Discount Armageddon

bureau to work as industriously as possible on hiding. Somehow, “come to New York for all your goat-slaughtering needs” just doesn’t have the right ring to it.) The lunch crowd was out in force, clogging the sidewalks with tourists and well-dressed business people out to grab a quick bite before diving back into the fast-paced world of whatever kind of job you need to pay for real Manolo Blahnik patent leather heels. I swallowed my drool, resisting the urge to clock a yuppie and make off with her shoes. There wasn’t time to mug passersby for their clothes, no matter how much they were abusing them by grinding the heels against the pavement.

Not that I was one to talk. Candy was impeccable, as always, but my clothing was covered with an exciting mix of sewer slime and three kinds of blood—Neapolitan gore. I could probably pass Piyusha’s blood off as maple syrup, and the blood from the lizard-men as some sort of tar. My own blood couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than what it was, especially since several of my smaller wounds were still leaking. People recoiled as I passed, expressions reflecting everything from confusion to horror. I didn’t stop to reassure them. As long as I kept following Candy, who clearly knew where she was going, it wasn’t likely that anyone would ask if I needed help, and that was good; the last thing I needed at the moment was a Good Samaritan. For one thing, I was too damn tired. The events of the last few days were starting to catch up with me and, no matter what happened with the dragon princesses, I was still going to need to tell Piyusha’s brothers that she was dead.

“All this, and I have to work tonight,” I muttered darkly, dodging around a touristy-looking woman with eighties bangs and a pair of grubby toddlers that seemed to be occupying the majority of her attention.

“What was that?” asked Candy.

“Nothing.”

“Good. We’re here.” She opened the door of a small, spotless bodega crammed between a wine bar and an upscale dog salon. Gesturing for me to follow, she went inside. Lacking any better ideas, I trailed after her.

The aisles in your average New York bodega are narrow enough to inspire claustrophobia in circus acrobats. This bodega seemed to have been designed on the theory that all those other bodegas were wasting valuable shelf space. I wasn’t sure anything even semi-human could have wedged its way into some of those aisles, which rendered the beer and chips effectively unreachable. That would be enough to keep the crowds away, even if they had the best prices in the city—which they clearly didn’t. Every tag in sight showed a markup of at least thirty percent, and sometimes more.

Candy smirked as she caught me eyeing a two dollar pack of gum. “You’d be surprised how many tourists shop here for the ‘authentic experience,’” she said. “Duane Reade would be a lot more ‘authentic,’ since there’s one on every corner, but we’re never going to sneer at profit. Come on.” She wove her way between displays and down one of the wider aisles, moving toward the counter. A drop-dead gorgeous blonde was seated behind it, an expression of profound boredom on her face as she filed her already perfect nails.

The blonde glanced up as we approached, sky-colored eyes narrowing as she took in the disreputable state of my attire. “Is this the Price girl?” she asked, not taking her eyes off me.

“It is,” said Candy. “We need the first aid kit.”

Wordlessly, the other dragon princess—there was nothing else she could be, not with that complexion and that attitude; not unless she was working at Vogue, anyway—put down her file and produced a white box with a familiar red cross on top from behind the counter. She offered it to Candy, who took it and tucked it under her arm.

“Are they ready for us?”

“They are.” The other dragon princess hesitated, glancing to Candy, and asked, “Is it true? What everyone’s saying the Price girl found?”

“The Price girl has a name,” I said.

Candy nodded, ignoring me. “It’s true. I saw the servitors with my own eyes. They were new-made, and they understood me when I spoke to them in the old tongue. It’s really true, Priscilla. It has to be.”

Priscilla pressed a hand against her mouth, eyes growing bright. “Oh,” she whispered. Clearing her throat, she added, “Go back. They’re going to have a lot of questions.”

“That’s why I brought her,” said Candy. Gesturing for me to follow again, she ducked around the counter and through the door to the employees-only part of the store. I was starting to feel a bit like a trained poodle, but I followed anyway. I’d come too far to turn back now, and I really wanted to know who “they” were.

The hallway was short, leading to an unlocked rear door. Candy pushed it open, and we exited into a perfect blind canyon that had probably been an alley, once, before construction sealed off the exits. I scanned as we walked across to the opposite wall, noting the places where the brick was uneven enough to let me get a foothold. If necessary, I could go up the wall to reach the fire escape and getting to the rooftops from there would be easy. Knowing that I could get away if I needed to made it easier to keep following.

Candy stopped with her hand on the door into the next building, giving me a hard look. “This used to be a slaughterhouse,” she said. “We bought it back when there was nothing here but slaughterhouses, and it was invisible. Now it’s blocked off by other buildings, and as long as we pay our property taxes, no one remembers that it’s here. We’ve lived here for more than two hundred years.” The underlying message in her voice was clear: Don’t screw this up for us. Bringing me to the Nest meant risking everything. That said a lot about how dedicated they were to finding the dragon. It also said a lot about how important it was for me to keep track of my escape routes. If they changed their mind about the risk I posed … dragon princesses might not have any natural weaponry, but in today’s world, guns level the playing field.

“I promise not to break the china,” I said. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because we need to know what you know.” Candy opened the door. The sound of distant voices and children laughing drifted into the alley. “What you found out is the first good news we’ve had in centuries, and we’re not letting you run off and get slaughtered by servitors until we’re sure we know everything.”

“Mercenary to the last,” I said dryly, and followed her inside.

The building had started life as a slaughterhouse, and didn’t appear to have changed much since. The alley door led into what had once been the holding pen for sheep or cattle; the floor was concrete, with spilled-wine bloodstains worked deep into the stone. A few of the low holding walls were gone, replaced by empty space. Overhead, the walkways and management offices hung in the gloom like spiderwebs, gray and sterile. The light was uniformly low, and an air of decay hung over the entire place, like no one had been there for years.

Candy caught sight of my face and bit back what looked like laughter before taking hold of my wrist and tugging me after her. “Just because we can’t do magic, that doesn’t mean we can’t pay for it,” she said. “We have a good relationship with the hidebehinds. It helps.”

“This is a glamour?” I asked, looking at my surroundings with renewed interest.

“And obviously a damn good one. I’ll have to tell Betty we got our money’s worth.” She took one more step forward, still pulling me in her wake, and the gloom burst around us like a soap bubble.

Everything changed.

The basic architecture of the building only shifted slightly—it was still mostly one big open room—but the last of the slaughterhouse tools vanished, taking the animal pens and the suspicious stains with them. A well-worn carpet pieced together from scraps and sample sale rejects suddenly covered the concrete, looking like the world’s largest quilting project. Lights came on in the rooms above and over the walkways, and the sound of voices was everywhere, coming from the dozens on dozens of women who filled the building. They were all unreasonably pretty. Most were blonde, but I saw a few redheads, brunettes, and even one with hair so black she could have made Goths weep.

And then there was the gold. There was no furniture; instead, there was gold. Where I would have expected chairs, beautiful women sat or lounged on heaps of piled-up jewelry, mixed coins, and even a few gold bars. Where I would have expected couches, more women did the same on larger heaps of precious metal. At the center of the room was a mound of gold that must have been nearly eighteen feet high and fifty feet around, covered in dragon princesses. Not all of them were adults, either. Golden-haired little girls chased each other in circles or sat quietly on the piles of gold, each of them as beautiful as their … what? Mothers, sisters, aunts? There was so much we didn’t know about the biology of dragon princesses—where they came from, how they reproduced, how long they lived. I was going where no cryptozoologist had gone before, and I didn’t even have a notebook.

“Dad’s gonna kill me,” I muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing.”