Discount Armageddon: An Incryptid Novel (5 page)

“Good insane, bad insane, run screaming from the building because this isn’t worth it insane?” I pulled off my T-shirt, wadding it up and tossing it into the bottom of the locker.

“Somebody put our name on another tourist website and we’re getting swarmed by sweaty businessmen who think it’s okay to play grab-ass with anything in a short skirt.” Marcy snapped the top of one knee-high white sock, cracking her gum at the same time for punctuation. “Candice went home sick. Said it wasn’t worth the tips.”

Marcy looked unconcerned, despite the alarming implications of Candy’s departure. Candy was a dragon princess, and she pursued money the way a cop in a buddy movie pursues donuts. I blamed it on the fact that Marcy had the emotional and physical sensitivity of a rock. No, really; all the research on Oreads has concluded that they have the durability and resilience of quartz, assuming quartz decided to turn into an attractive young biped and go out for a stroll. No amount of grab-ass was likely to cause her more than brief annoyance.

“Who gets Candy’s tables?” I asked, trying to ignore the sinking sensation in my stomach as I unloaded my weapons into the locker.

“You do.”

Sinking sensation, officially impossible to ignore. “Great.” I grabbed my uniform. “Just what I always wanted. Extra tables.”

“With extra grab-ass on the side,” Marcy said.

“I wish you’d stop saying that.”

“I wish I had a pony.” Marcy gave her socks one last adjustment and strode out of the changing room, leaving me alone with Carol.

“You’d probably eat the pony,” I muttered.

Carol shot me a sympathetic look in the mirror. “Aren’t you glad you’re working overnights for Kitty?”

“Ecstatic,” I said, and unbuckled my pants.

Every profession since the dawn of time has had its own uniform, its own special set of signals used to broadcast the identity of its practitioners to anyone who meets them. Sadly, the uniform of the cryptozoologist is “whatever is going to help you blend in with the locals.” The need to blend in led, in a roundabout way, to Dave’s Fish and Strips, the only gentlemen’s club in New York City almost exclusively staffed by cryptids.

I had the utmost respect for the other humans on the staff. They weren’t lucky enough to receive my early training in human/cryptid interactions, but they all did just fine—for values of “all” that mean “the three of them,” anyway. Dave didn’t practice discriminatory hiring; most humans were simply seized with the uncontrollable urge to scream and run away after spending more than ten minutes in a room with him …and he wasn’t the strangest thing on staff.

The strippers didn’t have an official uniform, since they’d just take it off, and the bartenders were allowed to wear jeans or skirts and T-shirts with the bar’s logo. The waitresses weren’t so lucky. Dave seemed to be under the deeply mistaken and deeply regrettable impression that pleated plaid micro skirts, knee-high socks, black heels, and midriff-baring white shirts with the club’s logo on the front combined to project an aura of “class.” Or maybe he was going for an aura of “ass,” since that’s what the uniforms actually managed to project.

I stepped into my heels and walked over to the mirror. Carol moved to the side, giving me room for my contemplation while she continued her epic battle of gorgon vs. snakes. Finally, I sighed, and said, “No matter how many times I put this on, I can’t get past the part where I look like a hooker.”

“No, you don’t, honey,” said Carol. “Hookers get better tips.”

With a final belabored groan, I grabbed an apron from the pile—it was more like a belt, but at least it gave me a place to store tips and my order pad—and tied it around my waist before heading to the door.

Bullets cost money. So do dance shoes, and the terms of my year in New York included the need to support myself as much as possible. Family finances are solid, thanks to good investing, a certain amount of alchemy, and the gratitude of the cryptid community. That doesn’t make them good enough to take care of us all forever. Dave’s might be a lousy place to work, but the boss understood when I had to call in sick because I was chasing something nasty across the rooftops of the city. Add it all together, and well …it was time to start my shift.

If you’d asked me in Oregon whether I was a prude, I would have responded with an offended “absolutely not.” My home life was strange, my hobbies were stranger, and it’s hard to do competitive Latin ballroom dance without shedding all taboos about nudity and invasion of personal space. I considered myself a tolerant, enlightened woman of the world, fully prepared for any perversity my quest for the elusive urban cryptid might bring me into contact with.

That was before I started working at Dave’s Fish and Strips, a place that could’ve been used as the answer to that age-old question, “What
does
the bogeyman do when he’s not
hanging out under your bed?” If the bogeyman in question is Dave, an individual with little tact and less taste, he opens a tacky titty bar. If the bogeyman in question is Kitty, she gets a job there.

(The word “bogeyman,” much like the word “human,” is gender-neutral. If you ever want to see a bogeyman laugh herself sick, call her a “bogeygirl,” or better, a “bogeywoman.” The last time I saw someone make that mistake with Kitty, she laughed so hard I was afraid she was going to rupture something.)

The main room was decorated like the bastard offspring of a nightclub and a sideshow tent—a deeply patriotic sideshow tent with a serious longing to return to the United Kingdom, where it would doubtless be greeted with pitchforks and torches, because the British probably wouldn’t want it either. Stages were set up at strategic locations around the room, each tucked into its own little acoustically isolated group of chairs. The main stage provided the ambient music for the club, as well as the highest percentage of tips and “grab-ass.” That was supposed to be Candy’s territory. Thanks to her cowardly departure, it was going to be mine.

Oh, well; it wasn’t like I could blame her. Dragon princesses are greedy and proud, not brave. When you’re bred to be the humanoid support staff for giant carnivorous lizards, there’s no reason to be brave. The giant lizards can do it for you.

After a stop at the bar to pick up the pending drinks—two trays’ worth, which was a bad sign for the shift ahead—I waded into the crowd. Marcy was a few tables away, distributing baskets of fried fish and blithely ignoring roving hands. Several would-be gropers were sucking bruised fingers and looking confused. That’s what they got for trying to goose an Oread.

I wasn’t so lucky. I’d barely cleared three tables before a hand latched onto my left buttock and squeezed. I jerked out of the way, nearly spilling my remaining drinks. General laughter greeted this reaction, followed
by a man saying, “Shit, honey, you’re lots prettier than the last one!”

“Gee, thanks,” I said, turning to face the speaker. He was red-faced, either with excitement or alcohol, and openly leering. “You know, we have strippers here. The waitresses are here to serve you, not service you. Hands off, okay?”

“I think somebody missed a little memo,” he said, turning redder as his friends made the “ooh” noise that seems to be the universal signifier for “you just got dissed.” Standing, he added, “You’re in the
service
industry.”

He had two hands. I had two breasts. I’m sure he thought the math made sense. Maybe it would have, if I hadn’t started self-defense lessons at seven and ballroom dance lessons at eight. Self-defense teaches you to kick ass. Ballroom dance teaches you to do it in heels.

I dropped my tray before he had time to finish squeezing, grabbed him just above the elbows, and used him to provide support while I braced myself on one leg and swept his feet out from under him with the other. He went down hard, his landing not particularly softened by my discarded drinks.

Sputtering and even redder now, my aspiring assailant stared at me. His friends did the same.

I smiled.

“You can pick up your drinks from the bar for the rest of the night, gentlemen. Table service is suspended,” I said, and started for the bar. I needed replacement drinks.

Ryan—one of the bouncers, and reasonably cute if you have a thing for therianthropes, which I don’t—was waiting for me next to the register. His expression was grim. “Very—”

“Let me guess. I need to go see Dave?”

Ryan nodded dolefully. “You know he doesn’t like you fighting with the customers.”

“And he knows my breasts are a no-fly zone. Let’s see
who knows better, shall we?” Dropping the orders I’d managed to collect before things went all Fight Club, I turned to head back to the hallway. Time for another chat about “violent tendencies.”

Jumping off the roof was more fun.

The manager’s office of Dave’s Fish and Strips, a club for discerning gentlemen

D
ARKNESS FILLED THE OFFICE
from side to side, solid enough to defy the standard laws of nature and trickle several inches out into the hall. I stopped in the doorway. “Dave? You know I won’t come in when you’ve got your darks on. Put on some damn sunglasses and turn on a light already.”

The manager’s dust-dry voice drifted out of the dark: “What, a Price afraid of a little darkness? What would your father say?” Every word dripped with sepulchral menace.

“My father would say that a Price who won’t walk into a bogeyman’s lair when he’s got his darks on is a Price who plans to live long enough to continue the family line.” I rolled my eyes. “You know the rules. I don’t kill your customers, you don’t try to bait me into your clutches, everybody walks away happy.”

“What do you call what just happened, hmm?”

“Sexual harassment.” I glared at the darkness. “Turn off the darks or let me go back to work. I’m not coming in there.”

A long-suffering sigh answered me, followed by Dave muttering, “You never let me have any fun.” The solid shadows clicked off as he flipped the switch controlling his darks, allowing light to filter into the office. I stayed in the hallway, waiting patiently. Dave grumbled and flipped another switch, turning on the lights.

“That wasn’t so hard, now, was it?” I asked, and stepped inside.

The office was small and cluttered, and the low-watt bulbs that were all Dave was willing to use did little to disperse the natural shadows cast by packing too much stuff into not enough space. It was still substantially better than it had been with the darks turned on.

(Darks were invented by an enterprising witch who looked at all the bogeymen, ghouls, and bug-a-boos trying to live below the radar of the human population and saw a niche begging to be filled. The bulbs fit most standard sockets and run off electrical current like almost everything else that plugs into a wall. They’re also crushingly expensive. But they come in wattages from “twilight” to “deepest pit of eternal damnation,” and they work. That’s enough to make most self-proclaimed creatures of the night grit their teeth and deal with the price tag.)

“Spoken like a true day-dweller,” grumbled Dave. Leaning his elbows on the desk, he asked, “Why am I not firing you?”

“Because I’m the best cocktail waitress you’ve got, Kitty’s not available to take her shift back until that tragedy they call a band finishes crashing and burning, and all I did was drop him. He’d grabbed hold of just about anybody else like that and he’d have ended up dead or worse.”

“I’d be more inclined to be lenient if you’d agree to dance for me.”

“I’d be less inclined to stick a high heel up your ass if you’d stop asking,” I answered cheerfully. “Answer’s ‘no,’ Dave. What would my grandmother say?”

Dave paused. “
She out of Hell this week?” he asked warily.

“Not until Solstice, but still. She wouldn’t understand.”

He relaxed. “She’d understand that you needed to save your job.”

“I think it’s a little more likely she’d understand that you can kill a bogeyman in a lot of different ways, and come riding in to avenge my honor.”