Discount Armageddon

Twelve

Central Park, a block and a half away from the Plaza Athenee, preparing to do something stupid

THE FIRST OUT-OF-THE-WAY MANHOLE COVER we could find was located on the edge of Central Park, about a block and a half away from the hotel. It was mostly hidden in the middle of one of those little seating areas that spring up around the city like mushrooms after a hard rain. The few people who did walk by pretty much ignored us. “I love big city life,” I said quietly.

“What was that?”

“Nothing.” Dominic had removed his duster and shirt before taking the crowbar Sarah somehow managed to wheedle out of the hotel manager—when a cuckoo gets involved, it’s better not to ask exactly how they accomplish things—and setting to work. Sarah was back at the hotel, gulping Tylenol and keeping a telepathic “eye” on the area. She’d let us know if she saw trouble coming.

In the meanwhile, I was absorbed with the all-important task of checking my weapons, including the emergency throwing knives and smoke grenades I’d retrieved from Sarah’s closet. Well, that, and watching the way the muscles of Dominic’s back moved every time he strained to get a better degree of leverage on the manhole cover. Sure, he was Covenant, and I might have to kill him before everything was said and done, but the man had the sort of physique professional athletes would kill for. In his case, he probably had. All the training in the world won’t take the place of knowing that your performance on the field literally means the difference between life and death. So what if he was a dead man walking? He wasn’t dead yet, and the way he was carbonizing my hormones reminded me, graphically, that neither was I.

Dominic glanced up, as if he could feel my eyes on him, and scowled. “You could help, you know,” he said sourly.

“There’s only one crowbar, and I’m busy making sure we get back from the lizard hunt in one piece.” I slotted another throwing knife into its holster. “Don’t worry. It’ll be my turn to sweat soon enough.”

Muttering something in a language that sounded suspiciously like Latin, Dominic shook his head and went back to work.

You do realize you’re broadcasting, right? asked Sarah, implied laughter coloring her mental “voice.”

I nearly stabbed myself in the leg. The first time she pulled that trick, I actually did—cuckoos mature into projective telepaths in their teens, riding what Antimony and Sarah call “the X-Men effect.” (My sister and my cousin: both enormous nerds.) Before that, she’d been strictly limited to feelings and vague impressions that were to actual sentences as interpretive dance is to the Viennese waltz.

Shut up and get out of my head, I shot back. I’m not a telepath, but that hasn’t stopped me from learning how to communicate with them, if only out of self-defense.

So are you going to jump his bones? I ask purely out of academic interest, and because if you’re taking brooding, dark, and inappropriate home with you, I’m not auditing any classes near your apartment for a week.

“God, Sarah,” I muttered. Dominic glanced sharply in my direction, and I offered him a quick, reality-show-perfect smile. He shook his head again, looking baffled as well as disgusted, and bent back to his work. Don’t you have anything better to do?

Not until you get back. Safely, please.

I’ll do my best, I replied, approvingly. Dominic was shoving the manhole cover off to one side, releasing an unpleasant gust of sewer smell. I wrinkled my nose. Looks like we’re ready to head down the rabbit hole. Thanks for all your help.

Call me when you get back above ground. The soft background static of an active telepathic connection cut off as Sarah turned her attention elsewhere, leaving me alone with a half-naked member of the Covenant of St. George, an open manhole cover, and a plan consisting mostly of “look for something to hit.”

“One subterranean tour of the island of Manhattan, coming right up,” I said, sheathing my last knife before sliding off the dumpster I’d been perching on. I trotted over to help Dominic get ready to descend into the darkness. The things I do to keep potentially extinct monsters from eating the human race, I swear.

The New York City subway system is a large part of the reason for the city’s massive cryptid population. Many species of cryptid prefer to live in darkness—hence the popularity of creepy old houses, supposedly haunted forests, and complex cave systems. When those aren’t available, a sufficiently large and complicated subway system will suit most cryptids just fine. As an added bonus, city subways tend to come with water and power systems that can be tapped with relative ease, allowing city cryptids to live in comfort, yet not miss out on their modern conveniences. A surprisingly large number of bugbears really enjoy their daytime talk shows.

Because of the city cryptids’ tendency to retreat underground when given the opportunity, I never go anywhere without a light, bug spray, and a water bottle in whatever bag I happen to be carrying. Just in case.

The manhole opened to reveal a rusty metal ladder bolted into the concrete and pointing straight down into the sewer system. Dominic insisted on taking the lead, presumably so he’d have the first opportunity to fight off anything that felt like attacking us. I didn’t object. If he wanted to feed himself to the monsters, it would both keep them from eating me and solve that nagging question of whether or not to kill him. Two birds, one stone.

By bracing my feet against one side of the narrow tunnel and my shoulders against the other, I was able—barely—to get sufficient leverage to let me pull the manhole cover back into place. Most of the light died once the opening was sealed, leaving only a few narrow beams to illuminate our descent.

“In a sewer, in the dark, with a Covenant member,” I muttered. “Can this day get any better?”

The ladder ended after about fifteen feet, when my questing foot hit a chilly layer of half-congealed water. Grimacing, I dropped off the ladder, letting water soak through my socks, and pulled the cave light out of my bag, clipping it to my belt before saying, “Close your eyes. I’m going to turn the light on.”

“What?” asked Dominic.

I flipped on the cave light—a miniature halogen designed for deep spelunking and hunting basilisks in the woods on moonless nights. Dominic’s pained yelp told me he hadn’t listened. “I warned you,” I said, and turned to survey our surroundings.

I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the tunnel we were in was labeled as “generic New York sewer tunnel, model 16-C” on the official maps. The walls were just the right shade of grimy, slightly-mossy concrete gray; the slime covering the floor was just the right depth, with just the right questionable texture. I glanced up and nodded, satisfied. “Thought so.”

“What are you talking about, you insufferable woman?” demanded Dominic, still scrubbing at his eyes in an effort to recover from looking directly into my halogen light. The gesture was made amusingly awkward by the short sword he was holding in one hand, which begged the question of where, exactly, he’d been hiding the sword before he got into the sewer.

“Look up.” I jerked a thumb toward the ceiling to better illustrate my point.

He looked, scowl turning slowly into a bewildered frown. “What am I looking at?”

I decided to take pity. If I didn’t, we’d be standing in the faux sewer all afternoon, and that was so not the way I wanted to spend the hours before my shift. “Look at the light fixtures.”

“I don’t see what you’re talking a—oh.”

“Yeah.” The light fixtures dangling from the concrete ceiling were ostensibly for use by city maintenance personnel. That would have worked fine, if they’d actually been functional. With my cave light directed at the bulbs, it was clear that they might look like lights from a distance, but were really nothing but blown glass covered in Halloween store cobwebs. They even had lengths of yarn where the filaments should have been, guaranteeing that no amount of tinkering would get them to turn on.

“Monstrous deceits,” snarled Dominic.

I turned to face him, careful to keep my light aimed downward as I gave him a dubious look. “What, swapping a light bulb for a decoy is a monstrous deceit in your world? Remind me never to eat the last of the Thin Mints.”

“What’s a Thin Mint?”

“That’s it: after we save the world, we’re finding some Girl Scouts to mug for cookies.” I did a slow turn, checking the tunnel branches around us. There were three. Two of them looked naturally broken-down and unpleasant, while the third wouldn’t have looked out of place in a midnight monster movie. “That way.”

“How do you know?”

“Because that’s the one that looks like it should have a sign warning us not to go near the castle. Come on.” I started picking my way carefully through the sludge. It might be there for effect, but that didn’t mean I wanted to get any more of it into my shoes than I had to.

“I don’t understand,” said Dominic. This didn’t stop him from muscling his way forward until he was pacing next to me, his shoulders making the tunnel a substantially tighter squeeze than it would have been if we’d been walking in sensible single file.

“Look: we’re not actually going to walk into anybody’s living room,” I hoped; the city cryptids would never forgive me for that, “but we’re definitely walking into somebody else’s territory. Most of the sewers and subway systems are inhabited, and I don’t mean by the human homeless. Although the humans may make up a serious chunk of the total population. I don’t know, I don’t keep track. What I do keep track of is our local cryptids, and this ‘don’t look here, ooh, spooky’ sort of setup is classic bugbear.”

“Doubtless you’re overlooking the human homeless because they’re supplementing the diets of your precious bugbears.”

I rolled my eyes. Thanks to the dark, he never saw it. “Bugbears don’t eat people. What are they teaching you Covenant kids, anyway?”

“So what do bugbears eat?”

“Usually? Trash, half-rotten meat, whatever they find that looks interesting and isn’t actually alive. They’re not big on eating living things. Or hunting. Or cooking.” Your average bugbear can set an apartment building on fire trying to make a bag of microwave popcorn. It’s either a supernatural power, or they’re really, really dumb about technology. Possibly a little of both. “They’re not harmless, but they’re not big contenders in the ‘fucking with you’ department.”

The sludge on the floor dried up as we walked, giving way to smooth-worn concrete. The tunnel slanted down shortly after that, easing us deeper into the bowels of Manhattan. I glanced at Dominic, trying to assess whether he’d caught the descent. Judging by the way his lips were narrowed, he had.

The walls were beginning to look less horror movie “all hope abandon,” and more legitimately weathered. The lower we got, the less effort the locals would have needed to put into making the transit authorities look elsewhere. “The top layers are likely to be bugbear and maybe—maybe—Jersey devil territory. Under that, we’ll have the hidebehinds, and under them, the subterranean bogeymen.” There were various other underground races we might encounter, but those were the big guys: the ones with sufficient numbers to have a say in what passed for local “government,” and sufficient intelligence not to mess with us unless we threatened them.

“Beyond that?” asked Dominic.

“Beyond that, according to Sarah, we’ll find our dragon.” A rat squealed ahead, alerting its relatives to our presence before darting back into the shadows. Its presence was a good sign. If there’d been cave basilisks around, there wouldn’t have been rats. I’d rather risk a little bubonic plague than a lot of turning to granite, thanks.

“I’m not equipped to kill a dragon,” said Dominic, sounding uncertain and faintly peeved. “I’m not even sure how you’re supposed to start.”

“Neither am I, but we’re not killing it, remember? We’re just finding out what the situation is, and if somebody’s stupid enough to be trying to wake the damn thing, we stop them.” The tunnel in front of us divided at a Y-bend, both branches proceeding identically into the dark. I stopped, frowning. “Cute.”

“I don’t suppose you have some great wisdom in the arena of sewer exploration?” Dominic asked. I shot him a look, and he met it with an amused quirk of his lips. “You seem to know everything else. I thought perhaps you’d been concealing a background in spelunking until the right dramatic moment to reveal it.”

“No, that’s my grandmother’s hobby, not mine.” I dug through my bag until I found a pair of high-bounce balls I’d purchased earlier from supermarket vending machines. I held them up for Dominic to see. “We can, however, consult the oracle.”

His expression turned dubious. “Your oracle is a pair of rubber balls?”

“Round rubber balls,” I said, and stepped forward, bending to place the balls carefully at the mouths of the two tunnels. “Okay. Watch the balls, not my ass.”

“I assure you, madam, your, ah, ass is of no pressing interest to me whatsoever.”

I smiled into the darkness. “Of course it’s not,” I said, and let the balls go.

Any kid can tell you that a high-bounce ball, when released, will immediately start making a break for freedom—even if you put it down on a completely level surface. The sewer tunnels were far from level. The two balls began rolling forward at the same pace, but the ball on the left started gaining speed almost immediately, accelerating until its brother was left in the proverbial dust. I straightened.

“We go that way,” I said, pointing down the leftward fork.

I was expecting at least a token argument, but to my surprise, Dominic nodded. “We’re trying to go down, so that makes sense. I do have to wonder—how long were you intending to wander around blind?”

“You didn’t have a problem with it when we were deciding to come down here,” I said, starting down the left fork. The light went with me. Dominic, not wanting to be abandoned in the dark a considerable distance beneath the streets of New York, followed.

“Since I don’t think maps exist for this sort of thing, I still think this is the best idea. But is there any way to start narrowing down where we ought to be looking?”

“There are maps of the New York sewer system, but they probably won’t extend to cover the areas we’re heading for.” I sighed. “I wasn’t expecting to come down here without having time to prepare. This day has so not even been in the neighborhood of what I was expecting.”

“I suppose I should apologize for that,” said Dominic. Tone gone wry, he continued, “I’m not sure what I was trying to prove. Maybe that you weren’t as well hidden as you seemed to think. I still don’t really understand why it’s so important to you. The dancing, I mean. But I’m sorry to have been as much of a disruption as I apparently was.”

“Thanks for that. It won’t get me into Regionals, but … thanks.” The decline was more pronounced in this tunnel. We were moving downward at a faster clip now, probably skirting at least one major transit line in the process. “To take your first question first, we’re going to go as deep as we can, and then I’m going to find the locals. If there’s a dragon down here—and there’s not really much ‘if’ about it, not if Sarah can spot the thing—then anybody who lives close enough to it should be feeling the effects. Whatever those are. So we’re just going to find the bottom, and then we’re going to ask for directions.”

“How civilized.”

“I try.”

“You said that was my first question. What was my second?”

“The dancing.” I smiled wistfully into the darkness. “Why it’s so important to me.”

“It is … odd, you must admit,” he said, sounding a little embarrassed. “Here you already have a purpose in your life, and yet you’re choosing to spend your time—doing something else.”

I could hear all the slurs and accusations of goofing off that my dance career has received in his hastily-swallowed words, and I appreciated them. Not the insults; the fact that he managed to stop himself from saying them out loud. “You remember that whole ‘traitors’ thing?”

“I doubt I could forget.”

“Well, after Dad and Grandma managed to convince the Covenant that we were all dead, we pretty much went into hiding. I don’t know what’s going to happen now that you know we’re still around. Since we can’t exactly quit the family business—there are too many people out there with serious grudges against us, and I’m not talking just cryptids—we have to keep learning how to fight. But we can’t go through standard channels. Not if we want to get as good as we need to be.”

“Why not?” he asked. He sounded honestly puzzled. Maybe we needed to spend more time in the sewers. I was definitely coming to like him better down here.

“Because most martial arts and organized sports publish their rankings once you get to a certain level of competition,” I replied. “My … one of us couldn’t even take fencing in college, because the entire Fencing Club got called out in the local paper.” Alex was livid when Dad found that out and told him he couldn’t fence. He wound up joining a historical reenactment group to learn how to handle a saber, since basically no one looks at those membership lists with an eye toward “spot the enemy presence.” We’ve been giving him shit about Renaissance Faires ever since.

“Oh,” said Dominic. I glanced toward him again, and saw the horror in his face. He’d clearly never stopped to consider what it meant to be hiding from a global organization that monitors the news for signs of cryptid activity. “So you went into ballroom dance because…?”

“It’s a viable way of building some of the same muscle groups as martial arts and gymnastics, but it isn’t monitored the same way. Plus, since it’s not ‘dangerous,’ it’s easier to do under an assumed name.”

“And you liked it?”

“I loved it. I still do.” I couldn’t keep my voice from turning wistful. “When you’re on the stage, nothing else really matters. Nobody’s trying to kill you; nobody wants to see your credentials or needs you to get them the gorgon antivenin. It’s just you, and the music, and knowing how you’re supposed to move. Dancing is all I’ve ever really wanted to do. I’m here partially so I can prove that I can make a career of it, before I get sucked into cryptozoology for keeps. That way, whichever way I go, it’ll be a choice.”

“Assuming you survive the dragon long enough to make choices.”

“There is that.” We kept walking. At our rate of descent, we were going to pass out of bugbear territory before we saw any of the locals. That was fine by me. Bugbears aren’t very helpful when interrupted, and we’d have better results with the hidebehinds or the bogeymen.

“Also assuming I don’t turn you in to the Covenant when I get home.” Dominic shook his head, causing his shadow on the wall to flicker and shift. I gave him a startled look. He smiled. “If I get home, that is. I know you’re thinking it. I may be an arrogant bastard by your standards, but I’m not foolish.”

“The thought had crossed my mind,” I admitted slowly.

“Given the natural conclusions of that thought, I’d like to propose a truce. I won’t tell anyone you exist, and you won’t attempt to kill me, until after we’ve dealt with the current situation.”

Did I trust him? Well, I was deep beneath the city streets, alone, in a narrow tunnel that left very few avenues of escape, and made gunfire a questionable option at best. I’d already trusted him further than I would have expected. At this point, did trusting him a little further really make that much of a difference?

Probably not. “Deal,” I said, shoulders slumping slightly with relief. I hadn’t been looking forward to trying to kill the man. For one thing, it would leave me with no one to move manhole covers for me. For another, annoying and impossible as he was, it was actually sort of nice to have someone male and human who wasn’t related to me and didn’t look at me like I was crazy when I slipped and used the word “Sasquatch” in casual conversation. Not that we’d had much opportunity for casual conversation—all our conversations so far had been focused on killing each other, killing something else, or trying not to get ourselves or anybody else killed. He just didn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d think Bigfoot was a synonym for “bonkers.”

“Excellent,” he said. Behind us, in the darkness, I heard the distinctive scrape of metal against metal. Tone deeply apologetic, Dominic continued, “Now, about dealing with the current situation…”

“Fan-fucking-tastic,” I snarled.

We turned to press our backs together, Dominic’s short sword held out in front of him, my halogen light bathing the tunnel walls. I pulled the telescoping baton from my belt, snapping it open and locking it in that position. There was no sign of whomever—or whatever—had drawn the knife, but I could hear the scuffle of claws on concrete, too large and too heavy to belong to the rats.

“What are our escape routes?” Dominic asked tightly.

“Forward and back,” I muttered. More loudly, I said, “Okay, people. If you want to talk, we’re prepared to talk. And if you want to dance…” Again the sound of metal on metal, from a different direction this time. Well. That answered that. “Okay. Let’s dance.”