Backpacking Through Bedlam, page 21
“Thanks for the ride,” I said.
“Wish you hadn’t needed it. I wouldn’t be anywhere near New York if the Lady hadn’t asked, and I’ll probably wind up taking a few of the locals out of town when I go. Call it a fare for the favor of the road. The Lady doesn’t want the world to lose any more backroads or byways than it already has.”
Sally was goggling out the windows, staring at a city she might or might not have seen as a kid, when she’d been growing up in Maine, but that she’d definitely seen on television and in movies. Something familiar and human that was absolutely still here. Thomas was doing something similar, although a bit more discreetly. They were reentering the world like comets plummeting toward the ground. I just hoped we’d have slightly more survivors.
Manhattan looked largely like I remembered it. The stores that were still open were different ones, and there were more “For Rent” signs in the windows than I would have expected, but the city itself, the bones of it, were the same as they had always been. It was reassuring, in its urbanized way, and I clung to that impression of familiarity as Darius pulled up to the curb.
“You’re here,” he said.
“‘Here’ being?”
“Don’t ask me. This is where the Lady said I needed to take you, and I don’t know anything more than that. Other than this is where you get out of my car, since I’m not taking you back and risking pissing her off.”
“Fair enough.” I shrugged and unbuckled my belt, reaching for the door.
Sally caught my wrist. I turned to look at her.
“Yeah?”
“What do you mean, ‘fair enough’?” she demanded. “He wants to dump us out on a random street corner, and you’re okay with that?”
“He’s doing what a god told him to do. I don’t think arguing gets us very far.” I shook off her grasp and got out of the car, taking my first breath of Manhattan air.
As always, it smelled of frying onions and cooling asphalt, the construction and cooking that were always happening in the city coming to greet yet another tourist. I snagged my bag and slung it over my shoulder, stepping up onto the sidewalk to wait for the others. Thomas followed a moment later, his own bag in one hand, and came to stand beside me. Sally looked sullen as she emerged from the car, shooting a sour glance back at Darius.
He rolled his window down, nodding to us. “If you need a ride back, I’m sure the Lady will let me know,” he said. “I’m one of the best she has for this kind of distance. You folks stay safe, all right?”
“We’ll do our best,” I said, looking around. The street wasn’t particularly crowded; not too unusual for this time of day. Workers on their lunch break and other fast-walking people went about their business, along with a few hustlers, and a small gaggle of what I presumed were tourists, but that was all. We were here. Time to start blending in. Which might be something of a challenge when we were just standing here looking like scruffy backpackers getting ready to spend a year wandering around Europe, but I’ve done stranger.
Darius nodded, rolled up his window, and pulled away from the curb, vanishing down the street faster than should have been possible, leaving us alone.
Twelve
“You can run, you can hide, but your family will always find you. Stop seeing that as a bad thing. It has nothing to do with blood.”
—Juniper Campbell
Standing on a random street in Manhattan, with no real idea where to go from here
SALLY MOVED UNTIL SHE was practically standing on top of Thomas and me, and I realized she was almost shaking. Bands of marauders and giant monsters were inside her comfort zone. Big human cities weren’t. Not anymore.
“It’ll be okay,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. “We wouldn’t be here if there weren’t a reason.”
“Trust Alice when she says things like that,” advised Thomas. “She’s run her entire life on a policy of ‘Well, now that I’m here, might as well see what happens,’ and while I won’t say it’s always been easy, it’s certainly worked so far.”
I wrinkled my nose at him, then turned a slow circle, gawking like the tourist I was.
This was a wide two-way street with multiple lanes, a commercial block with office buildings and storefronts stretching from corner to corner. From where we were standing, I could see at least three small convenience stores, a supermarket, a shoe store, and a shop that appeared to be selling nothing but fancy cupcakes. Anyplace but New York, I would have assumed I was wrong about that last one. No one can make a living on cupcakes alone.
“Okay,” I said, coming to a stop. “Nothing immediately jumping out at me. Which means it’s time for Mary.”
“Time for Mary?” asked Sally blankly.
“Yeah,” I explained. “It’s time to say Mary’s name over and over until she hears me, which she always does, and shows up to tell me what we’re doing wrong. Mary doesn’t like it when I annoy her this way. She told me once that it was like someone going up to a hotel desk and ringing the little bell over and over and over again.”
“But Mary’s a super common name,” said Sally. “Wouldn’t the bell just keep ringing all the time?”
“No,” said Mary, behind her. I hadn’t even seen her appear. Sally whipped around, eyes wide. I covered my smile with my hand. It was nice to see somebody else on the receiving end of that trick for a change. “It only works when the person saying it is family. You could have said the name a million times before you called yourself a Price, and I never would have heard you. Now, it’s just a little muffled. The sound’ll get stronger the longer you’re one of mine. When Jane got married, I could barely hear Ted at all. Now he’s as loud as the rest of these assholes. I didn’t hear Tommy until Kevin was born.” She shot a smile my way.
I answered it. “Hey, Mary. You know why they dropped us off here?”
“Because this is where you needed to be,” she said, and beckoned for us to follow her as she turned toward the nearest of the convenience stores. The smallest, dirtiest one, naturally.
Sally balked, wrinkling her nose. “What could you possibly want to buy in there?” she demanded.
Mary gave her a curious look. “You have something against candy and toilet paper?”
“When it’s being sold out of a shop that looks like it’s been collecting grime since my grandparents were in grade school? Yeah. That place isn’t filthy. Filth is too good for it.”
“I’ll tell Pris,” said Mary. “She’ll be thrilled to hear how well the camouflage is working.”
The bell over the door was as crappy as the rest of the place; it didn’t chime so much as make a dull clunking sound when Mary opened the door, stepping inside and leaving the rest of us with little choice but to follow. I stepped into the gloom, squinting at the understocked, dust-covered shelves. Only one of the overhead lights was working, and it flickered and buzzed unpleasantly. The blonde woman behind the cash register didn’t look up from her magazine.
She was the only attractive thing about this place, devastatingly gorgeous, with the sort of cheekbones a sculptor would kill to create. I blinked, raising an eyebrow. Thomas got there first.
“Are we approaching the Manhattan Nest?” he asked politely.
The woman finally glanced up, just a flicker of interest before her eyes snapped back to her magazine. She grunted.
“We are,” said Mary. “I hope you remember how to show respect and not get your face burnt off. New girl, you just follow these two’s lead. They may not know what the Internet is, but they know how dragon politics work.”
“I have an AOL account,” I said, stung.
Mary snorted. “Hey, Pris, the new girl”—she gestured to Sally—“thinks the place looks like it needs to be condemned.”
The woman—Pris—glanced up again, focusing on Sally with some interest. “You really think so?”
“Uh, yeah,” said Sally.
“That’s so sweet thank you!” She paused then, expression hardening slightly. “You human?”
“Yes,” said Sally.
“Huh.” The woman looked back to her magazine, dismissing us once more. Mary laughed as she led us to a door labeled EMPLOYEES ONLY. The sign was written on a sheet of plain cardboard in thick black marker, and held up by strips of duct tape.
“Classy,” I said.
“Yup,” Mary agreed. “We have nothing but the best accommodations here.” Opening the door required undoing three locks, one of which must have had a magical component, since whatever Mary did to open it made Thomas’s eyes widen in surprise.
On the other side of the door was a short, featureless hall lit by two bare bulbs, ending at a second door. Mary started down it, pausing and looking back at the three of us when we were halfway to the end.
“I know you wouldn’t have come here on your own,” she said. “I really do appreciate the fact that you’re willing to jump right into things, even if we didn’t give you as much of a choice as you would have liked. But I need you to promise you’re not going to freak out when you see what’s through here.”
“You have my word,” said Thomas gravely.
“You’re not the one I’m worried about.” Mary gave me a pointed look.
I sighed. “Okay, I get it, I’ve been gone for like three years,” I said. “I’m not going to freak out at whatever you have to show us.”
“More like five years, when you add it all together, and I’m still going to hold you to that,” she said, and finished walking to the second door. It wasn’t locked, and opened to reveal a tiny, boxed-in courtyard with several doors along one wall but no obvious street access. There was a stretch of sky high overhead, implying that this space had originally been more accessible. That was less immediately attention-grabbing than the small swarm of little blonde girls who were playing a complicated game with a red rubber ball and what looked a lot like a Komodo dragon the size of a large dog. All of them stopped when they saw us, going motionless. The ball bounced twice before rolling to a stop against one of the walls. That snapped the Komodo out of its stillness. It scurried in front of the girls, who clustered behind it as it opened its wings and hissed at us.
Opened its . . . wings?
“Mary,” I said, voice very low. “Is that a young male dragon?”
“Liam just turned five,” said Mary, as fondly as she would have mentioned any other child who occasionally fell under her care. More loudly, she added, “Liam, these are the friends I told you were coming. I appreciate you defending your sisters, but it’s okay, I promise.”
The dragon—Liam—furled his wings and gave us a mistrustful look before herding the girls to the other side of the courtyard, well away from the lot of us. It would have been funny, if he hadn’t been so intensely serious about it, glancing back at us almost constantly.
“Verity told me they’d found a male dragon, and that meant the dragon princesses would start having little boys again,” I said, voice still low. “I just never thought I’d get to see one.”
Thomas didn’t say anything, and his eyes were suspiciously bright as Mary turned toward one of the doors on the other side of the courtyard. I touched his shoulder, concerned, and he reached up to take my hand, offering me a weak smile.
Then Mary opened the door and the three of us followed her through, leaving the children behind.
Based on size and general construction, the room she led us into had started its existence as a slaughterhouse—it could easily have qualified as a warehouse, or a ballroom for people who liked to throw really unnerving balls. The heavy iron chains that had been used to suspend cuts of meat still hung from the ceiling, ending in sturdy hooks. The floor was plain polished wood, and the walls, while they had been painted a cheery shade of yellow with cream trim, were clearly bare brick under that thin layer of home improvement. A catwalk ran all the way around the second floor, with plain metal stairs connecting it to the space where we were standing. The ceiling was at least twenty feet up, and the only windows were high ones, set along the very top of the walls. Most of the sun was coming in through the large skylights in the ceiling itself. All in all, it was a stark, austere space.
The people who were clearly living here had done their best, using secondhand furniture and DIY partitions to create a variety of sectioned-off areas in the open space, little living rooms boxed off by freestanding bookshelves, tiny fairylands of bright rubber blocks and cheerful dinosaur rugs. The exposed walls were softened by hanging rugs and tattered tapestries, or covered up by more bookshelves. It was an industrial environment. It was also a populated one.
And then there were the people themselves. I had never seen this many dragon princesses in one place: there were at least twenty adults, and as many little girls, filling the designated play areas with noise and laughter. There were five more of the large lizards that I now recognized as the males of the species, and given what the species had been through, that alone was an embarrassment of riches.
There were non-dragons in the crowd as well: several people whose grayish skin marked them as bogeymen, an Inuit woman in a remarkably frilly black-and-pink dress sitting on the lap of a Japanese man who had his arms looped loosely around her waist, and a pair of dark-skinned men who were working in a makeshift kitchen area, remarkable mostly because of the cloud of bees that danced and wove around their heads. I didn’t stare. Thomas, eyes still damp and a bit too bright, didn’t stare. Sally, though . . .
Sally was getting a crash course in the fact that humans had never actually been the only sapient species on the planet, despite having always been told they were. It had to be jarring. I had trouble, sometimes, remembering just how jarring that sort of thing could be, since I’d grown up in this world, despite my father doing his level best to push me out of it. Discoveries like hers had never been a revelation for me.
“This used to be the primary Nest for the Manhattan dragons,” said Mary. “It’s sort of a refugee camp now. Has been since the Freakshow burned.”
“When did that happen, exactly?” asked Thomas.
Mary looked at him steadily. “Two thousand and fifteen. They torched the place, then left for a while, thinking they’d pulled off their goals. They came back. They haven’t gone away since.”
To his credit, he didn’t flinch. “And what year is it now?”
“Two thousand twenty-two,” said a new voice, from the other side of the room. I turned, breaking into a wide smile at the sight of a familiar face.
Even after five years away—I’d last been home in twenty seventeen, right after we’d sent Antimony off to go undercover with the Covenant—Verity looked essentially the same. Still short, still blonde, still built like someone who’d been dancing and doing gymnastics every minute since she’d figured out how to walk. She had what Thomas used to call “the Carew look,” a certain shape to her face and features that made it clear to anyone who saw us together that we were related, even if it wasn’t always quite as clear precisely how.
She was wearing jeans and an ombre sweater that faded from pink to orange, lingering on peach, and she looked somewhat warily at the three of us as she approached.
“You’ve aged,” she said, focusing on me as the most familiar face in the bunch. “I didn’t know you knew how to do that.”
“I kind of got out of the habit for a while, but I’ve decided to start again, for the sake of the people who love me,” I said.
“Uh-huh. Who are your friends?”
Kevin would have told the rest of the family about our brief appearance in the kitchen in Portland. Even if he hadn’t wanted to, the mice would have passed the news along to the other clergies in no time, and then there would have been no hiding it. We’re not a family that keeps secrets well. She had to know. And still, she wasn’t looking directly at Thomas.
“My friends . . . All right. This is going to be awkward every time I have to do it, so we might as well get on with it.” I stepped a bit to the side, putting myself between them, and took a deep breath. “Verity Price, meet your grandfather, Thomas.”
Sally didn’t protest her omission. She was more than smart enough to see that this wasn’t something she wanted to be in the middle of.
The mice that had been riding quietly in my bag up until this point lost their ability to be quiet when they heard an introduction happening, and announced their presence with a resounding “HAIL!” before quieting down again, the better to observe and record.
Verity didn’t react to the mice. She just shifted her gaze, slowly, to focus directly on Thomas. She tilted her head very slightly to the side, then looked back to me.
“Are you sure?”
I blinked. “What?”
“I asked, are you sure? Because anyone who knows you knows that you’ve been looking for him for the last fifty years, and it would be easy as anything to set up an imposter.”
I fought back the urge to laugh. “Believe it or not, he had basically the same reaction when I showed up. Thought I was an assassin sent to impersonate his wife and get close enough to kill him.”
“How’d you convince him you weren’t?”
“I beat the living crap out of him.”
Sally made a small sound of protest. Thomas took his eyes off of Verity for the first time since she’d entered the room, looking at me.
“Now, dear, I wouldn’t characterize it precisely like that,” he said. “I believe the beating was mutual.”
“And while I don’t recommend hitting your partner, it was the only way we were going to resolve that particular conflict,” I said. “I convinced him, and he convinced me at the same time.”
“If she hadn’t convinced me by telegraphing her punches the way she always has, she would have when she helped to break us out of the bottle dimension where we’d been trapped,” said Thomas. “She’s truly Alice.”
“And he’s truly Thomas,” I said. “I’m not a telepath, but the level of closeness we experienced during that working—he’s the real thing, Very. I found him. I told you your grandfather was still alive out there for me to find, and I found him, and I brought him home. Would you like to meet him?”
