“I didn’t know anyone over the age of seventeen could pull that off,” I said. “Congratulations.”
“Shouldn’t you be asking me personal questions and demanding blood samples by now?” Candy glowered at me. “I agreed to be your guide, not your specimen, and I only said I’d do that much because Betty was pretty sure you’d follow me. Since we’re coworkers and everything.”
“You’ve never actually been friendly enough for me to bank on that relationship, but I promise not to ask for any blood samples.” I ran a hand through my hair, grimacing a little as flakes of blood came off on my fingers. “As for personal questions, I have plenty. First question: did you have any idea that there might be a dragon here in New York?”
“No.” Candy shook her head. “We gave up believing that any of the Lost Ones were going to come back for us a long time ago.” Catching the confusion in my face, she sighed and said, “The Covenant didn’t kill all the males in one go. It took time. Some of them were fast enough to grab their wives and go into hiding for at least a little while. That’s how our line got here, sometime in the sixteenth century. But even dragons die. The last male we know of passed away over three hundred years ago. We just assumed we’d have to make it on our own after that.”
“But you kept collecting the gold.”
“It’s necessary if we want to stay healthy, especially when there aren’t any males around.”
Her expression challenged me to ask what the gold was used for. Since I wasn’t looking for the cryptid Carmen Sandiego, I decided that it would be a lot kinder not to. Did I want to know? Absolutely. My father was going to give me hell when I called home and couldn’t tell him exactly what purpose the gold served in dragon physiology. But Candy didn’t deserve to be treated like some sort of specimen and, if we could just find the dragon, relations with the dragon princesses were certain to improve. “Here, I went into the tunnels and found you a boyfriend” was definitely one hell of a peace offering.
“Right,” I said, nodding. I couldn’t miss the relief in her eyes when she realized that I wasn’t going to ask. Chalk one up to making the right decision. “What can you tell me about your biology, without going into anything too uncomfortable for you? You said that dragon blood is mutagenic—does that go for the females, too? Are there any other bodily fluids I need be watching out for?”
“You’d actually have to drink the blood for it to have any effect on you and, even then, it won’t work if there’s gold in your system,” said Candy. “Just swallow some gold flakes before you go anywhere near where you think he is, and you’ll be okay. Our blood doesn’t work the way the males’ blood does.”
“Swallow gold. Got it.” The idea of chugging an entire bottle of Goldschläger before I went back into the sewers was appealing, if somewhat impractical. “Can I, uh, get some gold before I go?”
Candy’s lips tightened with obvious reluctance before she nodded. “I can get you a bottle of gold dust, but whatever you don’t use, you’ll have to give back.”
“Deal.”
“There’s nothing you really need to be afraid of but the blood. Oh, and the fire-breathing—but he won’t do that until he wakes up, so unless he thinks you’re a threat, it shouldn’t be a problem.”
“… right,” I said. “Is he likely to wake up pissed off? And how do I keep him from perceiving me as a threat?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never actually met a boy before.” There was a wistful note in her voice.
That made me pause. What must it have been like to grow up as a member of a species that only had one gender? Worse, that only had one gender and knew that it was originally supposed to have two? “Are you mammals?” I blurted, summing up all the questions about loneliness and sexual frustration in three seemingly nonsensical words.
Candy seemed to understand the intent. She smiled a little, and said, “Not really. We think—I mean, the Nest-mothers think, after talking about it for a really long time—that we started out as a sort of dinosaur. We’re warm-blooded, and we have a lot of mammalian traits, but most of them are window dressing.”
“Like those praying mantises that look like flowers.”
“Something like that, yes, only we’re not insects. We think that the more we looked like people, the better our odds of surviving to breed were, and the more we bred, the more we all started to look like people.”
“Protective coloration that doesn’t even need a dye job. Remind me to introduce you to my cousin Sarah.” They could form some sort of pseudo-human support group or something. “How long do your males live? The only records I could find about this area were from a good three or four hundred years back.”
“Awake, about a hundred and thirty years. Asleep … it’s all just stories, but some of them say that males can hibernate for hundreds and hundreds of years without getting any older. We can do it, too, but not for as long. Fifty or sixty years is about all we can manage, and even that takes a lot of preparation.”
“Gold again,” I guessed. She nodded. So much of the social behavior of dragon princesses was starting to make sense to me. “All right. Other than ‘don’t get mutated’ and ‘watch the morning breath,’ is there anything I really need to know about dealing with the male of the species? Is there anything that can help me track him down?”
“If we had an easy way of finding him, you wouldn’t be anywhere near here,” said Candy, with calm matter-of-factness. “We have no idea where he is, except ‘down.’ The servitors are probably there to protect him, and are following the orders of whoever has him. He’s going to be hard to wake up if he isn’t finished hibernating. It isn’t seasonal, but if he isn’t prepared to be awake, he’s going to be groggy and confused.”
“How fun for me.”
“No, how dangerous for you.” She glanced down, not quite fast enough to hide the concern in her eyes. “I know you’ve been telling us for years that your family … wasn’t like the rest of the Covenant anymore, but we’ve never really believed you. I’m still not sure I believe you except that I have to if I want to have any chance of meeting the male. We’re not trained for the sort of things you are.”
“Spelunking isn’t one of my specialties,” I said, slow horror dawning as I realized what she wasn’t coming out and saying aloud. “He’s going to think I’m Covenant, isn’t he?”
“Probably.” Candy sighed, looking up again. “If you don’t talk fast, he’ll probably kill you.”
“Um, does he speak English?”
“I don’t know.”
“This gig just gets better and better,” I muttered.
Candy shrugged. “It probably beats waiting tables,” she offered. “At least this way you get to loot the bodies of the snake cultists.”
“I’m not much of a looter, but thanks.” I raked my fingers through my blood-stiff hair, and sighed. “Maybe I can find a really big tranquilizer gun. With armor-piercing darts.”
“Just don’t hurt him.”
I offered her a wan smile. “Trust me, Candy, at this point? He’s really not the one I’m worried about.”
Twenty
“When all else fails, put on a fresh coat of lip gloss and pretend you have no idea what that horrible thing that just went running down Main Street was. A surprisingly large number of people will believe you.”
–Frances Brown
Still in the Meatpacking District, well above street level
CANDY HAD BEEN ALMOST IRRITATINGLY EAGER to be rid of me even though my departure meant giving me a decently sized jar full of powdered gold. Dragon princesses watched me all the way to the door, none moving to follow or attempting to say anything. I guess when someone you view as your ancestral enemy winds up between you and your only shot at ever getting laid, you’re not overly inclined to be friendly.
“Can you find your way from here?” asked Candy, once we were back in the blind canyon between the bodega and the former slaughterhouse. “I need to get ready for my shift so I can start paying back t
he cost of the gold you’re taking.”
“They’re making you pay for this?”
“Yes, of course. It’s not like you will.”
“Right,” I said slowly. “I’m good from here. I’ll see you at work.”
Candy didn’t say good-bye, just flipped her hair and turned to stalk back into the building, letting the door slam shut behind her. I looked at the jar of gold powder in my hand, sighed, and shoved it into my pack. I was starting to think I would definitely have preferred the Goldschläger, especially with the little “fiery demise” rider on this particular adventure, but it’s true what the sages say: you can’t always get what you want.
I could, however, get the hell off the ground. I got a running start and threw myself at the far wall, where the bolts that once anchored the lowest ladder of a fire escape still protruded from the brick. Once I had hold of them, it was an easy matter to swing myself up to the remains of the actual fire escape and scramble up the creaking metal. In under a minute, my hands were hooked over the edge of the slaughterhouse roof, disturbing ancient grime and much more recent pigeon shit as I hoisted myself the rest of the way onto solid footing.
Seen from two stories up, the Meatpacking District was a strange patchwork of gentrified elegance and urban decay. Most of the less-attractive bits were hidden cunningly away, like the dragon princesses’ Nest, tucked into spots where no one at street level would ever see them. Some were probably cryptid nests, hiding their own outcasts and secret societies. Others were no doubt slated for eventual destruction and replacement, clearing away the bones of the district one little bit at a time. New York is a city built upon the cannibalized remains of its own past, constantly changing, constantly the same.
Stepping back so that I wouldn’t be visible from the street, I took a seat on the edge of a broken-off smokestack and pulled out my phone. According to the readout, I still had five percent of my battery charge remaining. That was enough to make both the calls that needed making.
Alex had clearly been waiting for my call; the phone didn’t even have time to finish ringing once before he picked up, demanding, “Who is this?”
“Your sister. The one who isn’t dead.”
There was a long pause before he said warily, “Verity?”
“Um, yeah. What’s Antimony up to today that you think she’d be the one making this call? Because seriously, I want to know.”
“Chasing basilisks, remember?”
“Oh, right. My lizard is so much bigger than her lizard that I guess it just slipped my mind.” I giggled, more from stress than actual amusement. “Hey, what do you know? Size does matter.”
“Verity—”
“Only wait, it turns out that you were actually wrong about something. Dragons aren’t lizards. They’re sort of like dinosaurs that managed to hang after the big extinction parties, and evolved to fit a whole new niche. A weird, fucked-up niche, but still, you have to admire them for trying.”
“Verity!” I heard Alex take a deep breath. “Can you please, please tell me what happened? I’m glad you’re not dead. I wasn’t relishing the idea of being called to the East Coast to fish your remains out of the sewer. Now explain.”
“You really do care.” I leaned against the crumbling brick of the next smokestack over. “Short form: I went down as carefully as I could. Piyusha was already dead when I found her. There were runes painted all over her body; I took pictures with my phone. I’ll email them to you and Dad.”
“Good. Why did it take you so long to call in?”
“Oh—I got jumped by draconic servitors.” Silence. “Remember when I said I got in a fight with the Sleestaks?”
“I’m not in the habit of forgetting things like that.”
“Well, see, dragon’s blood is a mutagenic substance, and when people drink it or, I guess, get it fed to them, they turn into weird lizard-people. Hence the Sleestak attack. I don’t know if there’s a demutator, but I’d be willing to bet that there isn’t. Evolution is generally pretty good about leaving things fucked up once it fucks them.”
The sound of a heavy thump traveled through the phone as Alex sat down on his end. “You found the dragon.”
“Not yet.”
“So how do you know this?”
“Because it turns out the Covenant didn’t wipe out all the dragons. Just the male ones. Think extreme sexual dimorphism, mimicry-based camouflage, and parthenogenesis. The dragon princesses are the female of the species, and they’re sort of excited by the idea of getting their boyfriends back.”
Alex swore quietly.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Like that, but louder.”
Most people are familiar with the theory of sexual dimorphism. It’s what gives peacocks those flashy tails while the peahens look like they’ve been dipped in boring, and what makes male lions so much bigger and lazier than the lionesses. Every gendered species is sexually dimorphic to one degree or another, even if it’s as simple as “one of us has an innie, one of us has an outie.” The female spotted hyena has what really looks like a penis from any sort of a distance. Lots of reptiles are visually sexless, which is why calling your tortoise “she” is silly if you’re not a zookeeper. Other animals are so sexually dimorphic that they don’t even look like the same species. We’re talking anglerfish where the males have no digestive systems of their own, barnacles where the females are basically internal organs feeding off their male hosts, and stuff that’s even weirder. Mother Nature is a freaky lady who probably created pot so she could spend all her time smoking it.
It’s unusual to find really extreme sexual dimorphism in anything bigger than a skink, but it happens. The dragons were definitely on the high end of the weirdness scale, and the parthenogenesis just upped the crazy ante. If extreme sexual dimorphism is rare in bigger animals, parthenogenesis—reproduction without access to the male of the species—is practically unheard of. Komodo dragons can do it (although since they’re Komodo dragons, they do it extra-freaky, and actually produce male offspring through what is essentially a method for self-cloning). Anything bigger than that? Not so much. But that explained why we’d never been able to figure out where the dragon princesses were coming from. They weren’t pulling the tanuki trick and mating with anything that moved. They were mating with themselves, all in the name of making it through another generation. Parthenogenesis means never having your mother tell you to stop doing that or you’ll go blind.
Anyone who thinks cryptozoology is the study of the impossible has never really taken a very good look at the so-called “natural world.” Once you get past the megamouth sharks, naked mole rats, and spotted hyenas, then the basilisks, dragons, and cuckoos just don’t seem that unreasonable. Unpleasant, yes, but unreasonable? Not really.
It took about ten minutes to finish explaining everything I’d learned from the dragon princesses, by which point the battery of my phone was on the brink of death. Emailing the pictures was going to need to wait until I got home to my charger. Alex agreed to call our parents and leave a message for them to pick up when they got back from the basilisk hunt, thus saving me from needing to go through the whole spiel twice in one afternoon. I was tired, I was sore, I still had to tell Piyusha’s brothers that she was dead, and I really didn’t want to deal with the risk that my parents were already home. The last thing I needed was to wind up getting grilled by Dad in full-on naturalist mode.
“You’re sure you’re okay?”
“Except for the cuts, contusions, bruises, damage to my pride, and slight dislocation of my worldview, I’m fine.” I stood, feeling the muscles in my thighs protest. A little run would work out the majority of the stiffness, and some painkillers would have to do for the rest. It wasn’t like I was going to be taking a hot bath and a nap any time soon. “I’m about to be unavailable for a little while, though—at least until I can charge my phone. I’ll be checking email, or you can call Sarah.”
“Doesn’t she have class today?”
“She always checks h
er messages between classes, in case Artie mysteriously decided to fly to New York and wants to have lunch.”
Alex snorted. “Yeah, like that’s going to happen. I don’t think he’s left the basement in a month.”
“Only a month this time? And you know Sarah. Hope springs eternal, especially when you’re a socially awkward math geek from a species of dangerous telepathic psychopaths. At least she’s fixating on the dork side, rather than the dark side. It could be worse.”
“Charming as ever, Very. I’m going to go call Dad and let him know what’s up on your end. Please try not to get killed before you can recharge your phone.”
“Love you too, big brother.” I hung up, tucking the phone into the pocket of my jeans before taking a step back and getting a running start toward the edge of the roof. If I got the trajectory right, I should be able to jump off, grab the fire escape on the building across the alley, and swing from there to the next roof over. It all depended on my building enough momentum before the first leap, but I had faith in my ability to clear the distance. I got one foot up onto the low concrete lip surrounding the roof, tensed to spring—
—and toppled backward as someone grabbed my arm.
I managed to avoid going into a full-out somersault as I yanked myself away, but I couldn’t dump speed fast enough to keep from tumbling to the roof, absorbing the majority of the impact with my elbows. I’ve taken worse falls with less preparation, and all I left behind on the hard-pack gravel of the roof was a few layers of skin. I bounced back to my feet with knives already drawn, whirling to face my assailant. I was pissed, but not quite pissed enough to go straight for my guns. That sort of escalation never does anyone any good.
Dominic was still standing by the rim of the roof, looking faintly surprised, like he hadn’t expected my interrupted leap to contain quite so much momentum. He was back in his duster and jeans, and there was fresh tape covering the wounds on his face. “Are you all right?”