“Family are the people who, at the end of the day, will find you a bed and welcome you home.”
—Alexander Healy
In a repurposed slaughterhouse, surrounded by dragons and descendants
VERITY LED US TO a hall lined with glass-fronted doors. I assumed the rooms behind them had originally been the slaughterhouse offices, back when this place housed a functional business rather than a Nest of dragons and their allies. Paper had been taped across the glass, creating a fragile sort of privacy, but a few stood ajar, showing small rooms hastily converted into sleeping quarters. None of them were very personalized: this was a refuge, not a home.
“Sorry for the makeshift housing,” said Verity. “We initially moved in here after the Freakshow burned down. Got a good deal from the dragons, and it only got better when they realized that this was going to keep happening for a while.”
“Good . . . deal . . . What?” Sally looked to me and Thomas for an explanation.
She looked so baffled that I explained as we walked, “Dragons need gold to stay healthy. It’s a biological requirement for them. That’s part of why they used to come into conflict with humans, back in the day. A dragon’s Nest is basically a bank with no tellers and no alarm systems, if you can get into it while the dragon’s out scavenging for dinner. Since humans invented capitalism, dragons need money if they want gold these days. Which is why most of them have a reputation for being greedy penny-pinchers who will take the shirt off your back if you let them.”
“This used to be the main Nest,” said Verity. “Before we . . . well, before. It was standing empty after the dragons moved out. They didn’t sell it because they thought they might want to bring their male children here when they got a little older, let them see the sky before they were shipped off to their eventual home enclaves. With the Covenant around, the next generation of dragons is probably going to spend most of their lives in caves for their own protection.”
Thomas grimaced. “Even without the Covenant,” he said. “If we’re ever going to acclimate humanity to the idea that we’re not alone in this world, it would be better to start with something nonthreatening, like the sylphs, rather than going straight to fire-breathing reptiles the size of city buses.”
“Yeah, we’ve been there, and it didn’t work out,” said Verity. “So we moved all the employees from the Freakshow in here, and started getting settled. Then it became clear the Covenant was happy to play war of attrition with us, and the dragons started moving the boys up to join us.”
“Why?” asked Sally. “If they were all underground before, isn’t this less defensible?”
Verity didn’t answer. The cold truth was that moving the children to the aboveground facility made sense if the dragons and their allies were trying to make sure some of the baby boys would survive if the adult male was found and destroyed. Having male dragons at all changed everything for their species, which could continue to reproduce parthenogenetically for an indeterminate period of time but couldn’t make males without having one in the first place. They lost genetic diversity with every generation that was effectively cloned from the one before.
Verity’s discovery of the male dragon under Manhattan had changed everything. And now the dragon princesses faced the possibility of losing him. Making sure their sons weren’t in the same place as their father was probably the smartest thing they could have done.
“Anyway, there aren’t many humans here, but we have two Madhura running the kitchenette, and it’s still pretty safe to go for take-out if you’re careful about it or go with Sarah,” said Verity, stopping at one of the closed doors. “We have to watch ourselves, always, and we don’t come back here through the front door unless we’ve secured the block.”
“Did we put you all in danger today by showing up the way we did?” I asked.
“Mary wouldn’t have brought you in if you had,” she said, reassuringly, and opened the door to reveal the square, barren room on the other side. A queen-sized air mattress was shoved into one corner, and there was a desk and a dresser, both clearly from IKEA. Verity flicked the light on. It didn’t make the room look any less industrial, but it did reveal the hole cut into the baseboard next to the dresser, allowing the mice a clear path into the room. Verity saw me looking, and smiled.
“The dragons didn’t like us making modifications that could impact the eventual sale price of the building, but we had to if we wanted the mice to stop chewing their way out of the walls,” she said. “This was faster, and it’s easier to repair when we finally get to leave.”
“This isn’t open warfare,” said Thomas. “How are we meant to help you?”
“I don’t know,” said Verity, sounding briefly exhausted. “But at this point, anything is going to be better than what we have going on. Standoffs are only fun in the movies.”
“Do you know what kind of forces they have here?” asked Thomas.
Verity looked at him solemnly. “We don’t have a full roster. The only person who might have been able to give us a better sense of the shape of things is Antimony, and she’s been confined to Portland until this is over. Too many current field agents met her while she was undercover at Penton Hall, and they know Timpani Brown is a traitor. They’d be able to follow her right back to us.”
That must have been Annie’s alias while she was infiltrating the Covenant. I nodded, listening intently.
“Dominic and I have been laying as low as we can, mostly focusing on evacuations and support, for a bunch of reasons. Olivia’s one of them. Turns out it’s a lot harder to make myself jump off a building when I’m seven months pregnant.” She rubbed the back of her neck with one hand, looking faintly ashamed of herself. “I’m still getting back up to my normal levels of disregard for my own safety.”
Thomas shot me a look, while Sally snorted.
“Gosh, I never thought a death wish would be genetic,” she said. “So you’re doing support. Why does that mean you can’t give us a head count?”
“Because we’ve been limited in what we can learn while still keeping off their radar, which is still our primary concern. Dominic and I were here the last time the Covenant showed up, and Sarah hurt herself pretty badly putting the whammy on their field team to make them think we were dead,” she said bluntly. “Part of it involved convincing them I wasn’t really a Price, I was some sort of hired impersonator. I damaged that false memory when I went and fought a Titanoboa on live television. They may have been having flashes of knowing things were wrong before they even got here, because one of the first things they did when they arrived was start rooting out cuckoo nests, since they knew, on some level, that mind control was a danger.”
“So?” I prompted.
“So if any of them see us clearly enough to make a solid ID, that mental block may collapse completely,” said Verity. “Meaning Sarah would have hurt herself for nothing, and they’d know they didn’t just have another traitor on their hands, they had one who was working with one or more cuckoos. Right now, they think Dominic’s dead. They’re running protocols and processes he knows, and he can warn people when the Covenant is likely to be moving into their area. They find out he’s alive . . .”
“They find out he’s alive and they change everything,” I concluded grimly. “Good reason.”
“Plus right now, they’re not profiling random blonde humans and attacking the ones who fit on the theory that they might be me,” added Verity. “Based on what Dominic and Antimony know about their tech, we think they’re using some sort of heat scanner to pick out nonhumans when they’re looking for targets. Honestly, if we had half their tools for detecting cryptids, outreach would be so much easier. But right now, you can walk down the street and you’ll be fine. If they figure out Dominic is alive and I’m the woman who was with him when he ‘died,’ too many innocent people could be at risk. We’re minimizing casualties.”
“Where’s Sarah?” I asked abruptly.
“This time of day, probably Starbucks,” said Verity. “She goes for coffee in the afternoon. She’s the only one of us who can be absolutely sure of being safe. The Covenant still hasn’t figured out how to track cuckoos, especially not if they’re following human rules of behavior. They can carry anti-telepathy charms, but those can’t help them differentiate cuckoos from humans with similar coloration, and New York has plenty of pale, dark-haired people.”
“Their heat scanners don’t find cuckoos?”
“Cuckoos run about eight degrees cooler than the average human. Most nonhuman bipeds run six to twelve degrees higher. At least for right now, the Covenant is looking for the hot people—and even if they weren’t, their odds of finding a single cuckoo in the city would be less than one in a million. Most of the cuckoos in North America vanished a little over five years ago, when they tried to open a dimensional door and skip town. They didn’t survive the process. Sarah may be the last cuckoo left in New York, and for once, that’s not because of anything the Covenant did. So she gets the occasional break from being shut up in here with all the local minds she’s actively attuned to, and we get coffee delivered once a day.” Verity shrugged broadly. “It helps. Not enough, but . . . it helps.”
“Right,” I said.
“The dragons are focused on protecting the Nest, the bogeymen are focused on trying to batten down the hatches and hold the sewers, and all the other cryptid communities are doing their best to close their doors against the outside world. So we’re not getting a lot of reports from the locals about the Covenant’s movements. We know they’re actively hunting all the time; they’ve caught a lot of the solitaries, and they keep patrolling every night, looking for anything ‘deviant.’ We’ve confirmed the existence of at least three field teams. There may be a fourth, or it may be members of the other three coming together in their off time to enjoy their favorite hobby, wrecking the lives of innocent cryptids.”
“So that’s what, twenty people?”
“Somewhere around that.” Verity looked at me, letting me glimpse the naked fear in her eyes. “If you’re thinking ‘Twenty’s easy, I carry twenty knives all the time,’ stop. They’re dangerous, Grandma. They travel in groups, they’re trained killers, and they’re cruel. They don’t fight fair. They don’t particularly care about collateral damage, as long as they can kill the people they think of as monsters. Most of the city doesn’t know we’re at war. Sure. That’s how the Covenant works. They move in the shadows, they pretend ignorance is bliss and what you don’t know can’t hurt you, and they kill, and they kill, and they keep killing, because as long as they keep their heads down while they’re doing it, people just write the deaths off as background noise!
“You haven’t been here, Grandma, you haven’t tried to comfort the people who’ve just lost spouses, or parents, or children. You haven’t watched people trying to cope with the deaths of their loved ones when no one else seems to care. We may not have tanks rolling down Broadway, but this is war, and it only ends when the Covenant can say nothing inhuman is left alive in Manhattan. And when they do that, they start heading out into other places, to cleanse those, too! There’s at least twenty of them, we don’t know all their names, we don’t know most of their faces, but they’re here, and they’re killing people, and we need them to stop. I need them to stop. And I need you to figure out how you’re going to make that happen, because my people are pretty damn tired of dying.”
She took a deep breath before turning toward the door. “I’ll let you get settled in. Come out when you’re ready. Istas will show you around the warehouse and make sure you know the escape routes and house rules. Sally, it’s nice to meet you. Grandma, it’s nice to see you again. Grandpa . . .” She hesitated, apparently not sure what she was supposed to say. The silence stretched like a piece of chewing gum, getting longer and longer and more and more fragile. Finally, she shook her head, and said, “I’m glad you’re not dead after all. And I’m glad all of you are here. Really. We need the hands.”
Then she was gone, leaving us alone in a situation that was very big, very complex, and very not designed to be handled by my usual brute-force methodology. Which explained why it was grinding her down the way it clearly was. Of all my descendants, Verity was the most like me in temperament. A problem she couldn’t punch into submission was a bit outside her comfort zone.
It wasn’t much closer to my own comfort zone. Thomas was fifty years out of time, Sally knew nothing about the cryptid world, and I was joining a fight where knives and hitting weren’t likely to be the solution.
Wasn’t this going to be fun.
I sat heavily on the edge of the bed, which sank a bit beneath me, revealing its origins as a piece of camping gear hastily press-ganged into service as bedroom furniture, and bent forward, dropping my head into my hands.
The bed rose as someone sat down next to me, and Thomas put a hand on the small of my back.
“I feel rather as if I’ve just been dropped into the middle of a theatrical production with no program and no notes on what happened during the first two acts,” he said, sounding surprisingly unruffled.
I lifted my head, eyeing him suspiciously. “You’re not upset?”
“Oh, I’m so upset that I’m astonished I can still draw breath,” he said, in a reassuring tone. “I left our infant son, and now his daughter is old enough to have a child the age he was the last time I saw him.”
“That wasn’t him in the kitchen?” asked Sally.
I felt Thomas turn his attention in her direction. “I suppose it was, but I have trouble wrapping my head around that fact. I’ve mostly been cleaving to the idea that it proves he’s still alive, and not dwelling on all the reality of what his age means. Alice was a surprise but not a shock. She still looks almost like she did when I had to leave her behind. I would have loved her no matter what. I still didn’t have to make any major mental adjustments to look at her and see my wife. Looking at a grown man and seeing my son is a more difficult feat. Looking at a grown woman with a daughter of her own and a De Luca by her side—a De Luca! Now there’s a family I never thought to see turn traitor— Well. That all takes a bit more adjustment.”
I uncovered my face and sat up, looking at her. “I haven’t missed nearly as much time as Thomas has—or as you have—but five years is a bigger jump forward than I usually make. I vanish for a year, maybe two. Not five. Not long enough for my granddaughter to get pregnant and have a daughter of her own, and probably decide I was dead. She’s not going to evacuate. Even with a baby, there’s no way we convince her to leave this city to its own ends, not when she feels responsible for what’s happening.”
“So your whole family’s like this?” Sally asked.
I considered for a moment. “They’re all different,” I said finally. “But pretty much, yeah. I ran out on my children when they were too small to understand why it was happening. They couldn’t tell me not to go. They couldn’t come with me. All they could do was stay behind. And somehow that led to them growing up with this incredible determination never to leave family behind again. Verity is what she was raised to be, and she was raised by the people I broke, so I know where her cracked bits are. Yeah, they’re all like this, to one degree or another. I haven’t seen most of them in . . . well, in five years longer than I thought I had.”
I barked a sharp laugh that threatened to become a sob, and Thomas shifted his hand from the small of my back to my shoulder, drawing me closer. I took another deep breath, looking for serenity. Looking for stability. Looking for anything other than the bone-deep exhaustion that threatened to rise up and overwhelm me.
“Think someone in this place has a sleeping bag I can borrow?” Sally asked. “No offense, and I trust you two not to get frisky while I’m in here, but I’m not sharing a bed with two people I’m not banging.”
“Were you this picky in the bottle dimension?” I asked, halfway amused despite myself.
“Nope,” said Sally. “Didn’t have the luxury of pickiness when we were all huddling together for body heat, or when we couldn’t spare the water for bathing more than once a month. You learn to put up with a lot. And you know what else you learn?”
“What?” Now the amusement was complete.
“You learn not to dwell on shit. The thing that tries to kill you today will try to kill you again tomorrow, and all you’re going to do if you sit around thinking about it is give yourself an ulcer. I’m back in the real world.”
“Technically, all worlds are real—” Thomas began.
“The real world,” Sally repeated, more firmly. “I am in the place pizza comes from, I am almost certainly going to get to stab some people, I have clean socks, and you’re intending to keep me, meaning I don’t have to try to figure out how I’m going to explain any of this bullshit to the Hendersons. I loved them, I did, and they tried their best to love me, but they adopted me because their church told them Jesus wanted them to, and then I turned out to be gay and weird and not very interested in their version of God, and so they were already falling out of the habit of loving me when I vanished. I’m sure it was a relief to everyone but James when I went away. And if I spent all my time sitting around dwelling on that, I’d scream forever, so instead, I’m going to go get some damn pizza. Anyone coming with me?”
“I am.” I stood. “Verity can’t risk being seen, but if the Covenant spots me, they won’t recognize me. Even if they do, they won’t believe it. They may catch the Carew look. That’s fine. Let them come after me, just as long as we don’t lead them back here.”
“Is this one of those situations where I would make things worse by insisting on coming with you?” Thomas asked.
I hesitated. “Actually . . . maybe.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Do tell.”
“One woman who looks kinda like she might be a Carew, but maybe not, walking with a Korean woman? Not that suspicious. A Carew and a Price, on the other hand . . .”
“They still hate us that much,” said Thomas, and sighed. “I’ll stay here, then, and get a better sense of the lay of the land.”
“Good plan.” I turned to Sally. “Ready for your pizza?”
Verity was in the main room, talking quietly with a cluster of dragons. She turned when Sally and I emerged. I waved her over, causing her to scowl briefly before she half-walked, half-trotted toward us.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Sally wants pizza, so we were going to go for a walk before we figure out how to take down the Covenant. What’s the protocol for leaving the building?”
“Go out through the convenience store, try not to look suspicious while you’re doing it, and call for Mary to meet you on the sidewalk and let you back in,” said Verity. “If she doesn’t show up within a few minutes, keep walking, and do a few circuits of the block before you try calling her again. If she doesn’t come after the third time, take a walk. Get at least a mile away, then call her again. I’m guessing you don’t have phones?”
We both shook our heads. Verity sighed.
“Okay, we’ll add that to the list for tomorrow. Right now, it’s just Mary for access for you. Or Sarah, if you see her, but you can’t count on that. I really wish you wouldn’t just wander off.”
“But you’re not telling us not to go.”
“You’re my grandmother. Do you think I could make that stick?”
I considered for a moment, then shook my head. “Not really. But I’m armed, we’re both paranoid, and I want to get a vague sense of the atmosphere out there.”
“All right,” she said, reluctantly. “Just be as careful as you reasonably can, okay? I don’t want to deal with Grandpa getting widowed when the two of you just got into the same place again.”
I sighed. “I know I can be a little crabby sometimes, but I’m more careful than you people give me credit for. Even if I continue to hate that word and everything it stands for.”
“Less talking, more pizza,” said Sally.
“You heard her,” I said. “Who am I to stand between a woman and her burning need for pizza? I even promise to do my best not to wander into traffic because I got distracted by all the shiny lights of civilization.”
“You better,” said Verity. “I want you all to meet Dr. Morrow while you’re in town, but I’d like it to be a meet-and-greet, not an emergency surgery. I think you’ll like him—and he’s not going to ask questions about paperwork or insurance once he knows you’re with me.”
I lifted my eyebrows as I nodded approvingly. After everything we’d been through during our interdimensional travels, all three of us were overdue for a physical, and Verity was smart enough to recognize that. “Got it: save the car crash for after we’ve met your pet doctor. Ally?”
“Caladrius.”
“Damn, you found a Caladrius?” They’re almost extinct. Have been for centuries. Something about the combination of being something that can be slaughtered for useful resources, and looking almost human while being obviously not human annoyed the Covenant. The fact that the almost-human thing they look like happened to align pretty well with the modern church’s depiction of angels probably didn’t help.
Probably.
“Two, actually,” she said. “They’re at St. Giles, and they’ll be thrilled to meet you.”
“Great. You get all that, Sally?”
“Nope,” said Sally. “There’s so much, I’m not really getting much of anything beyond ‘If I promise to look both ways before crossing the street, I can have pizza.’”
“That works for me,” I said, and leaned over to give Verity a quick hug before I started back toward the door we’d arrived through.
As before, it was unguarded, and the door wasn’t locked, easily letting us back out into the little courtyard. The dragon kids weren’t bouncing their ball anymore, having traded it in for piling themselves into a heap of golden heads, almost like a hoard, with the long, reptilian form of the young male curled proudly on top. They were giggling sleepily, obviously pleased with themselves. I paused long enough to look at them before heading on, Sally close behind me.
“The thing to remember about dragons,” I said, once we were in the short, private hallway to the convenience store, “is they look human, but they’re not. They’re people, and they deserve respect and dignity, but they’re not human people.”
“Meaning . . . ?”
“Meaning those kids were probably following some deep-seated instinctual pattern. I’ve seen adult dragons form piles like that my whole life. Not normally with the big scaly one on top, but still, often enough that I figure it’s not something they choose to do so much as something they’ll just find themselves doing from time to time. And it’s perfectly normal.”
“What . . . How does that . . . If that’s a boy, and those are girls, how does that even work?”
“Humans have an incredibly low degree of sexual dimorphism,” I said, and opened the door to the convenience store. “It’s why we can share sweaters and shoes and knives and such. Dragons have a very high degree of sexual dimorphism. Enough so that for a long time, we thought they were two separate species.”
The convenience store was empty save for Pris, who was now engrossed in a romance novel, barely seeming to pay attention to the shop she was supposed to be watching. She looked up when the door swung closed behind Sally and me, and got up with an exaggerated sound of irritation to cross over and lock the door.
“We’ll hopefully be back soon,” I informed her.
She scoffed but otherwise didn’t acknowledge that I’d said anything at all. She walked back to her stool and sat heavily, retrieving her book from where she’d placed it face-down on the counter.
“Great customer service,” said Sally.
I shrugged. “Cut her a break. She’s dealing with some pretty heavy bullshit from the dominant species right now, and that means we’re as likely to be enemies as allies, even after we’ve been vetted.”
One corner of the dragon’s mouth tugged upward in what might have been a quickly smothered smile. She still didn’t look at us. I waved anyway as I left the store, Sally on my heels, and stepped into the balmy New York afternoon.
“Pizza?”
Sally’s request was plaintive, and made my stomach grumble.
“We’re in New York,” I said. “No matter which way we go, there’s going to be pizza within a block or two. So pick a direction, and we’ll go that way.”
Sally turned a slow circle before pointing in the direction that seemed to have the most people heading in it. “There,” she said.
“Cool.” I started walking.
Letting her pick the direction served two purposes. First, this way she was less likely to get mad at me if we had to walk more than a block for pizza. Second, living with weird-ass luck like mine has meant learning how to manage weird-ass luck like mine. If I’d picked the direction, we would probably have walked straight into a Covenant patrol, and I wasn’t in the mood to deal with that just now. We’d have to face them eventually, but we could do it on the other side of pepperoni.
Sally huffed when we hit the end of the first block with no pizza in sight, only to light up like a Christmas tree when we saw the dollar-slice storefront halfway down the next block. I put a hand on her arm.
“Buddy system while we’re outside,” I said. “We stay together, got me?”
Sally sighed. “Yes, Mom.”
“If you’re going to call me that, we should probably be consistent about it, just so we don’t confuse people more than we’re already going to.”
She turned and blinked at me, then snorted and kept walking. The smell of pizza was starting to drift down the sidewalk, washing everything else away. Hard to smell the city when you have a nose full of basil and melted cheese.
Inside, it was the sort of narrow, boxy space that New York specializes in, with a tiny waiting area and a counter running from one side of the room to the other. The guy behind the register looked like he’d been half-asleep before we arrived, probably due to the afternoon lull: there were only a couple of other patrons standing at the counter, eating slices off of paper plates. Sally ignored them. All her attention was on the glass case of pizza options.
They were pretty straightforward, generic, even: pepperoni, mushroom, plain cheese, and an “everything” pizza that was missing at least fifteen toppings I could think of off the top of my head. She was still staring at them like they were the most beautiful things she’d ever seen.
The clerk looked at us, disinterested. “What can I get you?”
“How many slices in a large pizza?”
“Eight.”
I glanced at Sally. She was still staring at the pizza slices.
“Can I get a large pizza box with two slices of each kind you have in the case right now?”
The clerk shrugged, then nodded. He was a clerk at a dollar-slice place in Manhattan. He’d heard way stranger requests. “I’ll have to charge you for a large pie.”
Despite the name of the store, the slices were two-fifty each, rather than a dollar, although a sign on the case indicated that today’s dollar slice was ham and pineapple—maybe explaining why that flavor was conspicuously absent. “That’s fine. How much?”
“Twenty-two.”
A two-dollar surcharge for a large pizza box seemed like a small price to pay. I fished twenty-five dollars out of my pocket and dropped it on the counter between us. “That sounds great.”
He pulled a box from under the counter and began sliding slices deftly into it, creating a patchwork pizza in less time than it would have taken me to open the case. “You want me to heat this up for you?”
“If it’s not too much trouble.” Sally shot me a wounded look. I was keeping her away from the pizza. I patted her reassuringly on the shoulder. “This way it’s nice and hot when you get it. I saw a drugstore back the way we came. We can stop and get you some Lactaid before you eat your body weight in cheese.”
The clerk laughed, sliding our boxed pizza into an open oven that must have been more electric than contains-actual-fire. “You want a soda or anything with that?”
“No, just the pizza will be fine.”
“Here you go.” He pulled the pizza out of the oven, put the box on the counter, and pushed it toward us. “Have a nice day.”
I handed the box to Sally before she could grab it and start cackling. “You, too.”
Outside on the street, Sally glared at the closed box. “Lactaid is good for not getting horrible stomachaches and gas.”
“Yes,” I agreed, starting back toward the Nest.
“But not having it yet is bad for being able to eat pizza.”
“If it’s safe for us to go back inside right now, we can eat in our room. If it’s not, we’ll find a park or something and you can eat outside. This is New York. They have benches.” Or they used to, anyway. It had been a few years since I’d been for a visit. My work didn’t usually take me to big human cities.
The question of whether benches still existed kept me occupied as we walked, until we pulled up level with the drug store I’d seen before. “Can I wait out here?” asked Sally.
“Why?”
“Because I’m holding a whole-ass pizza, and I’d rather avoid jostling it more than I have to?”
I considered this, and decided Sally probably wasn’t in any danger of attracting Covenant attention by standing outside a CVS for five minutes in broad daylight. This was New York. People loitered here all the time. “Okay. I’ll be right back.”
The drugstore was laid out the way drugstores have been for my entire lifetime, and finding Sally’s Lactaid wasn’t hard. I stopped off at the large cooler, snagging three bottles of cold Coca-Cola, then got into line to check out.
Things cost more than I was used to. Just those four items took more of my remaining cash than I liked, and I made a silent note to get more when I could, taking my paper sack from the clerk and heading back out of the store to the sidewalk.
Where Sally was not.
I blinked, very slowly, then turned in a slow circle.
She was gone.