‘does the Covenant know that Valerie Pryor is actually me’? Yeah. They do. But that’s sort of secondary to the real problem at hand.”
“If the Covenant knows—”
“So far, only Dominic knows, and he isn’t telling anyone, because if he calls home, he’s going to wind up losing control of this operation pretty much immediately.”
There was a long pause before Mom asked the question that had to be preying on both of their minds—after all, losing my Valerie identity could mean the final end of my attempts at a dance career and, while they wanted me following in the family business, not dancing, this wasn’t the way they wanted to win the argument. Her voice was almost hesitant, like she was afraid of what my answer would be. “Verity, if the Covenant knowing who you are is the secondary problem … what’s the primary one?”
“Oh, yeah, that.” I closed my eyes, bracing for the shouting I knew was about to start. “See, it turns out there’s a dragon sleeping somewhere under Manhattan…”
My parents didn’t disappoint. They both began talking at once, and quickly escalated to both shouting at once, less out of anger than out of sheer and utter bewilderment. I relaxed and waited, letting them get it out of their systems. As expected, they started winding down after a few minutes. Finally, cautiously, Mom said, “Verity? Are you still there?”
“I’m here. Just waiting for you two to calm down enough to listen. Are you calm?”
“That depends,” said Dad.
“On what?”
“On whether you’re getting ready to buy a plane ticket home.”
I rolled onto my stomach, propping myself up on my elbows as I replied, “Nope. I’m getting ready to go find myself a dragon.”
“Verity—”
“Don’t ‘Verity’ me. This is a dragon. A real, honest-to-God dragon. I’m not going to walk away from that. Could you?” Silence greeted my question. “I thought not. Anyway, I can’t leave. The Covenant’s in town, and their local representative is actually willing to work with me, at least until the dragon gets found.”
“What happens then?” Mom asked quietly. “When you’re alone with the dragon and a member of the Covenant, what happens then?”
“Well, then I guess we see whose point of view is faster on the trigger.” I rolled onto my back again, staring at the ceiling. “I hate to admit it, but I need his help. I can’t do this alone, and I’m not willing to have any of the rest of you fly out here—not when there’s a chance that Covenant surveillance could ID you. I’m compromised, you’re on the other side of the country, and that seems like the right place for you to be. Besides, I have Sarah here.”
“Does she know about all this?” asked Dad.
“Know? How do you think I know there’s actually a dragon? Dominic found the rumor, but it was Sarah who found the giant sleeping lizard.” I hesitated, unsure as to whether I should tell them the rest. Common sense won out; if I was going to go off and get myself eaten, they’d need to know everything before they came charging in to recover my remains. “Oh, and there’s one more thing. We think someone’s trying to wake the dragon up.”
It took a lot longer for the shouting to stop this time, at least in part because Antimony finally realized we were having a conference call and hopped onto the downstairs extension. Adding a third voice to the chaos—especially a third voice that had to be brought up to speed on the situation—did nothing to make it quieter. I wound up holding the phone a foot away from me, listening to them yell at one another, and waiting for things to settle down.
Eventually, Dad realized I’d dropped out of the conversation. After vigorously hushing my mother and sister, he asked, “Verity? Are you still there?”
“Just waiting for the panicking part of our program to be over,” I said, and brought the phone back to my ear. “Are you ready to listen calmly and without commentary to the rest of what I have to tell you, or should I send an email and turn off my phone?”
“We’ll listen,” said Mom firmly, before Dad or Antimony could say anything. “Go ahead, honey.”
“Thanks, Mom,” I said. “Okay, first, Dominic isn’t responsible for the disappearances—not among the sentient cryptids, anyway. He killed a few of the nastier dumb ones. I was planning to kill a few of them myself, so it’s hard to be too pissed. Anyway, he thought I was helping the local cryptids get the heck out of Dodge after I knew that he was in town. According to a loca
l Madhura, most of the folks who’ve vanished have been young, female, and either unmarried or unmated, depending on the standards of their species.”
“Someone’s hunting virgins?” asked Antimony. “Gross much?”
“Pretty standard for the snake cults,” said Mom. “I’ve never known a snake god who cared about virginity, but somehow, the idea that they do has managed to really take root with those people.”
“So maybe somebody’s applying snake cult standards to the dragon. Whatever the reason, Sarah says someone’s trying to wake it up, and I believe her. When Dominic and I went down into the sewers—”
“Wait,” Mom interrupted. “Are you saying you took this Covenant boy to meet your cousin?”
I bit back a groan. “Mom, she’s a cuckoo. Like he’s going to find her again if she doesn’t want to be found? Give me a little credit, here.”
“If he’d attacked at the time—”
“First, he didn’t, and second, if he had, I would have been right there. Sarah and I together are more than a match for anything the Covenant can throw at us, and I know for a fact that I’m more heavily armed than he is. Can I get back to the sewers?”
“Please,” said Dad.
I outlined the Sleestak encounter in the sewers as quickly as I could, paring the information down to the bare minimum. We went down; we found signs of cryptid habitation; we got jumped by rejects from another remake of Land of the Lost. We kicked ass, we ran away. End of story.
When I was done, I paused, waiting for someone to say something. No one did. Finally, I asked, “Well?”
“I have no idea what those are,” said Mom.
“I’ll check my books,” said Dad.
“You got to have a subterranean grudge match with lizard-people, and I had to spend the day cleaning the library,” said Antimony. “Some people get all the luck.”
“Yeah, well,” I said. “So that’s the status. Are we agreed that I don’t currently need backup?”
“No,” said Dad. “You absolutely need backup. But…” He hesitated before saying, reluctantly, “We’re agreed that we can’t send any. Not right now. I want you to check in every day. The same goes for Sarah. If either of you fails to do so—”
“Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war,” I finished grimly. “I get the picture. I just know that if that dragon wakes up, we’re going to have a serious problem on our hands, and it’s best if we keep the number of us available for damage control as high as possible.”
“I wish I didn’t agree with you,” said Mom.
“Oh, trust me, Mom,” I said, sitting up and looking out the bedroom window to the city beyond. The city that I was responsible for protecting, and that was dangerously close to becoming the setting for the first real-world Godzilla flick in the past several hundred years. I sighed. “So do I.”
Fifteen
“There’s nothing wrong with making a last stand. Just make sure you bring enough grenades to share with the entire class.”
–Alice Healy
Still in that semilegal sublet in Greenwich Village
GETTING MY FAMILY OFF THE PHONE was simplified when Dad got an email from Uncle Ted. Uncle Ted was following reports of a basilisk sighting off I-5, and really wanted some backup. (Basilisks are no laughing matter. Not unless your idea of “funny story” involves the phrase “and then the lizard turned my wife to stone.”) After delivering a few more hurried admonishments about checking in and not letting myself end up alone in a room with Dominic, Dad hung up. Mom and Antimony were right behind him—the last thing I heard was Antimony shouting, “Just let me get my crossbow!” before blessed silence descended.
Well, blessed silence aside from the horns honking in the street outside, the pigeons on my windowsill, and the distant, ecstatic cheering of the mice. I wasn’t feeling picky. My family was staying in Oregon, and I had the possible dragon all to myself.
I paused in the act of plugging my phone into the charger. I had the possible dragon all to myself. Perversely appealing as that thought was, it also wasn’t fair. If there was even the slightest chance that the dragons weren’t extinct, there were some people who needed to know about it.
The dragon princesses.
I wasn’t actually scheduled to work until the next day. My job at Dave’s Fish and Strips may be about as intellectually taxing as watching paint dry, but it’s still exhausting, and I always try to take the days on either side of a major dance competition off. It’s safer that way, and reduces the odds of my becoming so tired that I lose my ability to deal with idiots. Knocking someone’s teeth out because they didn’t tip well is not a swift route to job security.
After a quick shower and an unhealthy meal of leftover pizza, spray cheese, and corn chips, I changed into clean clothes, put on a new pair of running shoes, packed a few replacement throwing knives, and jumped out the kitchen window. The pigeons were getting used to me. There were a few ruffled feathers, and I got my share of irritated looks, but none of them actually took flight as I plummeted past them, grabbed the fire escape rail, and slung myself across the courtyard. It’s amazing how quickly and completely the natural world can adjust. People forget that pigeons aren’t hatched from cracks on the sidewalk; they’re wild birds that have simply learned to exist in symbiosis with the human race. Their adaptation is proof that it can be done. We should applaud the pigeon as a survivalist totem, not call them “rats with wings” and shoo them off our windowsills.
The muscles in my thighs and shoulders loosened up as I ran, finding a rhythm that allowed me to compensate for the lingering stiffness in my left knee. My injuries hadn’t been as bad as they could have been. The bruises didn’t even slow me down much, although I felt them every time my heels made impact. I really hit my stride about halfway to Dave’s, and finished the journey at full-speed, almost laughing from the sheer joy of feeling the wind against my face and the city beneath my feet. I felt like one of those spandex-wearing superheroes in the comic books that Sarah and Antimony swap back and forth when they think the rest of us aren’t looking. I felt like I could fly.
Even Superman has to land eventually, even if it’s just to talk to somebody who doesn’t have super powers. I started slowing down as I got closer to Dave’s, dumping speed by throwing needless tricks into my progress, so it would be less jarring when I finally touched down. I finished with a half-cartwheel that left me in a crouch, the remains of my inertia bleeding out through the sole of my right foot. I glanced at my watch. Decent speed, especially considering my injuries.
“Guess I’m going to live after all,” I said, and straightened. Dust from the rooftops clung to my jeans and the palms of my hands. I took a moment to dust myself off before walking over to the rooftop door, testing the knob, and—upon finding it unlocked—letting myself inside.
The dressing room was deserted except for Carol, who was engaged in her usual mortal combat against her own hair. The tiny snakes covering her head writhed and snapped at her fingers, dodging frantically in their efforts to avoid the wig she was trying to clamp down over them. I couldn’t entirely blame them. My hair was always sticky with sweat and matted in weird patterns when I had to wear my Valerie wig for any length of time, and my hair isn’t independently alive. I knocked on the doorframe. She looked up, turning her head fast enough to give her bangs the opportunity to sink their fangs into her thumb. They did so, with gusto.
“Ow!” yelped Carol, dropping her wig and shoving her injured thumb into her mouth, going cross-eyed with the effort of glaring at her own hair. The snakes, sensing danger, promptly withdrew into hissing clusters. “’toopid ’air,” Carol mumbled around her thumb.
I winced. “Sorry about that. Are you going to be okay?” A lesser gorgon like Carol can’t actually turn people to stone—their gaze doesn’t work on anything much larger than a guinea pig—but that doesn’t make them harmless. The bite of their serpentine hair (and yes, I realize exactly how that sounds) can kill.
Carol shook her head,
pulling her thumb out of her mouth. She squinted at the rows of tiny puncture wounds. “We’re immune to our own venom,” she said, matter-of-factly. “Hi, Verity. I thought you weren’t on duty tonight.”
“I’m not. I’m here to see Candy—is she here?”
That got Carol’s attention. She turned to blink at me, even her hair standing at attention and directing all of its several hundred eyes in my direction. “Seriously? Is this one of those ‘if I tell you where to find her, you’ll walk out of here with her head in a bag’ situations? Because I don’t like Candy very much, but I’m still pretty sure I’m not allowed to sell her up the river.”
I rolled my eyes. “Gee, Carol, way to tell me what you really think of my loyalties. I don’t want to hurt her. I don’t even particularly want to call her nasty names. I just want to talk to her. So is she on duty or not?”
“Sorry. It’s just, well … if anyone around here could inspire you to homicide, it would be Candy, right?” Carol shrugged, looking sheepish. “Yes, she’s on duty. She should be taking her break soon, if you just wanted to wait here. You’re not exactly, um, what Dave would call ‘projecting a professional image’ right now.”
“You mean I don’t look like a Playboy Bunny? My poor heart breaks.” I walked over to perch on the edge of the dressing table, turning to peer at myself in the mirror. I was developing a pretty nice shiner around my right eye—I didn’t even remember getting hit there—and one of the only really visible scrapes ran down the same cheek. I looked like I’d been letting my boyfriend beat me up for fun. “You should’ve seen the other guy,” I muttered.
“What?”
“Never mind.” I hoisted myself up to perch on the makeup counter, careful to stay out of range of Carol’s hair. “So what’s been going on around here for the last couple of days? I am experiencing a drought of gossip, and demand the sweet rain of information.”