Discount Armageddon
Page 63

“I promise not to break the china,” I said. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because we need to know what you know.” Candy opened the door. The sound of distant voices and children laughing drifted into the alley. “What you found out is the first good news we’ve had in centuries, and we’re not letting you run off and get slaughtered by servitors until we’re sure we know everything.”
“Mercenary to the last,” I said dryly, and followed her inside.
The building had started life as a slaughterhouse, and didn’t appear to have changed much since. The alley door led into what had once been the holding pen for sheep or cattle; the floor was concrete, with spilled-wine bloodstains worked deep into the stone. A few of the low holding walls were gone, replaced by empty space. Overhead, the walkways and management offices hung in the gloom like spiderwebs, gray and sterile. The light was uniformly low, and an air of decay hung over the entire place, like no one had been there for years.
Candy caught sight of my face and bit back what looked like laughter before taking hold of my wrist and tugging me after her. “Just because we can’t do magic, that doesn’t mean we can’t pay for it,” she said. “We have a good relationship with the hidebehinds. It helps.”
“This is a glamour?” I asked, looking at my surroundings with renewed interest.
“And obviously a damn good one. I’ll have to tell Betty we got our money’s worth.” She took one more step forward, still pulling me in her wake, and the gloom burst around us like a soap bubble.
Everything changed.
The basic architecture of the building only shifted slightly—it was still mostly one big open room—but the last of the slaughterhouse tools vanished, taking the animal pens and the suspicious stains with them. A well-worn carpet pieced together from scraps and sample sale rejects suddenly covered the concrete, looking like the world’s largest quilting project. Lights came on in the rooms above and over the walkways, and the sound of voices was everywhere, coming from the dozens on dozens of women who filled the building. They were all unreasonably pretty. Most were blonde, but I saw a few redheads, brunettes, and even one with hair so black she could have made Goths weep.
And then there was the gold. There was no furniture; instead, there was gold. Where I would have expected chairs, beautiful women sat or lounged on heaps of piled-up jewelry, mixed coins, and even a few gold bars. Where I would have expected couches, more women did the same on larger heaps of precious metal. At the center of the room was a mound of gold that must have been nearly eighteen feet high and fifty feet around, covered in dragon princesses. Not all of them were adults, either. Golden-haired little girls chased each other in circles or sat quietly on the piles of gold, each of them as beautiful as their … what? Mothers, sisters, aunts? There was so much we didn’t know about the biology of dragon princesses—where they came from, how they reproduced, how long they lived. I was going where no cryptozoologist had gone before, and I didn’t even have a notebook.
“Dad’s gonna kill me,” I muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Candy eyed me suspiciously. “Come on. Betty wants to see you as soon as possible.”
“And Betty would be…?” It was a little late to be asking questions, especially with more and more of the dragon princesses taking notice of our arrival. Better late than never.
“She’s our Nest-mother,” said Candy, like it should have been self-explanatory. “Come on.”
I went.
Candy led me past the central mound of gold to the stairs leading to the overhead catwalks. We acquired a small procession as we walked, other dragon princesses stopping whatever they’d been doing before as they came to follow us. Most of them didn’t look friendly. I was probably the first non-cryptid to set foot in their Nest since it was established, and my presence represented a potential danger. Candy’s face was set in an expression of resolute neutrality. Looking at her, I realized what a risk she was taking in believing me. If I’d been lying about the dragon, she could have been in serious trouble—and so could I. Good thing for both of us that I wasn’t lying, even if it wasn’t necessarily a good thing for the city as a whole.
A door labeled “Manager” in old-fashioned gilt lettering stood at the head of the stairs. “Behave,” hissed Candy, and knocked.
“You may enter.” The voice from behind the door managed to be ancient and alluring at the same time, like an aging Mae West turning on the sex appeal one last time before shuffling off to the retirement home.
Candy opened the door, and I followed her inside.
The downstairs had given me a pretty good idea of the dragon princess aesthetic where interior decorating was concerned: why waste money on furniture when it could be used to buy perfectly good gold? This room was no different. Gold in every possible form was mounded high against the walls, and flakes of gold leaf covered the floor, some of it still attached to pages ripped from antique books. It was a good thing my father wasn’t there. Seeing books that old and valuable treated so poorly might have been enough to convince him that dragon princesses weren’t harmless after all.
The décor only held my attention for a few seconds before I found more important things to focus on, like the woman in front of us, who had to be the oldest dragon princess I’d ever seen. She appeared to be a well-preserved seventy, the kind of seventy that had done everything—and everyone—before retiring to a comfortable villa in the country. Her dress looked like it was made from real gold thread, and she was lying on a tangled pile of gold chains easily three feet tall. Time had bleached her hair white-gold, but it had done nothing to reduce the sharpness of her sapphire-colored eyes.
“So,” she said, in that Mae West voice. “You must be the new Healy girl.”
“We’re Price girls now, actually,” I said. “Have been for a couple of generations. I’m Verity Price. Nice to meet you.”
“Betty Smith.” She looked me appraisingly up and down. “I always forget about that little intermarriage. You do look frighteningly like your grandmother, you know, especially with all of that blood in your hair. There’s never been a Healy girl who didn’t look fabulous in red, which is a good thing; you spend so damn much time wearing it.”