Discount Armageddon: An Incryptid Novel (41 page)

“Verity!” Ryan smiled, displaying outsized canines. They were at half-mast; he was in good control of his therianthropy, which was a good thing if I was about to send him looking for Carol. “I wasn’t sure you were going to come in tonight. Candy was saying you’d been out to visit the Nest today.”

I paused to eye his expression. He looked sincere—no surprise there, Ryan always looked sincere—and like he had no idea that a dragon princess wouldn’t just decide to have a Price girl over on a social call. Pushing my misgivings aside, I said, “It’s been one hell of a week, and it’s not getting any better. In the locker room, Candy said Carol was out sick tonight. Do you know if she actually called in to say she wouldn’t be coming?”

“She didn’t,” said Angel. “Dave was
pissed
when she didn’t
show, especially since we’d all been figuring you’d be out. Candy already gouged him for a promise of overtime.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.” I turned to Ryan. “You need to go to Carol’s apartment. You need to leave
right now
, and you need to go as fast as you can.”

“What’s going on?”

“You know how cryptid girls have been disappearing? Well, there’s a snake cult under the city, and I’m pretty sure they’re sacrificing them to a dragon in order to try waking it up. Not that it cares, since, well, dragons, not all that into the eating of sentient creatures and are you two even listening to me or are you too busy staring like I just grew a second head?” I touched my shoulder automatically. No extra head greeted me. After the week I’d been having, that was something of a relief.

“Dragons are extinct, Verity,” said Ryan.

“And humans don’t fraternize with cryptids, but there’s Angel, and here I am, and somewhere under this city there are a bunch of assholes feeding cryptid girls to a sleeping dragon because they think it’s the way to achieve ultimate cosmic power. Or something like that. I don’t know—I haven’t found the snake cult yet and, when I do, they can explain themselves to me during the pauses.”

“The pauses?” asked Ryan. His canines were starting to get more pronounced. That was good. That meant that he was taking me seriously.

“I can’t beat their heads against the wall constantly, now can I? So will you go, or do I have to start beating
your
head against the wall?”

“I’ll drive,” said Angel. I shot her a startled look. She met it without batting an eye. “Carol’s my friend, too, and if she’s in trouble, Ryan shouldn’t be dealing with it alone.”

“Won’t Dave get pissed?”

“If we disappear together, he’ll figure Ryan’s instincts finally got the best of him, and he’ll call it our lunch hour.”
Angel pulled the dishrag out of her pocket and dropped it on the bar. “Give me five minutes to get changed and I’ll pick you up in front of the club.”

“Got it,” said Ryan. He watched Angel go before looking back to me. “Very, I really hope you’re wrong about this.”

“Trust me,” I said grimly. “So do I.”

Twenty minutes passed without word from Ryan and Angel. I worked five tables, avoided being kicked in the head by an overenthusiastic pole-dancer, and picked up about half my usual tips. Worry made it difficult to focus on flirting enough to get paid for it without crossing the line into coming off like I offered cocktails off a “special” menu. (Technically, Dave’s had a special menu. It just involved slime, blood, and other unmentionable fluids, rather than cheap sex in the employee break room.)

I was making my fifth round with the cleanup tray when my phone started ringing. I promptly dug it out of my apron pocket, shifting the tray to my dominant hand as I wedged the phone between my ear and shoulder. “Hello?”

“Verity?” Ryan’s voice was low and gravelly, and further distorted by the static of a bad connection. “Are you there?”

“Ryan!” I began beating a rapid retreat toward the bar, ignoring the people who were trying to flag me down. One of them flipped me off when I blew past his table without slowing. I made a mental note to fuck up his drink order at least once before the end of my shift. “Where are you? Is Carol okay?”

“She’s shaken, but she’s not really hurt. You were right about the snake cult coming to get her.”

I sagged against the bar, dropping my tray atop it with a loud clatter. Angel’s temporary replacement shot me a sour look. I showed him the gesture our beloved
patron had so recently shown to me. “They came? But she’s okay?”

“She is. Two of them aren’t. Guess her hair really does bite.”

“Oh, Jesus.” I closed my eyes for a moment, letting my shoulders relax. “You should get her out of there. What’s the address? I have someone I can send for the bodies.” Gingerbread Pudding was in the phone book. If Piyusha’s brothers wanted me to go bobbing for corpses, they could return the favor. Call it the first step toward justice: these were some of the men responsible for the death of their sister, after all.

“She’s pretty damn rattled. I’ll be back in about an hour; I’m going to get Carol and Angel set up at my place.” Ryan’s growl came through clearly, despite the static. “If any snake cultists want to try breaking into my home, they’ll be sorry.”

The defenses a pissed-off tanuki can throw up around his den rival the ones Antimony throws up around her bedroom. Ryan was right: Carol and Angel would be safe at his place, at least for the moment. “Just give me the address. I’ll let Dave know that Angel won’t be back tonight, and why.”

“Great.” Ryan rattled off an address uptown. It was reasonably close to Gingerbread Pudding, which was a relief; at least I wasn’t going to be asking a pair of Madhura to tote the bodies very far.

“Thanks.” I hung up, only to immediately dial Sarah’s number.

The phone rang just long enough that I was beginning to worry about the fact that I’d run off and left my cousin alone with a member of the Covenant. Cuckoos are great hiders, but she didn’t really have any natural defenses once she’d been spotted. I was starting to wonder what Artie would do to me if I’d managed to get Sarah killed when the phone was picked up, and she said, half-laughing, “Hi, Verity! We were just talking about you.”

The mice were cheering in the background, probably because they’d just revealed some horribly embarrassing personal secret to Dominic. I let out a sigh of relief. “Sarah. Hi. Can you put Dominic on the phone?”

“You called me to talk to him? Way to make a girl feel loved, Very-Very.”

“I’m serious. I don’t have his number, and I need him to go look at a couple of corpses.”

Sarah went quiet, leaving only the cheers of the mice to serve as counterpoint to the club’s thumping bass line. “You’re serious, aren’t you?” she asked finally, voice hushed.

“Yeah, I am. The snake cult went after Carol from work.” One of the passing bachelor party boys gave me a funny look. Given that he’d just been leering at a stripper with a tail, I really didn’t see where he got off. I showed him my middle finger. He showed me his. Vital cultural exchange completed, he walked away.

“The gorgon?”

“That’s the one. She’s not hurt, but two of the cultists are dead, and I figure Dominic may be able to figure out some more about their MO by looking them over.”

“I’ll put him on,” said Sarah, still hushed.

“I’ll be here.” I straightened up and started for the break room while I was waiting for her to pass the phone. If I could avoid any further “cultural exchanges” with our customers, I might also be able to avoid getting fired for another week.

I was halfway to the employee door when Dominic came on the line, asking, “Where are the bodies?”

“It’s always business with you, isn’t it?”

“As a rule, yes.”

“Well, right now, that’s a good thing. Do you have something to write with?”

“Yes.”

I rattled off the address to Carol’s place without hesitation. If the cultists knew where she lived, she was already
compromised; one member of the Covenant of St. George wasn’t going to make that much of a difference. “Call Gingerbread Pudding, get Sunil and Rochak to help you. You should probably take the bodies back to the café, since they have more room and probably a much bigger freezer. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“What are you going to do in the meantime?”

“I’m going to go and explain to my boss why he needs to shut down the club until we find the snake cult. This is the second cryptid woman I know of who’s been attacked
and
has a job that brings her regularly into contact with the public. They may have started with the ones who lived outside human society, but they’re getting more central, and Dave’s…” I paused in the doorway, scanning the club floor. I could see half a dozen cryptids from where I stood without really making an effort, and that didn’t include any of the staff. I shook my head. “Dave’s is like an all-you-can-kill buffet.”

The darks were on in Dave’s office, spilling through the open door to fill the hall with an almost physical weight. Approaching the doorway was like wading into pools of tar that had no substance, only darkness deep enough to swallow all the light in the world. “Dave?” I called. “Are you in there?”

“Very, Very, quite contrary.” His voice drifted from the dark, sounding more suited to an ancient tomb—curse optional—than the manager’s office of a strip club. “How does your garden grow, I wonder? I wasn’t sure we’d be seeing you around here again, given what the streets are saying.”

“And what’s that?” I held my position, not moving any closer to the too-solid darkness. I wasn’t angry enough for that much bravado, and something about the sound of Dave’s voice was putting my nerves more on
edge than they already were. He liked his horror host turned pornographer routine, but he normally dropped it within the first few words.

“That you’ve changed sides, my pretty little dandelion flower. That you’ve been running the rooftops and searching the sewers with our intrepid young man from the Covenant of St. George, and that perhaps—just perhaps—your motives can’t be trusted.”

“Cut the crap, Dave,” I snapped. “You were the one who didn’t tell us he was in town, remember? I didn’t invite him here, and you didn’t send out the bulletin on his location until after he’d already caught me.”

“But I’m not the one who took him into her home, Verity Price, nor the one who brought him to the home of an innocent family of Madhura. What
would
your mother say?” His voice hadn’t moved once while he was speaking, but he was suddenly in front of me, gray-skinned face leering from the border of the blackness. It was a classic bogeyman trick; while they can’t actually teleport or anything like that, they can control where their voices come from to a degree that any human ventriloquist would kill for. That’s how they can be everywhere at once when they sneak into your bedroom in the middle of the night—vaudeville and chicanery.

I learned about the kind of crap bogeymen like to pull when I was still in elementary school. I should have been braced. But Dave, for all his asshole tendencies, had never done anything like that before, and I wasn’t prepared. I jumped, taking a quick step backward and almost falling over my own feet in the process.

Dave smirked slowly. “Is that guilty conscience making you uneasy? Ashamed that someone finally found the purchase price for a Price?”

“Fuck you,” I said flatly. “Are you done being a dick? I need to talk to you, and unless you fired me while I wasn’t looking, I have the right to demand my manager’s attention.”

“Why in the world would I fire you when you’re such a
source of amusement?” Dave’s face vanished back into the shadows. A few seconds later the darks clicked off, filling the tiny office with dusty light. Dave was seated behind his desk, looking for all the world like he hadn’t moved in days. His sunglasses were even in place. “Come in, Verity. Tell me what’s so important that you had to leave the floor in the middle of your shift.”

“Carol’s been attacked.”

It was hard to tell if Dave’s expression changed at all. His tone certainly didn’t. “Is that why she didn’t come in this evening? I was wondering. Was it a mugging, or a home invasion?”

“Home invasion by snake cult, actually, and she’s fine, thanks so much for asking.” I slapped a hand down flat on his desk. “Cryptid girls have been disappearing all over this city—”