Discount Armageddon
Page 49

“Ten minutes,” said Candy sternly to Carol, and left the room, heading for the stairway to the roof.
Carol turned back to the mirror, her reflected lips mouthing the words “good luck” as she went back to stuffing snakes beneath her wig. I rolled my eyes beseechingly toward Heaven, and followed Candy out of the room.
Candy beat me to the roof by almost a minute—a minute I was sure she’d carefully deducted from my promised ten. She was more than ten feet from the door when I reached the top of the stairs. She raised her hand, saying sharply, “Stay there.”
I raised an eyebrow, letting the door swing shut behind me. “You mean, stay here by the door?” Candy nodded. “You know, it’s harder to keep secrets really secret when I have to shout them at you. Can you at least come a little bit closer?”
Candy narrowed her eyes. “How do I know you’re not planning to throw me off this roof?”
I bit back the urge to groan. “Because if I was going to kill you, I’d just shoot you, okay? Gravity is not my weapon of choice. Look, the deal’s off if you don’t come close enough for me to tell you what I came here to tell you. So you’ll have come up here for nothing.”
That, at least, got through to her. Candy took several grudging steps forward, until she was still out of arm’s reach, but at least close enough for me to talk to without shouting.
“Thank you,” I said. Forcing my body language to remain as nonthreatening as possible, I asked, “Candice, have you ever heard anything—anything at all—to indicate that the dragons aren’t really extinct?”
She reeled back as if I’d just hauled off and punched her in the face. When she focused again, it was to give me a look of such fury that I felt a little bit punched. “Is that why you brought me up here?” she demanded. “To make fun of me? What, cable isn’t enough for you people, you have to find other ways to entertain yourselves? That’s swell of you. That’s just plain swell.”
“Candy, we think we may have found a dragon.”
She froze. Literally froze, dewy blue eyes gone so wide that I could see the whites all the way around her irises. I didn’t think she was breathing.
“We weren’t looking for it, exactly, but I have access to a telepath, and she says—”
“Where?” asked Candy. Her voice was barely a whisper, and mostly ripped away by the wind, but I recognized the shape of it on her lips. She took three long, runway-perfect steps forward and grabbed me by the shoulders, succeeding in shaking me twice before the surprise wore off and I pulled myself away. “Where? Don’t you keep this from me, don’t you dare, and if you’re lying, I swear, if you’re lying—”
“Candy, calm down!” I shook my head, holding up my hands defensively. “I only just found out, okay? I haven’t been keeping anything from you. Anyway, we think there may be a dragon sleeping somewhere under the island, and we think it’s connected to the recent disappearances.”
Her eyes widened again—with anger, this time. “What, so you’re blaming the dragon? Is that why you wanted to talk to me? You’re looking for bait?”
“What? No! I’m blaming the disappearances on humans, some sort of snake cult, probably, trying to wake the dragon up the way they’d summon a snake god.” I let my hands drop back down to my sides. “If there is a dragon, I want to protect it. I want to prove that it’s not the source of the trouble we’ve been having recently. And I wanted the Nest to know as soon as possible, because this affects you.”
“More than you know,” she said bitterly. Shaking her head, she asked, “So what do you want from me?”
“I want you to go to the Nest. I want you to tell them what we’ve found, and that I’m trying to find a way for you to get to the dragon. If there’s anything that might tell me where to start looking, anything at all, I need to know.”
Candy studied my face, tilting her head slightly to the side as she asked, “Why should we tell you? Why shouldn’t we just go looking on our own?”
“Two reasons. First off, if there’s some sort of snake cult in town making virgin sacrifices, they probably already know how to get to the dragon. I’m sure they’d look at you and the Nest as a perfect virgin buffet.”
Candy blanched. “And the second reason?”
“I went down into the sewers earlier today, looking for clues.” I decided not to mention the fact that Dominic had gone down with me. That seemed like a little bit too much for Candy’s nerves. “I got jumped by a bunch of lizard-dudes I’d never seen before. It was like The Land of the Lost down there. Unless you’re sure they’d be happy to see you, you probably need some sort of—” I stopped midsentence. Candy had gone pale and started to shake, suddenly looking like she was on the verge of tears. “Candy? What’s wrong?”
“There’s a dragon,” she whispered. “There’s definitely a dragon, and somebody’s hurting him. They have to be hurting him if they’re making servitors. Oh, Verity!” My name came out as a wail, and she was suddenly doing something I would never have expected in my wildest dreams: she threw her arms around my shoulders, burying her face against my chest. “We have to find him!”
I patted her awkwardly on the back. “Don’t worry,” I said, as confidently as I could. “We will.”
Apparently, “I may have found you a dragon” counted as big enough news that Candy didn’t make me pay her for going up to the roof with me. Good thing, too—at a hundred dollars for ten minutes, I would have been borrowing money from Ryan just to pay off my debt to Candy. Never owe money to a dragon princess. Their interest rates are murder.
As for the pressing question of the night, namely—“What’s a servitor?”—Candy was willing to answer it in detail. Too much detail. After providing a vivid installment of Things I Never Wanted To Know Theater, Candy promised to speak with the rest of the Nest about the dragon and call me with anything they knew, and went back inside to finish her shift. I watched her go, then went racing back across the rooftops to my apartment. Her surprise had been genuine—I was certain of that—and with what I’d just learned, I needed to check in sooner rather than later.
No one was picking up at the house. That wasn’t a surprise, considering they’d left for the basilisk hunt not that long before, but I still said several words we’re supposed to be careful about using in front of the mice as I hung up. General cheering greeted my profanity, along with a few ecstatic mentions of the Feast of Washing Out Mouths With Soap. I didn’t have the energy to tell them to keep it down. If the mice wanted to have a party, let ’em. I had bigger—much, much bigger, as in “dragon-sized”—fish to fry.