Discount Armageddon

Twenty

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 the 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 her 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?”

“I’d be better if some asshole hadn’t just stopped me from jumping off the roof.” I straightened up, sliding my knives back into their sheaths. Sliding them into his sides would have been more satisfying, but not, in the long run, as productive. Stupid morals. “What are you doing here, De Luca?”

“I was concerned for your safety. You went into the sewers and didn’t come back out.”

I immediately regretted putting the knives away. “Wait, you were following me? Have you been following me all day? Because I could really have used some backup, if you were all that damn concerned.”

“I haven’t been following you all day.” He sighed, stepping away from the edge of the roof. “How many weapons are you carrying? I’m beginning to think you have an entire armory in your bag.”

“Don’t start with the flattery. How long have you been following me?”

“Since your cousin called to ask if I’d abducted you.”

“What? Sarah called you?” He nodded. I scowled. “I am going to kill that watery-blooded little—”

“Apparently, you were absent when she came back from class and, given your accounting of our evening activities, she became concerned for your safety.” Dominic’s expression darkened. “What, exactly, did you tell her?”

“Are you actually asking me whether I told the telepath we had sex? Because she knew before we did. Seriously, you do not want to ask Sarah about your sex life, or anyone else’s sex life, because she can draw you diagrams. She will draw you diagrams, with helpful labels, if you push her. I’d say she needs hobbies, but we sort of are her hobbies.”

Confusion tinting his voice, Dominic asked, “So you didn’t tell her?”

“Oh, the Covenant. What wonderful training programs they must be running.” I crossed my arms. “Sarah called you and asked if you’d decided to run off with me, so you decided to track me down. Is that it?”

“Essentially, yes.” He tucked his hands into the pockets of his duster, looking uncomfortable. “I managed to locate the sewer grate you descended through. I followed the blood trail from there to the PATH station. It took a while to figure out where you’d gone after that and, by the time I got to the appropriate district, you’d vanished again.”

“I was getting the biology rundown from the dragon princesses, who do not,” I raised a finger warningly, “need to be harassed right now. They’re creepy and a little unpleasant, but they’re still having a really hard week, and I think we just need to give them some time before we go prodding at them further.”

“I wasn’t going to harass them.”

“Just kill them a little?”

Dominic cleared his throat. “Dragon princesses have long been filed as essentially harmless. I see no reason to adjust that designation. Unless you’d like to provide me with one…?”

I gave him a measuring look. Either he’d arrived after I hung up on Alex, or he’d been listening to the whole conversation, and was just waiting to hear me tell him to his face. I liked Dominic, I really did, except for that superior “humans first” streak of his. That streak was the reason I had to at least try to lie to him.

“No, there’s no reason to adjust the designation,” I said blithely, with my best haughty Viennese waltz expression. It was the sort of face that implied that lemons would be too sweet for me. “They’d like the dragon under the city to be unharmed, since they’re sort of fond of the idea of having an actual dragon around again, but they’re pretty much harmless in and of themselves.” Not even technically a lie, I thought. Let’s see you poke a hole in that.

Dominic looked faintly disappointed, like he’d been expecting me to say something else. “I see. Well, then, may I ask what drove you into the sewers a second time? You already knew it wasn’t safe down there—not that I don’t think you can handle yourself in a fight,” he added hurriedly. “It’s just that even with two of us, we were hard-pressed to escape intact. I wouldn’t have expected you to return to the depths alone.”

“I … oh, crap, you really weren’t following me for the entire day, were you?”

“I believe I just said that.”

“Dominic…” I hesitated, unsure of how to continue. Would he even care about one more cryptid death? If he didn’t, would I be able to resist the urge to shove him off the edge of the roof? I took a breath and said, “Piyusha’s dead.”

“What?” Dominic’s shock didn’t look feigned in the least.

I let out a breath I’d been only half aware of holding, and said, “I went to stay with Sarah last night after you left.” His expression turned hurt. I raised my hands, palms outward, and lied, “I wasn’t hiding from you. The mice went into full-out exultation mode, and I needed to get some sleep. This morning, I went to check on Piyusha at Gingerbread Pudding, and the place was closed. Her brothers were waiting for one of us to show up. She went out to the store last night and never came back.”

“And they thought we had something to do with it?” he asked darkly.

“Hey, you’re Covenant and I’m an urban legend, remember? It was completely reasonable for them to think that we did it.”

“We gave our word.”

“They have no reason to consider it worth anything.”

“I suppose,” he said, not sounding at all happy about it. “Her trail led to the sewer?”

“Yeah. I found the body. I managed to take some pictures with my phone—not because I get my jollies from the corpses of innocent women; whoever killed her covered her with some sort of ritual symbols before they dumped her. I’d show you, but my battery’s dead.”

“What are you intending to do with the pictures?”

“I’m going to go home, plug my phone in, and mail them to my father so he can try to figure out what the hell they are.” I sighed. “While I’m at it, I should call Sarah and tell her not to set Covenant assassins on my tail every time I fail to show up for roll call. And then I get to go and tell Piyusha’s brothers that I found their sister, but not in the sense they were hoping I would.”

“I’ll come with you.” Dominic smiled, very slightly. It wasn’t a happy expression. “If she was targeted for talking to us, her death is my fault as much as it is yours. Oh, don’t look so surprised, Verity—I can see that you’re blaming yourself for what happened to her, and if you’re to blame, so am I. I should be there.”

“I … thanks, Dominic. That means a lot to me. Besides, you should probably see these pictures. I have a feeling your resources may be more useful than mine when it comes to figuring out what these symbols mean.”

“True,” he agreed. “I just have to request one favor, in exchange for access to whatever I can obtain from the Covenant records.”

I blinked. “What’s that?”

He hesitated before giving me an almost bashful look, and asking, “Can we please take a taxi?”

We were far enough from my apartment that a compromise wasn’t really an option: if Dominic took a cab, he’d beat me home by at least twenty minutes and, even though I was substantially more beaten up than he was, he wasn’t even willing to consider the overland route. It wasn’t that he was uncomfortable on rooftops. He just really, really didn’t like the idea of jumping off them on purpose. In the end, it was time to swallow my dislike of New York City cabs and descend to street level in order to get a ride home.

At least he picked up the tab without being asked. And he turned out to be a pretty decent tipper. Always an attractive trait in a man, even one who thinks half my friends and a large number of my relatives need to be exterminated.

The mice were nowhere in evidence when we got upstairs, although the signs of their bacchanal were everywhere, if you knew what to look for. Feathers, dried flowers, and brightly colored scraps of paper were scattered around the living room floor. A tidy pile of cheese rinds and Hostess Snack Cake wrappers surrounded the base of the kitchen trash can. Dominic raised his eyebrows when he saw that. I had to smile, if only because the reaction was so understandable.

“They try to make things easy on me when they have a big bash,” I said. Taking the broom from behind the door, I swept the refuse into a dustpan and shook it into the trash. “See? All tidied up. If they weren’t considerate about things, I’d be cleaning for hours before I could even get the vacuum.”

“You are very strange,” observed Dominic.

“You have no idea.” I put the broom back where it belonged and crossed to the desk. My phone beeped with electronic satisfaction when I connected it to the charger. “Give me just a minute to send the pictures to myself, and I should be able to show you what Piyusha looked like when I found her.”

“Would you be able to locate her body again if we returned to the sewer?”

I cast a look over my shoulder, replying, “I can find the place her body was; whether it’s still going to be there is anybody’s guess. I sort of got run out of there by servitors, and I don’t know whether they were just passing through, protecting the body, or planning to treat it as some sort of all-you-can-eat buffet. Why?”

“I thought her brothers might appreciate her return. I’m not sure what, if any, funeral rites the Madhura practice, but most thinking creatures would find the opportunity to make the decision on their own … comforting.” He shook his head. “I don’t understand how you can be so relaxed about such things.”

“What, you mean the idea of the servitors eating Piyusha’s body?” I shrugged as I turned back to the desk. My phone was powered up, even though it was still charging; I hooked it to the USB transfer cable and started copying over the pictures. “I’m just as confused by your ability to be so relaxed about killing people like her, so I guess we’re even. If the servitors eat her remains, it’s because that’s what they’re designed to do. You can’t blame them for doing what they’re made for.”

“What makes you so sure that humans weren’t made to exterminate the cryptids from the face of this world?”

The question sounded entirely sincere. That didn’t make it any less aggravating. Gritting my teeth, I continued copying pictures and asked, “How can you be so sure that we were? Maybe we’re here to keep them from exterminating each other, provide some ecological balance to the place. You know. Mediate.”

“I think you’re being unrealistic.”

“And I think you’re being an asshole, and since we already had this fight once, can we please focus on what’s important for a little while? A woman is dead, probably because she was seen talking to us. Somebody’s turning innocent people into servitors for a dragon that isn’t even awake enough to appreciate them. It’s a fucking mess, okay? Just another big, fat, fucking mess.” I wiped my eyes angrily with the back of my hand, glad that my back was to him. The last thing I needed was for a member of the Covenant to see me cry.

The pictures of Piyusha’s body began popping up on my screen. They’d come out about as badly as I feared, managing to be overexposed and too dark at the same time, but the runes were sufficiently darker than her skin that they still stood out. Dominic hissed through his teeth as he moved to crouch next to my chair, tapping the screen with a fingertip.

“Can you expand this?”

“Sure.” I moved the magnifier tool over the indicated area, clicking twice. “Artie made me learn how to do this when he got tired of updating my Facebook page. He’ll be thrilled to hear that it had real-world applications that didn’t have to do with airbrushing wardrobe malfunctions.”

“Who’s Artie?”

“My cousin,” I replied thoughtlessly, and winced. “Crap. Can you not ask these things? I really don’t want to explain to my parents how the Covenant got a full dossier on us again.”

“The Covenant still doesn’t know anything about you,” said Dominic. Before I could ask what that meant, he tapped the screen again and said, “This symbol. Have you ever seen it before?”

I squinted. Between the picture quality and the magnification, it was difficult to make out any details. “I don’t think so,” I said finally. “I’ve always been more into the practical sides of the job. I never really did much research in the ritual symbolism.”

“I’m reasonably sure that’s a Burushaski symbol meaning ‘control,’ and I recognize a few of the others—they all seem to mean the same things. ‘Control’ and ‘wake’ and ‘obey.’ This is a crazy mix of languages. I’m really not sure what you could hope to accomplish with this assortment.”

“How about waking up something that no one’s seen in a couple of hundred years?” I brought up another of the pictures, trying to focus on the symbols drawn across Piyusha’s belly, rather than the angry red wound bisecting her chest. “This one, I do recognize. It’s a standard piece of snake cult iconography. It means, essentially, ‘feeding time.’”

“I thought you said you didn’t handle ritual symbolism.”

“I have an uncle.” (Naga wouldn’t mind being called an uncle under the circumstances, and he was the family go-to guy for anything involving snake cults, largely because he was frequently their target. It was just that explaining why I had an extradimensional professor of demonic studies as an honorary uncle would take too long—especially since the uncle in question was a giant snake from the waist down.) “Plus, my father talks a lot.”

“For someone who dislikes talking about her family, you certainly do it a lot.”

“What can I say? Corpses make me chatty, and not entirely in the good way. It’s not like you’re filling in the gaps, you know. What about your family? Dad says you’re generational Covenant.”

“My parents are dead.” The statement was made without any real emotion. It was simply a fact, something that couldn’t be changed. “They were hunting a hydra when I was young. They didn’t return.”

“I … I’m sorry.”

“It was a very long time ago. I continued my training, so as to do what they had wanted of me. What was expected of me.” He hesitated before adding, “I had never met a sentient cryptid before coming here.”

A lot was starting to make sense. I pulled up my webmail account, attaching the pictures and shooting them off to one of the family’s blind accounts. Even if Dominic saw the address, he’d never be able to use it to backtrack anything important. Maybe I was being paranoid; I liked to think of it as being sensible. “Can I send you copies of these? I really do want you to check them against your records.”

“Here; let me.” He looked relieved at the change of topic, and leaned across me to type his email address into the “To” field. My cheeks flared red as his arms brushed against mine. I delivered a swift but firm internal slap to my hormones. No, Verity. Bad Verity. Giving in to the raw hotness of the Covenant boy once was bad enough. Doing it a second time would show a serious lack of judgment, as well as a definite failure of self-control.

Knowing exactly what he looked like under that shirt and duster wasn’t helping matters. It says something about what passes for “normal” when I’m around that the pictures of the dead girl on my computer screen weren’t doing anything to dampen my desire to jump his bones. They weren’t helping it, either, but they weren’t enough to kill the mood in and of themselves.

Dominic clicked the send button and pulled back. “There.”

“Thanks,” I said lamely. “You’ll let me know if you find anything?”

“I will.” He hesitated, eyes fixing on mine. “Verity—”

Someone started hammering on the front door of the apartment, about half a second before the telepathic static clicked on inside my head, telling me that “someone” was “my cousin,” who I’d forgotten to call. “Crap, it’s Sarah,” I said, knocking Dominic to the side as I scrambled from my chair.

Sarah had her hand raised to start hammering again when I opened the door. At first, she didn’t say anything. She just let her hand drop, and looked at me.

“Sarah, I’m sorry. I lost track of the time.”

Her eyes narrowed, frostbite seeming to spread around the edges of her irises. I took an involuntary step backward. For Sarah’s eyes to be whiting out like that, she had to be pissed. “I thought you were dead,” she said, in a clipped, tightly controlled tone that was belied by the wave of telepathic fury that underscored it. “You disappear right after fucking a boy from the Covenant, you’re not in any of the usual places, no one’s seen you anywhere, and then one of the gargoyles tells me he saw you going back into the sewers alone. You couldn’t even tell me where you were going?” You scared the living shit out of me, and what is he doing here, anyway? I thought you were done with that asshole after he explained his platform on racial cleansing!

The transition from spoken word to telepathic scolding was so smooth I barely noticed it at first, until I saw how much the white had spread across her eyes. “Sarah, you need to calm down. I’m fine. I’m sorry I scared you. I really didn’t mean to.”

You didn’t think! You never think! She stormed into the apartment, which was something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it meant I could close the door, thus sparing the neighbors our little family drama. On the other hand, it meant I was shutting myself in the apartment with a pissed-off cuckoo and a man from the Covenant. Not the sort of combination that inspires many funny anecdotes. A few cautionary tales, maybe, but nothing you can really go repeating in mixed company.

“Miss Zellaby.” Dominic straightened up, offering a shallow but impeccably polite bow in Sarah’s direction. “A pleasure to see you again.”

Sarah turned her narrow-eyed gaze on him, making me glad once more that Antimony’s comic books got it wrong, and telepaths can’t actually kill you with their brains. Give you a whopping headache and earworm you with annoying jingles, yes; kill you, no. (Although sometimes, when she’s managed to stick “The Happy Banana Song” in my head for a week, I sort of wish she could kill people with her brain. It would be kinder.)

What are you doing here? she demanded.

He didn’t respond. He couldn’t. Without spending a lot more time around her, there was no way he’d be attuned enough to actually “hear” her when she thought at him like that.

The white rimming Sarah’s eyes started to fade, replaced by a look of sheer frustration. “What are you doing here?” she repeated, out loud this time.

“You were the one that alerted me to your cousin’s absence, if you’ll take a moment to remember,” he said mildly. “I went looking for her because I shared your concern, and assumed you’d like her returned to you with as many of her original limbs as possible.”

The white fled Sarah’s eyes completely, leaving her chagrined and a little embarrassed. “Oh,” she said. “I did call you, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did.”

“I shouldn’t have had to.” She stalked over and smacked me solidly on the shoulder.

I yelped. “Hey!”

“Don’t you hey me! Why didn’t you call? You know you’re supposed to call before you go running off to your certain death!”

“I don’t remember that rule.” I rubbed my shoulder. Sarah doesn’t hit hard, but she has an unerring gift for hitting squarely atop any preexisting bruises you might happen to have. “I’m pretty sure I’d need a better cell plan if that was actually a rule, because I’d be making a lot of phone calls. Besides, your note said you were going to class. I didn’t want to interrupt you in the middle of algebra.”

“Probability theory,” corrected Sarah sharply, “and next time you’d damn well better interrupt me, or I’m telling.”

“Who are you going to tell? Alex knew where I was going. Mom and Dad would’ve known, except they’re off chasing basilisks, which is arguably even dumber than going into the sewers where the servitors are. I mean, all the servitors will do is bite me and maybe haul me back to the dragon for mutation. The basilisk will turn me into a piece of lousy garden statuary.”

“I am oddly less reassured than I believe you intended me to be.”

“And I find myself in the somewhat uncomfortable position of agreeing with a nonhuman,” Dominic said, frowning. “Mutation does not strike me as being a desirable or laughable consequence.”

“Oh! That reminds me.” I dug the jar of gold dust out of my pocket and held it up, giving it a little shake to make the powder swirl like the world’s most expensive snow globe. “The dragon princesses said that eating gold will keep us from being mutated.”

“… why does this statement not seem even slightly unreasonable or insane?” asked Dominic. “Something has gone terribly wrong with the world.”

Sarah patted him reassuringly on the arm. “Welcome to life with Verity. Just wait. Soon she’ll have you thinking that three-inch heels are suitable for combat situations.”

“Unlikely,” said Dominic.

“But funny,” I added. “Besides, you have the legs to pull it off. Not many men do. Anyway, Dominic, I know you’re planning to go down there again, and Sarah, I’m hitting the point of ‘better safe than sorry.’ So who wants a gold smoothie?”

“Can I have mine with ketchup?” asked Sarah.