Discount Armageddon
Page 44
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I saw Dominic get into his cab. I didn’t see where it went. I was too busy giving directions to my own driver, and planning out just what I’d tell my father. Hopefully, “Daddy, I found you a dragon” would be a bigger deal than “Daddy, I went into the sewers with a member of the Covenant and got attacked by killer lizard-men.” Hopefully. Personally, I wasn’t placing any bets.
My taxi pulled into midafternoon Manhattan traffic. I relaxed as best I could as we rattled over potholes and swerved to avoid tourists. If the past six hours had been anything to go by, this was the last break I was going to get for a while. And I still had to go to work.
Cries of exultation greeted my key turning in the lock. I opened the front door to find the entire Aeslin congregation gathered on and around the tiny table where I kept the mail. Several of them were waving tiny banners made of tissue paper that had been meticulously painted with drops of blue, black, and red ink.
“Hail!” shouted the head priest, waving his banner with extra enthusiasm.
“HAIL!” agreed the congregation.
“Hail,” I said tiredly, and shut the door. “What’s the occasion?”
“Today is the Holy Feast of I Swear, Daddy, I’ll Kiss the Next Man That Walks Through That Door,” said the priest, sparking a second, more solemn declaration of “Hail” from the rest of the mice.
“Cool.” I started for the living room. The mice scampered after me, still waving their banners wildly in all directions. Aeslin religious rituals are nothing if not enthusiastic. “Do I need to do anything?”
One of the novice priests looked at me like she wasn’t sure whether or not I was joking. “Priestess…”
“Right, right. I have to kiss the next man who walks through the door, right?” Cheers from the mice, interspersed with more cries of “Hail.” “Got it. At least I’m not expecting company.” I dropped my dance bag on the couch, looking toward the bedroom, where my computer was. Check email, or call home? Which was more pressing?
The odds that Dad was going to insist on coming when I called were high. The odds that he’d bring Alex and Antimony were lower, but still good enough to make me less than happy. There might, however, be something in my email that I could use to mollify him, like reports from a reliable source indicating a giant Gila monster or something living under the city. Anything but a dragon.
The mice had returned to their vigil at the door, having deduced that I wasn’t going to kiss anyone immediately. Occasional cries of “Hail” broke the silence, muted enough to be reduced to the level of background noise. Things like this were a perfect illustration of why Alex was my date to my Junior Prom, and why I never brought any of the boys from my dance classes home.
Not any of the human boys, at any rate.
I swung by the fridge on my way to the computer, nabbing a can of generic diet ginger ale and the Styrofoam box containing all the leftovers from my previous shift. The kitchen at Dave’s Fish and Strips isn’t particularly interested in saving the planet from the scourge of nonbiodegradable plastics, but boy, are they happy to clog your arteries.
I sat down at the computer, munching a deep-fried zucchini stick as I waited for my email to load. I maintain three different addresses—private, personal, and cryptozoological—and thanks to Artie, they all feed into the same mail reader. (He said he was doing me a favor. I think he was actually tired of Sarah bitching when I didn’t answer her mail.) When the download finished, the display at the top informed me that I had five hundred and thirty-seven new messages. I groaned. So much for making this fast.
More than half the messages were Facebook updates for Valerie, who has a lot more friends than I do—something about having been on national television upped her stock with the public. The remainder consisted primarily of spam and messages from my mailing lists. I flagged a few threads to come back to later—the reports of werewolves in Florida were starting up again, and there’d been another Bat-Boy sighting, this time at a strip mall in Boise—but shoved most of it into folders to get it out of my inbox.
Only seven messages remained by the time I was done. One was from Alex, telling me I’d better not do anything to get him sent to New York while his basilisk breeding program was still in such a delicate stage. Two were from Aunt Jane, updating me on the total lack of clues on the “what’s going on in New York” front. Her second message, sent while I was waiting to go on at the tango competition, included the information about the disappearing cryptid girls. If the gossips outside the city were picking up on it, it was definitely spreading.
As expected, the message immediately after Aunt Jane’s second email was from her son, my cousin Artie, demanding to know whether Sarah was okay. He’d clearly been worried when he sat down at his computer; two of the words were misspelled, something an enormous nerd like Artie would normally see as a crime worthy of hard time, or at least community service. He and Sarah have been sweet on each other since we were all kids. Not that she knows it’s mutual, and not that he’ll tell her. Eventually, I’m going to bang their heads together and lock them in a closet to work things out, before I’m forced to drown them both.
I fired off a response to Artie, assuring him that Sarah was fine. (I left out the part where she’d spent a chunk of the afternoon providing medical care for a member of the Covenant of St. George. There were things he didn’t need to know.) I emailed Aunt Jane next, relaying the information we got from Piyusha. I didn’t tell her about the dragon. She’d find out eventually, but I wanted to talk to Dad before I went spreading that information around.
The remaining three emails were from Dad, containing everything he’d been able to find about the history of cryptids in New York. The file attachments were large enough to make it seem like he’d emailed me an encyclopedia. I downloaded them all and started a search, looking for the word “dragon.” Maybe I’d get lucky. Maybe the search wouldn’t—
The search box blinked, indicating a hit. Heart sinking, I clicked over to the indicated file. The highlighted word was in the title of an article. “The Last Dragon?” Opening the article, I read:
Early settlers to the Island of Manhattan laughed at the local stories detailing how “the sun himself” had come to sleep beneath the island’s stone. The sun, according to the legends, was vast enough to blacken the sky, and when he walked, the very stones shook and trembled in their fear. He came cloaked in darkness, sending golden handmaids to convey his requests. He troubled not the people of the land, but still requested tribute, in exchange for all that he provided in his warmth and in his light.
My taxi pulled into midafternoon Manhattan traffic. I relaxed as best I could as we rattled over potholes and swerved to avoid tourists. If the past six hours had been anything to go by, this was the last break I was going to get for a while. And I still had to go to work.
Cries of exultation greeted my key turning in the lock. I opened the front door to find the entire Aeslin congregation gathered on and around the tiny table where I kept the mail. Several of them were waving tiny banners made of tissue paper that had been meticulously painted with drops of blue, black, and red ink.
“Hail!” shouted the head priest, waving his banner with extra enthusiasm.
“HAIL!” agreed the congregation.
“Hail,” I said tiredly, and shut the door. “What’s the occasion?”
“Today is the Holy Feast of I Swear, Daddy, I’ll Kiss the Next Man That Walks Through That Door,” said the priest, sparking a second, more solemn declaration of “Hail” from the rest of the mice.
“Cool.” I started for the living room. The mice scampered after me, still waving their banners wildly in all directions. Aeslin religious rituals are nothing if not enthusiastic. “Do I need to do anything?”
One of the novice priests looked at me like she wasn’t sure whether or not I was joking. “Priestess…”
“Right, right. I have to kiss the next man who walks through the door, right?” Cheers from the mice, interspersed with more cries of “Hail.” “Got it. At least I’m not expecting company.” I dropped my dance bag on the couch, looking toward the bedroom, where my computer was. Check email, or call home? Which was more pressing?
The odds that Dad was going to insist on coming when I called were high. The odds that he’d bring Alex and Antimony were lower, but still good enough to make me less than happy. There might, however, be something in my email that I could use to mollify him, like reports from a reliable source indicating a giant Gila monster or something living under the city. Anything but a dragon.
The mice had returned to their vigil at the door, having deduced that I wasn’t going to kiss anyone immediately. Occasional cries of “Hail” broke the silence, muted enough to be reduced to the level of background noise. Things like this were a perfect illustration of why Alex was my date to my Junior Prom, and why I never brought any of the boys from my dance classes home.
Not any of the human boys, at any rate.
I swung by the fridge on my way to the computer, nabbing a can of generic diet ginger ale and the Styrofoam box containing all the leftovers from my previous shift. The kitchen at Dave’s Fish and Strips isn’t particularly interested in saving the planet from the scourge of nonbiodegradable plastics, but boy, are they happy to clog your arteries.
I sat down at the computer, munching a deep-fried zucchini stick as I waited for my email to load. I maintain three different addresses—private, personal, and cryptozoological—and thanks to Artie, they all feed into the same mail reader. (He said he was doing me a favor. I think he was actually tired of Sarah bitching when I didn’t answer her mail.) When the download finished, the display at the top informed me that I had five hundred and thirty-seven new messages. I groaned. So much for making this fast.
More than half the messages were Facebook updates for Valerie, who has a lot more friends than I do—something about having been on national television upped her stock with the public. The remainder consisted primarily of spam and messages from my mailing lists. I flagged a few threads to come back to later—the reports of werewolves in Florida were starting up again, and there’d been another Bat-Boy sighting, this time at a strip mall in Boise—but shoved most of it into folders to get it out of my inbox.
Only seven messages remained by the time I was done. One was from Alex, telling me I’d better not do anything to get him sent to New York while his basilisk breeding program was still in such a delicate stage. Two were from Aunt Jane, updating me on the total lack of clues on the “what’s going on in New York” front. Her second message, sent while I was waiting to go on at the tango competition, included the information about the disappearing cryptid girls. If the gossips outside the city were picking up on it, it was definitely spreading.
As expected, the message immediately after Aunt Jane’s second email was from her son, my cousin Artie, demanding to know whether Sarah was okay. He’d clearly been worried when he sat down at his computer; two of the words were misspelled, something an enormous nerd like Artie would normally see as a crime worthy of hard time, or at least community service. He and Sarah have been sweet on each other since we were all kids. Not that she knows it’s mutual, and not that he’ll tell her. Eventually, I’m going to bang their heads together and lock them in a closet to work things out, before I’m forced to drown them both.
I fired off a response to Artie, assuring him that Sarah was fine. (I left out the part where she’d spent a chunk of the afternoon providing medical care for a member of the Covenant of St. George. There were things he didn’t need to know.) I emailed Aunt Jane next, relaying the information we got from Piyusha. I didn’t tell her about the dragon. She’d find out eventually, but I wanted to talk to Dad before I went spreading that information around.
The remaining three emails were from Dad, containing everything he’d been able to find about the history of cryptids in New York. The file attachments were large enough to make it seem like he’d emailed me an encyclopedia. I downloaded them all and started a search, looking for the word “dragon.” Maybe I’d get lucky. Maybe the search wouldn’t—
The search box blinked, indicating a hit. Heart sinking, I clicked over to the indicated file. The highlighted word was in the title of an article. “The Last Dragon?” Opening the article, I read:
Early settlers to the Island of Manhattan laughed at the local stories detailing how “the sun himself” had come to sleep beneath the island’s stone. The sun, according to the legends, was vast enough to blacken the sky, and when he walked, the very stones shook and trembled in their fear. He came cloaked in darkness, sending golden handmaids to convey his requests. He troubled not the people of the land, but still requested tribute, in exchange for all that he provided in his warmth and in his light.
