amidst the trilling hisses. There was a distinct note of command to whatever she was saying. The clicking grew stronger, and the tail around my throat let go, sending me toppling to the ground. I managed to hit my knees and catch myself, preventing gravity from dropping me face-first onto Piyusha’s body. My right hand hit her shoulder, fingers sinking into her flesh. I shuddered and scrambled to my feet, grabbing my machete and wrenching it free before I turned to look toward the woman who’d ordered my release.
Candy was standing in the opening of a connecting tunnel, the fingers of her left hand pressed up against her cheek. She was staring at the servitors around me with enormous eyes glistening with tears. I’d never seen a dragon princess cry before.
“Candice?” I rasped, and looked quickly around me. There were at least a dozen servitors, all of them watching her with the focused intensity of a snake wondering whether or not to strike.
“Don’t make any sudden moves,” she said, following it with another sentence in that strange sibilant tongue. “I don’t know how much they actually understand me, and I can’t hold them forever. Just … start walking toward me, and try to look like you’re not worried.”
“Right.” Talking hurt my throat, so I stopped there. My flensing knife was on the ground near a servitor’s foot. I stooped to grab it, and the servitor hissed at me, causing me to flinch back. He didn’t make any hostile moves, so I kept moving, making my slow way toward Candy.
“Can you run?” she asked. One of the servitors took a step forward, and she snapped something harsh and hissing at him. He stopped before stepping back to his original position, looking oddly chagrined. I didn’t know reptiles
“I think so,” I answered. “What are you saying to them?”
“I’m telling them they have to listen to me, because I speak the language of dragons,” she said, not taking her eyes off the servitors. “It’s an instinctive language. They weren’t born dragons, but they should get some of the language through the blood when they’re changed.”
“Should?”
“It’s not like anyone’s been able to test this for a long time, you know.” She cast a brief glance my way, an oddly bitter look in her eyes. “Dragons are extinct, remember?”
“I remember.” I slid the flensing knife into my belt, keeping hold of the machete. “Now what?”
“Now we run.” She grabbed my wrist, hissing a final command at the servitors before she turned and hauled me down the tunnel she’d emerged from. My lungs still hurt from my near-suffocation. I ran anyway.
Candy hauled me along for the length of the tunnel, until we emerged through a door in the wall into what was clearly a working subway tunnel. Rumbling in the distance made it sound like there was more than one dragon sleeping underneath the subway. Letting go of me, she pulled a smart phone from her pocket and glanced at the screen before motioning for me to follow her down the tracks.
“The next PATH train comes through in ten minutes,” she said, not looking back. “Hurry up if you don’t want to catch it.”
“Wait—what? I thought we were in the subway.”
“The PATH and the subway are different systems. Sometimes they connect. Both of them have trains.” Candy did look back this time, since that made it easier to look at me like I was an idiot. “Nine minutes.”
I hurried.
The Port Authority Trans-Hudson service runs trains between New York and New Jersey, under the Hudson River. They have a much more limited network than the main subway system, but they still get people where they’re going and, more importantly, their trains will still squash you flat as a bug on a windshield. On the plus side, because their service is more limited, we were less likely to wind up flattened by a train that wasn’t keeping to the schedule Candy had in her phone. That was something, anyway.
I stuck my machete back into my backpack, where I wouldn’t frighten any late morning commuters. I didn’t need to worry. The platform at the Christopher Street PATH station was deserted when Candy and I scrambled up onto it. She looked around, satisfying herself that we were alone, and dug into her pocket again, this time producing a MetroCard. “Here.”
“What—?”
“Everyone knows you think you’re too good to ride the subway, so I know you don’t have one, and you’re going to need it.” She started walking toward the exit gate, giving me a chance to really look at what she was wearing: designer yoga pants, black, a silk tank top, also black, running shoes, and a sleek ponytail. In New York, that’s the sort of thing you wear when you don’t want to be noticed.
“Hang on.” I hurried to catch up. “Were you
“Did you think I just stumbled over you down there? I’m not that into sewers.” Candy turned to glare at me. “Of course I was following you. You don’t get to tease us with the idea that there’s a dragon somewhere in New York and then go running off after it. We don’t trust you. You need to be watched.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” I asked.
“The Nest.” Candy shook her head. “You’re coming home with me. My sisters want to talk to you. They don’t believe me when I say that you’re not going to hurt the dragon.”
A bored-looking transit cop leaned against the fare gates, presumably to make sure we weren’t carrying any dead bodies or trying to break anything. The bruises forming around my throat didn’t even rate a change in his expression as he watched us exit the platform. I waited until we were up the first flight of stairs before asking, “So you saved me because you don’t trust me?”
“I saved you because you’re the best chance we have of actually finding the dragon. Whether I trust you or not is immaterial. He needs us.”
“For what?” I asked. The look she shot me made me immediately regret the question. Her expression was a complicated mixture of longing and anger and resentment, and I couldn’t even begin to unravel it.
“You’re coming to the Nest,” she said firmly, as we stepped off the last flight of stairs and into the tunnel connecting the PATH and subway systems. Grabbing my wrist again, she began hauling me along. “After that, you can ask me all the questions you want.”
I needed to tell Piyusha’s brothers that she was dead. I needed to tell my family that I was alive. I needed to go home and take care of my injuries before I went looking for more injuries to go with them. I needed to do a lot of things.
A dragon princess had saved me from the Sleestaks underneath Manhattan, and she’d done it by speaking to them in a language I didn’t even know existed. If I was going to find the dragon before Dominic did—and before the snake cult had time to do to more cryptid girls what they’d done to Piyusha and the others—I needed to understand why she’d been willing to do that. What were the dragon princesses to the dragons, really? We’d been asking that question for years, but it was always very academic, something to ponder when you didn’t really have anything else to do with your time. Suddenly that “very academic” question might be the answer to everything.
“I hate the subway,” I muttered.
Candy cast a smugly vicious look in my direction. “I know,” she said.
For the second time in a single day, I started down into the darkness beneath New York City. At least this time, all I’d have to deal with were the people who rode the subway.
Nineteen
“Learning something new about the world in which we live is always a wonderful thing. Unless you’re learning what a wendigo looks like from the inside.”
WE POPPED OUT OF THE SUBWAY in the Meatpacking District, a rapidly-gentrifying neighborhood that used to be devoted almost entirely to, you guessed it, meat. (There are still working slaughterhouses there which is both a real blessing to the city’s cryptid community and something for the tourist
