Discount Armageddon

offering, well, I couldn’t be rude, now could I? Also, I didn’t particularly want to walk home barefoot, and there was no way I was ever wearing my sewer-soaked running shoes again. Sarah had promised to dispose of them for me. I didn’t want to know any more than that.

I saw Dominic get into his cab. I didn’t see where it went. I was too busy giving directions to my own driver, and planning out just what I’d tell my father. Hopefully, “Daddy, I found you a dragon” would be a bigger deal than “Daddy, I went into the sewers with a member of the Covenant and got attacked by killer lizard-men.” Hopefully. Personally, I wasn’t placing any bets.

My taxi pulled into midafternoon Manhattan traffic. I relaxed as best I could as we rattled over potholes and swerved to avoid tourists. If the past six hours had been anything to go by, this was the last break I was going to get for a while. And I still had to go to work.

* * *

Cries of exultation greeted my key turning in the lock. I opened the front door to find the entire Aeslin congregation gathered on and around the tiny table where I kept the mail. Several of them were waving tiny banners made of tissue paper that had been meticulously painted with drops of blue, black, and red ink.

“Hail!” shouted the head priest, waving his banner with extra enthusiasm.

“HAIL!” agreed the congregation.

“Hail,” I said tiredly, and shut the door. “What’s the occasion?”

“Today is the Holy Feast of I Swear, Daddy, I’ll Kiss the Next Man That Walks Through That Door,” said the priest, sparking a second, more solemn declaration of “Hail” from the rest of the mice.

“Cool.” I started for the living room. The mice scampered after me, still waving their banners wildly in all directions. Aeslin religious rituals are nothing if not enthusiastic. “Do I need to do anything?”

One of the novice priests looked at me like she wasn’t sure whether or not I was joking. “Priestess…”

“Right, right. I have to kiss the next man who walks through the door, right?” Cheers from the mice, interspersed with more cries of “Hail.” “Got it. At least I’m not expecting company.” I dropped my dance bag on the couch, looking toward the bedroom, where my computer was. Check email, or call home? Which was more pressing?

The odds that Dad was going to insist on coming when I called were high. The odds that he’d bring Alex and Antimony were lower, but still good enough to make me less than happy. There might, however, be something in my email that I could use to mollify him, like reports from a reliable source indicating a giant Gila monster or something living under the city. Anything but a dragon.

The mice had returned to their vigil at the door, having deduced that I wasn’t going to kiss anyone immediately. Occasional cries of “Hail” broke the silence, muted enough to be reduced to the level of background noise. Things like this were a perfect illustration of why Alex was my date to my Junior Prom, and why I never brought any of the boys from my dance classes home.

Not any of the human boys, at any rate.

I swung by the fridge on my way to the computer, nabbing a can of generic diet ginger ale and the Styrofoam box containing all the leftovers from my previous shift. The kitchen at Dave’s Fish and Strips isn’t particularly interested in saving the planet from the scourge of nonbiodegradable plastics, but boy, are they happy to clog your arteries.

I sat down at the computer, munching a deep-fried zucchini stick as I waited for my email to load. I maintain three different addresses—private, personal, and cryptozoological—and thanks to Artie, they all feed into the same mail reader. (He said he was doing me a favor. I think he was actually tired of Sarah bitching when I didn’t answer her mail.) When the download finished, the display at the top informed me that I had five hundred and thirty-seven new messages. I groaned. So much for making this fast.

More than half the messages were Facebook updates for Valerie, who has a lot more friends than I do— something about having been on national television upped her stock with the public. The remainder consisted primarily of spam and messages from my mailing lists. I flagged a few threads to come back to later—the reports of werewolves in Florida were starting up again, and there’d been another Bat-Boy sighting, this time at a strip mall in Boise—but shoved most of it into folders to get it out of my inbox.

Only seven messages remained by the time I was done. One was from Alex, telling me I’d better not do anything to get him sent to New York while his basilisk breeding program was still in such a delicate stage. Two were from Aunt Jane, updating me on the total lack of clues on the “what’s going on in New York” front. Her second message, sent while I was waiting to go on at the tango competition, included the information about the disappearing cryptid girls. If the gossips outside the city were picking up on it, it was definitely spreading.

As expected, the message immediately after Aunt Jane’s second email was from her son, my cousin Artie, demanding to know whether Sarah was okay. He’d clearly been worried when he sat down at his computer; two of the words were misspelled, something an enormous nerd like Artie would normally see as a crime worthy of hard time, or at least community service. He and Sarah have been sweet on each other since we were all kids. Not that she knows it’s mutual, and not that he’ll tell her. Eventually, I’m going to bang their heads together and lock them in a closet to work things out, before I’m forced to drown them both.

I fired off a response to Artie, assuring him that Sarah was fine. (I left out the part where she’d spent a chunk of the afternoon providing medical care for a member of the Covenant of St. George. There were things he didn’t need to know.) I emailed Aunt Jane next, relaying the information we got from Piyusha. I didn’t tell her about the dragon. She’d find out eventually, but I wanted to talk to Dad before I went spreading that information around.

The remaining three emails were from Dad, containing everything he’d been able to find about the history of cryptids in New York. The file attachments were large enough to make it seem like he’d emailed me an encyclopedia. I downloaded them all and started a search, looking for the word “dragon.” Maybe I’d get lucky. Maybe the search wouldn’t—

The search box blinked, indicating a hit. Heart sinking, I clicked over to the indicated file. The highlighted word was in the title of an article. “The Last Dragon?” Opening the article, I read:

Early settlers to the Island of Manhattan laughed at the local stories detailing how “the sun himself” had come to sleep beneath the island’s stone. The sun, according to the legends, was vast enough to blacken the sky, and when he walked, the very stones shook and trembled in their fear. He came cloaked in darkness, sending golden handmaids to convey his requests. He troubled not the people of the land, but still requested tribute, in exchange for all that he provided in his warmth and in his light.

The golden handmaids of the sun collected the tribute and carried it to him deep beneath the world, while every day he sent his magic into the sky, bringing heat and life. The handmaids were human in appearance, but the heat of the sun did not burn them, and the sharpness of stones beneath their feet did not cut them. Some among the settlers found the lure of the sun’s handmaids irresistible, and went to the cave indicated by the legends as the place of tribute. The sun’s seven golden handmaids came, and the men, dazzled by their beauty, took them as their wives. When locals protested this disruption of the tribute, they were chastised, and told that the sun did not sleep beneath the island, but that the golden women had tricked them.

No pictures survive of the “golden handmaids,” but their description and purpose matches that most often ascribed to the so-called “dragon princesses,” a symbiotic cryptid race which evolved to live in parallel with the dragons. It is possible that the last of the great dragons, fleeing the Covenant of St. George, may have taken refuge in the caves beneath Manhattan, bringing as many of the symbiotic race as possible into exile. Once the dragon died, possibly of wounds sustained before coming to Manhattan, it would be an easy matter to remove the dragon princesses from their home. There can be no question that the dragon died, if it was there at all; no living dragon would allow the dragon princesses to be removed.

The article went on to describe the various physical and psychological characteristics of dragons from around the world. There were—or had been, before people got tired of being on the buffet menu—six known species of “Great Wyrm,” which is cryptozoologist for “enormous fucking lizard with wings.” They all liked caves and precious metals, they all traveled with dragon princesses, and they were all, supposedly, extinct.

“And that, kids, is why we still have to depend on fieldwork,” I muttered. I instructed the computer to print the file, and rose, picking up my phone as I walked toward the kitchen. After I got some ice packs for my leg, it was time to call home and let the parents know what I was dealing with.

* * *

“Can I help you?” inquired a flat, utterly nonhelpful female voice. The speaker’s air of disdain was enhanced