you?”
“I’m not sure what time I’ll be able to get out of my shift; feel free to just head back to the apartment. Sarah will either ignore you completely or kick your ass at chess, and either way, she’ll be happy to keep you busy until I get home.” I thrust my bag of gingerbread at him. “Take this with you. To the apartment, not into the sewers, if you can help it. The fastest way to the hearts of my mice is through their tiny, overactive stomachs.”
“I’ll take it to your apartment before I descend,” he said. “You’re sure you’ll be all right?”
“I’m a Price girl, remember? We’re like the antithesis of damsels in distress. Besides, I’m spending the evening at a strip club, waiting on drunk businessmen and frat boys who don’t know how to pick a watering hole.” I flashed a smile. “I’ll not only be perfectly safe, I may get paid for breaking a few fingers.”
“Good,” he said, and kissed me again. It was a gesture that was becoming pleasantly familiar. He was getting seriously better at it, too. I’d be happy to help him get a lot more practice. “I intend to hold you to that.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said flippantly. “I’m the bad thing that happens to other people.”
Sometimes I think the universe listens for lines like that one, so that it can punish the people who use them. At that particular moment in time, standing in a smelly, deserted alley with a hot Covenant boy and two bags full of the world’s best gingerbread, I found it difficult to care.
That was my first mistake.
Twenty-two
“Never tell anyone to be careful, never ask what that noise was, and for the love of God, never, ever say that you’ll be right back.”
I HIT THE ROOF OF THE STRIP CLUB at a speed that probably qualified me for the free running Olympic trials. I slowed myself down by using the lip around the edge of the roof as a sort of high-speed balance beam, finally hopping down when I was sure I wouldn’t twist an ankle doing it. All the muscles in my legs were complaining in that happy “feeling the burn” way that meant I’d be able to get through my shift without feeling the need to shove my foot up someone’s ass, largely because I wouldn’t feel like lifting my feet that far off the floor. The rooftop door was unlocked. I opened it and went inside.
Candy and Istas were in the locker room when I arrived. Istas stood in front of the mirror making the final adjustments to her coquettish pigtails. Watching a waheela try to play the Gothic Lolita is so wrong on so many levels that I immediately skipped to Candy, who was involved in the much less worrisome process of applying sparkly pink lip gloss. “Hey, guys,” I said, heading for my locker. “Sorry I’m late.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Candy, flashing me a quick, stiff-looking smile. Guess Mae West told her to play nice.
Istas grunted. All things considered, that was probably the friendlier and more sincere of the greetings. Waheela are solitary creatures, coming into the company of others only when they absolutely have to, for things like reproduction and paying the cable bill. I’ve never been able to figure out what evolutionary advantage they got from being able to turn into humanoid bipeds, since their default big-ass wolf-bear shapes—or, as I like to call them, “please God don’t eat me”—are a lot better suited to their natural habitat in Northern Canada. In her human form, Istas was a cute and curvy Inuit girl with slightly too-sharp teeth and a tendency to talk to people’s jugulars. If she was just grunting, not attacking, she was in a good mood.
“Carol already on the floor?” I hooked open my locker, pulling out my uniform top before hauling my shirt off over my head.
“She called in sick,” said Candy.
I paused in the process of unfastening my jeans. As far as I knew, Carol was unmarried, and lived alone. “Did she actually call in, or did she just not show up?”
Candy shrugged to show her total lack of concern for such nonfinancial niceties. Swearing under my breath, I went back to getting changed. Dave didn’t like the waitresses to appear in the club out of uniform (he said it sent a mixed message; I was pretty sure he just hated not being able to see our tits), and I needed to go into the club if I wanted to find Ryan. He took his duties as bouncer and protector of us girls seriously. I was hoping that would extend to pulling Carol’s emergency contact information and heading over to check on her. Just in case. If she was really sick, she’d probably appreciate some chicken soup and maybe some pinkie mice for her hair. If she wasn’t…
I already felt lousy for going to work while Dominic—a man from the Covenant, for God’s sake—retrieved Piyusha’s body from its resting place beneath the city streets. If Carol had been taken because I didn’t think to warn her about the goddamn snake cult, I was never going to forgive myself.
Twisting my hair roughly into a tangled bun, I secured it with a hair pick that could double as a stiletto and went stomping toward the front of the club. Time to dispatch the tanuki.
Ryan was exactly where I expected him to be this early in the evening: standing by the register chatting with Angel, who was wiping down the bar and trying to hear him over the thumping bass of the current dancer’s personal soundtrack. She saw me coming before Ryan did. Tucking the rag into her pocket, she straightened up and looked at me anxiously. Once I was in earshot, she asked, “Well, Very? What’s the news?”
“Verity!” Ryan smiled, displaying outsized canines. They were at half-mast; he was in good control of his therianthropy, which was a good thing if I was about to send him looking for Carol. “I wasn’t sure you were going to come in tonight. Candy was saying you’d been out to visit the Nest today.”
I paused to eye his expression. He looked sincere—no surprise there, Ryan always looked sincere—and like he had no idea that a dragon princess wouldn’t just decide to have a Price girl over on a social call. Pushing my misgivings aside, I said, “It’s been one hell of a week, and it’s not getting any better. In the locker room, Candy said Carol was out sick tonight. Do you know if she actually called in to say she wouldn’t be coming?”
“She didn’t,” said Angel. “Dave was
“That’s what I was afraid of.” I turned to Ryan. “You need to go to Carol’s apartment. You need to leave
“What’s going on?”
“You know how cryptid girls have been disappearing? Well, there’s a snake cult under the city, and I’m pretty sure they’re sacrificing them to a dragon in order to try waking it up. Not that it cares, since, well, dragons, not all that into the eating of sentient creatures and are you two even listening to me or are you too busy staring like I just grew a second head?” I touched my shoulder automatically. No extra head greeted me. After the week I’d been having, that was something of a relief.
“Dragons are extinct, Verity,” said Ryan.
“And humans don’t fraternize with cryptids, but there’s Angel, and here I am, and somewhere under this city there are a bunch of assholes feeding cryptid girls to a sleeping dragon because they think it’s the way to achieve ultimate cosmic power. Or something like that. I don’t know—I haven’t found the snake cult yet and, when I do, they can explain themselves to me during the pauses.”
“The pauses?” asked Ryan. His canines were starting to get more pronounced. That was good. That meant that he was taking me seriously.
“I can’t beat their heads against the wall constantly, now can I? So will you go, or do I have to start beating
“I’ll drive,” said Angel. I shot her a startled look. She met it without batting an eye. “Carol’s my friend, too, and if she’s in trouble, Ryan shouldn’t be dealing with it alone.”
“Won’t Dave get pissed?”
