According to the hours in the window, Gingerbread Pudding was open from seven AM to nine PM every day. According to my watch, it was almost ten. So why were the doors still locked?
Usually, if I encountered a business that was closed during normal operating hours, I would assume they were having a private party or doing inventory or something. That might have been the case at Gingerbread Pudding. I just needed to talk to Piyusha too badly to take that chance. I’d already lost too much time by having a good night’s sleep—even if I was pretty sure sleep was going to be in short supply from here on out. I rapped my knuckles briskly against the café door. No one came to let me in. I waited a few minutes before rapping again, harder this time.
The door creaked slowly open, revealing the narrow, anxious face of a man with a pronounced family resemblance to Piyusha. They had the same dark hair, and his features were practically a masculine version of hers. “Yes?” he asked suspiciously. The door creaked a bit farther open, letting me catch the sweet smell of honey and fresh ginger wafting from his skin. He gave me a quick up-and-down glance, assessing my jeans (designer) and burgundy halter top (silk, shamelessly “borrowed” from Sarah’s closet) before reaching a decision, and saying, “I’m sorry. We’re closed.”
“Hi,” I said, offering him the sweetest smile I could muster. “You must be one of Piyusha’s brothers. I’m Verity. I realize you’re probably busy, but this will only take a few minutes, and I really need to talk to her. Is there any way you could get her for me?”
The man’s expression froze. “Verity Price?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Piyusha may have mentioned that I dropped by—?”
“Yes, she did,” he said, expression still not wavering. Opening the door fully, he stepped to one side and asked, “Won’t you come inside?”
“Thanks.” I stepped into the darkened café, flashing him another smile as I went. He didn’t return it.
As soon as I was past the threshold an arm reached out from the space behind the door, locking itself around my neck and hauling me backward. It was surprising enough that I didn’t fight immediately. I felt myself pressed against the chest of a second, shorter man. He smelled less like honey, and more like a mixture of cinnamon and ginger. That was something. At least if this turned into a serious fight, I’d know where to aim my kicks—even if I couldn’t see to tell them apart, I’d be able to smell the difference.
The door swung shut. “Now,” said the man who’d let me inside in the first place. “You’re going to tell us what you’ve done with our sister.”
Intelligent cryptids come in two major types: loners, like the cuckoos and the gorgons—most of whom would be perfectly happy if the rest of their species disappeared off the face of the planet—and the more social sorts, like the dragon princesses and Madhura. Social cryptids live and die by the concept of family. For many of them, that dependence on the company of their own kind is what has allowed them to survive into the modern era. That gives them a sense of family that would put my own to shame.
The Madhura with his arm hooked around my neck tightened it slightly, not quite choking me, but definitely making it a bit harder to breathe. I wasn’t that worried. He was strong enough to be an inconvenience. That didn’t mean he had the training necessary to hold onto me once I decided I was done being held. Strength is cheap. Technique is what really counts.
Keeping my chin up and my voice calm, I said, “I haven’t done anything with Piyusha. Is there a reason you’re assuming I did?”
“Hold her, Sunil,” commanded the first man. Turning, he locked the door before walking toward me and my captor, the newly-identified Sunil. “You’re Covenant. Why should we assume anyone else was responsible?”
“I’m terribly sorry to disappoint you but, not only am I not responsible for Piyusha going wherever it is she’s gone, I’m not Covenant. I’m a Price.”
“There’s no such thing,” said Sunil, breath hot against my ear. “They’re a lie you Covenant bastards spread to make us think that some of you can be trusted. You fooled our sister. You won’t fool us. We’re nowhere so gullible.”
I was starting to get annoyed. I focused on the man in front of me. Much as I wanted to start yelling at both of them—no one calls me Covenant and gets away with it—I needed to be reasonable as long as I could. “If you want to take my wallet out and check my driver’s license, I promise you, it’ll tell you that my name is Verity Price. And no woman has ever voluntarily carried fake ID with a picture that ugly. What happened to Piyusha?”
“That’s what you’re going to tell us,” snapped the man in front of me, jabbing a finger at my chest. He didn’t quite make contact.
Raising my eyebrows, I asked, “Is that the best you can do? Threaten to poke me? Wow, do you not have any talent for interrogation.” I reached up with both hands—which neither of them seemed to have thought might need to be pinned—and grabbed Sunil’s arm, twisting hard. He yelled. I yanked down. In a matter of seconds, I was free, and both Madhura were staring at me like I’d suddenly demonstrated the ability to walk through walls.
“I’m really not in the mood for games, and I have way bigger problems than the two of you,” I said sternly, producing a throwing knife from inside my shirt and holding it at a defensive angle in front of me. It’s normally a bad idea to be the first one to draw a weapon, but they had me outnumbered, and I needed to even the playing field a bit. “Does one of you want to tell me what you think I did, so we can clear this up, or do you just want to piss me off?”
“Our sister came home telling fairy tales about a Price woman and her friend from the Covenant,” spat the taller of the two men, glaring. “Twelve hours later, she was gone. Do you really think we wouldn’t put the pieces together?”
“Rochak, I think she’s serious,” said Sunil, frowning as he studied my expression. He shared the family resemblance, although his hair was a deep burnt-toast brown, rather than the black shared by his siblings, and his eyes were slightly lighter. He looked like the human incarnation of the Gingerbread Man. Assuming that you’d always pictured runaway pastry as a smoking-hot Indian dude in his mid-twenties. “No one looks that clueless when they’re lying.”
“Hey!” I yelped. “I’m blonde, but that doesn’t make me a dumb blonde.” I paused. “But I really am that clueless, at least right now. You’re telling me that Piyusha is actually gone? As in, missing, disappeared like the others, didn’t just cut out to see her boyfriend gone?”
“Yes,” said Sunil, gravely. “She went out for groceries and she didn’t come back. We tried calling her phone after an hour had passed. She didn’t answer. We were concerned, and started looking for her. She … there were signs of a struggle.”
“Blood?” I guessed. He nodded. “Are you sure it was hers? I mean, how could you tell?”
Sunil turned to Rochak, looking vindicated. “See? She’s serious. This is not the one who hurt our sister.”
“Why does this please you? It means we still have no idea who did.” Rochak scowled at his brother before looking at me and saying, flatly, “My apologies for the accusation. You must see why you would be a reasonable suspect.”
“I do, but does someone want to tell me why you’re suddenly willing to believe me?” I lowered my throwing knife. I didn’t put it away. “Blood is blood, usually. Unless it’s not.”
“Our blood is not precisely like yours.”
“Really?” I asked, with what must have seemed like a bit too much enthusiasm. They both gave me uneasy looks. I sighed. “I’m not going to cut you open to see what your interesting inside bits look like. I’m just curious.”
Rochak said, uncomfortably, “Still, it is something we’d rather not discuss.”
“Have it your way.” I’d just have to let Dad know that the database entries on the Madhura needed to be updated to reflect undocumented physiological oddities. That’s the trouble with not dissecting everything you meet: so much remains a mystery. “What time did she
disappear?”
“She left for the store a little before ten o’clock last night,” said Sunil. “We became concerned when she didn’t come home or call by eleven.”
I breathed out a silent sigh of relief. Dominic hadn’t been responsible. He’d been at my house well before that, and he hadn’t left until sometime after eleven-thirty. Piyusha probably wouldn’t have shared my relief—whether she’d been taken by the Covenant or taken by crazy people who wanted to sacrifice her to a sleeping dragon, she’d still been taken—but at least I knew I hadn’t led death to her front door. Not directly.
If I warned her brothers about Dominic, they might decide that I really had been responsible for Piyusha’s disappearance. If I didn’t, and he came back here on his own, they’d be completely unprepared. Either way, I was taking a risk.
Only one of those risks stood a chance of leading me to the dragon. If I didn’t find the dragon before Dominic did, an entire species might go extinct. Mustering the most sincere “I’m here to help” expression I could, I asked, “Can you show me where you found the blood?”
Sunil and Rochak led me out the back door of the café and down the street to a tiny hole-in-the-wall bodega. There was a faded sign propped in the window, advertising a two-for-one sale on canned tomatoes, and a milk crate of sad-looking apples was doing double duty as a doorstop. “Here,” said Sunil, indicating a reddish smear on the wall next to the bodega’s window. It looked more like thickened sap than blood. I leaned closer, and the overpowering sweetness of it hit me. It was like pine resin mixed with molasses, with only the slightest hint of copper to confirm the mammalian origins of the one who’d lost it.
“We knew it was dangerous to let her go out alone, but she said she felt perfectly safe; she said nothing would touch her with a Price this close.” The accusation in Rochak’s eyes was impossible to bear. I focused my attention on the bloodstain instead, trying to pretend I knew anything about blood splatter analysis that hadn’t been learned from watching reruns of Dexter. “I suppose she was incorrect.”
“Guess so,” I mumbled. Glancing to Sunil, I asked, “Did she make it into the bodega?”
He nodded. “The clerk said that she had been in and out right around ten. That she was in good spirits.”
Neither one of us was going to mention the fact that the clerk might have been the last one to speak to Piyusha before she was grabbed, hauled underground, and sacrificed to a giant sleeping lizard that really couldn’t have cared less. “So we have a window on when she went missing. That’s something at least.” I straightened, moving back until I could no longer smell the cloyingly sugary scent of Piyusha’s blood. “Thank you for showing me this. I’ll look for her, and if I find anything—”
“You won’t,” said Rochak, quietly.
“Maybe not, but you’ll still be the first to know.” I shrugged. “It’s all I can offer. Stay together. If you have any other sisters, don’t let them go to the store by themselves.”
“You’ll really look for her?” asked Sunil.
I nodded. “I really will.”
“How do we know that we can trust you?” asked Rochak.
“You don’t. But right now, I think I’m about the best chance your sister’s got.” All three of us looked at the smear on the wall. None of us said anything after that. No one really needed to.
Things that I am: impulsive, foolhardy, occasionally too convinced of my own invulnerability. Things that I am not: completely stupid. After I bid Piyusha’s brothers good-bye, I scaled the nearest fire escape, got myself back up to rooftop level, and pulled out my cell phone. Leaning against the side of an ornately-carved gargoyle (after first checking to make sure it wasn’t a real gargoyle taking a nap), I called home. The answering machine picked up: fifteen seconds of silence followed by an ear-shattering “beep.” Another safety precaution.
“Hey, guys, it’s me. Pick up.” I waited a few seconds. No one picked up. “Come on, if you’re there, pick up.” No one picked up. I sighed deeply. “You’d better not all be dead right now. I’ll try your cells. If you don’t hear from me again, send reinforcements. With tanks, if at all possible.” I hung up.
Calling Mom, Dad, and Antimony’s phones got the same result: a quick ring to a blank voicemail prompt. I left basically the same message with all three of them, and considered calling Uncle Ted. They’d been going on a basilisk hunt…
And those can take days, I reminded myself firmly, and someone would have called me if things had gone wrong. Maybe just Aunt Jane, but still. Someone. I sighed, pushing my concern as far into the back of my mind as I could, and dialed the person I’d been trying to avoid calling. My brother.
Unlike the rest of the family, Alex has always stayed in the habit of answering his phone. That’s because he’s the only one—apart from me—at least pretending to have a life outside the family business, and since his job comes with nine-to-five hours and an actual paycheck, when the phone rings, he’s there to answer it. True to form, the phone only had time to ring three times before it was picked up on the other end. I smothered a small sigh of relief.
“Alexander Preston’s phone, Alexander Preston speaking.” My brother, as always, sounded distracted. He probably had a book in one hand, some kind of lizard in the other, and the phone on speaker.
“Hi, Alex,” I said. “It’s your best-beloved baby sister. You got a moment to chat?”
“Verity?” His tone turned wary. I could practically feel the full force of his attention being turned in my direction. “Where are you?”
“Still in Manhattan. Dad keeping you posted on the local news, or do I need to bring you up to speed before I start asking for your help?”
“You mean the part where you’re claiming you may have an actual dragon on your hands? Yeah, I’ve heard.”
“Oh, see, you haven’t heard the best part. My dragon’s been upgraded from ‘may have’ to ‘absolutely have.’ It’s here. It’s sleeping, which is the good part, but, well. There are a few bad parts.”
“Why don’t I like the sound of that?”
“If I have to take a guess? Because Mom wasn’t in the practice of bouncing you off the pavement when you were a baby. Bad part number one, I think we’ve got a snake cult. Or, well, whatever you call it when you have a bunch of idiots worshiping a reptile that isn’t actually a snake. Dragons have legs, right?”
“Yes, dragons have legs,” said Alex, slowly. “They’re like very large lizards. What makes you think you have a snake cult?”
“Didn’t Dad tell you about the virgin sacrifices?”
There was a long pause before Alex spoke again—long enough for him to count silently to ten. I know that pause very well. He’s been incorporating that pause into basically every conversation we’ve had since I turned twelve. “No, he didn’t tell me about the virgin sacrifices. Verity, why are you calling?”
“Because I’m about to do something really stupid.” Silence greeted my proclamation. I sighed. “The snake cult—dragon cult—whatever—it’s been snagging cryptids all over the city. Maybe humans too, for all I know. They’ve taken a Madhura I know, a girl named Piyusha. I have to at least try to get her back.”
“What do you mean, ‘get her back’?”
“I mean I’m going to go down into the sewers where I got attacked by Sleestaks—it’s a long story, turns out dragon biology is even wackier than we thought it might be, and now there are Sleestaks under New York—to find Piyusha. I had backup last time I was down there, and it was still pretty close. So I want to make sure someone knows what the situation is, and can sound the alarm if I don’t call back in an hour. I’d have called Mom, but they’re all out chasing basilisks around Oregon.”
“Verity…”
“There’s no one close enough to get here while she still has a chance in hell of being alive, and if I can’t at least try to save her, what’s the point of my even being here?” Silence. “You know I’m right.”
“What about Sarah?”
br /> “I’m not taking her down there with me, if that’s what you mean. She’ll be fine on her own until the cavalry can get to town. Piyusha doesn’t have that long.”
There was a long pause before Alex said, voice stiff with resignation, “If you haven’t called in two hours, I’m catching the next plane to New York. And if I find you hanging out in some dance club because you didn’t think I needed an update, I’m going to beat your ass. We clear?”
“As crystal. I left messages with Mom, Dad, and Annie, so if any of them call you—”
“I’ll tell them you’re insane but being responsible about it.”
“Thanks, Alex.”
“You better remember this the next time I ask you for a favor.” He hung up without saying good-bye. I was sort of expecting that. What I wasn’t expecting was the pang that went through my chest as the silence fell and I realized that I was truly getting ready to do this. I closed my phone and gazed across the rooftops around me. This was where I belonged, out in the open, with a thousand directions to escape in. Not down there, in the dark, alone.
Piyusha was an innocent. She’d answered all the questions Dominic and I asked her, and she’d trusted in my presence to keep her safe. There’s a sort of responsibility that has to come with having that sort of a reputation. I had to try. No matter how much I didn’t want to.
I slid my phone into my pocket and stood, stretching out my hamstrings before stepping delicately off the edge of the roof. Time to get to work.
Eighteen
“This isn’t the sort of business that comes with a lifetime guarantee. You start because it’s the right thing to do, and by the time you realize that the only way to quit is a closed casket funeral, it’s too late to get out. That’s just the way it is.”
–Alice Healy
In the sewers under Manhattan, doing something stupid
THE SEWERS WERE DARK, OPPRESSIVE, and a little nerve-racking when I went into them with Dominic to watch my back and no reason to expect any trouble. Going into them on my own was a dozen times worse, especially now that I knew what was down there. I’m not a fan of close-quarters combat, and blind fighting is Antimony’s thing, not mine. But Piyusha needed me, and there was no one else to call.