Discount Armageddon

Nineteen

The Meatpacking District, which is nicer than it sounds

WE POPPED OUT OF THE SUBWAY in the Meatpacking District, a rapidly-gentrifying neighborhood that used to be devoted almost entirely to, you guessed it, meat. (There are still working slaughterhouses there which is both a real blessing to the city’s cryptid community and something for the tourist bureau to work as industriously as possible on hiding. Somehow, “come to New York for all your goat-slaughtering needs” just doesn’t have the right ring to it.) The lunch crowd was out in force, clogging the sidewalks with tourists and well-dressed business people out to grab a quick bite before diving back into the fast-paced world of whatever kind of job you need to pay for real Manolo Blahnik patent leather heels. I swallowed my drool, resisting the urge to clock a yuppie and make off with her shoes. There wasn’t time to mug passersby for their clothes, no matter how much they were abusing them by grinding the heels against the pavement.

Not that I was one to talk. Candy was impeccable, as always, but my clothing was covered with an exciting mix of sewer slime and three kinds of blood—Neapolitan gore. I could probably pass Piyusha’s blood off as maple syrup, and the blood from the lizard-men as some sort of tar. My own blood couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than what it was, especially since several of my smaller wounds were still leaking. People recoiled as I passed, expressions reflecting everything from confusion to horror. I didn’t stop to reassure them. As long as I kept following Candy, who clearly knew where she was going, it wasn’t likely that anyone would ask if I needed help, and that was good; the last thing I needed at the moment was a Good Samaritan. For one thing, I was too damn tired. The events of the last few days were starting to catch up with me and, no matter what happened with the dragon princesses, I was still going to need to tell Piyusha’s brothers that she was dead.

“All this, and I have to work tonight,” I muttered darkly, dodging around a touristy-looking woman with eighties bangs and a pair of grubby toddlers that seemed to be occupying the majority of her attention.

“What was that?” asked Candy.

“Nothing.”

“Good. We’re here.” She opened the door of a small, spotless bodega crammed between a wine bar and an upscale dog salon. Gesturing for me to follow, she went inside. Lacking any better ideas, I trailed after her.

The aisles in your average New York bodega are narrow enough to inspire claustrophobia in circus acrobats. This bodega seemed to have been designed on the theory that all those other bodegas were wasting valuable shelf space. I wasn’t sure anything even semi-human could have wedged its way into some of those aisles, which rendered the beer and chips effectively unreachable. That would be enough to keep the crowds away, even if they had the best prices in the city—which they clearly didn’t. Every tag in sight showed a markup of at least thirty percent, and sometimes more.

Candy smirked as she caught me eyeing a two dollar pack of gum. “You’d be surprised how many tourists shop here for the ‘authentic experience,’” she said. “Duane Reade would be a lot more ‘authentic,’ since there’s one on every corner, but we’re never going to sneer at profit. Come on.” She wove her way between displays and down one of the wider aisles, moving toward the counter. A drop-dead gorgeous blonde was seated behind it, an expression of profound boredom on her face as she filed her already perfect nails.

The blonde glanced up as we approached, sky-colored eyes narrowing as she took in the disreputable state of my attire. “Is this the Price girl?” she asked, not taking her eyes off me.

“It is,” said Candy. “We need the first aid kit.”

Wordlessly, the other dragon princess—there was nothing else she could be, not with that complexion and that attitude; not unless she was working at Vogue, anyway—put down her file and produced a white box with a familiar red cross on top from behind the counter. She offered it to Candy, who took it and tucked it under her arm.

“Are they ready for us?”

“They are.” The other dragon princess hesitated, glancing to Candy, and asked, “Is it true? What everyone’s saying the Price girl found?”

“The Price girl has a name,” I said.

Candy nodded, ignoring me. “It’s true. I saw the servitors with my own eyes. They were new-made, and they understood me when I spoke to them in the old tongue. It’s really true, Priscilla. It has to be.”

Priscilla pressed a hand against her mouth, eyes growing bright. “Oh,” she whispered. Clearing her throat, she added, “Go back. They’re going to have a lot of questions.”

“That’s why I brought her,” said Candy. Gesturing for me to follow again, she ducked around the counter and through the door to the employees-only part of the store. I was starting to feel a bit like a trained poodle, but I followed anyway. I’d come too far to turn back now, and I really wanted to know who “they” were.

The hallway was short, leading to an unlocked rear door. Candy pushed it open, and we exited into a perfect blind canyon that had probably been an alley, once, before construction sealed off the exits. I scanned as we walked across to the opposite wall, noting the places where the brick was uneven enough to let me get a foothold. If necessary, I could go up the wall to reach the fire escape and getting to the rooftops from there would be easy. Knowing that I could get away if I needed to made it easier to keep following.

Candy stopped with her hand on the door into the next building, giving me a hard look. “This used to be a slaughterhouse,” she said. “We bought it back when there was nothing here but slaughterhouses, and it was invisible. Now it’s blocked off by other buildings, and as long as we pay our property taxes, no one remembers that it’s here. We’ve lived here for more than two hundred years.” The underlying message in her voice was clear: Don’t screw this up for us. Bringing me to the Nest meant risking everything. That said a lot about how dedicated they were to finding the dragon. It also said a lot about how important it was for me to keep track of my escape routes. If they changed their mind about the risk I posed … dragon princesses might not have any natural weaponry, but in today’s world, guns level the playing field.

“I promise not to break the china,” I said. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because we need to know what you know.” Candy opened the door. The sound of distant voices and children laughing drifted into the alley. “What you found out is the first good news we’ve had in centuries, and we’re not letting you run off and get slaughtered by servitors until we’re sure we know everything.”

“Mercenary to the last,” I said dryly, and followed her inside.

The building had started life as a slaughterhouse, and didn’t appear to have changed much since. The alley door led into what had once been the holding pen for sheep or cattle; the floor was concrete, with spilled-wine bloodstains worked deep into the stone. A few of the low holding walls were gone, replaced by empty space. Overhead, the walkways and management offices hung in the gloom like spiderwebs, gray and sterile. The light was uniformly low, and an air of decay hung over the entire place, like no one had been there for years.

Candy caught sight of my face and bit back what looked like laughter before taking hold of my wrist and tugging me after her. “Just because we can’t do magic, that doesn’t mean we can’t pay for it,” she said. “We have a good relationship with the hidebehinds. It helps.”

“This is a glamour?” I asked, looking at my surroundings with renewed interest.

“And obviously a damn good one. I’ll have to tell Betty we got our money’s worth.” She took one more step forward, still pulling me in her wake, and the gloom burst around us like a soap bubble.

Everything changed.

The basic architecture of the building only shifted slightly—it was still mostly one big open room—but the last of the slaughterhouse tools vanished, taking the animal pens and the suspicious stains with them. A well-worn carpet pieced together from scraps and sample sale rejects suddenly covered the concrete, looking like the world’s largest quilting project. Lights came on in the rooms above and over the walkways, and the sound of voices was everywhere, coming from the dozens on dozens of women who filled the building. They were all unreasonably pretty. Most were blonde, but I saw a few redheads, brunettes, and even one with hair so black she could have made Goths weep.

And then there was the gold. There was no furniture; instead, there was gold. Where I would have expected chairs, beautiful women sat or lounged on heaps of piled-up jewelry, mixed coins, and even a few gold bars. Where I would have expected couches, more women did the same on larger heaps of precious metal. At the center of the room was a mound of gold that must have been nearly eighteen feet high and fifty feet around, covered in dragon princesses. Not all of them were adults, either. Golden-haired little girls chased each other in circles or sat quietly on the piles of gold, each of them as beautiful as their … what? Mothers, sisters, aunts? There was so much we didn’t know about the biology of dragon princesses—where they came from, how they reproduced, how long they lived. I was going where no cryptozoologist had gone before, and I didn’t even have a notebook.

“Dad’s gonna kill me,” I muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Candy eyed me suspiciously. “Come on. Betty wants to see you as soon as possible.”

“And Betty would be…?” It was a little late to be asking questions, especially with more and more of the dragon princesses taking notice of our arrival. Better late than never.

“She’s our Nest-mother,” said Candy, like it should have been self-explanatory. “Come on.”

I went.

Candy led me past the central mound of gold to the stairs leading to the overhead catwalks. We acquired a small procession as we walked, other dragon princesses stopping whatever they’d been doing before as they came to follow us. Most of them didn’t look friendly. I was probably the first non-cryptid to set foot in their Nest since it was established, and my presence represented a potential danger. Candy’s face was set in an expression of resolute neutrality. Looking at her, I realized what a risk she was taking in believing me. If I’d been lying about the dragon, she could have been in serious trouble—and so could I. Good thing for both of us that I wasn’t lying, even if it wasn’t necessarily a good thing for the city as a whole.

A door labeled “Manager” in old-fashioned gilt lettering stood at the head of the stairs. “Behave,” hissed Candy, and knocked.

“You may enter.” The voice from behind the door managed to be ancient and alluring at the same time, like an aging Mae West turning on the sex appeal one last time before shuffling off to the retirement home.

Candy opened the door, and I followed her inside.

The downstairs had given me a pretty good idea of the dragon princess aesthetic where interior decorating was concerned: why waste money on furniture when it could be used to buy perfectly good gold? This room was no different. Gold in every possible form was mounded high against the walls, and flakes of gold leaf covered the floor, some of it still attached to pages ripped from antique books. It was a good thing my father wasn’t there. Seeing books that old and valuable treated so poorly might have been enough to convince him that dragon princesses weren’t harmless after all.

The décor only held my attention for a few seconds before I found more important things to focus on, like the woman in front of us, who had to be the oldest dragon princess I’d ever seen. She appeared to be a well-preserved seventy, the kind of seventy that had done everything—and everyone—before retiring to a comfortable villa in the country. Her dress looked like it was made from real gold thread, and she was lying on a tangled pile of gold chains easily three feet tall. Time had bleached her hair white-gold, but it had done nothing to reduce the sharpness of her sapphire-colored eyes.

“So,” she said, in that Mae West voice. “You must be the new Healy girl.”

“We’re Price girls now, actually,” I said. “Have been for a couple of generations. I’m Verity Price. Nice to meet you.”

“Betty Smith.” She looked me appraisingly up and down. “I always forget about that little intermarriage. You do look frighteningly like your grandmother, you know, especially with all of that blood in your hair. There’s never been a Healy girl who didn’t look fabulous in red, which is a good thing; you spend so damn much time wearing it.”

I couldn’t decide whether she was trying to be insulting or not. I decided to go with the interpretation that was less likely to get me attacked by the cast of America’s Next Top Cryptid Model. “I’d take it off if you’d give me a little time in the bathroom. I didn’t exactly have a chance to clean up after Candy hauled me out of the sewer.”

“She was fighting with servitors,” said Candy.

Betty’s eyes narrowed. “You’re sure?”

“I spoke to them. They understood me, just like the stories said they would.” Candy abruptly pointed at me, as accusing as the prosecuting attorney in a murder case. “She was there. She saw it happen.”

“I saw something like that, yeah. I don’t speak dragon, so I don’t know exactly what Candy said, or how much of it they actually understood, but they stopped attacking me when she told them to play nice with the breakable children.” I leaned over, plucking the first aid kit from under Candy’s arm while she was distracted with pointing at me. “Look, I really, really want to know what’s going on. I’d also really, really like to stop bleeding. Is there a place I can sit down and slap on some bandages while you explain? Please?”

“You truly are so much like your grandmother.” Betty chuckled as she rose slowly from her pile of gold chains, sounding more like Mae West than ever. “She never had any patience either. Of course, most of the time she was impatient because your grandfather was watching my, ah, attributes when she wanted him to be watching her back, but no one ever claimed your family line was designed for patience. Sit down. My girls can take care of you.”

“Do as you’re told,” hissed Candy, glaring daggers as she shoved me toward the spot Betty had vacated. Lacking any real grounds for argument, I sat. Three of the dragon princesses who had accompanied us upstairs moved to take the first aid kit and start tending my wounds. I was tired enough to let them. If it meant I stopped bleeding, it was fine by me.

“I’m assuming Candice has explained the basic nature of servitors to you,” Betty said. “I do hope you haven’t killed too many of them—the poor dears really don’t have much control over themselves without the proper people to tell them what to do.” Seeing my expression, she clucked her tongue, giving a small shake of her head. “That’s what I was afraid of. Ah, well. It’s not like they’re a necessity, and really, they only serve to prove that you were telling the truth when you claimed there might be a male waiting somewhere in this fair city of ours. And you, my little rumpled darling, are going to find him for us.”

“Wait—what?” It was difficult to sit up straight on a mound of slippery gold jewelry with several dragon princesses aggressively cleaning and bandaging my wounds. Somehow I managed. Blame it on the shock. “A male?”

“Oh, my dear innocent poppet.” Betty smiled, Mae West turned pure predator. “Surely you didn’t think that dragons were actually extinct?”

For a moment I just stared at her, with dragon princesses smirking at me from all directions. This was it: the big secret that they’d been keeping all this time, probably since the conflicts between the humans and dragons first began. Dragon princesses didn’t exist. There were just … dragons. Big dragons and little dragons, but still dragons, regardless of whether they had scales or supermodel-quality skin. One species.

Betty smirked along with the others, clearly waiting for my expression of surprise and dismay. I settled back on the bed of gold, letting the dragon princesses around me go back to cleaning my wounds. “So what, you’re saying is this is a case of extreme sexual dimorphism combined with parthenogenetic reproduction? That’s a new one.”

The dragon princesses stared at me.

I sighed. “Trained cryptozoologist, remember? God, it’s like you put on one pair of five-inch heels and everyone forgets you have a brain. The tango is hard, people. It takes actual intelligence to do it right.”

“Regardless,” said Betty, recovering her equilibrium with admirable speed. She put a hand on her hip, taking a slinky step toward me. For a woman her age, she sure knew how to move. “You owe us, you and your family, and we don’t take kindly to debts. This is your chance to pay them off. You’re going to find us the male.”

“That was already the goal.” The dragon princesses who’d been working on bandaging my various scrapes and scratches were done, or close enough that I no longer felt like I was in danger of bleeding all over everything. I pulled away from them, tugging my shirt back into a semblance of order before I stood. “If there’s a dragon in this city—sorry, a male dragon—then I need to find him before whoever’s been sacrificing virgins in his name manages to wake him up. But since you’ve made it clear that you’ve got a pretty good reason to be interested in how this turns out, I’ll make you a deal. Tell me everything you know that might help me find him without getting eaten.”

“And what, you’ll remember us in your prayers each night? I’m sorry, but we prefer to work in more concrete coinage.” Betty waved a hand, indicating the heaps of gold cluttering the room. “Interior décor this nice doesn’t come cheap, sweetheart.”

“And assuming I can find your dragon before his current keepers manage to kill him, I’ll tell you where he is, sweetheart.” I couldn’t match her level of poisonous sweetness—I didn’t have the practice—but I can be snide with the best of them. “Is that coinage concrete enough for you? I mean, sure, you can be a girl-band species forever, if that’s what floats your boat, but wouldn’t it be nice to shelve the parthenogenesis for a little while? I bet it’s more fun when there’s more than one person involved.”

Betty squared her shoulders, glaring down her nose at me. It was easy enough for her to do, since she was easily five-eight and I wasn’t wearing heels, but if it made her feel better, I wasn’t going to make a big deal of it. I looked blithely back at her, and waited.

“Fine,” she said, finally. “Candy will answer all your questions.” Candy gave her an alarmed look, and Betty repeated, “All your questions.”

“Actually, I have a question for you, if you don’t mind,” I said. “Did you really know my grandparents?”

Betty’s smirk returned, expression going back to the languid Mae West look she’d been wearing when I first entered the room. “That strikes me as a question you ought to be asking your grandfather. Don’t you agree?”

Before I could frame my response as something other than “He’s in another dimension, so, uh, hell, no,” she turned and sashayed out of the room, taking all the dragon princesses but Candy with her. Some people just aren’t happy unless they’re getting the last word.

There was nothing to sit on but the gold, so I moved to lean against the doorframe. Candy flounced over to the pile of gold where first Betty, and then I, had been stationed, and sat in a huffy heap. I raised my eyebrows.

“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.”