“We make monsters whenever we disagree about how a limited resource should be spent. It’s so much easier to kill a person whose personhood you’ve stolen away.”
—Thomas Price
Manhattan, standing inside a former slaughterhouse filled with dragons, trying to figure out how to accomplish the impossible
SO: WE HAD LIMITED resources, including two people who were almost entirely out of synch with the present day, and myself, who had never bothered to become intimately acquainted with the way the modern world worked, since I’d had bigger things to worry about. Like finding a man who’d been thrown into another dimension by a cosmic force of being a giant asshole, and keeping myself from getting killed in the process.
Sarah was off the board, thanks to the telepathy limiters and whatever had happened to leave her so withdrawn. Normally I wouldn’t say personal trauma was a good-enough reason for someone to stay benched when kids were in danger, but Sarah’s a cuckoo. Pushing her when she doesn’t feel stable enough to be in the field could have really bad consequences, for everybody.
I don’t like treating my grandkids like they might be dangerous, but they could be, every single one of them. Even Artie, loath as he generally is to leave his room. We don’t raise harmless children in this family. And maybe that’s the way I did grow up to be my father. I didn’t have much say in the way Laura brought up Kevin and Jane, but the expectation that they’d take after my mother had still traveled with me every time I’d come to visit during their childhoods. In my way, I gave them as little of a choice as my dad gave me. If they wanted my approval, they’d show me they were ready to survive in a world whose dangers I was all too intimately acquainted with.
Kevin had always been more enthusiastic about knife training and field work, had always been more eager to impress me and make sure I knew that he was still my son, even if he only saw me once or twice a year. Who would Jane have grown up to be, without the constant need to impress a mother who was more absence than attendance?
Could she have been happy?
So no, Sarah wasn’t really on the table for this one. I didn’t know how much field work Verity was feeling up for, with Olivia still so young. If Verity was anything like her own father, she’d have a much stronger parental instinct than I ever had, and she’d want to protect her child above everything else. But Dominic could still help us if she couldn’t, and if he wasn’t up for going into the field, he could stay behind and babysit. We wouldn’t be going into this without any backup. Just with limited backup, which was nothing new, and would probably be more comfortable for Sally and Thomas, neither of whom were used to the current family dynamic.
As if I was. These people weren’t quite strangers to me, but they were close enough that I needed to stop thinking of myself as being the one who had all the answers. I didn’t. Thinking that way was only going to get people hurt.
The door creaked slightly as someone eased it open. All three of us turned to watch as Verity peeked around the edge, looking unaccountably relieved to find us standing there, considering our options, and not covered in blood or something.
“Sarah said you were going to go looking for the missing dragons,” she said. “I wanted to check and see if there was anything you needed from me before you went.”
That answered the question of whether or not she was feeling up for field work. As if she were the telepath, rather than Sarah, her lips drew downward in a frown and she stepped the rest of the way into the room, letting the door swing ease behind her.
“I’d go with you, but Livvy gets fussy when I’m out of her sight for too long,” she said. “Mary says this is a normal developmental stage, and that she’s better about it than some kids her age, since she has people around her all the time, but I still shouldn’t go into an active combat situation with you. I’m sorry.”
“Sweetheart, it’s fine,” I said. “Please don’t feel bad about needing to stay here and take care of your child. It’s understandable.”
“But you went into the field when Dad was Livvy’s age,” she said, doggedly. “I should be able to do the same thing.”
My stomach twisted, feeling uncomfortably as if it wanted to flip all the way over. I swallowed to hide my discomfort, glancing at Thomas.
“Your grandmother’s situation was somewhat unique,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder, Sally between us, standing silent and watchful as a stone. “There’s no obligation for any new parent to feel up to risking their lives for the lives of others.”
“But if you don’t find them, everything we’ve been working for falls apart,” she protested. “The dragons are furious. They can see the logic of what you were saying—something about hairstyles?—but they still want someone to blame, and it’s always easiest when you can shove the blame on someone outside your community. Outside your species is just a bonus. So they’re willing to cut off all contact with humans over this, if it doesn’t end the way we all want it to.”
“You said there are three confirmed strike teams, with a fourth that may or may not be made up of members of the first three,” I said. “You also said there were approximately twenty operatives that you knew of, in total. Which division makes the most sense, given those numbers?”
“Unless things have changed rather dramatically since my time, the smallest units the Covenant fields normally have three to five members,” said Thomas. “Large enough that you can lose someone without losing the battle at hand, but also small enough that losing a team is unlikely to completely destroy a complex operation.”
“Dominic says four teams is most likely,” said Verity, uncomfortably. “He’d like to go with you, if you’d be willing to have him.”
That explained her discomfort. I’d never been a big fan of Thomas going off to fight things without me, and the only reason it hadn’t been more of an issue for us was that during the officially romantic portion of our relationship, he’d been confined to the house. Meaning he’d been the one who had to get comfortable with the idea of me running off into danger without him around to watch my back.
“We’d be glad to,” said Thomas. “None of us is exactly a local, and it would be good to have someone who knows the city.”
“Especially since not everyone shares your arboreal tendencies,” I said, as warmly as I could manage. Verity mustered a smile. I returned it. “And it’ll be nice for Thomas and me to spend some time getting to know our latest grandson.”
“To be honest, I’m happy to get to know any of my grandchildren, born or married in,” said Thomas, a little wryly. “I didn’t expect I’d ever had the chance to meet any of you, and knowing your grandmother, there was more than half a chance your parents wouldn’t have reached adulthood.”
“Hey!” I protested.
Sally and Verity snickered, briefly united in mocking my questionable parenting skills. Thomas shrugged, unrepentant.
“I love you dearly, but in the time we had together, we both know I was the one who made sure Kevin had clean clothes and washed his hands, while you were the one who forgot that knives aren’t appropriate toys for children,” he said.
Verity looked between us with wide eyes. “Dad is starting to make so much more sense,” she said.
I snorted.
“Sorry to interrupt this delightful look into the history of my new family, but weren’t we supposed to be moving by now?” Sally folded her arms. “Honestly, with the way you people like to talk, it’s a miracle you ever got around to having kids, much less selling your souls to the crossroads and winding up in horrible bottle dimensions.”
“That’s specific,” said Verity.
“The mice will tell you all about it,” I said. “Sally’s right. We need to go. I know you’re not coming, and I know Sarah’s not coming, but is anyone else actually going to come along with us as backup?”
“The dragons are refusing,” said Verity. “They don’t trust you. They also don’t want you looking for their children alone, so Istas and Ryan will be going with you.”
“Istas . . . isn’t that the waheela you used to work with?”
She nodded, looking pleased that I’d remembered. “Yup, and Ryan’s her husband. He’s a tanuki. They make it work.”
“Okay. Cool.” I pushed my hair back with one hand. “Where are we leaving from?”
“Come on. I’ll show you.” She turned to leave the room.
The rest of us followed.
Ever since she was a little kid, Verity had been drawn to the highest point in her environment. My grandparents used to joke about me pursuing an arboreal lifestyle, with as much time as they spent fishing me out of trees, but compared to her, I had always kept my feet firmly on the ground. If she had a life motto, it was probably “I can climb that.”
It’s normal for the Aeslin mice to play around with titles for a little while after a new baby is born to the family, since we can’t really know what kind of person someone is going to be until they’ve had a little time to grow into themselves. Verity was dubbed the Arboreal Priestess by the time she turned three, and there has never, to the best of my knowledge, been any clerical question of changing that.
Taking all that into consideration, it probably shouldn’t have been a surprise when Verity led us up three flights of stairs to the slaughterhouse roof, which had been partially converted into a rooftop garden, complete with herb beds, a pigeon coop, and several boxy things I thought were probably beehives. It managed to surprise me all the same. Sometimes the least surprising things manage to turn themselves around and become the most surprising of all.
Three people were already up there, waiting for us: Dominic, now wearing charcoal-gray leggings and a matching turtleneck, the Inuit woman I’d seen before, who had changed into a rose-pink-and-cherry-red confection of a dress, including matching shoes and parasol, pink-streaked black hair tied up in curled pigtails, and the man whose lap she’d been sitting on downstairs, whose clothing matched Dominic’s. All three looked over at our approach, Dominic stepping forward to meet us.
“Are they ready?” he asked.
“I’d ask why you were so sure we’d be going, but that would just waste time, so instead I’m going to ask how we’re supposed to get down from here,” I said. “Even if I were big on parkour, which I’m not, Sally’s had no training in jumping off buildings, and Thomas is out of practice.”
“I assume you can all handle a ten-foot drop?” Verity gestured over the edge of the roof. “The nightclub next door belongs to venture capitalists who reinforced the hell out of the place in order to get away with violating noise ordinances on a nightly basis. I’m not really sure how they expected that to be cost-effective, but whatever, I’m not a rich twenty-something who made it big in tech. Anyway, jump down to there and you’ll be fine. They won’t hear you land, and if you cross to the back of the building, there’s a fire escape that goes all the way to the ground on the block behind this one. Unless someone’s there and looking up when you exit, they won’t see you leave.”
“Verity is trustworthy on the matter of exiting via overland routes,” said Istas, almost serenely. “Her acquaintance with the ground is fleeting at best.”
“We have roughly another four hours of daylight,” said Dominic.
“Do you have any idea where these teams are based?” asked Thomas. “They won’t all be clustered together. That would be bad operational security.”
“There’s one in Hoboken, on the other side of the river,” said Dominic. “We think there’s another in Brooklyn. The third is likely somewhere in Midtown. They may be based out of a hotel, or doing a long-term lease on one of the illegal sublets that people advertise online. But they won’t bring a bunch of kidnapped children back to the place they’re living and operating out of, they’ll have secured a separate location or locations.”
“The fact that you listed those three areas first tells me you think they have the children somewhere in the fourth,” said Thomas. “Where would that be?”
Dominic actually looked faintly guilty before squaring his shoulders in an almost-military posture, turning to Thomas, and saying, “The East Village, sir. We’ve based our assumptions off verified activity and where it seems to be centered. There are too many incidents in that area to explain by assigning them to the other teams. It would make sense for the fourth team to be based there.”
“We’ve both retired from the Covenant, son,” said Thomas, voice gentle. “I’m not your superior. You don’t need to hesitate before you speak to me, and you don’t need me to approve of your ideas before they can be voiced. You know this city and we don’t. We’re following you into the field.”
Dominic glanced to Verity, then Istas and Ryan, as if looking for confirmation. When all of them nodded, he returned his attention to Thomas, standing a little taller and a little less rigid at the same time. “We’ve spotted an agent we believe to be a woman named Margaret Healy with the team in the East Village. More than anything else, that makes me believe they’re the central command. Margaret has been dispatched to New York before, and as you say, knowledge of the territory is essential if you want to succeed in your mission.”
“Then we go to the East Village,” I said. “Just show us how to get there.”
“That, I will do,” said Istas, and stepped up onto the edge of the building. Ryan hurried after her and actually jumped down first. She turned to face us and fell backward off the ledge a moment later, as nonchalantly as if she plummeted off buildings every day. Which maybe she did. I’ve never spent much social time with a waheela; I don’t know what they do for fun.
Dominic was the next over the edge, pausing to kiss Verity on the cheek before he went. I followed him, getting a running start. I’m not necessarily afraid of falling, but I’ve always found it just a little easier if I’m moving quickly when it happens. Like making my own carnival ride, only you don’t need a ticket and there’s no safety rail.
Ryan was standing with Istas in his arms when I landed next to them, having apparently caught her before her impractical shoes could cause a problem. He set her on her feet as I straightened, and she turned a small, satisfied smile on me.
“It is a pleasure to finally meet you, Alice-Verity’s-grandmother,” she said, politely.
“Nice to meet you, too,” I said, more wary than polite.
“We don’t have many grandparents among my kind.”
“No?”
“Istas, be nice,” said Ryan.
Her smile became more of a snarl, showing me all of her strong, white, human-seeming teeth. “We eat them before they can become too much of a burden to the rest of us. So I lack Verity’s sympathy for your role in her family.”
Dominic started to protest. Istas raised a hand to quiet him. He stopped.
There was a soft thump as Thomas landed on the roof. I didn’t allow myself to turn and look at him. Istas was a predator. A predator in a fluffy, lacy dress, but a predator all the same. Turning my back on her might be the last thing I ever did.
“I would like you to explain, please, why grandparents are necessary.”
“We know things,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “We’ve been around to learn more than someone younger might know. And sometimes we can be a little set in our ways, especially for people who are used to newer methods of doing things, but sometimes, the old way is the right way, because no one sees it coming. And because we’re family.”
Sally squeaked as she hit the roof, a small sound, quickly swallowed, but audible.
“Family needs family. It’s not always about blood—Thomas and I aren’t blood, and Sally isn’t blood to either of us—but it’s about knowing where you belong, and feeling like you’ll be welcome there. Verity’s our family. That means she needs us.” I paused before venturing a guess: “I get the feeling Verity’s your family, too, and that’s why you’re so concerned about whether or not we’re good for her. I can’t promise we’ll always make her happy, but I can promise that we’ll always love her, and that we’re just here to help.”
That seemed to satisfy Istas. She turned without another word, walking across the roof toward the promised fire escape. Ryan shot me a helpless, half-adoring look. The adoration was in no way for me.
“She can be a little intense sometimes, sorry about that,” he said, and took off after her.
I waited until he was halfway across the roof before letting out a shaky breath and looking toward Dominic.
“That happen often?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Istas is the first waheela—the only waheela—I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. They’re not found in Europe, and Covenant attempts at study and extermination have not historically ended very well.”
“I wouldn’t think so,” said Thomas. To Sally, he added, “Waheela are therianthropes—natural shapeshifters. When it pleases her, our Miss Istas is likely to be somewhere between ten and twelve feet tall and capable of throwing motor vehicles, as well as resembling a hybrid of a dire wolf and a grizzly bear.”
Sally blinked, looking momentarily nonplussed. Then she shrugged. “Okay,” she said, like this was perfectly normal, and started across the roof after Ryan and Istas.
Thomas, Dominic, and I hurried to catch up.
“She takes things in stride for someone who appears to have quite a few holes in her education,” commented Dominic.
“Sally was introduced to the cryptid world when she made a bargain with the crossroads which they couldn’t refuse but also couldn’t fulfill without going against an earlier bargain they had been holding to for over a century,” said Thomas. “They hurled her into the prison dimension where they had placed me, leaving her surrounded by individuals we would class as cryptids here on Earth, but who she saw first as aliens, and later as people. I think that sink-or-swim approach to what it means to be a person is making it slightly easier for her to adjust.”
“That, or she’s going to have a screaming breakdown just as soon as we get back to Michigan,” I said.
The fire escape was bare metal and probably violated half a dozen safety codes, most of them having to do with tetanus. I clomped down it after Ryan, Sally, and Istas, with Thomas and Dominic close behind me. Our feet echoed enough that it was difficult to believe no one could hear us inside the building, but no windows opened, and we made it to the ground without interruption. The alley smelled of slowly liquifying trash, stale beer, and old urine: the classic perfume of the city streets. Istas and Ryan were waiting next to a dumpster, and when I gave them a curious look, Ryan shrugged.
“The smell helps to cover our tracks.”
“Not mine,” said Istas. “Waheela leave no scent behind. Tracking our kind is a more difficult proposition than following a single human, or a tanuki. Although . . .” She looked at me and blinked slowly, a predator’s assessing expression on her face. “Verity smells odd. Not quite of humankind, but close enough that I have always assumed it was within the normal deviance for your species. You smell much the same, but more strongly. Was your mother bred to something other than a human man, or was she something other than a human woman?”
“I’m really not sure how to answer that,” I said, as the others reached us and saved me from the need to try. Dominic motioned for the rest of us to follow him, and led the way out of the alley to the other side of the block, where things were basically exactly the same. Oh, the businesses were different, but it was the same mixture of storefronts and street activity. We paused at the mouth of the alley to look around, making sure we weren’t being followed, and I moved to the front of the group, away from the smell of trash. Which probably explained why Ryan and Istas were hanging back. As therianthropes, they had far more sensitive senses of smell than a bunch of humans, and the smell of trash was something they were accustomed to. It wasn’t going to distract them the way it did me.
“Hey,” I said, glancing at Dominic. “I thought alleys were rare in New York, outside of the movies. How . . . ?”
“The city as a whole, yes. The Meatpacking District, not as much. They used to dispose of animal corpses here, and it was easier if they could do it where no one was going to see.”
“Charming,” I said.
“This way.” There was a subway stop halfway down the block. Dominic pointed at it and started walking, leaving the rest of us to follow. The subway is really the best way to get around New York. They built one of the most comprehensive public transit systems on the planet, and for all that New Yorkers seem to enjoy complaining about it more than they enjoy anything else, the wise ones understand that it’s a gift beyond price. It gives them the freedom of an incredibly dense metro area, and even with the delays that seem to be innate to the system, it’s still faster than taking a car.
The L train ran in a virtually straight line between where we were and where we were going, and both taking it and avoiding to keep ourselves from being followed would have been equally reasonable choices. So I wasn’t overly surprised when Dominic led us down the stairs into the subway station.
I was a bit more confused when he slipped a twenty to the transit cop on duty and waved for the rest of us to follow him through a door marked DO NOT ENTER.
The hallway on the other side was the same industrial concrete as everything else in the New York subway but with exposed piping along the ceiling, bare bulbs lighting the area, and no smell of urine. No matter how much they clean the underground stations, pee runs downward, and what the humans don’t manage to mark as their own, the rats will claim quickly enough. I blinked at him, raising an eyebrow, and waited for someone else to ask.
“Are we supposed to be back here?” asked Sally.
“No,” said Istas. “If we were meant to be in this area, Dominic would not have given money to the policeman. That is called a ‘bribe,’ and sometimes they are used to gain access to places you are not meant to be.”
Sally eyed her. “Okay, lady.”
“I tell you only because you did not seem to know, and if you did know, you were asking the question for no reason, and might need to be bitten. I am making generous assumptions.”
“No one’s getting bitten,” said Ryan hastily. “Istas, honey, sometimes humans have to ask really obvious questions out loud, or they feel like they don’t understand what’s going on and get fussy. We don’t want our allies to be fussy when they’re supposed to be helping us find the kids, remember?”
“I suppose,” said Istas.
“These are the maintenance access corridors,” said Dominic. “They parallel the subway line, and none of the cameras here work.”
“You know that why?” Sally asked.
“Sometimes the local station workers want to smoke, and there’s no smoking allowed in the station, so they come back here to do it,” he said, starting to walk. As will normally happen when someone begins to walk away while still speaking, the rest of us followed him automatically. “So they disabled the cameras to keep from getting into trouble with the authorities. The door’s usually locked unless there’s an officer on duty, so they don’t really have issues with crime in the corridors.”
“How very . . . You know what? No.” I shrugged. “It’s a very human solution to the problem. A-plus, transit workers, thanks for the convenient underground passage.”
“It’s about a mile’s walk to where we’re going, and we’ll get there almost as fast as we would have on the train,” said Dominic.
He would have been right, too, if we hadn’t run into a group of civic electricians when we were a little over halfway there. The corridor was dotted with junctions, other corridors connecting briefly before heading off to other parts of the subway system, and they came around one of those corners, toolboxes in hand and tool belts low on their hips, off to do their jobs. There were five of them. They stopped when they saw us, eyes going wide. Several of their mouths dropped open. I’ve seen more attractive sights, but since I wasn’t sure whether they were about to call for help or not, I wasn’t going to say anything. I settled for trying to look inoffensive.
I didn’t imagine I did a very good job of it. Two heavily tattooed people, a woman in full goth Lolita gear, two men in tactical clothes, and Sally did not, on the whole, a deeply reassuring picture make. Or an inoffensive one. One of the men stepped forward, face drawing into an expression of posturing aggression, while another grabbed for his radio.
“Hey!” said the first, jabbing a finger toward Dominic. “You can’t be down here!”
“Please, just don’t tell anyone and let us pass.” Dominic held his hands up in a gesture that was probably meant to be soothing. “We just want to get to Union Square. If you let us go, we’ll go, and no one has to get hurt.”
“Who said anything about anyone getting h— Hey, why is that lady taking her clothes off?”
I glanced back. Istas was in the process of undoing the many small buttons on her dress, peeling it down her torso to reveal a lacy black bra with little pink ribbons on it. She was an attractive woman. It was still somehow the least titillating striptease I had ever seen, maybe because I had a pretty good idea what was going to happen when she was done.
“Please,” Dominic repeated. “You don’t want to know what happens when she finishes getting naked.”
“I like these shoes,” said Istas. “I don’t want to destroy them. Ryan, can you help me with the zipper?”
“These men didn’t do anything wrong, sweetie,” said Ryan, even as he moved behind her to begin easing her zipper down. “They really don’t deserve this.”
“Deserve what?” asked another of the men. The one who’d reached for his radio was standing silent and open-mouthed, apparently too stunned by what he was seeing to finish calling the authorities.
Thomas sighed heavily, rolling up his left sleeve and extending his arm like he was preparing to give blood. “I would rather not have spent the energy this close to what may be a rather nasty fight,” he said. “But it seems better than allowing our fair lady waheela to have her way with you.”
He pressed the first two fingers of his right hand to the image of a stylized poppy, murmuring something under his breath at the same time. For a moment, the air seemed to grow heavy with the scent of some unidentified flower—then the scent passed, and the men in front of us hit the ground, one by one, falling where they stood.
Behind me, Istas said, somewhat peevishly, “Oh. Sorcery. Ryan, help me zip back up?”
“We need to move,” said Dominic, stepping forward and snagging the radio from the fallen electrician’s hand. “These men were on an assignment for something, and someone’s going to notice when they don’t get it done or report back to their supervisors. Not much farther now.”
“Have you never been caught before?” asked Thomas.
“No,” he said. “There’s miles of corridor down here, when you account for the whole system, and only so many electricians to go around. Normally, if I move fast and keep my head down, no one questions my presence.”
I absolutely believed that Dominic used this passage on a regular basis without trouble, just as I believed that having me along had made the wild coincidence of running into someone all but inevitable. We needed to get me out of here, or more people would come along. That was just the way things worked.
Istas had re-secured her clothing to her satisfaction, and we started moving again. Sally glanced back at her as we walked, but didn’t ask. After a few minutes of walking in silence, Istas took pity.
“When I change from human shape to my great-form, my clothing does not change with me. If I do not take the time to disrobe, I will destroy whatever I am wearing.”
“So why wear anything but sweatpants and tank tops? You could just ‘grr Hulk smash’ your way through life, without worrying about buttons.”
Istas made a small, horrified sound before replying, “Fashion is the greatest invention the humans have ever managed to pursue to perfection. It clearly demarcates the line between person and beast, it knows neither gender nor species, it is art and function and glory. Sweatpants? I would sooner return to the high tundra to feast on the bones of my ancestors than demean myself so.”
Sally lifted her eyebrows. “That’s . . . uh. That’s a pretty hard line.”
“Yes, well.” Istas sniffed. “Properly fitted lingerie is worth the conviction.”
“Istas really likes clothes,” said Ryan. “She moved here from Canada so she could wear more of them, even.”
“Simplistic but accurate,” Istas agreed.
I kept walking, pushing away the urge to say something and make the situation even more awkward than it already was. Sally would have to learn that when you’re dealing with nonhumans who can pass in human society, you can’t assume they think the way a human in a similar situation would think. Even the ones who’ve all but completely assimilated—and no waheela who hadn’t virtually assimilated into humanity would even have considered wearing those shoes.
The corridor ahead of us, which had seemed limitless up until this point, finally had a visible ending: a door, virtually identical to the one we’d come in through, marked OFFICIAL USE ONLY. Dominic picked up the pace slightly, and the rest of us matched him, as eager to get out of this subterranean warren as we were to get to the main part of our mission. We had to locate five hostile people we didn’t know, most of whom none of us had ever seen before, in an area as large as Manhattan’s East Village, with three people out of time, one human semi-local, and two therianthropes whose exact contributions to the goal—except for being absolutely terrifying—were as yet unclear.
So nothing too major.
Dominic motioned for the rest of us to wait as he reached the door and cautiously eased it open, peering out into the subway station on the other side. Apparently content with whatever it was he saw, he gestured for us to follow again as he pushed it all the way open and stepped out, into the station.
There was one transit officer standing a few feet away who gave us a curious look until Dominic walked over and slipped him a twenty-dollar bill. Istas was close behind, somehow managing to look as if she were looming over the officer even though she was considerably shorter than he was.
“You should refrain from staring,” she said. “It’s quite rude, and I do not appreciate it.”
“Excuse my wife, she’s just pissed about missing out on tickets for her favorite designer at Fashion Week,” said Ryan pleasantly, taking Istas by the shoulders and steering her toward the stairs. If there’d been any question about whether they were married, it was answered by the way she allowed herself to be led away. A waheela doesn’t do anything they don’t want to do. It’s sort of like trying to argue with a rhinoceros, only more likely to kill you.
“Sorry about that,” said Dominic. “Thank you for your service.” He took off after Ryan and Istas, and the rest of us followed, not saying anything until we reached street level.
Once we were there, Istas turned to Ryan and said, “He was staring at my chest. You should have permitted him to answer my challenge.”
“Eating the police attracts attention, and we don’t want to attract attention,” said Ryan, voice almost mild.
“Where to now?” asked Sally.
Dominic looked around, stepping to the side so as not to block the exit, and said, “Now we find someplace where Ryan can shift down to something more useful.”
“I find him perfectly useful in this form,” said Istas. “His thumbs are very desirable when I want him to rub my feet, and we are incapable of mating in our more basic forms. But I will agree that human noses make for poor trackers.”
“If he can pick up the scent of the missing kids, he’ll be more than useful,” I said, looking around. The street was unfamiliar—no real surprise there—and completely familiar at the same time. You’ve seen one city street, you’ve essentially seen them all.
That’s applicable across dimensions, too. Once people reach the point of building large communities with civic infrastructure, certain elements become consistent. Which is not to say that Tokyo and Chicago are the same place, just that the base landscape remains similar enough to make them functionally the same environment. It’s like forests. They come in flavors, and I’ll never mistake another biome for my beloved Galway, but they’re all forests, in the end.
“Alice?”
Thomas’s voice snapped me out of my brief rumination. I glanced at him, lifting an eyebrow. He looked at me gravely.
“What were you thinking about?”
“Cities, mostly. They’re all pretty much the same. If you can navigate one, you can navigate them all. Come on, if we don’t know where we’re going, we may as well walk until we find a place where Ryan can change.” I started down the street, trying not to look as restless as I felt. For all that everything was familiar, it also had a certain rawness to it that left me anxious to be moving toward a goal.
“Yes,” said Thomas, with near-surprising acceptance. “We may as well.”
We ambled down the block, me temporarily in the lead, the others following behind. Only Dominic looked nervous about how exposed we were—I supposed there wasn’t much concern about the rest of us actually being recognized before we could reach our goal.
We didn’t find a safe place for Ryan to change on that block. We made our way to the next. Sally pulled up next to me and asked, in a low voice, “Is this really it? No plan? We don’t have some grand strategy that’s going to help us find the people we’re looking for and make it all come out okay?”
“Dominic’s planning to use Ryan as a sniffer dog, if that helps,” I offered.
“Not really. That’s not a plan.”
“I thought I would wait and see what Alice decided to do,” said Thomas. I looked at him, blinking. He smiled as he shrugged, a remarkable gentleness in his eyes. “We could do with a bit of that luck of yours.”
Healy family luck: sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, but it’s never, ever boring. Or, as it might be better called, Brown family luck, because I definitely got it from my mother. If you give me two doors to open, I’ll always choose the one that leads to certain doom: two paths across a room, I’ll pick the one with the hidden pit trap. Every single time. And then I’ll survive them both, through some ridiculous combination of coincidence and one-in-a-million shots. Whatever it is, it’s genetic, I know that much: both my kids have the same weird coincidence field. It extends to the grandkids, too. Where it stops, I don’t know, but whatever something extra Mom brought to the family tree, it’s gotten me in—and out of—trouble more times than I can count.
“It’s not a switch I can flip, you know.”
“I know. But when we most need you to be in the right place, you tend to wind up there.” His eyes crinkled at the corners as his smile grew. “It would never have taken you so long to find me if there hadn’t been someone yanking you in the wrong direction every chance he got. So go, follow your feet, and let the random coincidences that have kept you alive this long lead you.”
“Okay,” I said, rolling my shoulders in a shrug. It wasn’t like anyone had a better idea. We still had no real intel or plan—and I was a little annoyed about that. Shouldn’t Dominic have at least asked the shapeshifter who wouldn’t be useful until he stopped looking like a human being to transform before we left the hidden passage in the subway? Amateurs. But picking a fight wasn’t going to do us any good right now. So we walked.
We walked, and New York City closed around us like a fist, and that was exactly right. This was our world, where we should have been all along; this was where we could fit in. It might take us time, but eventually, it was going to be like we had never left, and that was going to be wonderful.
Thomas made a small, pleased sound. I stopped walking, snapped out of my brief reverie, and blinked at him. He smiled at me again. Was I ever going to get tired of seeing him outside in the sun, smiling at me? No. No, I was not. After the amount of time I’d spent trying to make this moment even remotely possible, I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more.
Maybe to have it happen without a bunch of missing juvenile dragons and the Covenant of St. George in the mix, but there’s wishful thinking and then there’s being a little bit delusional, and I’d rather trend toward the former than the latter.
“You found me a bookstore,” he said.
I blinked again, turning to see what he was looking at. We were standing outside a store, its wide glass windows crammed with books and its front overhung by a red awning. Carts packed full of discounted books had been pushed out in front, tempting customers.
“Good job, you found the Strand,” said Ryan, sounding only a little bemused. “I don’t think we’re here to shop, though. We’re supposed to be finding an alley.”
“Do they have a public bathroom?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, sounding even more bemused.
“Great.” I turned to Istas. “Can I have the ribbons from your pigtails?”
“Why?”
“I want to use them to rig a leash to put on him,” I nodded toward Ryan. “If we go into the bathroom together and wait ten minutes, I can tie the ribbon around his neck and pretend that I’m one of those assholes who takes her dog everywhere she goes. I’m blonde. If I look confused, people tend to believe it.”
“I want to be offended by the suggestion that we leash me, but it’s not a bad one,” said Ryan, slowly. “No security cameras in the bathrooms, either.”
“And since we won’t be shoplifting, if they ask to search my bag, they’ll just find your clothes. Which is a little odd, but I don’t think it’s out of the ordinary for New York.” It was a decent plan, if not a great one, and I tried to sound more confident about it than I felt.
Dominic sighed. “You know, standing out here and talking about going into the bookstore is not actually as effective as going into the bookstore. Shall we?”
“It’s the beginning of a plan, if not the end of one, and we may as well go with it,” said Thomas.
Dominic nodded, and as a group, we moved inside.