Midnight Blue-Light Special

Two

The Freakshow, a highly specialized nightclub somewhere in Manhattan

A WEEK HAD PASSED since the manananggal incident, giving me sufficient time to file my reports, update the family field guide (this just in: manananggal are venomous), and pay two follow-up visits to St. Giles’ Hospital, where Dr. Morrow and the Caladrius nurse (whose name turned out to be Lauren) were happy to patch me up free of charge. The manananggal’s claws didn’t even leave a scar. I had resolved a threat, and saved a bunch of babies—and their mothers—from being eaten. Not bad for a ballroom dancer from Portland.

I hit the stairs leading down from the nightclub roof almost five whole minutes before my shift was scheduled to start. For me, that’s practically getting to work early, especially these days. We had a little snake cult incident last year, and the city’s cryptids are still all worked up about it. That’s meant more mediation, more handholding through interactions with the human world, and, unfortunately, more hunting, since some of the more predatory types of cryptid took the destabilization of Manhattan as an invitation to move in and start chowing down on the locals. It seems like I’m out on the streets every other night, teaching some idiot that you don’t act like that in my city.

Candy was standing by the base of the stairs, eating a ham and gold leaf sandwich. (It’s a house special. Angel calls it “the Adam Lambert,” and serves it with a pickle and a shot of Goldschläger. Bartenders are weird.) “You’re late,” she called, as I went blowing past her like my shoes were on fire.

“I have five minutes!” I shouted back, and kept on running until I hit the dressing room, and dove into chaos.

Picture a medium-sized room, maybe twenty feet by twenty feet square. Now add standing lockers cannibalized from a high school gym, with the requisite long wooden benches stretching between the rows. Great. Now add half a dozen women, all of them jockeying for position at the single long mirror lining one wall, and you’ll have some idea of what I was walking into.

Sometimes I think I’d rather deal with a herd of angry unicorns than a bunch of women trying to get themselves ready for work. “I’m here,” I announced to no one in particular as I walked past the throng and made my way between two racks of lockers to my assigned spot. The “real world skills” I’ve learned from my years of struggling to launch a dance career are mostly limited to things like putting on mascara on a moving bus, but I definitely know better than to come between an amateur kick-line and their own reflections.

I opened my locker and tossed in my bag before starting to squirm out of my street clothes. Five minutes was cutting it close for getting into my uniform and putting on my makeup. I’d done it before, but that didn’t mean I could waste time watching the clown car antics unfolding in front of the mirror.

The dancers and cocktail waitresses fighting for space squabbled like wet hens as they applied lip gloss, fixed their eye makeup, and tried to keep from being bitten by Carol’s hair, which was making its usual attempt to escape from her elaborate beehive wig. Carol stuffed the tiny serpents back into the weave as quickly as they slithered free, but it was a hopeless fight—like all lesser gorgons, she was seriously outnumbered by her own hair.

Under normal circumstances, Carol would have had at least three feet on either side of her, since only Marcy was willing to sit any closer. Marcy’s an Oread, and her skin is way too thick to be punctured by anything as plebeian as a snake bite. That was under normal circumstances, not during shift change. During shift change—especially shift change to the night shift—real estate at the mirror was too valuable to leave open just because you might wind up getting chomped on by a cocktail waitress’ hairdo.

Distraction makes you careless. One of the new girls squealed and jerked away from Carol, clutching her hand to her chest. I sighed as I fastened the last few snaps on my uniform bodice and pulled on my ruffled cancan skirt. Once that was done, I grabbed the at-work first aid kit from my locker and walked over to the mirror.

“I’m so sorry, tomorrow’s feeding day, they’re all cranky,” Carol was saying to the girl her hair had taken a chunk out of—a wide-eyed human whose normally coppery complexion was underscored with a sudden sickly pallor. Carol kept stuffing as she spoke, trying to get the snakes back into her wig. They weren’t cooperating. Her agitation was transmitting itself to them, and they were beginning to writhe and snap wildly, making her blonde beehive wig pulse like a prop from a bad horror movie.

“Here, Carol.” I pressed my emergency can of Mom’s gorgon hair treatment into Carol’s hand. She shot me a grateful look. Neither of us really understands why a mix of concrete dust, eggshells, and powdered antivenin has a sedative effect on the snakes, but it doesn’t hurt them, and it keeps them calmer than anything else we’ve been able to come up with. Carol gets three cans a month. I get one in the same shipment, for emergencies just like this one.

The new girl was still sitting there, looking terrified. I tried to remember who’d recommended that we hire her. Humans are great dancers, but most of them really aren’t all that comfortable with the cryptid world—and there’s good reason for that. You need to worry about a lot in a normal chorus line; being bitten by the other girls’ hair isn’t on the list.

“You.” I pointed to another of the new girls, a green-haired siren with eyes only a few shades lighter than her heavily hairsprayed curls. “Take her to the manager’s office. There’s antivenin in the fridge there.”

“Okay,” said the siren, the whistling sweetness of her voice betraying her anxiety. She took the bitten girl by the elbow, pulling her away from the mirror. “Come on, Nye. Let’s get that taken care of.”

The bubble of silence that followed their departure held for only a few seconds before the room exploded back into its previous level of chaos. The hole at the mirror left by the siren and her human friend was almost instantly filled. That’s show business for you.

Marcy dusted Carol’s hair with sedative powder as Carol shoved the suddenly-passive little snakes back into her wig.

A quarter of the mirror had been claimed by four of the gorgeous blondes we spent centuries calling “dragon princesses” before we learned that, no, they were just the female of the dragon species. Three equally gorgeous Chinese girls were crammed in there with them, all of them doing their makeup with grim precision. They were visiting representatives of another dragon subspecies. They were in town to grill William—the dragon who lives under downtown Manhattan, and yeah, I’m still pretty flipped out about that—about whether any of their males might have survived, and, like all dragons, they were happy to spend their off hours making a few extra bucks by waiting tables.

(Dragons take avarice to a religious level, but they have good reason; their health and reproduction depend on the presence of certain precious materials. European dragons need gold. Their Chinese counterparts seemed to have a similar affection for jade and pearls, although some of what I’d been able to overhear implied that they actually created pearls somehow, which definitely gave them a financial leg up. What can I say? I’m a cryptozoologist, and we didn’t write our books on cryptid biology by being too polite to eavesdrop.)

“Are we good?” I asked.

“We’re good,” said Marcy, shoving the last of the sedated snakes under Carol’s wig. “Thanks for the save.”

“It’s no big deal,” I said, although a quick glance at the clock told me that it was actually a very big deal indeed. I was due on stage with the rest of the chorus in less than three minutes. I stuck two fingers in my mouth and whistled sharply before shouting, “This is not a drill, people! Hairspray down, high heels on, and anyone who breaks a leg before intermission is going to answer to me!”

The already hectic dressing room exploded into motion as everyone scrambled, double-time, to get ready for the cue that was about to crash down on us. I dashed back to my locker, grabbing the few pieces of costume still in need of application, and took off for the stage. Anything I couldn’t put on while I was running was just going to have to wait until I got a break.

There’s no business like show business. And thank God for that.

A little background, in case it’s still needed: my name is Verity Price, and I’m a journeyman cryptozoologist, currently studying the sentient cryptid population of New York City and the surrounding area. This turns out to pay surprisingly poorly, since most people don’t believe cryptids exist, and those who do believe in them usually fall into one of two camps—either “kill it with fire” or “I wonder how I can use that freak of nature to make myself buckets and buckets of money.” Neither of these is helpful when what you’re trying to do is observe and assist a cryptid population, and so I, like every other member of my family, make do with whatever jobs my admittedly non-standard skill set can help me hold onto. That brought me, in a roundabout way, to Dave’s Fish and Strips, a tits-and-ass bar that was billed as a “nightclub for discerning gentlemen.”

Dave was a bogeyman. He probably still is, since no one’s managed to kill him yet—at least as far as I know, and given how we parted ways, I would expect his killers to send me a nice “you’re welcome” card. Anyway, when I came to town looking for gainful employment, serving cocktails in a cryptid-owned establishment seemed like the best of all possible worlds. I could study the urban cryptid population both in and out of the workplace, allowing me an unparalleled view of their social structure, and I could make a little money at the same time.

I mean, really, it was all going pretty great until Dave decided to sell me to a snake cult before skipping town. They say nobody’s perfect, but there’s having a few flaws, and then there’s selling your employees as human sacrifices. That sort of thing is just uncool.

The whole “human sacrifice” thing didn’t pan out, and I returned to find Dave gone and the strip club abandoned. Since he wasn’t technically dead—not until I get my hands on him, anyway, and who knows when that might be?—the rest of the city’s bogeymen got to decide what would be done with his property, and they settled for turning it over to his niece, Kitty. She’d been touring with her boyfriend’s band when things really got nasty, and didn’t find out that her uncle was missing until she came to ask for her old job back. Maybe Dave left the deed in her name, or else her boyfriend was really good at fabricating paperwork, but either way, talk about your welcome home presents.

None of us had expected too much of Kitty, but she proved to have a good head for business and, better still, a good sense of showmanship. Dave operated the club on a sort of “If we put hot naked girls on stage, they will come” theory. Kitty looked at that and said, “Well, yes, but how are we going to get them to come back?” Dave’s Fish and Strips closed its doors for good a week after Kitty took it over. Two months after that, the Freakshow was born.

Have a prehensile tail? Wear a miniskirt and use it to carry an extra tray when you’re serving drinks. Got wings? How do you feel about swinging on a perch suspended from the ceiling? Cryptids of every race and creed were invited to come and show off the things that divided them from the human race—and every one of them who did just helped to raise the Freakshow’s cred a little higher. There was even a review in the New Yorker, calling it a “cunning use of smoke and mirrors,” and “a fantastic example of the misuses one can manage with a degree in theatrical makeup and costuming.” In short, it was so in-your-face that everyone assumed it had to be fake, and the human populace of the city was all but busting down the doors for the chance to dance with the monsters they still didn’t believe in.

Still, every gimmick has its shelf life, and Kitty knew that if she wanted to keep the Freakshow running, she would need to have more than just a few strange but pretty faces on staff. She’d need actual entertainment. Well, that, and some of the stiffest drinks in the city, courtesy of our bartenders, Ryan and Angel.

All of which goes to explain why I scrambled to the middle of the stage less than a minute before curtain, wearing a corset, a ruffled black-and-red cancan skirt, high heels, and enough glitter to start my own David Bowie tribute band. In the end, no matter how tight the timing, the show must always go on.

“Ladies and gentlemen, honored guests and less-than-honored neighbors, the Freakshow welcomes you to a night of thrills, chills, and sweet surprises that can be found nowhere else in this fairest of all fair cities.” Kitty always did her ringmaster act from the center of the stage, despite the fact that she’s a bogeyman, and should hence want to avoid the light whenever possible. I guess she never got to that page of the bogeyman edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves. She strutted back and forth between two precisely placed marks as she used her womanly wiles to get the attention of a rowdy crowd.

Her luck was usually good in that regard. Something about her wearing an outfit that looks like a classic ringmaster’s attire as reinterpreted by a designer who specializes in high-end fetish gear just managed to catch the eye. It didn’t hurt that she had the subtly inhuman proportions shared by all bogeymen, making her difficult to look away from.

I said Kitty changed the place after Dave left. I never said she made it classy.

“—and now, my beloved guests, if you would put your hands together for our sweet sugarplums, our cancan belles, our Freakshow dancers, the Scarionettes!” Kitty finished our introduction with a flourish, her heels hitting the floor with gunshot precision as she walked off the main stage half a step ahead of the opening curtain. Floodlights splashed down from the rafters, revealing eleven dancers in corsets and short ruffled skirts, all frozen in perfect clockwork doll poses as we waited for the music to begin.

The tapping of an unseen conductor’s baton echoed from the speakers, catching the attention of those patrons who had learned to ignore Kitty’s posturing in favor of sucking down cocktails while they waited for the floorshow to begin. Then Emilie Autumn’s “I Know Where You Sleep” blasted out, and we started to dance.

Kitty was being generous when she called the floorshow’s first number a “cancan.” I’ve danced the cancan, although never professionally, and while it does involve a lot of girls hiking their skirts to heaven, they’re usually doing it wearing outfits that look less like they came from the remainder bin at Hot Topic. Still, it was athletic, enthusiastic, and involved cute girls in high heels and corsets bouncing up and down for five minutes without stopping for air, which was more than sufficient for our clientele.

We whirled and spun around the stage, kicking, prancing, thrusting our chests out, and somehow managing to look like we were both classier and naughtier than your average stripper. A lot of the credit for that goes to my choreography, if I do say so myself. My specialty is Latin ballroom, which is all about pouring a whole lot of sexy into a very small amount of suggestive.

Off to one side of the stage, a chorus girl was deviating from the routine to snatch dollar bills from a leering man in a baseball jersey. Okay, so maybe the transition from stripper to dancer was still a work in process for some of my coworkers. I was happy to work with them as much as I had to, since failure might mean going back to cocktail waitressing. Any amount of coaching our slower learners was worth it if it meant I could avoid that particular fate. Even if I had to do my coaching in a corset.

The nicest thing about working in a bar with aspirations of growing up to be a burlesque joint: I might have to shake my tail feathers if I wanted to bring home a paycheck, but the rotation of the acts and the solo numbers in-between meant that I was only on stage once every ninety minutes during the busy periods.

I congratulated the rest of the chorus as they stampeded off the stage, narrowly avoiding the snake dancer who was shoving her way up the backstage steps with a large wicker basket in her arms. The basket hissed companionably as it passed me. I hissed back, trying to keep my tone respectful. It never pays to piss off a wadjet.

The main room was packed with bodies by the time I stripped off my chorus girl outfit—trading it for a much more demure lacy blouse-and-petticoat combination, and yes, moments like that are the only times when I miss the tacky little uniforms Dave used to make us wear—and pushed my way out of the dressing room into the crowd. A few men leered in my direction, but none of them made a move toward me. Proof that men of any sentient species can be taught.

Also proof that having a bad-ass tanuki bouncer who sometimes fills in behind the bar can work wonders for the female employees of a place like the Freakshow. I waded my way through bodies to the bar, where luck, timing, and the willingness to cut people off won me an open stool. The man I’d ducked under to get the seat glared at me. I flashed a bright smile and blew him a kiss, then turned my attention to the bartender currently mixing drinks for my side of the room.

“Ryan, I require something so horrifically alcoholic that it makes livers tremble with fear and run for their lives when its name is uttered,” I said solemnly.

Ryan raised an eyebrow. “Or I could get you a martini glass filled with club soda and garnished with something that makes it look like you’re actually drinking liquor for a change. That way when you left the bar, you might not fall off the nearest available rooftop.”

I grinned. “That sounds good. Let’s do that.”

“Why am I not surprised?” asked Ryan—but he was laughing as he said it, and he kept laughing as he moved to get me my drink. A woman bellied up to the bar next to me, giving his ass an appreciative look. Now, I’m happy to admit that Ryan has a fantastic rear end. He not only works out, he’s a therianthrope, a shapeshifter who gets his connection to the wild side through magic and genetics, not a curse-turned-infection. Plus, how many six-five half-Japanese hotties do you find on the street, even in Manhattan? Ryan was prime man-flesh on the hoof.

There was one small complication: “His girlfriend works here,” I informed the woman, blithely.

She turned the measuring look she’d been applying to Ryan’s ass on me, expression clearly telegraphing my failure to live up to whatever rating system she was using. “Oh, really?”

“Yes, really,” I said, stung. I may be short, but five-two is a respectable height, and I don’t have any unpleasant birth defects, or share my little sister’s taste in clothes. I’m a natural blonde, even though my particular line of work means I have to keep my hair cut Mia Farrow-short, and spending three hours a day at dance practice has guaranteed me the kind of figure that stops salsa judges in their tracks. Sure, I was covered in glitter and wearing what looked like Victorian underwear, but there are a lot of men who’d find that a plus. Ryan among them: Istas believes in glitter and petticoats the way some people believe in God.

The woman sniffed. “I’ll take my chances.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Uh-huh.” There was a moment when I considered abandoning my efforts to warn her, but quite honestly, a little snottiness wasn’t enough to earn her a broken arm. Maybe a sprain or something. “I’m not the girlfriend in question. She is.” I indicated Istas, who was bussing tables on the other side of the room. She was dressed in her gothic Lolita best, a fashion statement that didn’t stand out nearly as much as it used to now that the whole club was done in steampunk-meets-Hot Topic circus style. “Just a friendly warning. She’s the jealous type.”

“She should be,” said the woman, giving Ryan’s ass one more approving glance. Then, with a final sneering look at me, she turned and blended back into the crowd.

I was still looking sulkily in her direction when Ryan waved a hand in front of my eyes, calling my attention back to him. “Earth to Verity, come in, Verity. You checked out on me for a minute there. Have the mice been letting you sleep?”

“I think letting me sleep is against their religion.”

“You are their religion.”

“And in their cosmology, the gods have no need for silly little things like ‘sufficient rest.’” I picked up the club soda Ryan set in front of me. Tonight’s garnish involved a lemon wedge, a chunk of mango, and yes, a little paper umbrella. “Seriously, though, I’ve been interviewing hidebehinds all week, and I’m a little worn out.”

Ryan started to answer me, but stopped himself before the first word could form. Straightening to his full height, he fixed his eyes on a point just behind me in the crowd, all but glowering. “You have company.”

There’s only one man I know in New York City who can get that kind of rise out of Ryan. I took a deliberate sip of my club soda before removing the paper umbrella from the glass, drying its toothpick handle on my napkin, and sticking it jauntily behind one ear. Then I turned, cocking my head and directing a winsome smile at the man standing there.

“Want a drink?” I asked. “I’m buying.”

“We need to talk,” replied Dominic.

That’s the Covenant for you: never using five words when four extremely ominous ones will do. I slid off my hard-won bar stool, taking one more drink from my club soda before putting it down on the bar. “I’ll get my coat,” I said, and stalked toward the dressing room door, leaving Dominic De Luca waiting alone in the crowd that clustered around the bar.

I couldn’t even get a little peace and quiet in a cryptid-owned burlesque club. What’s the world coming to these days?