Discount Armageddon: An Incryptid Novel (32 page)

Calling Mom, Dad, and Antimony’s phones got the same result: a quick ring to a blank voicemail prompt. I left basically the same message with all three of them,
and considered calling Uncle Ted. They’d been going on a basilisk hunt…

And those can take days, I reminded myself firmly, and
someone
would have called me if things had gone wrong. Maybe just Aunt Jane, but still.
Someone
. I sighed, pushing my concern as far into the back of my mind as I could, and dialed the person I’d been trying to avoid calling. My brother.

Unlike the rest of the family, Alex has always stayed in the habit of answering his phone. That’s because he’s the only one—apart from me—at least pretending to have a life outside the family business, and since
his
job comes with nine-to-five hours and an actual paycheck, when the phone rings, he’s there to answer it. True to form, the phone only had time to ring three times before it was picked up on the other end. I smothered a small sigh of relief.

“Alexander Preston’s phone, Alexander Preston speaking.” My brother, as always, sounded distracted. He probably had a book in one hand, some kind of lizard in the other, and the phone on speaker.

“Hi, Alex,” I said. “It’s your best-beloved baby sister. You got a moment to chat?”

“Verity?” His tone turned wary. I could practically feel the full force of his attention being turned in my direction. “Where are you?”

“Still in Manhattan. Dad keeping you posted on the local news, or do I need to bring you up to speed before I start asking for your help?”

“You mean the part where you’re claiming you may have an actual dragon on your hands? Yeah, I’ve heard.”

“Oh, see, you haven’t heard the
best
part. My dragon’s been upgraded from ‘may have’ to ‘absolutely have.’ It’s here. It’s sleeping, which is the good part, but, well. There are a few bad parts.”

“Why don’t I like the sound of that?”

“If I have to take a guess? Because Mom wasn’t in the practice of bouncing you off the pavement when you were a baby. Bad part number one, I think we’ve got a
snake cult. Or, well, whatever you call it when you have a bunch of idiots worshiping a reptile that isn’t actually a snake. Dragons have legs, right?”

“Yes, dragons have legs,” said Alex, slowly. “They’re like very large lizards. What makes you think you have a snake cult?”

“Didn’t Dad tell you about the virgin sacrifices?”

There was a long pause before Alex spoke again—long enough for him to count silently to ten. I know that pause very well. He’s been incorporating that pause into basically every conversation we’ve had since I turned twelve. “No, he didn’t tell me about the virgin sacrifices. Verity, why are you
calling
?”

“Because I’m about to do something really stupid.” Silence greeted my proclamation. I sighed. “The snake cult—dragon cult—whatever—it’s been snagging cryptids all over the city. Maybe humans too, for all I know. They’ve taken a Madhura I know, a girl named Piyusha. I have to at least try to get her back.”

“What do you mean, ‘get her back’?”

“I mean I’m going to go down into the sewers where I got attacked by Sleestaks—it’s a long story, turns out dragon biology is even wackier than we thought it might be, and now there are Sleestaks under New York—to find Piyusha. I had backup last time I was down there, and it was still pretty close. So I want to make sure someone knows what the situation is, and can sound the alarm if I don’t call back in an hour. I’d have called Mom, but they’re all out chasing basilisks around Oregon.”

“Verity…”

“There’s no one close enough to get here while she still has a chance in hell of being alive, and if I can’t at least try to save her, what’s the point of my even being here?” Silence. “You know I’m right.”

“What about Sarah?”

“I’m not taking her down there with me, if that’s what you mean. She’ll be fine on her own until the cavalry can get to town. Piyusha doesn’t have that long.”

There was a long pause before Alex said, voice stiff with resignation, “If you haven’t called in two hours, I’m catching the next plane to New York. And if I find you hanging out in some dance club because you didn’t think I needed an update, I’m going to beat your ass. We clear?”

“As crystal. I left messages with Mom, Dad, and Annie, so if any of them call you—”

“I’ll tell them you’re insane but being responsible about it.”

“Thanks, Alex.”

“You better remember this the next time I ask you for a favor.” He hung up without saying good-bye. I was sort of expecting that. What I wasn’t expecting was the pang that went through my chest as the silence fell and I realized that I was truly getting ready to do this. I closed my phone and gazed across the rooftops around me. This was where I belonged, out in the open, with a thousand directions to escape in. Not down there, in the dark, alone.

Piyusha was an innocent. She’d answered all the questions Dominic and I asked her, and she’d trusted in my presence to keep her safe. There’s a sort of responsibility that has to come with having that sort of a reputation. I had to try. No matter how much I didn’t want to.

I slid my phone into my pocket and stood, stretching out my hamstrings before stepping delicately off the edge of the roof. Time to get to work.

In the sewers under Manhattan, doing something stupid

T
HE SEWERS WERE DARK, OPPRESSIVE
, and a little nerve-racking when I went into them with Dominic to watch my back and no reason to expect any trouble. Going into them on my own was a dozen times worse, especially now that I knew what was down there. I’m not a fan of close-quarters combat, and blind fighting is Antimony’s thing, not mine. But Piyusha needed me, and there was no one else to call.

Stepping off the bottom rung of the ladder, I snapped my cave light on and clipped it to my belt. The light illuminated what looked like a perfectly normal stretch of sewer, from the water-stained brick of the walls to the unrecognizable sludge thinly coating the concrete floor. I drew my .45 and started forward, holding it in front of me in the classic television cop position. I was trying to keep my nerves in check. I knew what direction I was going, thanks to Sarah (and my compass). All I needed
to do was get there without freaking out. And hopefully without encountering any more unwanted lizard-men. I’m not normally one to run from a fight, but if I could avoid this one, let’s just say I wouldn’t be sorry.

Fifteen minutes later, I’d walked probably half a mile into the dark beneath the city, descending gently all the while, and I hadn’t seen anything bigger than a rat. (Not that the rats weren’t plenty big. New York seems to take pride in trying to produce the largest rodents the world has ever seen. Fortunately, with size comes intelligence, and most of them took one look at my expression and scattered.) I was starting to think I was on a wild-goose chase when an air current wafted up from the depths and addressed my nose with an aroma that had absolutely no business being in the sewer:

The sweet scent of pine resin mixed with molasses.

Piyusha was somewhere ahead of me. Somewhere in the dark. Gritting my teeth, I adjusted my grip on the gunstock and kept walking.

The sticky-sweet smell of Piyusha’s blood got stronger as I descended, becoming harder to ignore with every step. Part of me took careful note of the strength of the smell, analytically trying to figure out whether Madhura blood contained some chemical compound that made it smell stronger as it dried. Maybe it worked as a deterrent to predators, or as an attractant for some natural prey? (Not that Madhura have much I’d call “prey” outside of donuts, Snickers bars, and cotton candy.) Lots of cryptids have blood with interesting qualities, at least from a human standpoint. Cuckoos bleed antibiotics; giant swamp bloodworms bleed a gummy slime that attracts damn near any predator you’d care to name; incubi and succubi bleed something that’s basically an open call to fornication. It’s all part of the barely-comprehensible circle of cryptid life. Disney it’s not, but
it definitely keeps things interesting, especially when Mom forgets to label the plasma in her medical emergency kit.

It was easy to regard the smell of Madhura blood as a relief, given the sewer-stink alternatives … as long as I didn’t think too much about what the strength of the smell meant. If Piyusha had been human, losing this much blood would have killed her for sure. Not knowing much about Madhura physiology, I just had to hope she had more reserves than a human girl her size.

Hope died when my foot hit something soft. I looked down and met Piyusha’s staring, sightless eyes with something from the strange, empty country that sits between sorrow and disappointment. She was naked, with black runes sketched down the length of her body in what looked like it was probably Sharpie. It hurt my eyes if I tried too hard to focus on them. I holstered my gun before pulling my phone from my pocket, and whispered soft apologies as I took blurry digital photos of her corpse. I didn’t know enough about her culture to know if this was considered desecration, but I needed to document those runes. Maybe Dad could tell me what they meant. Whatever it was, it wasn’t anything good. Nothing written in Sharpie on a corpse ever is.

Once I was done with the unpleasant task of photographing Piyusha’s body, I tucked the phone away and knelt, beginning the even more gruesome task of examining her wounds. Whoever took her had slit her throat just below her jaw, covering the runes on her chest and collarbones with a gummy-looking veil of watery red blood. There wasn’t enough blood for that to have been the wound that killed her; she’d already been bled almost dry by that point, probably via the slashes running down the length of her forearms and calves. I just hoped she’d been numb before they cut out her heart. It was a small thing to hope for, given the obvious and undeniable violence of her death. It was the only thing I had left to hope.

Her expression was a mixture of terror and raw confusion, like she hadn’t been able to believe what was happening to her. I blinked back tears as I reached down and brushed her eyelids closed. There was still a faint, lingering warmth to her skin, but not much; she’d been dead for a while.

“I’m so sorry, Piyusha,” I whispered. “If I’d known this was going to happen, I wouldn’t have left you alone. I’m so, so sorry.”

She didn’t answer me. There are ghosts in the world—my Aunt Mary is one of them, and she’s a lot of fun at parties—but they almost never result from ritual sacrifices. That kind of death commits the soul to something else altogether, and doesn’t leave anything behind. I just had to hope that stopping the bastards who’d done this would free Piyusha to move on to whatever afterlife waits for the Madhura.

I straightened, wiping tears from my eyes with the back of one hand. I couldn’t move her alone, and I wasn’t going to make her brothers come down into the dark. Maybe Ryan could help. Tanuki are stronger than they look, even when they’re in their human forms; he’d probably be able to shift her without any real—

Something hissed ahead of me. My head snapped up, shoulders locking as I took in the vulnerability of my position. Retreat was probably the best approach in this situation. I could return to collect Piyusha’s body, with Ryan to back me up and, more importantly, I wouldn’t wind up dead in a sewer.

The hissing started up behind me, even louder than the hissing from the front, just before the hissing started from the sides. Okay. Maybe I wasn’t going to be retreating after all.