Discount Armageddon: An Incryptid Novel (9 page)

“Next time, neither will I,” he snarled, and pulled another knife from his coat, flinging it toward my chest—or at least toward the space where my chest had been. By the time the knife finished its flight, I was already over the edge of the roof, dropping like a rock into the darkness below.

A small semilegal sublet in Greenwich Village, cranky and in pain

R
ECOVERING THE HEIGHT I LOST
during my getaway would have been too much trouble, especially when I could feel the bruises forming as I ran. My left ankle was throbbing steadily, making my footing questionable at best. One of the first rules of successful free running talks about how you do it with injured ankles, wrists, knees, or hips. It’s a simple rule: don’t. It’s a good way to do permanent damage, and unless you’re being chased by a hungry wendigo, no shortcut is worth that.

I found a fire escape three blocks from home that was close enough to the ground to let me finish my descent. I made the rest of the trip on foot. It was late enough that the only people I passed were drunk, homeless, drunk
and
homeless, or in the middle of traveling from one nightclub to another. None of them gave my outfit, or the blood covering it, a second glance.

The mice had either finished their religious ceremony or moved on to one of the quieter parts of the liturgy. The apartment was silent when I came in, and stayed that way as I dug my phone from my backpack and retrieved the first aid kit from the medicine cabinet. I dropped my windbreaker in the bathtub. I didn’t know whether ahool blood was acidic, but I’d be finding out soon. There was a little blood on my skirt. I stripped it off and threw it into the tub on top of the windbreaker. Then I turned and limped back to the living room.

The couch was covered in last week’s laundry. I swept it onto the floor as I sat down, groaning a little when my bruises brushed against the cushions. Once the aching slowed, I removed my left shoe and rolled down the sock.

The damage was both better than I’d been expecting and worse than I’d been hoping; not an uncommon combination when it comes to me and injuries. I’m pretty resilient. That doesn’t mean I enjoy getting hurt, or the complications that come with it. At least it was all just surface damage; the snare had done a good job of scraping my skin through the sock, but the rope never actually touched me. I slathered the scrapes liberally in antibiotic cream, pasted on some gauze, wrapped an Ace bandage around it, and called it good. As long as I didn’t need to win any foot races or dance any Paso Dobles for the next few days, I’d be fine.

I leaned back into the couch, wincing, and snapped open my phone. If the Covenant was in Manhattan, there was only one reasonable place to call.

Home.

The story of my family winding up in a sprawling farmhouse outside of Odell, Oregon is simple, even though it takes the mice three days to tell. My great-great-grandparents left England and settled in Pennsylvania; the Covenant promptly sent a man to check on them.
The family sent him packing and moved inland, to Michigan. The Covenant sent another man to check on them. They didn’t send this one packing. Instead, my grandmother married him.

The family stayed put for a few years, largely due to issues involving a contract with a demon, an open dimensional rift, and preschool, but once the demon finished doing its thing, the survivors weren’t that keen on Michigan anymore. They moved to Oregon. According to the mice, the whole family originally lived in the house where I grew up, which was selected for reasons of geographic isolation and ease of potential defense strategies. I find that concept horrifying. Putting Dad and Aunt Jane in a room together on the holidays is bad enough. Making them share a house should have resulted in homicide. Dad went to Cleveland, met Mom, and brought her home; Aunt Jane went to Portland, met Uncle Ted, and settled down close enough to be a nuisance, yet far enough away that nobody dies.

We don’t really have a family tree at this point; it’s more like a family branch, given the way people keep getting themselves killed or sucked into alternate dimensions that may or may not be capable of supporting human life (the jury’s still out on what happened to Grandpa Thomas, although Grandma Alice insists he’s alive, and my mother raised me never to contradict anyone who regularly carries grenades).

It’s always been assumed that my siblings and I will settle in the Pacific Northwest. It’s not empty nest syndrome: it’s practicality. We’ve lost a lot of family members since Alexander and Enid Healy decided to move to America, and none of their tombstones say things like “died peacefully in her sleep” or “lived a good long life.” If we don’t stick close to home, we don’t
make
it home.

And people at school used to wonder why I laughed when they tried to tell me how weird their families were.

“
Can I help you?” That was all. No hello, no “this is the Price residence, Antimony speaking,” nothing that might encourage the person on the other end of the phone to keep talking. My baby sister wasn’t being rude; that’s how we were taught to handle unexpected callers. There was always the chance that cold call might be someone from the Covenant. Paranoia as a family tradition: it’s not a good one, but it’s ours, and we’re fond of it.

Sarah once asked why we didn’t just change our surname and go all the way into hiding, rather than screwing around with unlisted phone numbers and keeping our heads down. Sarah’s a cryptid, and the concept of not letting the bastards win wasn’t something I could explain to her. She understood hiding. What she didn’t understand was being willing to be found, as long as it was on your own turf and your own terms.

“Hey, Timmy. Is Mom there?”

“Don’t call me Timmy,” said Antimony, the words carrying the distinct stamp of reflex. “Mom’s not home.”

“Not home where? Will she be back soon?”

“Uh, no.” Antimony is three years younger than I am, but what she lacks in age, she constantly makes up for in insulting my intelligence. “Did you miss the part where there’s a big planetary alignment going on? This week is going to be one of the only times of the year where there’s half a chance in hell of getting into, y’know,
Hell
.”

I groaned. “Mom’s spelunking the Underworld with Grandma, isn’t she?”

“Mom’s spelunking the Underworld with Grandma,” Antimony confirmed.

“Crap.”

The dimensions align between six and fifteen times a year, depending on the position of the stars, whether or not the groundhog saw his shadow, and lots of other mystical crap I’ve never bothered trying to understand. When that happens, there’s an even chance my grandmother will show up demanding ammunition, additional grenades, and a shower. Thanks to the time dilation that
happens in most of the layers of the Underworld, she looks like she’s about my age, which gets a little weirder every year, and means she’ll probably still be making these little visits when the house belongs to
my
grandchildren.

My mother’s unique skills can come in handy in the various layers of the Underworld, and they’re most required when attempting to navigate the Netherworld, a confusingly named subdevelopment that Grandma Alice is convinced borders on the Christian version of Hell. She’s been trying to find her way into
that
dimension for the past twenty years. There is no cellular network that extends beyond the first three levels of the Underworld. Mom would be out of touch until she got back.

At least Grandma’s field trips were usually entertaining. But it always took weeks to get the smell of sulfur out of my hair.

“Well, if Mom’s in the Underworld, can I talk to Dad?”

Antimony paused. “Verity? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Everything. I don’t know. Is Dad there?”

“Do you need me to come out there? I can be on the next plane.”

The image of Antimony in Manhattan was enough to bring me stuttering to a horrified stop. She considers pit traps and high explosives the appropriate solution to almost every problem. There was no scenario I could envision where putting her in contact with the Covenant would improve the situation. Elevate it to explosive new heights, possibly, but improve, no.

“I’m good for right now, but I really need to talk to Dad.”

“But—”

“Dad.”

“Oh,
fine
,” said Antimony, pouring every ounce of scorn she could muster into the word. Putting a hand over the receiver, she shouted, “Dad! It’s your other daughter!”

There was a clunk as my father picked up the extension. “Thank you, Annie. You can hang up now.”

“But I want to know why she’s calling.”

“I’ll brief you later. Hang up now.” He went silent. An old trick: he was waiting for the sound of Antimony hanging up her end of the line. After a few seconds, a click signaled her doing exactly that, and he said, sounding only a little concerned, “Now what’s this about, Very?”

“What makes you think I’m not calling to bask in the loving warmth of my family?” Silence greeted the question. I laughed, more from exhaustion than anything else, and said, “Okay, you win. Dad, do we know anything about a ‘De Luca’ family?”

“Covenant, Spanish branch, joined up about three hundred years after the Healys,” he said, without hesitation. One advantage to having a history nut for a father: if it’s ever encroached on the supernatural world, he probably knows its pedigree. “The last recorded encounter with a member of the family was your great-grandmother, Fran, when she met Jacinta De Luca during a routine sweep of the naga breeding grounds outside Albuquerque. Jacinta was in the process of destroying several nests when—”

“Dad?”

“—she was located, and requests that she—”

“
Dad
!”

“—stop were met with—what?”

One disadvantage to having a history nut for a father: sometimes it’s hard to keep him focused on what’s actually going on. “That’s not the last recorded encounter.”

“What do you mean?” I could practically hear him frowning. “It’s in her diary, and since there’s no mention in any of the volumes since then—”

“The last recorded encounter happened about a half an hour ago, on a rooftop in Manhattan, between Verity Price and Dominic De Luca.”

Silence.

“He
was setting rooftop snares on my route. He may still be setting snares, although if he’s smart, he’s gone home to lick his wounds and write ‘here be dragons’ on his subway map. He killed an ahool! In
my
city! It wasn’t doing anything wrong! I mean, eventually, sure, but it hadn’t been given the chance!”

More silence.

“I didn’t kill him.”

“Well, thank God for that. Did he ID you?”

“Afraid so,” I said, leaning farther back on the couch. “I lost my temper. It’s hard to remember to play the innocent bystander when you’re hanging by one ankle a couple hundred feet above street level.”

“Did he tell you what he was doing there?”