Backpacking Through Bedlam, page 26
“That tracks.” If anyone had seen Sally getting snatched, they might have called the police, but seeing two young Asian women helping a third into a van probably wouldn’t have raised any alarms, and given there had been no one there when we arrived, I was willing to say that her abduction had gone frustratingly unnoticed. “One question, though: if they were so sure you were working for a group of theirs, why bother to knock you out before putting you in their van?”
“They kept asking me questions in Korean, and they switched to English when they realized I couldn’t understand,” said Sally. She shrugged. “I didn’t answer them. I think they were starting to get a little annoyed with me before you showed up. Is this sort of thing going to happen often? Because I can’t say I’m a fan.”
“Word,” I said, agreeably, and together, we descended into the subway.
Fifteen
“Holding on too hard is a fine strategy if you don’t mind potentially losing everything.”
—Laura Campbell
Manhattan, heading toward a former slaughterhouse filled with dragons, so a pretty normal day, really
THE SUBWAY RIDE WAS easy and uneventful, once we figured out how to swipe my card twice to get us on the train and which direction that train needed to be going. “Uptown” and “Downtown” were intuitive for the locals, not so much for us. We got off when we reached the Meatpacking District, and I led Sally back to street level, my sack of Lactaid and now-warm Coke tucked underneath my arm.
“I don’t think we have enough money for a second pizza, but we can grab you a slice if you’d like,” I offered.
Sally sighed. “Do I come off like a wimp if I say that at this point, I just want to lock myself in a bathroom and have a nice, ordinary panic attack where no one can see me falling apart? I’m freaked out and exhausted.”
“Of course not,” I said. “Let’s get you home.”
We walked all the way to the grungy convenience store that served as an entrance, stopping outside to lean against the wall, where I muttered, “Hey, Mary, if you could come and let us in, that would be real cool.”
“How long do we wait?”
“Give it about five minutes. That should be long enough for her to extricate herself from putting Olivia down for her nap, and not long enough to make anyone suspicious about us hanging around out here.” I pulled one of the warm Cokes out of the bag and passed it to Sally. “Drink this if you need something to do with your hands.”
Sally sniffled, twisting off the cap. “You don’t have to be so nice to me, you know.”
“Kinda do, though, since my husband adopted you while I wasn’t looking, which makes you my family, too. And massively effective skin-care regimens aside, we both know you’re young enough to be my granddaughter, so ‘daughter’ is only a stretch when we’re talking to normal people.” I shrugged, brick wall scratchy against my skin. “I fucked up having kids of my own. If Thomas wants to give it a go, I’m not going to get in the way, and that means I do have to be nice to you, if only so we’re not all miserable all the time.”
Sally looked at me as she took a sip of warm Coke, eyes wary. Finally, she said, “You mean that.”
“Life’s too short to go around saying things I don’t mean.”
“Says the twenty-year-old octogenarian.”
“I said life was short, not that life was logical.”
Sally was still laughing when Mary came rushing out of the convenience store and grabbed me by the wrist. “Verity needs you,” she said, pulling me sharply toward her.
Sally stopped laughing.
I dug my heels in and pulled my arm out of Mary’s grasp before she could pull me into the door, which she hadn’t bothered to open on her way out of the store. “You’re forgetting to stay solid,” I said, voice sharper than I meant it to be. “What’s going on?”
“We’ll explain everything once you’re inside,” said Mary, and beckoned for us to follow as she ducked back through the door, still not bothering to open it.
“See?” I said to Sally, as I opened the door and followed Mary into the convenience store. “People don’t pay attention. We’ve been at the top of the food chain for too long. We got complacent.”
“Stop talking and come on,” said Mary, grabbing my arm to haul me along. She felt only half-substantial, like a cloud of thick, icy fog. I blinked. While walking through walls and doors and the like was pretty standard procedure for her, and something she was more than happy to do when asked, she was usually either fully solid or fully intangible, not hanging out in whatever weird in-between state she was presently occupying.
She tried to undo the locks on the door. Her hands went right through them. She swore, trying again, with the same effect.
“Mary,” I said, voice as level as I could make it despite the swelling panic, “you need to focus. Think about the kids. Think about me. We need you solid.”
She shot me a desperate glance, and I realized the dragon who’d been behind the counter every other time we’d come through here was gone. We were alone.
Mary took a deep breath and tried for the locks again, this time undoing them with the normal amount of resistance. She shoved the door open and rushed through. We followed her.
“Is she going to explain?” asked Sally.
“Eventually.”
The short hall was empty. The courtyard was similarly deserted, save for the red rubber ball, which had rolled to a stop in one corner. Somehow, that was the most unnerving thing of all: seeing that ball abandoned, bereft of the children who had been playing with it.
Mary gave me one last, despairing look, and opened the door into the slaughterhouse. We followed her through.
The semi-reassuring hum that meant a Johrlac who was already attuned to my mind was on the premises kicked in as soon as I was inside, and I looked around the chaos that the slaughterhouse had become, scanning for a familiar black-haired figure. I didn’t see her.
What I did see was several dozen dragons, adults and children, all of them shouting at one another like they thought they could somehow yell the world back into making sense. The Inuit woman I’d seen before was pacing, a lacy parasol over one shoulder and a fierce glower on her face; she had been joined by the man whose lap she had been sitting in. He was following a few steps behind her, looking worried.
Verity and Dominic were at the center of one of the clusters of dragons, both talking rapidly, although I couldn’t hear them over the din. Dominic had Olivia against his hip and was bouncing her as if he could distract her from the fact that all the adults were yelling. Mary flickered out, reappearing next to him and taking the toddler out of his arms. She was always solid when there was a small child involved. Her sometimes-erratic relationship with physical reality didn’t struggle that much.
Dominic promptly turned in our direction, touching Verity on the elbow to get her attention. She straightened, and the two of them walked away from their conversational partners, heading toward us at a fast clip. Some of the dragons stopped yelling to watch them go, and more than a few glares were cast in our direction.
Okay, this wasn’t good. And maybe that was stating the obvious, but it’s never once been a positive thing when I come back from a shopping trip to find the world cast into chaos. I crossed my arms and frowned at the pair of them.
Verity stopped a few feet away, sighing and dragging one hand through her short blonde hair. The gesture caused it to stick out in all directions, like a startled hedgehog.
“Grandma,” she said. “We have a problem.”
“Got that from the yelling,” I said. “Where’s Thomas?”
“That’s not—”
“I swear to God, Verity, I love you more than I love myself, but I just spent fifty years looking for that man, and if you think I’m going to be okay with stepping into this much of a cacophony and not knowing where he is, you don’t know me very well.” I glared at her. “So I know you weren’t about to tell me his location wasn’t important.”
“I was—” she began, before catching herself and admitting, “I was about to say it wasn’t important. You got me. I promise, he’s safe. I just need to talk to you.”
“About what? What the hell is going on?”
“You left,” said Dominic. “You didn’t return, for much longer than your errand could explain. Sarah came back with the coffee and said she hadn’t picked up any traces of you during her walk. And about that time, Cara was supposed to be showing up with a group of children.”
That was a new name. I presumed “Cara” was either another dragon or an ally; either way, it wasn’t as important as the fact that she apparently hadn’t shown up. “How was she transporting them?”
“Dry-cleaning van full of cheap old rugs,” said Verity. “We have a few underground access points to William’s cavern. Park there, load the kids into the back, pile blankets over them in case the van gets pulled over, and then drive them to the pickup spot. We roll the boys inside the rugs, then carry them in that way while the girls walk.”
“Uh-huh. And are you using the same routes regularly?”
“We’re not amateurs, Grandma. We’ve been rotating through eight different routes, and we never do a pickup run the same time twice. This was routine. It should have gone off without a hitch.”
“Except that it didn’t.” I shook my head. “Sally and I were late because we got nabbed by a Clutch of yong who knew you had boys in here. They don’t want one—wrong species, it wouldn’t help them with their genetic bottlenecking—but they want access to William—”
“Absolutely not,” snapped a nearby dragon. She had clearly been listening in, and just as clearly wasn’t sorry about it. She shook her head, expression a twisted mask of disapproval. “Our husband is not some sideshow attraction to be shared with every cryptid who expresses an interest.”
“They’re a sister species whose continued existence may depend on them finding a male of their own,” I said, soothingly. “If there’s any chance William knows something about where any surviving yong males might be hiding, they deserve to know.”
“We’ve asked him about other Western dragons, and about laidly worms, but we haven’t asked about yong, long, or Tatsu,” Verity admitted, slowly. “I knew there were some clusters of their females left, but it hasn’t been a priority, with everything else that’s been going on.”
“Well, it’s a priority for them,” I said. “Regardless, they knew this was your Nest, and they knew where the door was, well enough that they were watching and followed us when we came out. You’ve been being careful. ‘Careful’ doesn’t mean ‘flawless.’ If the yong could find you, who else could?”
“Humans can’t tell us apart,” said the dragon who’d objected to the idea of giving the yong access to William. “They could never have figured out which one was Cara.”
So Cara was a dragon: got it. “And have you been counting on that?” I asked, even as Verity turned to stare at her. “Very, how much of your operation security has been down to the dragons?”
“About half,” she admitted. “People are usually more careful when their children are involved.”
“Says the woman who strapped our daughter to her chest and leapt off several buildings before I could stop her,” grumbled Dominic.
I decided to ignore that. “Say the Covenant has been watching this place, whether because they had reason to suspect something was happening here, or because it’s in a range they’re surveilling for cryptid activity in general,” I said. “It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that it only matters if they see me or Verity, because of that ‘Carew look’ that Thomas likes to go on about. But we’re not the only ones here. It’s a little odd to have this many blonde women who look like sisters living in the same place. Even if they didn’t know for sure whether or not you were human—even if they hadn’t been using their little temperature scanners—there are ways of telling people apart, no matter how similar they look. Even cuckoos have distinguishing features. Sure, most humans can’t tell dragons apart facially, but do you all have the exact same hairstyle? Because I’m looking around this room, and I can tell you with reasonable certainty that you don’t. I could tell you apart, and I’ve been here less than a day.”
The dragon looked flustered. I turned my attention back to Verity. “I’m guessing this Cara never showed up.”
“No.” Verity shook her head. “She’s missing, along with five of the little boys and three of the little girls.”
How many male dragons did they have? It seemed rude to ask, under the circumstances, but we were definitely going to have a discussion about birth rates when this was over. “So I’m guessing all the yelling is because of the missing kids, and nothing else has gone wrong?”
“Some of them were sure the two of you had to be involved, and are threatening to have all the humans and human-lovers expelled,” said Verity. “Grandpa is trying to talk down the people in charge, since they’re really sure he must be involved.”
“They’ve never trusted me,” said Dominic. “For them, once Covenant is always Covenant, and he’s a figure out of their bedtime stories. Some of them believe Mr. Price carried the Covenant to these shores in the first place.”
“Uh, our family was already here when Thomas showed up. We had a two-generation head start on him,” I said, while Verity elbowed him lightly.
“He’s your grandfather-in-law,” she said. “You don’t have to call him ‘Mr. Price.’”
“I would be uncomfortable with that degree of familiarity when I’ve just met the man,” said Dominic, voice going stiff. “He may be a traitor, but his research is still taught in the Covenant. He was a trailblazer in his time, and his rank upon leaving the organization was higher than my own. He deserves my respect.”
“He deserves your respect, and my support,” I said. “Verity, if he’s trying to convince people of his innocence, I should be there. Where is he?”
“You’re just going to make things worse, Grandma.”
“I can be diplomatic.”
She snorted, then caught herself. “Oh. You’re serious.”
I scowled at her. “I can. Now where, exactly, is your grandfather?”
She sighed. “Through here,” she said, and motioned for me to follow her to a door.
Sally followed me, and we left the chaos behind us.
* * *
Well, we left that chaos behind us, anyway. There was more chaos on the other side of the door, in the form of a variety of angry cryptids, all of them yelling at once, and several more frantic dragons looking for somewhere to direct their furious energy. Verity brushed by them all with soft apologies, and Sally and I followed along behind, and for a moment, it looked like we might actually go unchallenged.
Then a skinny woman with grayish skin stepped in front of us, putting her hands up to signal Verity to stop. “Come on, Verity, you know better,” she said. “This is not a meeting for humans.”
“But it’s a meeting about a human, and I have evidence that supports his innocence,” she said, indicating me and Sally. “They came back. They didn’t sell us out to the Covenant. They wouldn’t have bothered coming back here if they’d been expecting this sort of a welcome. Come on, Kitty, you know me, and you know my family. Did you really think my grandfather was somehow behind this?”
“Your grandfather is an urban legend as much as he’s a man,” said the bogeyman who had stopped her, whose name was apparently Kitty. Kitty gave me a wary, sidelong look at the same time. “If anyone could betray us and tell his own wife to walk right back through the doors into the hornet’s nest, it would be him. He already betrayed the people who raised him.”
“If you mean the Covenant, he knew he was going to betray them from the moment he grew into his sorcery and started setting things on fire,” I said. “And it’s pretty clear he wasn’t unusual for the Price bloodline. Even if sorcery doesn’t show in every generation, they put so many protections on the family fortune that it’s a miracle anyone can get to that money. They were expecting one or another of their descendants to wind up on the outside eventually, and they took what steps they could to make sure whoever it was would be okay when that happened. I, on the other hand, have never betrayed anyone, and if you don’t want me to demonstrate exactly how poorly I think of you casting aspersions on my husband, you’ll let us into the room.”
Kitty frowned. “And this would be . . . ?”
“Alice Price,” I said, voice flat. “Verity’s grandmother.”
“And I’m Sally,” said Sally, helpfully. “Alice’s stepdaughter. Sort of. It’s complicated, I think I’ve been adopted. I haven’t betrayed anybody, either, if that’s something we’re worried about all of a sudden.”
Kitty blinked, looking at me with new respect—and no small amount of fear. You don’t get rid of a reputation like mine just by deciding you’re going to retire and be a good citizen from now on, no matter how much I might wish the world worked that way.
“So, since it sounds like you have my husband behind that door, it would be awesome if you could let us through of your own free will, before I have to make you let us in against your will,” I said, almost cheerfully, and with a visible swallow, Kitty stepped aside and let us pass.
Verity moved to put herself ahead of me again, maybe concerned that I was going to stab the next person who got in my way, and pushed the door open, revealing a room almost identical to the office we were going to be using as our “bedroom” for the duration, save for the absence of the bed and the inclusion of a folding table. Several dragons were standing around it, all of them attempting to interrogate Thomas at the same time. Thomas, for his part, was looking at them calmly, with no sign that he was disturbed in the slightest by their behavior, hands folded neatly behind his back.
Verity pulled in a small, sharp breath. I gave her a curious look. She shook her head. “Annie stands just like that when she’s mad at us,” she said, voice low. “I just didn’t expect that kind of family resemblance.”
