Discount Armageddon: An Incryptid Novel (31 page)

The door creaked slowly open, revealing the narrow, anxious face of a man with a pronounced family resemblance to Piyusha. They had the same dark hair, and his features were practically a masculine version of hers. “Yes?” he asked suspiciously. The door creaked a bit farther open, letting me catch the sweet smell of honey and fresh ginger wafting from his skin. He gave me a quick up-and-down glance, assessing my jeans (designer) and burgundy halter top (silk, shamelessly “borrowed” from Sarah’s closet) before reaching a decision, and saying, “I’m sorry. We’re closed.”

“Hi,” I said, offering him the sweetest smile I could muster. “You must be one of Piyusha’s brothers. I’m Verity. I realize you’re probably busy, but this will only take a few minutes, and I really need to talk to her. Is there any way you could get her for me?”

The man’s expression froze. “Verity Price?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “
Piyusha may have mentioned that I dropped by—?”

“Yes, she did,” he said, expression still not wavering. Opening the door fully, he stepped to one side and asked, “Won’t you come inside?”

“Thanks.” I stepped into the darkened café, flashing him another smile as I went. He didn’t return it.

As soon as I was past the threshold an arm reached out from the space behind the door, locking itself around my neck and hauling me backward. It was surprising enough that I didn’t fight immediately. I felt myself pressed against the chest of a second, shorter man. He smelled less like honey, and more like a mixture of cinnamon and ginger. That was something. At least if this turned into a serious fight, I’d know where to aim my kicks—even if I couldn’t see to tell them apart, I’d be able to smell the difference.

The door swung shut. “Now,” said the man who’d let me inside in the first place. “You’re going to tell us what you’ve done with our sister.”

Intelligent cryptids come in two major types: loners, like the cuckoos and the gorgons—most of whom would be perfectly happy if the rest of their species disappeared off the face of the planet—and the more social sorts, like the dragon princesses and Madhura. Social cryptids live and die by the concept of family. For many of them, that dependence on the company of their own kind is what has allowed them to survive into the modern era. That gives them a sense of family that would put my own to shame.

The Madhura with his arm hooked around my neck tightened it slightly, not quite choking me, but definitely making it a bit harder to breathe. I wasn’t that worried. He was strong enough to be an inconvenience. That didn’t
mean he had the training necessary to hold onto me once I decided I was done being held. Strength is cheap. Technique is what really counts.

Keeping my chin up and my voice calm, I said, “I haven’t done anything with Piyusha. Is there a reason you’re assuming I did?”

“Hold her, Sunil,” commanded the first man. Turning, he locked the door before walking toward me and my captor, the newly-identified Sunil. “You’re Covenant. Why should we assume anyone else was responsible?”

“I’m terribly sorry to disappoint you but, not only am I not responsible for Piyusha going wherever it is she’s gone, I’m not Covenant. I’m a Price.”

“There’s no such thing,” said Sunil, breath hot against my ear. “They’re a lie you Covenant bastards spread to make us think that some of you can be trusted. You fooled our sister. You won’t fool us. We’re nowhere so gullible.”

I was starting to get annoyed. I focused on the man in front of me. Much as I wanted to start yelling at both of them—no one calls me Covenant and gets away with it—I needed to be reasonable as long as I could. “If you want to take my wallet out and check my driver’s license, I promise you, it’ll tell you that my name is Verity Price. And no woman has
ever
voluntarily carried fake ID with a picture that ugly. What happened to Piyusha?”

“That’s what you’re going to tell us,” snapped the man in front of me, jabbing a finger at my chest. He didn’t quite make contact.

Raising my eyebrows, I asked, “Is that the best you can do? Threaten to poke me? Wow, do you not have any talent for interrogation.” I reached up with both hands—which neither of them seemed to have thought might need to be pinned—and grabbed Sunil’s arm, twisting hard. He yelled. I yanked down. In a matter of seconds, I was free, and both Madhura were staring at me like I’d suddenly demonstrated the ability to walk through walls.

“I’m
really not in the mood for games, and I have way bigger problems than the two of you,” I said sternly, producing a throwing knife from inside my shirt and holding it at a defensive angle in front of me. It’s normally a bad idea to be the first one to draw a weapon, but they had me outnumbered, and I needed to even the playing field a bit. “Does one of you want to tell me what you think I did, so we can clear this up, or do you just want to piss me off?”

“Our sister came home telling fairy tales about a Price woman and her friend from the Covenant,” spat the taller of the two men, glaring. “Twelve hours later, she was gone. Do you really think we wouldn’t put the pieces together?”

“Rochak, I think she’s serious,” said Sunil, frowning as he studied my expression. He shared the family resemblance, although his hair was a deep burnt-toast brown, rather than the black shared by his siblings, and his eyes were slightly lighter. He looked like the human incarnation of the Gingerbread Man. Assuming that you’d always pictured runaway pastry as a smoking-hot Indian dude in his mid-twenties. “No one looks that clueless when they’re lying.”

“Hey!” I yelped. “I’m blonde, but that doesn’t make me a dumb blonde.” I paused. “But I really am that clueless, at least right now. You’re telling me that Piyusha is actually gone? As in, missing, disappeared like the others, didn’t just cut out to see her boyfriend
gone
?”

“Yes,” said Sunil, gravely. “She went out for groceries and she didn’t come back. We tried calling her phone after an hour had passed. She didn’t answer. We were concerned, and started looking for her. She … there were signs of a struggle.”

“Blood?” I guessed. He nodded. “Are you sure it was hers? I mean, how could you tell?”

Sunil turned to Rochak, looking vindicated. “See? She’s serious. This is not the one who hurt our sister.”

“Why does this please you? It means we still have no idea who
did
.”
Rochak scowled at his brother before looking at me and saying, flatly, “My apologies for the accusation. You must see why you would be a reasonable suspect.”

“I do, but does someone want to tell me why you’re suddenly willing to believe me?” I lowered my throwing knife. I didn’t put it away. “Blood is blood, usually. Unless it’s not.”

“Our blood is not precisely like yours.”

“Really?” I asked, with what must have seemed like a bit too much enthusiasm. They both gave me uneasy looks. I sighed. “I’m not going to cut you open to see what
your
interesting inside bits look like. I’m just curious.”

Rochak said, uncomfortably, “Still, it is something we’d rather not discuss.”

“Have it your way.” I’d just have to let Dad know that the database entries on the Madhura needed to be updated to reflect undocumented physiological oddities. That’s the trouble with not dissecting everything you meet: so much remains a mystery. “What time did she disappear?”

“She left for the store a little before ten o’clock last night,” said Sunil. “We became concerned when she didn’t come home or call by eleven.”

I breathed out a silent sigh of relief. Dominic hadn’t been responsible. He’d been at my house well before that, and he hadn’t left until sometime after eleven-thirty. Piyusha probably wouldn’t have shared my relief—whether she’d been taken by the Covenant or taken by crazy people who wanted to sacrifice her to a sleeping dragon, she’d still been taken—but at least I knew I hadn’t led death to her front door. Not directly.

If I warned her brothers about Dominic, they might decide that I really had been responsible for Piyusha’s disappearance. If I didn’t, and he came back here on his own, they’d be completely unprepared. Either way, I was taking a risk.

Only one of those risks stood a chance of leading me to the dragon. If I didn’t find the dragon before Dominic did, an entire species might go extinct. Mustering the most sincere “I’m here to help” expression I could, I asked, “Can you show me where you found the blood?”

Sunil and Rochak led me out the back door of the café and down the street to a tiny hole-in-the-wall bodega. There was a faded sign propped in the window, advertising a two-for-one sale on canned tomatoes, and a milk crate of sad-looking apples was doing double duty as a doorstop. “Here,” said Sunil, indicating a reddish smear on the wall next to the bodega’s window. It looked more like thickened sap than blood. I leaned closer, and the overpowering sweetness of it hit me. It was like pine resin mixed with molasses, with only the slightest hint of copper to confirm the mammalian origins of the one who’d lost it.

“We knew it was dangerous to let her go out alone, but she said she felt perfectly safe; she said nothing would touch her with a Price this close.” The accusation in Rochak’s eyes was impossible to bear. I focused my attention on the bloodstain instead, trying to pretend I knew anything about blood splatter analysis that hadn’t been learned from watching reruns of
Dexter
. “I suppose she was incorrect.”

“Guess so,” I mumbled. Glancing to Sunil, I asked, “Did she make it into the bodega?”

He nodded. “The clerk said that she had been in and out right around ten. That she was in good spirits.”

Neither one of us was going to mention the fact that the clerk might have been the last one to speak to Piyusha before she was grabbed, hauled underground, and sacrificed to a giant sleeping lizard that really couldn’t have cared less. “So we have a window on when she went missing. That’s something at least.” I straightened,
moving back until I could no longer smell the cloyingly sugary scent of Piyusha’s blood. “Thank you for showing me this. I’ll look for her, and if I find anything—”

“You won’t,” said Rochak, quietly.

“Maybe not, but you’ll still be the first to know.” I shrugged. “It’s all I can offer. Stay together. If you have any other sisters, don’t let them go to the store by themselves.”

“You’ll really look for her?” asked Sunil.

I nodded. “I really will.”

“How do we know that we can trust you?” asked Rochak.

“You don’t. But right now, I think I’m about the best chance your sister’s got.” All three of us looked at the smear on the wall. None of us said anything after that. No one really needed to.

Things that I am: impulsive, foolhardy, occasionally too convinced of my own invulnerability. Things that I am not: completely stupid. After I bid Piyusha’s brothers good-bye, I scaled the nearest fire escape, got myself back up to rooftop level, and pulled out my cell phone. Leaning against the side of an ornately-carved gargoyle (after first checking to make sure it wasn’t a real gargoyle taking a nap), I called home. The answering machine picked up: fifteen seconds of silence followed by an ear-shattering “beep.” Another safety precaution.

“Hey, guys, it’s me. Pick up.” I waited a few seconds. No one picked up. “Come on, if you’re there, pick up.” No one picked up. I sighed deeply. “You’d better not all be dead right now. I’ll try your cells. If you don’t hear from me again, send reinforcements. With tanks, if at all possible.” I hung up.