Twenty
“When all else fails, put on a fresh coat of lip gloss and pretend you have no idea what that horrible thing that just went running down Main Street was. A surprisingly large number of people will believe you.”
CANDY HAD BEEN ALMOST IRRITATINGLY EAGER to be rid of me even though my departure meant giving me a decently sized jar full of powdered gold. Dragon princesses watched me all the way to the door, none moving to follow or attempting to say anything. I guess when someone you view as your ancestral enemy winds up between you and your only shot at ever getting laid, you’re not overly inclined to be friendly.
“Can you find your way from here?” asked Candy, once we were back in the blind canyon between the bodega and the former slaughterhouse. “I need to get ready for my shift so I can start paying back the cost of the gold you’re taking.”
“They’re making you pay for this?”
“Yes, of course. It’s not like
“Right,” I said slowly. “I’m good from here. I’ll see you at work.”
Candy didn’t say good-bye, just flipped her hair and turned to stalk back into the building, letting the door slam shut behind her. I looked at the jar of gold powder in my hand, sighed, and shoved it into my pack. I was starting to think I would definitely have preferred the Goldschläger, especially with the little “fiery demise” rider on this particular adventure, but it’s true what the sages say: you can’t always get what you want.
I could, however, get the hell off the ground. I got a running start and threw myself at the far wall, where the bolts that once anchored the lowest ladder of a fire escape still protruded from the brick. Once I had hold of them, it was an easy matter to swing myself up to the remains of the actual fire escape and scramble up the creaking metal. In under a minute, my hands were hooked over the edge of the slaughterhouse roof, disturbing ancient grime and much more recent pigeon shit as I hoisted myself the rest of the way onto solid footing.
Seen from two stories up, the Meatpacking District was a strange patchwork of gentrified elegance and urban decay. Most of the less-attractive bits were hidden cunningly away, like the dragon princesses’ Nest, tucked into spots where no one at street level would ever see them. Some were probably cryptid nests, hiding their own outcasts and secret societies. Others were no doubt slated for eventual destruction and replacement, clearing away the bones of the district one little bit at a time. New York is a city built upon the cannibalized remains of its own past, constantly changing, constantly the same.
Stepping back so that I wouldn’t be visible from the street, I took a seat on the edge of a broken-off smokestack and pulled out my phone. According to the readout, I still had five percent of my battery charge remaining. That was enough to make both the calls that needed making.
Alex had clearly been waiting for my call; the phone didn’t even have time to finish ringing once before he picked up, demanding, “Who is this?”
“Your sister. The one who isn’t dead.”
There was a long pause before he said warily, “Verity?”
“Um, yeah. What’s Antimony up to today that you think she’d be the one making this call? Because seriously, I want to know.”
“Chasing basilisks, remember?”
“Oh, right. My lizard is so much bigger than her lizard that I guess it just slipped my mind.” I giggled, more from stress than actual amusement. “Hey, what do you know? Size
“Verity—”
“Only wait, it turns out that you were actually wrong about something. Dragons aren’t lizards. They’re sort of like dinosaurs that managed to hang after the big extinction parties, and evolved to fit a whole new niche. A weird, fucked-up niche, but still, you have to admire them for trying.”
“Verity!” I heard Alex take a deep breath. “Can you please, please tell me what happened? I’m glad you’re not dead. I wasn’t relishing the idea of being called to the East Coast to fish your remains out of the sewer. Now explain.”
“You really do care.” I leaned against the crumbling brick of the next smokestack over. “Short form: I went down as carefully as I could. Piyusha was already dead when I found her. There were runes painted all over her body; I took pictures with my phone. I’ll email them to you and Dad.”
“Good. Why did it take you so long to call in?”
“Oh—I got jumped by draconic servitors.” Silence. “Remember when I said I got in a fight with the Sleestaks?”
“I’m not in the habit of forgetting things like that.”
“Well, see, dragon’s blood is a mutagenic substance, and when people drink it or, I guess, get it fed to them, they turn into weird lizard-people. Hence the Sleestak attack. I don’t know if there’s a demutator, but I’d be willing to bet that there isn’t. Evolution is generally pretty good about leaving things fucked up once it fucks them.”
The sound of a heavy thump traveled through the phone as Alex sat down on his end. “You found the dragon.”
“Not yet.”
“So how do you know this?”
“Because it turns out the Covenant didn’t wipe out all the dragons. Just the male ones. Think extreme sexual dimorphism, mimicry-based camouflage, and parthenogenesis. The dragon princesses are the female of the species, and they’re sort of excited by the idea of getting their boyfriends back.”
Alex swore quietly.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Like that, but louder.”
Most people are familiar with the theory of sexual dimorphism. It’s what gives peacocks those flashy tails while the peahens look like they’ve been dipped in boring, and what makes male lions so much bigger and lazier than the lionesses. Every gendered species is sexually dimorphic to one degree or another, even if it’s as simple as “one of us has an innie, one of us has an outie.” The female spotted hyena has what really looks like a penis from any sort of a distance. Lots of reptiles are visually sexless, which is why calling your tortoise “she” is silly if you’re not a zookeeper. Other animals are
It’s unusual to find really extreme sexual dimorphism in anything bigger than a skink, but it happens. The dragons were definitely on the high end of the weirdness scale, and the parthenogenesis just upped the crazy ante. If extreme sexual dimorphism is rare in bigger animals, parthenogenesis—reproduction without access to the male of the species—is practically unheard of. Komodo dragons can do it (although since they’re Komodo dragons, they do it extra-freaky, and actually produce male offspring through what is essentially a method for self-cloning). Anything bigger than that? Not so much. But that explained why we’d never been able to figure out where the dragon princesses were coming from. They weren’t pulling the tanuki trick and mating with anything that moved. They were mating with
Anyone who thinks cryptozoology is the study of the impossible has never really taken a very good look at the so-called “natural world.” Once you get past the megamouth sharks, naked mole rats, and spotted hyenas, then the basilisks, dragons, and cuckoos just don’t seem that unreasonable. Unpleasant, yes, but unreasonable? Not really.
It took about ten minutes to finish explaining everything I’d learned from the dragon princesses, by which point the battery of my phone was on the brink of death. Emailing the pictures was going to need to wait until I got home to my charger. Alex agreed to call our parents and leave a message for them to pick up when they got back from the basilisk hunt, thus saving me from needing to go through the whole spiel twice in one afternoon. I was
