Discount Armageddon

extinct?”

She reeled back as if I’d just hauled off and punched her in the face. When she focused again, it was to give me a look of such fury that I felt a little bit punched. “Is that why you brought me up here?” she demanded. “To make fun of me? What, cable isn’t enough for you people, you have to find other ways to entertain yourselves? That’s swell of you. That’s just plain swell.”

“Candy, we think we may have found a dragon.”

She froze. Literally froze, dewy blue eyes gone so wide that I could see the whites all the way around her irises. I didn’t think she was breathing.

“We weren’t looking for it, exactly, but I have access to a telepath, and she says—”

“Where?” asked Candy. Her voice was barely a whisper, and mostly ripped away by the wind, but I recognized the shape of it on her lips. She took three long, runway-perfect steps forward and grabbed me by the shoulders, succeeding in shaking me twice before the surprise wore off and I pulled myself away. “Where? Don’t you keep this from me, don’t you dare, and if you’re lying, I swear, if you’re lying—”

“Candy, calm down!” I shook my head, holding up my hands defensively. “I only just found out, okay? I haven’t been keeping anything from you. Anyway, we think there may be a dragon sleeping somewhere under the island, and we think it’s connected to the recent disappearances.”

Her eyes widened again—with anger, this time. “What, so you’re blaming the dragon? Is that why you wanted to talk to me? You’re looking for bait?”

“What? No! I’m blaming the disappearances on humans, some sort of snake cult, probably, trying to wake the dragon up the way they’d summon a snake god.” I let my hands drop back down to my sides. “If there is a dragon, I want to protect it. I want to prove that it’s not the source of the trouble we’ve been having recently. And I wanted the Nest to know as soon as possible, because this affects you.”

“More than you know,” she said bitterly. Shaking her head, she asked, “So what do you want from me?”

“I want you to go to the Nest. I want you to tell them what we’ve found, and that I’m trying to find a way for you to get to the dragon. If there’s anything that might tell me where to start looking, anything at all, I need to know.”

Candy studied my face, tilting her head slightly to the side as she asked, “Why should we tell you? Why shouldn’t we just go looking on our own?”

“Two reasons. First off, if there’s some sort of snake cult in town making virgin sacrifices, they probably already know how to get to the dragon. I’m sure they’d look at you and the Nest as a perfect virgin buffet.”

Candy blanched. “And the second reason?”

“I went down into the sewers earlier today, looking for clues.” I decided not to mention the fact that Dominic had gone down with me. That seemed like a little bit too much for Candy’s nerves. “I got jumped by a bunch of lizard-dudes I’d never seen before. It was like The Land of the Lost down there. Unless you’re sure they’d be happy to see you, you probably need some sort of—” I stopped midsentence. Candy had gone pale and started to shake, suddenly looking like she was on the verge of tears. “Candy? What’s wrong?”

“There’s a dragon,” she whispered. “There’s definitely a dragon, and somebody’s hurting him. They have to be hurting him if they’re making servitors. Oh, Verity!” My name came out as a wail, and she was suddenly doing something I would never have expected in my wildest dreams: she threw her arms around my shoulders, burying her face against my chest. “We have to find him!”

I patted her awkwardly on the back. “Don’t worry,” I said, as confidently as I could. “We will.”

* * *

Apparently, “I may have found you a dragon” counted as big enough news that Candy didn’t make me pay her for going up to the roof with me. Good thing, too—at a hundred dollars for ten minutes, I would have been borrowing money from Ryan just to pay off my debt to Candy. Never owe money to a dragon princess. Their interest rates are murder.

As for the pressing question of the night, namely—“What’s a servitor?”—Candy was willing to answer it in detail. Too much detail. After providing a vivid installment of Things I Never Wanted To Know Theater, Candy promised to speak with the rest of the Nest about the dragon and call me with anything they knew, and went back inside to finish her shift. I watched her go, then went racing back across the rooftops to my apartment. Her surprise had been genuine—I was certain of that—and with what I’d just learned, I needed to check in sooner rather than later.

No one was picking up at the house. That wasn’t a surprise, considering they’d left for the basilisk hunt not that long before, but I still said several words we’re supposed to be careful about using in front of the mice as I hung up. General cheering greeted my profanity, along with a few ecstatic mentions of the Feast of Washing Out Mouths With Soap. I didn’t have the energy to tell them to keep it down. If the mice wanted to have a party, let ’em. I had bigger—much, much bigger, as in “dragon-sized”—fish to fry.

I was sitting down at my computer, composing an email with everything I’d managed to learn so far (not nearly enough) when there was a knock at the apartment door. My head snapped up like a jackalope scenting a pack of coyotes. My presence in the apartment was, after all, technically illegal, since the original lease forbade subletting and the apartment’s actual tenant was on extended vacation somewhere in Canada. I didn’t exactly encourage things like “visitors,” especially since a lot of the people who’d be coming to visit couldn’t pass for human in a dark alley on a moonless night.

The knock came again. The mice gave a subdued cheer. “Hush!” I hissed, standing. “You get out of sight while I answer the door.”

“But, Priestess, the Holy Feast—”

“Will be honored, if it’s a man, and if I let him through the door,” I said. “Now hide.” The mice scattered, vanishing under furniture and into hidey-holes. Only a few pennants and some pigeon-bone accessories were left to show that they’d ever existed, and those could be excused as my having morbid taste in dolls. (Antimony did that once, taking a bunch of mouse- designed ceremonial gear to school as part of an art project she billed as “Barbie Meets Modern Primitive.” She got an “A,” and an appointment with the school counselor.)

The knocking came a third time. It was starting to sound impatient. “Shit,” I hissed, giving the room a quick once-over for obvious weapons before shouting, “I’ll be right there!” I triggered my screensaver—no point in giving some nosy neighbor an eyeful—and half-ran across the room, yanking open the door.

Dominic De Luca gave me a look that was half-exasperated, half-amused, and held up a large paper sack which smelled enticingly of fried chicken and the usual assortment of sides. “Before you begin shouting at me for having your address, I wish to note that I come bearing peace offerings, and am prepared to apologize for further intruding on your privacy. I simply thought we should speak, and I no longer trust you in coffee shops.”

“Fair,” I said, and grabbed his arm, hauling him into the apartment before shutting the door firmly behind him. “Sorry, I’m trying to avoid attracting the attention of the neighbors. Technically, I can’t legally be here, so —”

The room erupted into cheers. Quite literally: with mice crammed into every cushion and hidden under every piece of furniture, it sounded like the apartment had suddenly been possessed by the spirit of Super Bowl Sunday. Dominic’s head whipped around, eyes going wide. “What in God’s name—?!”

“Oh, crap,” I groaned, putting a hand over my face. “I should have expected this. I should have known, and spent the night at Sarah’s or something. This is all my fault.”

“Why is the apartment shouting at us?” Dominic groped for his belt, presumably to produce something he could use to attack the cheering, hostile … apartment. If he had a knife intended entirely for stabbing haunted sublets, I didn’t want to know about it. I uncovered my face and clamped my hand down over his, holding him in place. He gave me a startled look.

“I’m really, really sorry about this, but it’s the Holy Feast, and it’s just not going to stop until I do this, so please don’t take things the wrong way, okay?” He was still looking completely baffled. “Oh, to hell with explaining.” Stepping into his personal space, I leaned up, and kissed him for the second time.

The cheers got even louder. But after a few seconds, I don’t think either of us was listening to the mice.

Dominic tensed for an instant before he was kissing me back, all the urgency I’d sensed in him earlier returning, and joined by a strange sort of relaxation, like he’d come to terms with the reality that I was kissing him. Things got good faster this time; he wasn’t holding back. With one hand pinned under mine, and the other filled