The Patient Priestess was their name for my great-great-grandmother, Enid Healy, who belonged to the Covenant of St. George, once upon a time, before she and her husband wised up, quit, and moved to America. According to the mice, she was a really awesome lady. I wish I’d had the opportunity to meet her, but, well. My family isn’t exactly the “live long and die peacefully in your bed” sort. She was killed a long time before my parents were born.
“That’s okay,” I said, crouching down to put myself more on the acolyte’s level. “I can talk to him when the catechism is over. Have you been to this recitation before?”
“No, Priestess,” said the acolyte, with obvious reverence. “I am very excited by the knowledge that this will be a night filled with Revelations and Enlightenments.”
My family’s colony of Aeslin have so many religious rituals at this point that even the supposedly yearly rites don’t actually come around on a yearly basis anymore. There was a ten-year gap between recitations of the Catechism of the Violent Priestess—my great-grandmother, Frances Healy. Then again, that may have been because Mom yelled at the mice about the property damage every time they performed those particular devotions.
At least the revelations and enlightenments offered by Enid’s life story weren’t as likely to hurt the apartment’s security deposit. The Sasquatch I was subletting from probably wouldn’t take “but the mice had religious needs” as much of an excuse.
Crap. I needed to call her answering service and tell her that there might be a purge coming. If I died trying to stop it, she could come home to a very, very bad situation. Considering I’d been living out of her apartment for almost a year, that didn’t seem fair.
“Well, if you see the Head Priest before the services begin, and he doesn’t look too busy, can you let him know that I’ll be coming to see him sometime around dawn?”
“Yes, Priestess,” said the acolyte.
“Cool. Thanks.” I straightened, picking up my backpack in the process. “I’ll be back later. Don’t burn down the apartment.”
The small audience of previously unnoticed mice that had come to watch with rapt attention as I spoke to the acolyte suddenly cheered. Loudly. “HAIL THE COMMITMENT TO NOT IGNITE THE DOMICILE!”
“Uh, yeah,” I agreed. “No fire.”
“HAIL THE ABSENCE OF FIRE!”
“I’ll just be going now,” I said, and fled, before the mice could launch fully into some sort of ritualized fire-safety lesson. Sometimes being one of the holy figures of my own personal church was more trouble than it was worth.
Dominic didn’t pick up when I called his cell phone. I didn’t have his home number, assuming he even had one; I’d never seen the place where he lived. He could have been emulating Sarah, and just moving from hotel to hotel, keeping a roof over his head without tying himself to a permanent address. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like I’d been deluding myself all along. There was no way he’d ever really trusted me.
Still, I needed to put that aside, at least for right now, and figure out how I was going to deal with the very real threat of a Covenant purge. I broke into a run as I pushed my phone deep into the front pocket of my jeans, building to a full-out sprint. I needed to find Dominic. I needed to start warning people. And there was nothing saying I couldn’t combine the two.
Gravity took over once I stepped off the edge of the roof, and I was able to push other concerns aside in favor of the pressing need to keep myself from splashing on the pavement. That’s one of the nice things about free-running; it’s very distracting when I need it to be. I’m focused enough on my surroundings that I can usually avoid things that present an actual danger, like pissed-off cryptids or booby-traps, but I don’t need to think about my faltering dance career, or the fact that the man I’d been starting to think about as maybe being my boyfriend wasn’t really boyfriend material, or the upcoming Covenant purge. All I have to think about is the run.
My first destination was a little café called Gingerbread Pudding. Going there wouldn’t help me find Dominic. It wouldhelp me begin the process of warning the city’s cryptids that they needed to keep their heads down and maybe consider taking that California vacation they’d been dreaming about. I was telling the truth when I told Dominic that there was no way I could evacuate the entire city. That didn’t mean I had to leave the people I considered my friends unprepared for what was coming.
Letting go of the last rooftop between me and my destination, I dropped down, into the dark beyond.
The hours posted outside of the Gingerbread Pudding storefront said that they were open until nine PM, and a cheery sign in the window told me to come back tomorrow for fresh sweets and the best hot chocolate in New York. I can testify to the quality of both the baked goods and the hot drinks, but coming back tomorrow wasn’t an option. I banged on the door. Politely. When five minutes passed without anyone coming to let me in, I banged again, impolitely this time.
“Hey!” I half-whispered, half-shouted, pressing my mouth up to the crack in the door. “Sunil! Rochak! Come let me in, I need to talk to you!”
I was starting to consider breaking and entering when I heard the bolt on the door being undone, and the door swung soundlessly open, revealing a smoking-hot Indian man in his mid-twenties. Note that the word “human” was nowhere in that sentence. Sunil was a Madhura, a type of humanoid cryptid. His skin was a rich, medium brown, and his hair was a few shades darker, distinguishable from black only because his brother, Rochak, had hair that was even darker. Their sister Piyusha’s coloring had been somewhere in-between, with lighter brown eyes like Sunil’s and true black hair like Rochak’s.
Piyusha had been sacrificed by the snake cult that was trying to wake the dragon sleeping under the city. I tried to save her. I hadn’t been fast enough. There were reasons I thought warning her brothers about the coming purge was really the least that I could do.
Sunil didn’t look surprised to see me. “It’s late,” he said.
“I know. I’m as diurnal as you are, but this is sort of an emergency. Did I wake you? Can I come in?”
“No, you didn’t wake me, and yes, you can come in. Rochak is in the café kitchen heating up some gingerbread.” Sunil stepped to one side, waving for me to enter. I did, blinking at him.
“Were you expecting me?”
“Yes,” said Dominic. I snapped my head around so fast it made my ears ring. He was standing in the doorway to the private dining alcove, a festively-decorated little nook with a single table and no windows opening on the outside. That was how I’d been able to miss the light. “I was hoping you’d come here after you finished calling your family. Did you convey my regards to your father?”
“Not this time,” I said. Sunil closed the door behind me, pulling the shade a little tighter. I barely noticed. My attention was focused on Dominic. “Why are you here?”
“Because I knew you would come.” He smiled a little, indicating Sunil with one hand. “You are a deeply infuriating woman, but you’re also a dependable one. I knew you’d start by warning your friends. The dragons will panic. Then they will demand explanations and protection, all of which will take a great deal of time. You were going to begin either here or with your cousin.”
“And she can wait,” I said softly. “Dominic . . .”
“Why don’t you go sit down?” asked Sunil. “I’ll help Rochak in the kitchen.” He looked uncomfortable, maybe because very few cryptids who’ve seen a one-on-one meeting between a Price and a member of the Covenant have walked away unwounded.
“Thanks, Sunil,” I said. He flashed me a smile, and left.
Dominic, meanwhile, gestured for me to follow him into the dining nook. He’d clearly been there for a while; a half-empty cup of hot cocoa was sitting in front of one seat, and his duster was hanging from a hook on the wall. He didn’t say anything as he sat, picked up his cup, and looked at me.