Discount Armageddon: An Incryptid Novel (35 page)

“Wait—what?” It was difficult to sit up straight on a mound of slippery gold jewelry with several dragon princesses aggressively cleaning and bandaging my wounds. Somehow I managed. Blame it on the shock. “A male?”

“Oh, my dear innocent poppet.” Betty smiled, Mae West turned pure predator. “Surely you didn’t think that dragons were actually
extinct
?”

For a moment I just stared at her, with dragon princesses smirking at me from all directions. This was it: the big secret that they’d
been keeping all this time, probably since the conflicts between the humans and dragons first began. Dragon princesses didn’t exist. There were just … dragons. Big dragons and little dragons, but still dragons, regardless of whether they had scales or supermodel-quality skin. One species.

Betty smirked along with the others, clearly waiting for my expression of surprise and dismay. I settled back on the bed of gold, letting the dragon princesses around me go back to cleaning my wounds. “So what, you’re saying is this is a case of extreme sexual dimorphism combined with parthenogenetic reproduction? That’s a new one.”

The dragon princesses stared at me.

I sighed. “Trained cryptozoologist, remember? God, it’s like you put on one pair of five-inch heels and everyone forgets you have a brain. The tango is hard, people. It takes actual intelligence to do it right.”

“Regardless,” said Betty, recovering her equilibrium with admirable speed. She put a hand on her hip, taking a slinky step toward me. For a woman her age, she sure knew how to move. “You owe us, you and your family, and we don’t take kindly to debts. This is your chance to pay them off. You’re going to find us the male.”

“That was already the goal.” The dragon princesses who’d been working on bandaging my various scrapes and scratches were done, or close enough that I no longer felt like I was in danger of bleeding all over everything. I pulled away from them, tugging my shirt back into a semblance of order before I stood. “If there’s a dragon in this city—sorry, a
male
dragon—then I need to find him before whoever’s been sacrificing virgins in his name manages to wake him up. But since you’ve made it clear that you’ve got a pretty good reason to be interested in how this turns out, I’ll make you a deal. Tell me everything you know that might help me find him without getting eaten.”

“And what, you’ll remember us in your prayers each night? I’m
sorry, but we prefer to work in more concrete coinage.” Betty waved a hand, indicating the heaps of gold cluttering the room. “Interior décor this nice doesn’t come cheap, sweetheart.”

“And assuming I can find your dragon before his current keepers manage to kill him, I’ll tell you where he is,
sweetheart
.” I couldn’t match her level of poisonous sweetness—I didn’t have the practice—but I can be snide with the best of them. “Is that coinage concrete enough for you? I mean, sure, you can be a girl-band species forever, if that’s what floats your boat, but wouldn’t it be nice to shelve the parthenogenesis for a little while? I bet it’s more
fun
when there’s more than one person involved.”

Betty squared her shoulders, glaring down her nose at me. It was easy enough for her to do, since she was easily five-eight and I wasn’t wearing heels, but if it made her feel better, I wasn’t going to make a big deal of it. I looked blithely back at her, and waited.

“Fine,” she said, finally. “Candy will answer all your questions.” Candy gave her an alarmed look, and Betty repeated, “
All
your questions.”

“Actually, I have a question for you, if you don’t mind,” I said. “Did you really know my grandparents?”

Betty’s smirk returned, expression going back to the languid Mae West look she’d been wearing when I first entered the room. “That strikes me as a question you ought to be asking your grandfather. Don’t you agree?”

Before I could frame my response as something other than “He’s in another dimension, so, uh, hell, no,” she turned and sashayed out of the room, taking all the dragon princesses but Candy with her. Some people just aren’t happy unless they’re getting the last word.

There was nothing to sit on but the gold, so I moved to lean against the doorframe. Candy flounced over to the pile of
gold where first Betty, and then I, had been stationed, and sat in a huffy heap. I raised my eyebrows.

“I didn’t know anyone over the age of seventeen could pull that off,” I said. “Congratulations.”

“Shouldn’t you be asking me personal questions and demanding blood samples by now?” Candy glowered at me. “I agreed to be your guide, not your specimen, and I only said I’d do that much because Betty was pretty sure you’d follow me. Since we’re coworkers and everything.”

“You’ve never actually been friendly enough for me to bank on that relationship, but I promise not to ask for any blood samples.” I ran a hand through my hair, grimacing a little as flakes of blood came off on my fingers. “As for personal questions, I have plenty. First question: did you have any idea that there might be a dragon here in New York?”

“No.” Candy shook her head. “We gave up believing that any of the Lost Ones were going to come back for us a long time ago.” Catching the confusion in my face, she sighed and said, “The Covenant didn’t kill all the males in one go. It took time. Some of them were fast enough to grab their wives and go into hiding for at least a little while. That’s how our line got here, sometime in the sixteenth century. But even dragons die. The last male we know of passed away over three hundred years ago. We just assumed we’d have to make it on our own after that.”

“But you kept collecting the gold.”

“It’s necessary if we want to stay healthy, especially when there aren’t any males around.”

Her expression challenged me to ask what the gold was used for. Since I wasn’t looking for the cryptid Carmen Sandiego, I decided that it would be a lot kinder not to. Did I want to know? Absolutely. My father was going to give me hell when I called home and
couldn’t
tell him exactly what purpose the gold served in dragon physiology. But Candy didn’t deserve to be treated like some sort of specimen and, if we could just find the
dragon, relations with the dragon princesses were certain to improve. “Here, I went into the tunnels and found you a boyfriend” was definitely one hell of a peace offering.

“Right,” I said, nodding. I couldn’t miss the relief in her eyes when she realized that I wasn’t going to ask. Chalk one up to making the right decision. “What
can
you tell me about your biology, without going into anything too uncomfortable for you? You said that dragon blood is mutagenic—does that go for the females, too? Are there any other bodily fluids I need be watching out for?”

“You’d actually have to drink the blood for it to have any effect on you and, even then, it won’t work if there’s gold in your system,” said Candy. “Just swallow some gold flakes before you go anywhere near where you think he is, and you’ll be okay. Our blood doesn’t work the way the males’ blood does.”

“Swallow gold. Got it.” The idea of chugging an entire bottle of Goldschläger before I went back into the sewers was appealing, if somewhat impractical. “Can I, uh, get some gold before I go?”

Candy’s lips tightened with obvious reluctance before she nodded. “I can get you a bottle of gold dust, but whatever you don’t use, you’ll have to give back.”

“Deal.”

“There’s nothing you really need to be afraid of but the blood. Oh, and the fire-breathing—but he won’t do that until he wakes up, so unless he thinks you’re a threat, it shouldn’t be a problem.”

“… right,” I said. “Is he likely to wake up pissed off? And how do I keep him from perceiving me as a threat?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never actually met a
boy
before.” There was a wistful note in her voice.

That made me pause. What must it have been like to grow up as a member of a species that only had one gender? Worse, that only had one gender and knew that it was originally supposed to have two? “Are you mammals?” I
blurted, summing up all the questions about loneliness and sexual frustration in three seemingly nonsensical words.

Candy seemed to understand the intent. She smiled a little, and said, “Not really. We think—I mean, the Nest-mothers think, after talking about it for a really long time—that we started out as a sort of dinosaur. We’re warm-blooded, and we have a lot of mammalian traits, but most of them are window dressing.”

“Like those praying mantises that look like flowers.”

“Something like that, yes, only we’re not insects. We think that the more we looked like people, the better our odds of surviving to breed were, and the more we bred, the more we all started to look like people.”

“Protective coloration that doesn’t even need a dye job. Remind me to introduce you to my cousin Sarah.” They could form some sort of pseudo-human support group or something. “How long do your males live? The only records I could find about this area were from a good three or four hundred years back.”

“Awake, about a hundred and thirty years. Asleep … it’s all just stories, but some of them say that males can hibernate for hundreds and hundreds of years without getting any older. We can do it, too, but not for as long. Fifty or sixty years is about all we can manage, and even that takes a lot of preparation.”

“Gold again,” I guessed. She nodded. So much of the social behavior of dragon princesses was starting to make sense to me. “All right. Other than ‘don’t get mutated’ and ‘watch the morning breath,’ is there anything I really need to know about dealing with the male of the species? Is there anything that can help me track him down?”

“If we had an easy way of finding him, you wouldn’t be anywhere near here,” said Candy, with calm matter-of-factness. “We have no idea where he is, except ‘down.’ The servitors are probably there to protect him, and are following the orders of whoever has him. He’s going to
be hard to wake up if he isn’t finished hibernating. It isn’t seasonal, but if he isn’t prepared to be awake, he’s going to be groggy and confused.”

“How fun for me.”

“No, how dangerous for you.” She glanced down, not quite fast enough to hide the concern in her eyes. “I know you’ve been telling us for years that your family … wasn’t like the rest of the Covenant anymore, but we’ve never really believed you. I’m still not sure I believe you except that I have to if I want to have any chance of meeting the male. We’re not trained for the sort of things you are.”

“Spelunking isn’t one of my specialties,” I said, slow horror dawning as I realized what she wasn’t coming out and saying aloud. “He’s going to think I’m Covenant, isn’t he?”

“Probably.” Candy sighed, looking up again. “If you don’t talk fast, he’ll probably kill you.”

“Um, does he speak English?”

“I don’t know.”

“This gig just gets better and better,” I muttered.

Candy shrugged. “It probably beats waiting tables,” she offered. “At least this way you get to loot the bodies of the snake cultists.”

“I’m not much of a looter, but thanks.” I raked my fingers through my blood-stiff hair, and sighed. “Maybe I can find a really big tranquilizer gun. With armor-piercing darts.”

“Just don’t hurt him.”

I offered her a wan smile. “Trust me, Candy, at this point? He’s really not the one I’m worried about.”