Discount Armageddon

There was no response from my cuckoo cousin. Whatever was standing between us, it was distracting enough that she wasn’t bothering to talk to me anymore. Cultists were running everywhere, and Candy was shouting in the sibilant language of the dragons. It was impossible from my position to tell whether it was doing her any good—but since she was still shouting, rather than screaming while they ripped her to pieces, I was willing to say that it wasn’t doing her any harm.

Shouts rang down the corridor connecting the dragon’s chamber to the room where Istas and I had been brought first, and several of the cultists that fled in that direction came running back like their robes were on fire. I bucked against my straps … and actually slipped upward about an inch. All the blood Betty poured on me before Candy shot her was working like a lubricant, making my skin slippery and making it easier to move against the leather. No one seemed to be coming after me for the moment; I guess with Candy shooting at people and a couple of corpses on the floor, I seemed like the least of their worries. Flexing my feet as hard as I could, I began pulling my legs free.

* * *

Working my legs out of the straps was surprisingly easy, now that I was covered in gore and no longer actively worried about being sliced up and offered to a sleeping dragon. I yanked them loose, paused to take a breath, and dug my heels into the base of the gurney, starting to pull myself downward. The blood-slick metal beneath me offered little resistance to the movement. “Amateurs,” I muttered, and twisted my head to the side, slipping it under the strap that had been fastened originally across my shoulders.

With my head free, things got much easier. The band across my chest was loose enough to let me get my hands unpinned, and then it was just a matter of fighting the blood-soaked buckles on the sides of the straps until they came loose. Any inmate in an eighteenth-century asylum would have been able to do it easily. I had a bit more trouble, but compared to what I’d already done, it was a cakewalk.

I slid off the gurney, almost stepping on Betty before I managed to get my balance back. The fight was still staying mostly on the other side of the cavern, so I paused to do the sensible thing: looting the dead. Between Betty’s unfashionable brown robe, the gun she’d been carrying, and the knife originally held by the cultist Istas took down, I was slightly better prepared to fight my way out of the sewers.

Betty’s gun still had three bullets. If I needed them, that would have to be enough.

Istas was sprawled where she’d fallen, still in her hulking canine shape. I crouched next to her, feeling the side of her neck for a pulse. It was steady. I slid my hand down to her chest, where the bullets had hit her; there was very little blood. She might be in shock, but thanks to her physiology, she wasn’t in danger of dying. “I am so asking you to let me give you a physical when we both get out of here alive,” I said. Istas didn’t answer.

I stood, scanning the room for an idea of the direction we’d need to flee in. There were several tunnels leading in and out; presumably, at least one of them would lead to the surface. The servitors were focusing their attentions on Candy. Wiping the worst of the blood from the soles of my feet onto the dead cultist’s robe, I took off running in her direction.

“Verity! On the left!”

I spun without hesitating, shooting the cultist who’d been charging me squarely in the chest. Two bullets left. His eyes widened in surprise, and he fell, momentum carrying him past me to land in a crumpled heap on the floor. It wasn’t until after he’d stopped moving that I realized who’d warned me—Sarah—and that the warning had been verbal, not telepathic. Eyes wide, I turned.

Dominic De Luca was standing at the entrance to the room, flinging knives at cultists with clinical precision. Those he wasn’t impaling had problems of their own, in the form of Ryan, who’d abandoned his human shape for something a hell of a lot more intimidating: a seven-foot-tall raccoon-man with talons longer than most kitchen knives, really sharp teeth, and the ability to block attacks by turning parts of his body into stone. Those were some cultists who were having a seriously lousy day.

Sarah was standing behind Dominic, her eyes so white that at this distance they seemed to glow. One of the servitors charged at the pair while Dominic was throwing a knife in the opposite direction, and she raised her hand, palm-out. The servitor promptly froze.

“What the—”

He can’t remember how his muscles work. I can’t hold him for long. Now go help Candy!

“On it,” I said, and took off running, slowing only to shoot a servitor before he could smash a lead pipe into the side of Ryan’s head. Candy was still shouting, her commands starting to take on a pleading, terrified note. I kept running toward her, elbowing a cultist in the throat and vaulting over two bodies before plunging into the knot of servitors surrounding her. Several of them were on the ground, bleeding from a variety of inexpertly placed bullet wounds. Three had moved to stand between Candy and the others, hissing and clicking furiously. Those had to be the ones she’d talked around to her side. Four others were trying to claw past them to get to her.

“I am so fucking tired of fighting with Sleestaks,” I grumbled. I only had one bullet left. I aimed at the nearest servitor, fired, threw the gun aside, and charged.

We were making a lot of noise. Between the screaming, the shooting, the rending, and the tearing, we were getting close to loud enough to wake the dead. Since that isn’t actually possible without some very complicated ritual magic, we managed to achieve the next best thing. One of the servitors went down with a final, ear-splitting shriek after I stabbed it in the neck, and then the Voice of God—or at least the Voice of James Earl Jones as God—came rumbling out of the darkness, so deep it seemed to shake the ground beneath our feet:

“What is going on here?”

The servitor that had been attacking me hissed and cringed back, posture turning subservient. Candy stopped shouting, the gun slipping from her hand to clatter to the ground as she stared with wide eyes into the space behind me. I turned.

The dragon looked at me.

“Oh,” I said faintly. “Hey, Candy, guess what? I found the dragon, and he speaks English.”

Candy whimpered.

Twenty-five

“The greatest joy is the joy of discovery. Followed closely by the joy of a discovery that doesn’t kill you.”

–Enid Healy

Somewhere below the streets of Manhattan, hoping dragons don’t usually wake up cranky

THE DRAGON’S EYES WERE a luminous pumpkin orange, like giant jack-o-lanterns burning in the face of the largest lizard the world has ever seen. He was still mostly prone, but his head was raised like the head of a snake getting ready to strike. The few remaining cultists cheered, apparently thinking he’d finally woken up at their command, and would now be happy to do their bidding. I wasn’t completely sure they were wrong.

“You!” One of the cultists ran forward, pointing imperiously toward me and Candy as she addressed the dragon. “Destroy these infidels!”

The dragon looked down at the cultist before turning those jack-o-lantern eyes back on the two of us. Sarah and Dominic were still near the door, and Ryan was kneeling next to Istas, trying to get her to wake up. As a fellow therianthrope, he probably had a better idea of what she needed than anybody else in the room. No one moved to attack anyone else; all of us were waiting to see what the dragon would do.

The dragon lifted one enormous hand and slammed it down on the cultist, smashing her the way I might squash a bug. There was a long pause as everyone considered this. Then the remaining cultists went back to screaming and running away. Candy stepped around me and broke into a run of her own—but unlike the cultists,