dumped her. I’d show you, but my battery’s dead.”
“What are you intending to do with the pictures?”
“I’m going to go home, plug my phone in, and mail them to my father so he can try to figure out what the hell they are.” I sighed. “While I’m at it, I should call Sarah and tell her not to set Covenant assassins on my tail every time I fail to show up for roll call. And then I get to go and tell Piyusha’s brothers that I found their sister, but not in the sense they were hoping I would.”
“I’ll come with you.” Dominic smiled, very slightly. It wasn’t a happy expression. “If she was targeted for talking to us, her death is my fault as much as it is yours. Oh, don’t look so surprised, Verity—I can see that you’re blaming yourself for what happened to her, and if you’re to blame, so am I. I should be there.”
“I … thanks, Dominic. That means a lot to me. Besides, you should probably see these pictures. I have a feeling your resources may be more useful than mine when it comes to figuring out what these symbols mean.”
“True,” he agreed. “I just have to request one favor, in exchange for access to whatever I can obtain from the Covenant records.”
I blinked. “What’s that?”
He hesitated before giving me an almost bashful look, and asking, “Can we please take a taxi?”
We were far enough from my apartment that a compromise wasn’t really an option: if Dominic took a cab, he’d beat me home by at least twenty minutes and, even though I was substantially more beaten up than he was, he wasn’t even willing to consider the overland route. It wasn’t that he was uncomfortable on rooftops. He just really, really didn’t like the idea of jumping off them on purpose. In the end, it was time to swallow my dislike of New York City cabs and descend to street level in order to get a ride home.
At least he picked up the tab without being asked. And he turned out to be a pretty decent tipper. Always an attractive trait in a man, even one who thinks half my friends and a large number of my relatives need to be exterminated.
The mice were nowhere in evidence when we got upstairs, although the signs of their bacchanal were everywhere, if you knew what to look for. Feathers, dried flowers, and brightly colored scraps of paper were scattered around the living room floor. A tidy pile of cheese rinds and Hostess Snack Cake wrappers surrounded the base of the kitchen trash can. Dominic raised his eyebrows when he saw that. I had to smile, if only because the reaction was so understandable.
“They try to make things easy on me when they have a big bash,” I said. Taking the broom from behind the door, I swept the refuse into a dustpan and shook it into the trash. “See? All tidied up. If they weren’t considerate about things, I’d be cleaning for hours before I could even get the vacuum.”
“You are very strange,” observed Dominic.
“You have no idea.” I put the broom back where it belonged and crossed to the desk. My phone beeped with electronic satisfaction when I connected it to the charger. “Give me just a minute to send the pictures to myself, and I should be able to show you what Piyusha looked like when I found her.”
“Would you be able to locate her body again if we returned to the sewer?”
I cast a look over my shoulder, replying, “I can find the place her body was; whether it’s still going to be there is anybody’s guess. I sort of got run out of there by servitors, and I don’t know whether they were just passing through, protecting the body, or planning to treat it as some sort of all-you-can-eat buffet. Why?”
“I thought her brothers might appreciate her return. I’m not sure what, if any, funeral rites the Madhura practice, but most thinking creatures would find the opportunity to make the decision on their own … comforting.” He shook his head. “I don’t understand how you can be so relaxed about such things.”
“What, you mean the idea of the servitors eating Piyusha’s body?” I shrugged as I turned back to the desk. My phone was powered up, even though it was still charging; I hooked it to the USB transfer cable and started copying over the pictures. “I’m just as confused by your ability to be so relaxed about killing people like her, so I guess we’re even. If the servitors eat her remains, it’s because that’s what they’re designed to do. You can’t blame them for doing what they’re made for.”
“What makes you so sure that humans weren’t made to exterminate the cryptids from the face of this world?”
The question sounded entirely sincere. That didn’t make it any less aggravating. Gritting my teeth, I continued copying pictures and asked, “How can you be so sure that we were? Maybe we’re here to keep them from exterminating each other, provide some ecological balance to the place. You know. Mediate.”
“I think you’re being unrealistic.”
“And I think you’re being an asshole, and since we already had this fight once, can we
The pictures of Piyusha’s body began popping up on my screen. They’d come out about as badly as I feared, managing to be overexposed and too dark at the same time, but the runes were sufficiently darker than her skin that they still stood out. Dominic hissed through his teeth as he moved to crouch next to my chair, tapping the screen with a fingertip.
“Can you expand this?”
“Sure.” I moved the magnifier tool over the indicated area, clicking twice. “Artie made me learn how to do this when he got tired of updating my Facebook page. He’ll be thrilled to hear that it had real-world applications that didn’t have to do with airbrushing wardrobe malfunctions.”
“Who’s Artie?”
“My cousin,” I replied thoughtlessly, and winced. “Crap. Can you not ask these things? I really don’t want to explain to my parents how the Covenant got a full dossier on us again.”
“The Covenant still doesn’t know anything about you,” said Dominic. Before I could ask what that meant, he tapped the screen again and said, “This symbol. Have you ever seen it before?”
I squinted. Between the picture quality and the magnification, it was difficult to make out any details. “I don’t think so,” I said finally. “I’ve always been more into the practical sides of the job. I never really did much research in the ritual symbolism.”
“I’m reasonably sure that’s a Burushaski symbol meaning ‘control,’ and I recognize a few of the others—they all seem to mean the same things. ‘Control’ and ‘wake’ and ‘obey.’ This is a crazy mix of languages. I’m really not sure what you could hope to accomplish with this assortment.”
“How about waking up something that no one’s seen in a couple of hundred years?” I brought up another of the pictures, trying to focus on the symbols drawn across Piyusha’s belly, rather than the angry red wound bisecting her chest. “This one, I do recognize. It’s a standard piece of snake cult iconography. It means, essentially, ‘feeding time.’”
“I thought you said you didn’t handle ritual symbolism.”
“I have an uncle.” (Naga wouldn’t mind being called an uncle under the circumstances, and he was the family go-to guy for anything involving snake cults, largely because he was frequently their target. It was just that explaining why I had an extradimensional professor of demonic studies as an honorary uncle would take too long— especially since the uncle in question was a giant snake from the waist down.) “Plus, my father talks a lot.”
“For someone who dislikes talking about her family, you certainly do it a lot.”
“What can I say? Corpses make me chatty, and not entirely in the good way. It’s not like you’re filling in the gaps, you know. What about your family? Dad says you’re generational Covenant.”
“My parents are dead.” The statement was made without any real emotion. It was simply a fact, something that couldn’t be changed. “They were hunting a hydra when I was young. They didn’t return.”
“I … I’m sorry.”
“It was a very long time ago. I continued my training, so as to do what they had wanted of me. What was expected of me.” He hesitated before adding, “I had never met a sentient cryptid before coming here.”
A lot was starting to make sense. I pulled up my webmail account, attaching the pictures and shooting them off to one of the family’s blind accounts. Even if Dominic saw the address, he’d never be able to use it to backtrack
