Discount Armageddon

Twenty-two

The roof of Dave’s Fish and Strips, a club for discerning gentlemen, only ten minutes late for work

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 pissed when she didn’t show, especially since we’d all been figuring you’d be out. Candy already gouged him for a promise of overtime.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.” I turned to Ryan. “You need to go to Carol’s apartment. You need to leave right now, and you need to go as fast as you can.”

“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 your head against the wall?”

“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?”

“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 and has a job that brings her regularly into contact with the public. They may have started with the ones who lived outside human society, but they’re getting more central, and Dave’s…” I paused in the doorway, scanning the club floor. I could see half a dozen cryptids from where I stood without really making an effort, and that didn’t include any of the staff. I shook my head. “Dave’s is like an all-you-can-kill buffet.”

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 would your mother say?” His voice hadn’t moved once while he was speaking, but he was suddenly in front of me, gray-skinned face leering from the border of the blackness. It was a classic bogeyman trick; while they can’t actually teleport or anything like that, they can control where their voices come from to a degree that any human ventriloquist would kill for. That’s how they can be everywhere at once when they sneak into your bedroom in the middle of the night—vaudeville and chicanery.

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 prepared. I jumped, taking a quick step backward and almost falling over my own feet in the process.

Dave smirked slowly. “Is that guilty conscience making you uneasy? Ashamed that someone finally found the purchase price for a Price?”

“Fuck you,” I said flatly. “Are you done being a dick? I need to talk to you, and unless you fired me while I wasn’t looking, I have the right to demand my manager’s attention.”

“Why in the world would I fire you when you’re such a source of amusement?” Dave’s face vanished back into the shadows. A few seconds later the darks clicked off, filling the tiny office with dusty light. Dave was seated behind his desk, looking for all the world like he hadn’t moved in days. His sunglasses were even in place. “Come in, Verity. Tell me what’s so important that you had to leave the floor in the middle of your shift.”

“Carol’s been attacked.”

It was hard to tell if Dave’s expression changed at all. His tone certainly didn’t. “Is that why she didn’t come in this evening? I was wondering. Was it a mugging, or a home invasion?”

“Home invasion by snake cult, actually, and she’s fine, thanks so much for asking.” I slapped a hand down flat on his desk. “Cryptid girls have been disappearing all over this city—”

“I know.”

“—and I know you know about it, because you … wait, what did you say?”

“I said I know. Given that you just accused me of exactly that, I don’t understand quite why you look so surprised.” Dave settled back in his chair. “Whatever’s been going on hasn’t been involving my staff, so I haven’t really seen the need to concern myself with it.”

“Did you not once think that I might have wanted to know?”

“Did you not once think that I might believe you were behind it?”

I stopped, gaping at him. “You’re not serious.”

“True enough, I’m not, but you should see the look on your face right now.” Dave shook his head. “You don’t pay me for information, Verity. You could have come to me at any point and offered an exchange. Money, gossip, you dancing on my stage, I would have taken any of those. You never offered, and so neither did I.”

“You knew I was looking into the disappearances.”

“Yes, and I also knew that you were laying traps for the Covenant boy, but you didn’t feel the need to keep me updated on your progress, now, did you?” Scowling now, Dave leaned forward and drummed his simian fingers against the desk. “You can’t go through life expecting something for nothing, whether or not you believe that you’re on the ‘right side.’ The right side is the one that pays for the tools it needs.”

The urge to punch him in the nose warred with the urge to punch myself. I knew he was a bogeyman when I took the job, and much as I hated to think it, he was at least partially right. The first question any bogeyman asks when you ask him for help is “What’s in it for me?”

“Fine,” I said, after taking a deep breath. “You want to trade information?”

“Why, my dear Verity,” he said, scowl turning into an expression of predatory anticipation. “I was starting to think you’d never ask.”

Trading information with a bogeyman is difficult under the best of circumstances. Since gossip is their primary currency, they’ll not only try to get as much as possible while giving as little as they can get away with, they’ll leave things out. Little things, like the number of wendigo reported in a neighborhood or the exact species of the basilisks in question. It’s the little things that can get you killed.

Explaining how I was so sure there was a dragon under the city without telling him about Sarah was difficult, but not impossible. People mostly ignore the existence of cuckoos even when leaving them out of something causes it to stop making any actual sense. I just said I’d been “reasonably suspicious” after talking to Piyusha, and that I’d been able to find a write-up on the Sleestaks in one of Dad’s bestiaries. I didn’t tell him about the mutagenic properties of dragon blood, or that the servitors were originally humans. That was a piece of information that might be valuable, but was also dangerous; there were cryptids who would happily spike the city water supply and live off bottled water for a year if it meant turning the entire human population into lizards. As a part of the human population, I didn’t feel it was my job to encourage that sort of thing.

I told him about finding Piyusha’s body, and how the symbols confirmed that there was a snake cult trying to wake the dragon. After a momentary pause, I continued with an explanation of what had happened at Candy’s. I left out everything I’d learned about the actual relationship between the dragon princesses and the dragons. It was a valuable piece of information. It was something everyone had been wondering for centuries. And it was none of his goddamn business.

When I finished, Dave looked at me thoughtfully, and asked, “You took pictures of the symbols on her body?”

“I did. I’ve been able to translate a few of them, and I mailed all the pictures to my family for further translation. I should know what kind of ritual they’re trying to perform by tomorrow.” How many cryptid girls was that going to be too late for? The thought was enough to turn my stomach, but there was no way to avoid it.

“I don’t suppose you brought me copies.”

“I didn’t know it was your birthday.”

“Ah, well; perhaps later.” Dave drummed his fingers against the desk again. “I knew about the snake cult. They’re largely human businessmen, with a few more gullible cryptids thrown in to make them seem more legitimate. I wasn’t aware that their interests involved feeding my cocktail waitresses to a sleeping dragon. It seems like a rather frivolous waste of a cocktail waitress.”

“I’m sure the cocktail waitresses would agree.” Shaking him to get him to tell me what I needed to know would be satisfying, but it wouldn’t help as much as I wanted it to. “What else do you know about the cult?”

“That they weren’t trying to summon a snake god, despite being a snake cult, which struck me as odd when I first heard it. I assure you, this is the first time the word ‘dragon’ has come up in conjunction with their activities. Are you truly sure?”

“Dave, do you honestly think I’d be claiming something the size of Metallica’s tour bus was under the city if I wasn’t sure? Especially when it’s something that’s supposedly been extinct for centuries? It’s a real dragon, I’m absolutely certain, and the assholes want it awake and doing their bidding. I want to stop them. Now, where are they?”

“I don’t know.” Catching the sudden darkness in my eyes, Dave raised his hands, palms out, and protested, “I don’t! If I knew, I’d tell you. You’ve got enough credit, and hell, you think I want these people chopping up the staff? Kitty’s going to be back from her tour any day now. I let my sister’s kid get sliced and diced, I’m a dead man walking—and that doesn’t get into the cost of training replacements for all my girls. I honestly don’t know, Verity.”

I could argue with him, or I could let it go. At the end of the day, arguing with him was just going to make him less likely to do what I was about to ask. “Fine. But since I just gave you a whole bunch of really good information, and you’re not giving me anything I didn’t already know, I get to ask you for a favor.”

Dave’s brief-lived smile faded, replaced by a wounded pout. “Confirmation wasn’t good enough for you?”

“Not this time. I need you to close down for the night, and stay closed until we’ve managed to stop this snake cult. It shouldn’t take long. We’re closing in on the dragon’s location, and now that I have copies of their runes, Dad should hopefully be able to tell me something useful about the rituals they’re likely to be using to conceal themselves.”

“What the hell do you want me to do that for?”

“Until you do, everyone here is basically just walking around with a giant target painted on top of the tacky uniform!” I pointed toward the door. “They already went after Carol. What’s going to stop them from following the rest of the girls home? I need time to stop this, Dave, and I need to do it without being constantly worried that my coworkers are about to become Sacrifice McNuggets.”

“Fine,” said Dave, looking disgusted. “I’ll close for the night, and we can discuss whether I’ll be staying closed for the rest of the week. The week! No longer than that. I have a business to run here, and I’m not going to go bankrupt because of some stupid snake cult.”

“Thanks, Dave.” I flashed a quick smile in his direction. “Do you want me to help you clear the club?”

“I’ll just have somebody pull the fire alarm. That’ll clear things out fast enough, and it’s better than giving people a reason to talk shit about the health inspector closing us down.” Dave adjusted his sunglasses. “Now get out of here and go save the world, will you? All this talking with no nudity is giving me a headache.”

“I’m on it.” I turned and left the office. The darks clicked on before I was three steps down the hall, and shadows thick as tar pooled across the floor once more. I kept walking. That was my second mistake … and by that point, although I didn’t really know it yet, I was just about out of leeway.