Discount Armageddon

anything important. Maybe I was being paranoid; I liked to think of it as being sensible. “Can I send you copies of these? I really do want you to check them against your records.”

“Here; let me.” He looked relieved at the change of topic, and leaned across me to type his email address into the “To” field. My cheeks flared red as his arms brushed against mine. I delivered a swift but firm internal slap to my hormones. No, Verity. Bad Verity. Giving in to the raw hotness of the Covenant boy once was bad enough. Doing it a second time would show a serious lack of judgment, as well as a definite failure of self-control.

Knowing exactly what he looked like under that shirt and duster wasn’t helping matters. It says something about what passes for “normal” when I’m around that the pictures of the dead girl on my computer screen weren’t doing anything to dampen my desire to jump his bones. They weren’t helping it, either, but they weren’t enough to kill the mood in and of themselves.

Dominic clicked the send button and pulled back. “There.”

“Thanks,” I said lamely. “You’ll let me know if you find anything?”

“I will.” He hesitated, eyes fixing on mine. “Verity—”

Someone started hammering on the front door of the apartment, about half a second before the telepathic static clicked on inside my head, telling me that “someone” was “my cousin,” who I’d forgotten to call. “Crap, it’s Sarah,” I said, knocking Dominic to the side as I scrambled from my chair.

Sarah had her hand raised to start hammering again when I opened the door. At first, she didn’t say anything. She just let her hand drop, and looked at me.

“Sarah, I’m sorry. I lost track of the time.”

Her eyes narrowed, frostbite seeming to spread around the edges of her irises. I took an involuntary step backward. For Sarah’s eyes to be whiting out like that, she had to be pissed. “I thought you were dead,” she said, in a clipped, tightly controlled tone that was belied by the wave of telepathic fury that underscored it. “You disappear right after fucking a boy from the Covenant, you’re not in any of the usual places, no one’s seen you anywhere, and then one of the gargoyles tells me he saw you going back into the sewers alone. You couldn’t even tell me where you were going?” You scared the living shit out of me, and what is he doing here, anyway? I thought you were done with that asshole after he explained his platform on racial cleansing!

The transition from spoken word to telepathic scolding was so smooth I barely noticed it at first, until I saw how much the white had spread across her eyes. “Sarah, you need to calm down. I’m fine. I’m sorry I scared you. I really didn’t mean to.”

You didn’t think! You never think! She stormed into the apartment, which was something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it meant I could close the door, thus sparing the neighbors our little family drama. On the other hand, it meant I was shutting myself in the apartment with a pissed-off cuckoo and a man from the Covenant. Not the sort of combination that inspires many funny anecdotes. A few cautionary tales, maybe, but nothing you can really go repeating in mixed company.

“Miss Zellaby.” Dominic straightened up, offering a shallow but impeccably polite bow in Sarah’s direction. “A pleasure to see you again.”

Sarah turned her narrow-eyed gaze on him, making me glad once more that Antimony’s comic books got it wrong, and telepaths can’t actually kill you with their brains. Give you a whopping headache and earworm you with annoying jingles, yes; kill you, no. (Although sometimes, when she’s managed to stick “The Happy Banana Song” in my head for a week, I sort of wish she could kill people with her brain. It would be kinder.)

What are you doing here? she demanded.

He didn’t respond. He couldn’t. Without spending a lot more time around her, there was no way he’d be attuned enough to actually “hear” her when she thought at him like that.

The white rimming Sarah’s eyes started to fade, replaced by a look of sheer frustration. “What are you doing here?” she repeated, out loud this time.

“You were the one that alerted me to your cousin’s absence, if you’ll take a moment to remember,” he said mildly. “I went looking for her because I shared your concern, and assumed you’d like her returned to you with as many of her original limbs as possible.”

The white fled Sarah’s eyes completely, leaving her chagrined and a little embarrassed. “Oh,” she said. “I did call you, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did.”

“I shouldn’t have had to.” She stalked over and smacked me solidly on the shoulder.

I yelped. “Hey!”

“Don’t you hey me! Why didn’t you call? You know you’re supposed to call before you go running off to your certain death!”

“I don’t remember that rule.” I rubbed my shoulder. Sarah doesn’t hit hard, but she has an unerring gift for hitting squarely atop any preexisting bruises you might happen to have. “I’m pretty sure I’d need a better cell plan if that was actually a rule, because I’d be making a lot of phone calls. Besides, your note said you were going to class. I didn’t want to interrupt you in the middle of algebra.”

“Probability theory,” corrected Sarah sharply, “and next time you’d damn well better interrupt me, or I’m telling.”

“Who are you going to tell? Alex knew where I was going. Mom and Dad would’ve known, except they’re off chasing basilisks, which is arguably even dumber than going into the sewers where the servitors are. I mean, all the servitors will do is bite me and maybe haul me back to the dragon for mutation. The basilisk will turn me into a piece of lousy garden statuary.”

“I am oddly less reassured than I believe you intended me to be.”

“And I find myself in the somewhat uncomfortable position of agreeing with a nonhuman,” Dominic said, frowning. “Mutation does not strike me as being a desirable or laughable consequence.”

“Oh! That reminds me.” I dug the jar of gold dust out of my pocket and held it up, giving it a little shake to make the powder swirl like the world’s most expensive snow globe. “The dragon princesses said that eating gold will keep us from being mutated.”

“… why does this statement not seem even slightly unreasonable or insane?” asked Dominic. “Something has gone terribly wrong with the world.”

Sarah patted him reassuringly on the arm. “Welcome to life with Verity. Just wait. Soon she’ll have you thinking that three-inch heels are suitable for combat situations.”

“Unlikely,” said Dominic.

“But funny,” I added. “Besides, you have the legs to pull it off. Not many men do. Anyway, Dominic, I know you’re planning to go down there again, and Sarah, I’m hitting the point of ‘better safe than sorry.’ So who wants a gold smoothie?”

“Can I have mine with ketchup?” asked Sarah.

Twenty-one

“Most of the time, there isn’t time to adjust to whatever’s going on before you have to deal with it. Life in our world is very sink or swim, and that’s for the best. If you can’t survive in the deep end, you should get out before you drown.”

–Alice Healy

Drinking the world’s most expensive milkshakes, the kitchen of a semilegal sublet in Greenwich Village, soon to be late for work

THE PERFECT RECIPE FOR GOLD MILKSHAKES turns out to be two tablespoons of gold dust to two scoops of vanilla ice cream, a cup of vanilla soy milk, and either a sizable quantity of Hershey’s Syrup (if you’re a reasonably normal human being) or a quarter-cup of leftover chunky Prego with mushrooms (if you’re a cuckoo). Sarah was kind enough to let me make the human-style milkshakes first, since past experience has taught us that preparing one of her milkshakes leaves the blender looking like the site of a particularly nasty massacre.