“If we disappear together, he’ll figure Ryan’s instincts finally got the best of him, and he’ll call it our lunch hour.” Angel pulled the dishrag out of her pocket and dropped it on the bar. “Give me five minutes to get changed and I’ll pick you up in front of the club.”
“Got it,” said Ryan. He watched Angel go before looking back to me. “Very, I really hope you’re wrong about this.”
“Trust me,” I said grimly. “So do I.”
Twenty minutes passed without word from Ryan and Angel. I worked five tables, avoided being kicked in the head by an overenthusiastic pole-dancer, and picked up about half my usual tips. Worry made it difficult to focus on flirting enough to get paid for it without crossing the line into coming off like I offered cocktails off a “special” menu. (Technically, Dave’s had a special menu. It just involved slime, blood, and other unmentionable fluids, rather than cheap sex in the employee break room.)
I was making my fifth round with the cleanup tray when my phone started ringing. I promptly dug it out of my apron pocket, shifting the tray to my dominant hand as I wedged the phone between my ear and shoulder. “Hello?”
“Verity?” Ryan’s voice was low and gravelly, and further distorted by the static of a bad connection. “Are you there?”
“Ryan!” I began beating a rapid retreat toward the bar, ignoring the people who were trying to flag me down. One of them flipped me off when I blew past his table without slowing. I made a mental note to fuck up his drink order at least once before the end of my shift. “Where are you? Is Carol okay?”
“She’s shaken, but she’s not really hurt. You were right about the snake cult coming to get her.”
I sagged against the bar, dropping my tray atop it with a loud clatter. Angel’s temporary replacement shot me a sour look. I showed him the gesture our beloved patron had so recently shown to me. “They came? But she’s okay?”
“She is. Two of them aren’t. Guess her hair really does bite.”
“Oh, Jesus.” I closed my eyes for a moment, letting my shoulders relax. “You should get her out of there. What’s the address? I have someone I can send for the bodies.” Gingerbread Pudding was in the phone book. If Piyusha’s brothers wanted me to go bobbing for corpses, they could return the favor. Call it the first step toward justice: these were some of the men responsible for the death of their sister, after all.
“She’s pretty damn rattled. I’ll be back in about an hour; I’m going to get Carol and Angel set up at my place.” Ryan’s growl came through clearly, despite the static. “If any snake cultists want to try breaking into my home, they’ll be sorry.”
The defenses a pissed-off tanuki can throw up around his den rival the ones Antimony throws up around her bedroom. Ryan was right: Carol and Angel would be safe at his place, at least for the moment. “Just give me the address. I’ll let Dave know that Angel won’t be back tonight, and why.”
“Great.” Ryan rattled off an address uptown. It was reasonably close to Gingerbread Pudding, which was a relief; at least I wasn’t going to be asking a pair of Madhura to tote the bodies very far.
“Thanks.” I hung up, only to immediately dial Sarah’s number.
The phone rang just long enough that I was beginning to worry about the fact that I’d run off and left my cousin alone with a member of the Covenant. Cuckoos are great hiders, but she didn’t really have any natural defenses once she’d been spotted. I was starting to wonder what Artie would do to me if I’d managed to get Sarah killed when the phone was picked up, and she said, half-laughing, “Hi, Verity! We were just talking about you.”
The mice were cheering in the background, probably because they’d just revealed some horribly embarrassing personal secret to Dominic. I let out a sigh of relief. “Sarah. Hi. Can you put Dominic on the phone?”
“You called me to talk to him? Way to make a girl feel loved, Very-Very.”
“I’m serious. I don’t have his number, and I need him to go look at a couple of corpses.”
Sarah went quiet, leaving only the cheers of the mice to serve as counterpoint to the club’s thumping bass line. “You’re serious, aren’t you?” she asked finally, voice hushed.
“Yeah, I am. The snake cult went after Carol from work.” One of the passing bachelor party boys gave me a funny look. Given that he’d just been leering at a stripper with a tail, I really didn’t see where he got off. I showed him my middle finger. He showed me his. Vital cultural exchange completed, he walked away.
“The gorgon?”
“That’s the one. She’s not hurt, but two of the cultists are dead, and I figure Dominic may be able to figure out some more about their MO by looking them over.”
“I’ll put him on,” said Sarah, still hushed.
“I’ll be here.” I straightened up and started for the break room while I was waiting for her to pass the phone. If I could avoid any further “cultural exchanges” with our customers, I might also be able to avoid getting fired for another week.
I was halfway to the employee door when Dominic came on the line, asking, “Where are the bodies?”
“It’s always business with you, isn’t it?”
“As a rule, yes.”
“Well, right now, that’s a good thing. Do you have something to write with?”
“Yes.”
I rattled off the address to Carol’s place without hesitation. If the cultists knew where she lived, she was already compromised; one member of the Covenant of St. George wasn’t going to make that much of a difference. “Call Gingerbread Pudding, get Sunil and Rochak to help you. You should probably take the bodies back to the café, since they have more room and probably a much bigger freezer. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“What are you going to do in the meantime?”
“I’m going to go and explain to my boss why he needs to shut down the club until we find the snake cult. This is the second cryptid woman I know of who’s been attacked
The darks were on in Dave’s office, spilling through the open door to fill the hall with an almost physical weight. Approaching the doorway was like wading into pools of tar that had no substance, only darkness deep enough to swallow all the light in the world. “Dave?” I called. “Are you in there?”
“Very, Very, quite contrary.” His voice drifted from the dark, sounding more suited to an ancient tomb—curse optional—than the manager’s office of a strip club. “How does your garden grow, I wonder? I wasn’t sure we’d be seeing you around here again, given what the streets are saying.”
“And what’s that?” I held my position, not moving any closer to the too-solid darkness. I wasn’t angry enough for that much bravado, and something about the sound of Dave’s voice was putting my nerves more on edge than they already were. He liked his horror host turned pornographer routine, but he normally dropped it within the first few words.
“That you’ve changed sides, my pretty little dandelion flower. That you’ve been running the rooftops and searching the sewers with our intrepid young man from the Covenant of St. George, and that perhaps—just perhaps—your motives can’t be trusted.”
“Cut the crap, Dave,” I snapped. “You were the one who didn’t tell us he was in town, remember? I didn’t invite him here, and you didn’t send out the bulletin on his location until after he’d already caught me.”
“But I’m not the one who took him into her home, Verity Price, nor the one who brought him to the home of an innocent family of Madhura. What
I learned about the kind of crap bogeymen like to pull when I was still in elementary school. I should have been braced. But Dave, for all his asshole tendencies, had never done anything like that before, and I wasn’t
