Discount Armageddon

seven!” The flaming figure at the DJ stand gestured assent and began jabbing fingers at my iPod, which was hopefully fireproof. If it survived this experience, I’d be sure to send a nice note to Apple about the quality of their products.

The music changed abruptly, replacing the Tamperer with the high-speed frenzy of “Hey Ya!” by Outkast. The servitors kept charging—but they were off-balance now, thrown out of their comfort zone by the sudden change in the beat. I unloaded two bullets into the lead servitor’s chest, dropping him, and swung myself hard around to slam my elbow into the second servitor’s throat. It wasn’t showing mercy; it was conserving bullets by hitting him while his equilibrium was off. He fell back, choking, and was promptly replaced by two more healthy lizard-men, both bent on ripping me to pieces.

I shot the first in the chest. The second lashed out with the lead pipe held in his tail, hitting my wrist and knocking the gun from my hand. I yelped and spun around the pole again, bringing my feet up and together to slam into the servitor’s face. He rocked back, hissing ferociously, but didn’t fall.

“Okay, time for plan B,” I muttered, before shouting, “Candy! Track eleven!” The poisonously bubbly sound of Aqua blasted from the speakers, the sudden addition of a bone-rattling bass line disorienting the servitors for the half second I needed to jump from the stage and take off running across the strip club. They followed. That was fine. I’d been looking for a reprieve, not an escape.

I spared a glance toward Candy as I ran for the wall. She was still burning brightly, her two harrying servitors hanging back and hissing at her. There was another update for the rapidly evolving file on the dragon princesses. They might not be able to create or control flame, but they could encourage it to last longer than it should have. She’d been burning long enough that the vodka should definitely have been gone. The flames didn’t seem to mind the absence of an accelerant. They were perfectly content to leap and dance around her, consuming her clothing, and showing no signs of either dying out or spreading to the rest of the club.

I vaulted over Istas as I made my way across the room, not pausing to see whether she was breathing. With no backup in the building and no clear escape route that would work for all three of us, I just had to keep fighting until she either woke up or the fight was over, one way or the other.

When I reached the wall, I grabbed the nearest limply dangling flag and began pulling myself off the ground, scrambling upward with a speed that would have impressed my free running instructors. Most of the servitors were still in hot pursuit and, to make matters worse, the ones toward the rear of the pack were starting to get fuzzy around the edges. They didn’t seem capable of staying camouflaged when they were actually attacking, but they could sneak up while I couldn’t see them. This needed to end soon, or they were going to end it for me.

I stopped halfway up the flag, wrapping one leg tight around the cloth and dangling like I was planning to audition for the next Cirque de Soleil show. I didn’t even wait to be certain that I was secure before pulling the revolvers from under my shirt and started firing into the swarm of servitors. The thunderous echoes of the gunshots blended with the relentless cheer of the blaring pop music, making it sound like some sort of really badly thought- out remix.

Two servitors went down hard. I would have been pleased by the shift in the odds, if not for the two who’d been circling Candy suddenly deciding that I was a much more dangerous target. They turned from her to join the pack that was closing in on me, leaving me with fewer bullets and just as many targets in need of gunning down. I swore, firing twice more and felling a third servitor for my troubles. The one I’d kicked in the throat picked himself up off the ground and ran to join the fight.

“Fuck,” I muttered, and took aim. This was looking bad. “Candy! Track two!” Aqua cut out, replaced by Pink. If I was going to get ripped apart, at least I wouldn’t need to be embarrassed by the song I used for my last dance. “Now get out of here! Run!”

It was hard to make out any expression on her face, veiled as it was by the crackling flames. Still, I thought I saw her nod before she turned and fled for the hallway door, leaving me with the charging servitors and the screaming wail of electric guitars.

“All right, you motherfucking lizards,” I snarled. “Let’s dance.”

I opened fire. They charged.

* * *

The thing about waheela is that they’re like the Timex watch of subarctic cryptids: they can take a licking and keep on ticking. Right about the time the remaining servitors reached the wall, driving me farther up the flag as they grabbed for my ankles with their whipcord tails, Istas sat up.

First she rubbed her jaw. Then she looked around the room, clearly bewildered. And then she saw her parasol, which had not only fallen to the floor when she did, but had landed in the path of several servitors. The lace was ripped. A large footprint marred its previously pristine surface. Istas, seeing her property treated with such an obvious lack of respect, began to growl. And then she unbuttoned her shoes.

It was almost possible to feel sorry for the servitors after that. Sure, they were creepy lizard-men trying to kill me, but they weren’t doing it voluntarily. They were men when all this craziness started—and as men, they probably never even heard of waheela, much less learned what a bad idea it was to piss one off. I shot one of them in the shoulder, and another in the tail. Then Istas stood up, balancing on the toes of her feet, and roared.

It wasn’t a sound that should ever come from a human throat, which made sense, since Istas didn’t technically have a human throat anymore. What she had was a neck that was rapidly swelling like an inner tube as her musculature tripled in mass and density. Sort of like the Incredible Hulk if Bruce Banner were a cocktail waitress instead of a rocket scientist. Several of the servitors whipped around to hiss at her. Istas roared again and then, while the echoes of her challenge were still ringing through the club, she charged.

For the servitors, it must have seemed odd in the extreme when the cute little chick in the frilly maid uniform started running toward them, howling challenge all the way. It just got odder from there. By the second step she took, she had doubled in size, shredding her stockings and splitting the seams all up and down the sides of her cute little uniform. By the third step, her clothing was falling away like so much debris, but it didn’t really matter, since her pelt was coming in, covering her body with a thick, protective layer of red-black hair. By the fourth step, she was only technically bipedal. The changes accelerated after that, as did Istas, and she slammed into the servitors in full animal form: a wolf the size of a grizzly bear, with a grizzly’s flexible paws and the furious mind of a pissed-off Gothic Lolita.

The servitors didn’t stand a chance. She slapped two of them aside like they were bowling pins, and I dropped back to the floor, putting three bullets in the head of the last one standing. Istas pursued her two across the floor, hitting them every chance she got, until they went down and didn’t get up again.

“I think they’re dead,” I said, breathing shallowly to keep from hyperventilating. One of the servitors closer to me twitched. I shot him twice in the spine. He stopped twitching. I amended, “I think they’re dead now.”

Istas growled deep in her throat, smacking a fallen servitor one last time before she turned to do a slow survey of the room. The hair along her shoulders and spine was standing on end, making her look even larger. As if she needed the help. She finished her circuit, snarled, and trotted over to me, claws audibly scratching the club floor.

“You okay?” I asked her. She shot me what could only be called an amused look. “Sorry. Reflex. Come on; let’s go find Candy. She’s not safe here on her own.”

“She’s not on her own,” said a voice from behind us.

I turned toward the hallway door, blinking in confusion. “Dave? I thought you left with the rest of the—oh, God, Dave, I am so sorry about the damages. In our defense, they were trying to kill us —wait, what?” I stopped talking as his words sank in. “Where’s Candy?”

Dave looked awkwardly at the pair of us, his long-fingered hands tucked deep into the pockets of his cheap polyester slacks. “She’s not alone,” he said. “I really am sorry about this, Verity, but business is business, and you never would have danced for me anyway.”

I took a step back, my hip brushing Istas’ shoulder. “Dave?” I said uncertainly.

“Good night, Miss Price.” He pulled his hands from his pockets and blew their contents—a sparkly white powder that I recognized from the Tooth Fairy arsenal—in our direction.

We were both unconscious before we hit the floor.