Stepping off the bottom rung of the ladder, I snapped my cave light on and clipped it to my belt. The light illuminated what looked like a perfectly normal stretch of sewer, from the water-stained brick of the walls to the unrecognizable sludge thinly coating the concrete floor. I drew my .45 and started forward, holding it in front of me in the classic television cop position. I was trying to keep my nerves in check. I knew what direction I was going, thanks to Sarah (and my compass). All I needed to do was get there without freaking out. And hopefully without encountering any more unwanted lizard-men. I’m not normally one to run from a fight, but if I could avoid this one, let’s just say I wouldn’t be sorry.
Fifteen minutes later, I’d walked probably half a mile into the dark beneath the city, descending gently all the while, and I hadn’t seen anything bigger than a rat. (Not that the rats weren’t plenty big. New York seems to take pride in trying to produce the largest rodents the world has ever seen. Fortunately, with size comes intelligence, and most of them took one look at my expression and scattered.) I was starting to think I was on a wild-goose chase when an air current wafted up from the depths and addressed my nose with an aroma that had absolutely no business being in the sewer:
The sweet scent of pine resin mixed with molasses.
Piyusha was somewhere ahead of me. Somewhere in the dark. Gritting my teeth, I adjusted my grip on the gunstock and kept walking.
The sticky-sweet smell of Piyusha’s blood got stronger as I descended, becoming harder to ignore with every step. Part of me took careful note of the strength of the smell, analytically trying to figure out whether Madhura blood contained some chemical compound that made it smell stronger as it dried. Maybe it worked as a deterrent to predators, or as an attractant for some natural prey? (Not that Madhura have much I’d call “prey” outside of donuts, Snickers bars, and cotton candy.) Lots of cryptids have blood with interesting qualities, at least from a human standpoint. Cuckoos bleed antibiotics; giant swamp bloodworms bleed a gummy slime that attracts damn near any predator you’d care to name; incubi and succubi bleed something that’s basically an open call to fornication. It’s all part of the barely-comprehensible circle of cryptid life. Disney it’s not, but it definitely keeps things interesting, especially when Mom forgets to label the plasma in her medical emergency kit.
It was easy to regard the smell of Madhura blood as a relief, given the sewer-stink alternatives … as long as I didn’t think too much about what the strength of the smell meant. If Piyusha had been human, losing this much blood would have killed her for sure. Not knowing much about Madhura physiology, I just had to hope she had more reserves than a human girl her size.
Hope died when my foot hit something soft. I looked down and met Piyusha’s staring, sightless eyes with something from the strange, empty country that sits between sorrow and disappointment. She was naked, with black runes sketched down the length of her body in what looked like it was probably Sharpie. It hurt my eyes if I tried too hard to focus on them. I holstered my gun before pulling my phone from my pocket, and whispered soft apologies as I took blurry digital photos of her corpse. I didn’t know enough about her culture to know if this was considered desecration, but I needed to document those runes. Maybe Dad could tell me what they meant. Whatever it was, it wasn’t anything good. Nothing written in Sharpie on a corpse ever is.
Once I was done with the unpleasant task of photographing Piyusha’s body, I tucked the phone away and knelt, beginning the even more gruesome task of examining her wounds. Whoever took her had slit her throat just below her jaw, covering the runes on her chest and collarbones with a gummy-looking veil of watery red blood. There wasn’t enough blood for that to have been the wound that killed her; she’d already been bled almost dry by that point, probably via the slashes running down the length of her forearms and calves. I just hoped she’d been numb before they cut out her heart. It was a small thing to hope for, given the obvious and undeniable violence of her death. It was the only thing I had left to hope.
Her expression was a mixture of terror and raw confusion, like she hadn’t been able to believe what was happening to her. I blinked back tears as I reached down and brushed her eyelids closed. There was still a faint, lingering warmth to her skin, but not much; she’d been dead for a while.
“I’m so sorry, Piyusha,” I whispered. “If I’d known this was going to happen, I wouldn’t have left you alone. I’m so, so sorry.”
She didn’t answer me. There are ghosts in the world—my Aunt Mary is one of them, and she’s a lot of fun at parties—but they almost never result from ritual sacrifices. That kind of death commits the soul to something else altogether, and doesn’t leave anything behind. I just had to hope that stopping the bastards who’d done this would free Piyusha to move on to whatever afterlife waits for the Madhura.
I straightened, wiping tears from my eyes with the back of one hand. I couldn’t move her alone, and I wasn’t going to make her brothers come down into the dark. Maybe Ryan could help. Tanuki are stronger than they look, even when they’re in their human forms; he’d probably be able to shift her without any real—
Something hissed ahead of me. My head snapped up, shoulders locking as I took in the vulnerability of my position. Retreat was probably the best approach in this situation. I could return to collect Piyusha’s body, with Ryan to back me up and, more importantly, I wouldn’t wind up dead in a sewer.
The hissing started up behind me, even louder than the hissing from the front, just before the hissing started from the sides. Okay. Maybe I wasn’t going to be retreating after all.
I didn’t want to open with gunfire in an enclosed space until I knew exactly how many opponents I was dealing with. Since I lost my telescoping baton the last time I tangled with the Sleestaks, I’d been reduced to sharp things. That’s okay. I like sharp things. I reached back and drew the machete from behind my backpack with one hand, drawing the flensing knife from my belt with the other. Nice, sharp, and capable of hitting bone in a single thrust if I was using it correctly. If I ever wanted to see daylight again, I’d damn well better use it right.
“Well?” I asked the hissing darkness. I couldn’t see anything in the area illuminated by my halogen light, but there was a lot of sewer I couldn’t see at all. They had the advantage. “Are we going to do this thing, or what?”
The darkness boiled, and out of it came the servitors. There was no posturing this time; they moved with the speed of striking cobras, coming too fast for me to count. This gang was at least as large as the one Dominic and I fought off together, and that had been a close victory. If I couldn’t find an escape route, the best I could hope for would be a swift and reasonably painless death. Piyusha’s body provided a mute, horrifying example of what the worst would be.
I launched myself into a high kick, my toe catching the lead servitor in the chin as I slashed out to either side with my respective weapons. I felt, rather than saw, the machete find a target, hacking deep into scaled flesh. The flensing knife hit nothing but air, but at least it drove back the attacker on that side, giving me a little more space in which to maneuver. None of the servitors went down. That would have been too much to hope for.
My lead foot finished its arc, hitting the floor just in front of the servitor I’d kicked. He looked dazed. I took advantage of the hole in his guard, bringing my other leg up and kneeing him firmly in the groin. Whatever mutagenic process created the servitors, some attributes of their mammalian origins remained intact; as soon as my knee hit his nuts, he doubled over, allowing me to bring my machete down across the back of his neck. He toppled.
I was still wrenching my machete free when a tail snaked out of the darkness behind me and wrapped noose-tight around my neck, jerking me backward. My hand lost its grip on the machete handle, leaving me with nothing but the flensing knife, which I didn’t dare start waving around my own throat. I dropped it instead, frantically clawing at the tail that was in the process of choking me. Air had suddenly become a much more valuable commodity than weaponry.
My fingernails couldn’t find traction on the scales covering the servitor’s flesh. One of my nails caught and tore, the sharp flare of pain barely distracting from the all-encompassing pain in my neck. My vision was starting to blur around the edges as oxygen deprivation set in. I kicked and thrashed, but my feet didn’t make contact with anything. Suffocation is one of those things you just don’t learn how to fight through. Big problem, that.
A female voice spoke suddenly from up ahead in a language that I’d never heard before. It managed to be sibilant and fluid at the same time, like choral music written for snakes. The hissing around me stopped, replaced by confused clicking. The tail around my throat didn’t loosen. I continued to struggle, but I was losing strength, and without the leverage to break the hold, I wasn’t going to have much time to be curious about what was happening around me.
The woman spoke again, still in that strange snake-song language—but this time I recognized my name in
