“Well,” said Carol, as she picked up her wig and resumed her efforts to stuff her hissing hair beneath it, “Kitty called from the road, and it turns out her boyfriend’s band isn’t doing quite as well as she expected, which I don’t think is surprising in the least, but she, of course, thought they’d be the next big thing. Anyway—”
I leaned back against the mirror, listening to Carol talk, careful to nod at the right places and make the correct exclamations of surprise when prompted. Bit by bit, she coaxed her snakes under the wig, settling them one row at a time, like a general trying to control the world’s most disobedient army. “You should get a beehive wig,” I said, without really thinking about it. “One of those huge bouffant hairstyles. Then you could just hollow out the center, so you wouldn’t have to squash your snakes when you put it on.”
Carol’s hands froze, eyes going wide and startled. “I never even thought of that!” she said. “Big hair is in again, isn’t it?”
“Not quite that big—” I protested, but it was too late; the seed was planted. Carol resumed stuffing snakes beneath her wig, smiling bright as sunshine.
“I’ll go to the wig shop after my shift. Thanks, Verity. You’re the best.”
“You’re, uh, welcome,” I said, unable to keep myself from thinking of those old urban legends about girls whose beehive hairdos turned out to be full of spiders, or earwigs, or other horrible things. How long before “and her hair was full of venomous snakes” joined the roster?
Oh, well. If you can’t actually be an urban legend in your own right, I guess inspiring one is just about as good.
“Slumming in the bestiary again, Price?” asked a snide voice from the doorway. I glanced over. Candice was standing just inside the room, arms crossed defensively across her chest, model-pretty features drawn into a scowl. Her shoulders were set like she expected a fight. Maybe she did. I had told her the Covenant was in town not all that long before, and now here I was with another bombshell.
I slid off the counter, keeping my body language as open and nonthreatening as I could manage. “Hey, Candy,” I said. “I actually came to talk to you, if you could give me a few minutes? It’s sort of important.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What could you possibly want to discuss with me?”
I glanced unobtrusively toward Carol, who was trying to look like she wasn’t watching this little drama in the mirror. “It’s sort of private. Would you mind coming up to the roof with me?”
“Why, so you can throw me off?” Candy demanded.
I bit the inside of my cheek and counted to ten before saying, very carefully, “I have no intention of throwing you off the roof, and if you’d rather we talk here, I’m perfectly willing. I just thought you might like to have the chance to decide whether or not to tell the Nest, rather than risking this getting into the rumor mill and reaching them some other way.”
Carol rolled her eyes. “Thanks for putting such trust in my discretion.”
“It’s not you I’m worried about.” I jerked a thumb toward the air vent. “You really think Dave doesn’t have this place bugged?”
“Good point.” Carol turned in her chair, half her snakes still exposed and snapping fiercely at the wig. “Candy, go up to the roof with her. If you’re not back down here in ten minutes, I’ll get Ryan and come looking for you. Promise.”
Candy still looked unsure. I sighed. “If you don’t think my information was worth your time, I’ll give you fifty dollars,” I said, picturing my groceries for the week growing wings and flying away. I could always make do with leftovers stolen from the kitchen at Dave’s. That was mostly what I’d been doing anyway.
“One hundred,” countered Candy.
“A hundred—Candy, I make the same amount of money you do! Less, even, since you get better tips.” She had an ice princess demeanor with a Playboy Bunny’s looks. I’m no slouch in the looks department, but my tendency to break fingers that “accidentally” touch my ass means I don’t tend to get the tables with the repeat customers.
“One hundred, or I don’t go with you,” said Candy, lifting her chin in an imperious gesture that telegraphed exactly how serious she was. Only the promise of money—all but irresistible to a dragon princess—was getting her to the rooftop, and fifty wasn’t going to cut it.
I sighed. “One hundred, if you think my information isn’t any good.”
“Deal,” said Candy, and unfolded her arms. Moving with quick efficiency, she untied her apron, placed it in her locker, and padlocked the whole thing, protecting her tips. She went through that ritual every time she took a break, and it had long since stopped being insulting; it was just another part of being who she was, a dragon princess surrounded by creatures that looked like her, but really belonged to another species altogether.
Sometimes I think evolution really didn’t do the totally human-form cryptids any favors. It’s so easy to forget that they aren’t like the rest of us—geeky, like Sarah or Artie, or maybe a little spaced-out, like Uncle Ted, but still essentially just folks—and start judging them by human standards. You can’t do that. It isn’t fair.
“Ten minutes,” said Candy sternly to Carol, and left the room, heading for the stairway to the roof.
Carol turned back to the mirror, her reflected lips mouthing the words “good luck” as she went back to stuffing snakes beneath her wig. I rolled my eyes beseechingly toward Heaven, and followed Candy out of the room.
Candy beat me to the roof by almost a minute—a minute I was sure she’d carefully deducted from my promised ten. She was more than ten feet from the door when I reached the top of the stairs. She raised her hand, saying sharply, “Stay there.”
I raised an eyebrow, letting the door swing shut behind me. “You mean, stay here by the door?” Candy nodded. “You know, it’s harder to keep secrets really secret when I have to shout them at you. Can you at least come a little bit closer?”
Candy narrowed her eyes. “How do I know you’re not planning to throw me off this roof?”
I bit back the urge to groan. “Because if I was going to kill you, I’d just shoot you, okay? Gravity is not my weapon of choice. Look, the deal’s off if you don’t come close enough for me to tell you what I came here to tell you. So you’ll have come up here for nothing.”
That, at least, got through to her. Candy took several grudging steps forward, until she was still out of arm’s reach, but at least close enough for me to talk to without shouting.
“Thank you,” I said. Forcing my body language to remain as nonthreatening as possible, I asked, “Candice, have you ever heard anything—anything at all—to indicate that the dragons aren’t really extinct?”
She reeled back as if I’d just hauled off and punched her in the face. When she focused again, it was to give me a look of such fury that I felt a little bit punched. “Is that why you brought me up here?” she demanded. “To make fun of me? What, cable isn’t enough for you people, you have to find other ways to entertain yourselves? That’s swell of you. That’s just plain swell.”
“Candy, we think we may have found a dragon.”
She froze. Literally froze, dewy blue eyes gone so wide that I could see the whites all the way around her irises. I didn’t think she was breathing.
“We weren’t looking for it, exactly, but I have access to a telepath, and she says—”
“Where?” asked Candy. Her voice was barely a whisper, and mostly ripped away by the wind, but I recognized the shape of it on her lips. She took three long, runway-perfect steps forward and grabbed me by the shoulders, succeeding in shaking me twice before the surprise wore off and I pulled myself away. “Where? Don’t you keep this from me, don’t you dare, and if you’re lying, I swear, if you’re lying—”
“Candy, calm down!” I shook my head, holding up my hands defensively. “I only just found out, okay? I haven’t been keeping anything from you. Anyway, we think there may be a dragon sleeping somewhere under the island, and we think it’s connected to
the recent disappearances.”
Her eyes widened again—with anger, this time. “What, so you’re blaming the dragon? Is that why you wanted to talk to me? You’re looking for bait?”
“What? No! I’m blaming the disappearances on humans, some sort of snake cult, probably, trying to wake the dragon up the way they’d summon a snake god.” I let my hands drop back down to my sides. “If there is a dragon, I want to protect it. I want to prove that it’s not the source of the trouble we’ve been having recently. And I wanted the Nest to know as soon as possible, because this affects you.”
“More than you know,” she said bitterly. Shaking her head, she asked, “So what do you want from me?”
“I want you to go to the Nest. I want you to tell them what we’ve found, and that I’m trying to find a way for you to get to the dragon. If there’s anything that might tell me where to start looking, anything at all, I need to know.”
Candy studied my face, tilting her head slightly to the side as she asked, “Why should we tell you? Why shouldn’t we just go looking on our own?”
“Two reasons. First off, if there’s some sort of snake cult in town making virgin sacrifices, they probably already know how to get to the dragon. I’m sure they’d look at you and the Nest as a perfect virgin buffet.”
Candy blanched. “And the second reason?”
“I went down into the sewers earlier today, looking for clues.” I decided not to mention the fact that Dominic had gone down with me. That seemed like a little bit too much for Candy’s nerves. “I got jumped by a bunch of lizard-dudes I’d never seen before. It was like The Land of the Lost down there. Unless you’re sure they’d be happy to see you, you probably need some sort of—” I stopped midsentence. Candy had gone pale and started to shake, suddenly looking like she was on the verge of tears. “Candy? What’s wrong?”
“There’s a dragon,” she whispered. “There’s definitely a dragon, and somebody’s hurting him. They have to be hurting him if they’re making servitors. Oh, Verity!” My name came out as a wail, and she was suddenly doing something I would never have expected in my wildest dreams: she threw her arms around my shoulders, burying her face against my chest. “We have to find him!”
I patted her awkwardly on the back. “Don’t worry,” I said, as confidently as I could. “We will.”
Apparently, “I may have found you a dragon” counted as big enough news that Candy didn’t make me pay her for going up to the roof with me. Good thing, too—at a hundred dollars for ten minutes, I would have been borrowing money from Ryan just to pay off my debt to Candy. Never owe money to a dragon princess. Their interest rates are murder.
As for the pressing question of the night, namely—“What’s a servitor?”—Candy was willing to answer it in detail. Too much detail. After providing a vivid installment of Things I Never Wanted To Know Theater, Candy promised to speak with the rest of the Nest about the dragon and call me with anything they knew, and went back inside to finish her shift. I watched her go, then went racing back across the rooftops to my apartment. Her surprise had been genuine—I was certain of that—and with what I’d just learned, I needed to check in sooner rather than later.
No one was picking up at the house. That wasn’t a surprise, considering they’d left for the basilisk hunt not that long before, but I still said several words we’re supposed to be careful about using in front of the mice as I hung up. General cheering greeted my profanity, along with a few ecstatic mentions of the Feast of Washing Out Mouths With Soap. I didn’t have the energy to tell them to keep it down. If the mice wanted to have a party, let ’em. I had bigger—much, much bigger, as in “dragon-sized”—fish to fry.
I was sitting down at my computer, composing an email with everything I’d managed to learn so far (not nearly enough) when there was a knock at the apartment door. My head snapped up like a jackalope scenting a pack of coyotes. My presence in the apartment was, after all, technically illegal, since the original lease forbade subletting and the apartment’s actual tenant was on extended vacation somewhere in Canada. I didn’t exactly encourage things like “visitors,” especially since a lot of the people who’d be coming to visit couldn’t pass for human in a dark alley on a moonless night.
The knock came again. The mice gave a subdued cheer. “Hush!” I hissed, standing. “You get out of sight while I answer the door.”
“But, Priestess, the Holy Feast—”
“Will be honored, if it’s a man, and if I let him through the door,” I said. “Now hide.” The mice scattered, vanishing under furniture and into hidey-holes. Only a few pennants and some pigeon-bone accessories were left to show that they’d ever existed, and those could be excused as my having morbid taste in dolls. (Antimony did that once, taking a bunch of mouse-designed ceremonial gear to school as part of an art project she billed as “Barbie Meets Modern Primitive.” She got an “A,” and an appointment with the school counselor.)
The knocking came a third time. It was starting to sound impatient. “Shit,” I hissed, giving the room a quick once-over for obvious weapons before shouting, “I’ll be right there!” I triggered my screensaver—no point in giving some nosy neighbor an eyeful—and half-ran across the room, yanking open the door.
Dominic De Luca gave me a look that was half-exasperated, half-amused, and held up a large paper sack which smelled enticingly of fried chicken and the usual assortment of sides. “Before you begin shouting at me for having your address, I wish to note that I come bearing peace offerings, and am prepared to apologize for further intruding on your privacy. I simply thought we should speak, and I no longer trust you in coffee shops.”
“Fair,” I said, and grabbed his arm, hauling him into the apartment before shutting the door firmly behind him. “Sorry, I’m trying to avoid attracting the attention of the neighbors. Technically, I can’t legally be here, so—”
The room erupted into cheers. Quite literally: with mice crammed into every cushion and hidden under every piece of furniture, it sounded like the apartment had suddenly been possessed by the spirit of Super Bowl Sunday. Dominic’s head whipped around, eyes going wide. “What in God’s name—?!”
“Oh, crap,” I groaned, putting a hand over my face. “I should have expected this. I should have known, and spent the night at Sarah’s or something. This is all my fault.”
“Why is the apartment shouting at us?” Dominic groped for his belt, presumably to produce something he could use to attack the cheering, hostile … apartment. If he had a knife intended entirely for stabbing haunted sublets, I didn’t want to know about it. I uncovered my face and clamped my hand down over his, holding him in place. He gave me a startled look.
“I’m really, really sorry about this, but it’s the Holy Feast, and it’s just not going to stop until I do this, so please don’t take things the wrong way, okay?” He was still looking completely baffled. “Oh, to hell with explaining.” Stepping into his personal space, I leaned up, and kissed him for the second time.
The cheers got even louder. But after a few seconds, I don’t think either of us was listening to the mice.
Dominic tensed for an instant before he was kissing me back, all the urgency I’d sensed in him earlier returning, and joined by a strange sort of relaxation, like he’d come to terms with the reality that I was kissing him. Things got good faster this time; he wasn’t holding back. With one hand pinned under mine, and the other filled with fried chicken, it wasn’t like he could exactly put his arms around me, so he turned us around instead, pinning me up against the wall beside the door. It didn’t feel like being trapped. It felt like an embrace, one that couldn’t use the standard materials, and so had to find a way to improvise. I like a man who knows how to think on his feet.
Our first kiss ended when he pushed me away. This time, there was no pushing. He leaned into me, and I strained to press myself more solidly against him. Dominic made a small growling noise in the back of his throat, clearly frustrated by the unavailabi
lity of his hands. The cheers were tapering off, and my hormones were starting to go insane. Right. If I was going to get the situation—and myself—back under control, this was the time to do it. Right now. Not in five minutes, despite the fascinating thing Dominic was doing with his tongue. Right now.
Pulling back with a gasp, I looked into Dominic’s eyes, seeing my own thin control reflected there, and gasped, “You just walked in on the Holy Feast of I Swear, Daddy, I’ll Kiss the Next Man That Walks Through That Door. It was the only way to make them stop.”
He blinked.
“Seriously.”
Dominic blinked again. Seeming to realize that the cheering had faded, he stepped back, letting me move away from the wall. “They … who?” he asked blankly.
“My resident colony of Aeslin mice.” Sensing that the mood was irreparably broken, I took the bag of chicken from Dominic’s hand and called, “You can come out now!”
“HAIL!” replied the mice, popping into view from places all over the room. It looked like a bad special effect on a Jim Henson TV show, and I’m used to them. It’s really no surprise that Dominic jumped, eyes going enormously wide in his suddenly-pale face.
“Your apartment is full of talking rodents,” he said, like this was somehow going to be a surprise to me.
“Yes,” I said.
“Your apartment is full of talking rodents, and you just kissed me again.”
It seemed safest to keep agreeing with him. “Yes.”
Dominic nodded slowly. “All right. You mentioned a … Holy Feast of some sort? Was that the motivation behind…?”
“Yes. I mean, no. I mean … chicken?” I held up the bag, forcing a smile that probably looked more like the painted grin of a crazy clown. “Come on. Kitchen’s this way.”
Of course, my kitchen was so small that there was no chance we could sit down. Even eating standing up at the counters wouldn’t work, unless we wanted to eat with our backs to one another. Somehow, I didn’t think that was going to reduce the tension between us.