“Probably,” said Ryan. “Istas is a black hole in a lacy pinafore.”
“And other phrases that have never before been uttered.” I stabbed my lasagna with my fork. It wasn’t as satisfying as certain other kinds of stabbing would have been, but it was what I had available at the moment. “We need a plan.”
“Don’t die,” suggested Ryan.
“We need a better plan.”
“Don’t get seriously injured,” said Uncle Mike.
I eyed him. “Are you going to take this seriously? This is serious. This is a serious situation.” I paused, scowling. “Only now I’ve said ‘serious’ so many times that it’s starting to sound funny to me. Dammit. We need a plan.”
“The Covenant doesn’t know where this place is, so that’s a start,” said Mike.
“Dominic has never been here, and he doesn’t like free running, so he’s unlikely to have ever followed me,” I agreed. “The others don’t know yet that I’m someone they shouldbe following, so that buys us a little time. We’ll need to be careful coming and going, but we were already planning on that. And the mice make remarkably good spies. If anyone comes sniffing around here, we’ll know.”
For the first time, Ryan looked faintly uncomfortable. “They’re not going to be, you know, announcing themselves to people on the sidewalk or anything, are they? Because talking mice will convince the Covenant that there’s something up with this place pretty darn quick.”
“They’re actually better at being subtle than anyone gives them credit for,” I assured him. “When you see them around me, they’re in a safe place. They know they can be themselves here. Out in the world, they practice stealth and actual cunning. If they didn’t, we would have long since run out of Aeslin mice.”
“That’s a relief,” said Ryan.
I paused. “Actually . . . there’s something to be said for using Aeslin mice as spies. We’ve done it before, when we felt that we really had to. The mice are happy to have something they can do to help the gods.” And some of them inevitably wouldn’t make it back from their “holy mission,” because they were mice, and what I was contemplating involved sending them out into a world where practically everything was bigger than they were.
It was still one of the best ideas I’d had so far, and from the thoughtful look on Uncle Mike’s face, he thought so, too. He brought his plate and sat down next to me. “It would be a good way to find out what the Covenant was up to, if we could find a way to sneak some mice into their headquarters,” he said. “Didn’t the mice come before your family left the Covenant, though?”
“Yeah, but they came with my great-great-grandmother, Enid, when she married into the Healys,” I said. “Margaret might not know about the mice.”
“There’s an awful lot of wiggle room in ‘might.’”
I didn’t have an answer for that. I was saved from needing one when Istas appeared in the kitchen doorway. “I smell lasagna,” she announced. “You will share.”
“Hi, sweetie.” Ryan waved his fork in her direction. “Food’s on the stove. Did you have a good time with the mice?”
“Yes.” Istas started toward the lasagna, detouring only long enough to kiss Ryan on the cheek. “They are very pleasant company.”
“You have rat breath,” said Ryan, wrinkling his nose.
Istas looked pleased. “Yes,” she said. “I know.” She dished half the remaining lasagna onto a plate, bringing it with her as she moved to sit down next to Ryan. “Have we determined the best method for driving the Covenant from our territory yet? Will carnage be involved?”
“We’re still working on that,” I said. “We have numbers . . . now. But if this whole team disappears without a trace, the odds are good that the Covenant will send more people to find out what happened to them. Maybe we can disappear a second team, but can we manage a third? Or a fourth? Eventually, we’re going to wind up being the ones who don’t have the numbers in our favor.” And then the purge of New York would be able to begin in earnest.
“So what do we do right now?”
“Right now? I guess we watch and see what theydo. Once we know what we’re up against, we’ll be able to counter it.” I jammed my fork into my lasagna. “I hate waiting.”
“Doesn’t everyone?” asked Mike.
I sighed heavily. “That’s what I’m afraid of. We’re waiting because we want to minimize the damage. Well, the Covenant doesn’t have anything like that to worry about. They can move whenever they want to, and we have no way of seeing them coming.”
Ryan took care of the dishes while Uncle Mike walked around the slaughterhouse, double-checking my traps and doubtless setting a few of his own. We’d all need to walk carefully from now on. That was good. It would keep us on our toes. As for me, I collected all the knives I’d thrown at the various dart boards—it was a surprisingly high number, given how little time I’d had, but I guess stress makes me stabby—and returned to the small office that was going to be my bedroom for the foreseeable future. My “bed” was an air mattress on the floor with a quilt I didn’t recognize and a pile of pillows that I did. I threw myself onto it with more force than was necessarily safe and rolled onto my back, staring at the ceiling.
My lease was almost up. The Sasquatch whose apartment I’d been using was going to be home soon, which was supposed to be my cue to go back to Oregon (assuming she came back at all, after the message I’d left for her). Mom and Dad would understand that I couldn’t leave while the threat of a purge was hanging over the city—we’ve always done fieldwork in emergency situations, and the Covenant was the next best thing to a natural disaster as far as most cryptids were concerned. But what was going to happen after that?
I came to Manhattan to prove that I could make it as a professional ballroom dancer. Only things didn’t exactly work out that way. I hadn’t managed to win a single major competition; the times I’d placed, it had always been local, and the prize money I’d received barely paid for the cost of my registration. It didn’t touch my costumes, or the hours of studio time I had to beg, borrow, and steal whenever I could. Most people in my tier of the profession supplemented their income teaching classes, but I couldn’t even do that anymore. Trying to be a cocktail waitress anda cryptozoologist took up too much time. Quit bussing tables and I couldn’t afford to eat. Quit taking care of cryptids . . .
If I quit taking care of cryptids, I wouldn’t even know who I was anymore. I pulled a throwing knife out of my shirt without thinking about it, flicking it toward the ceiling. It flew in a satisfyingly straight line, embedding itself in the wood with a soft “thunk” sound. The fact that throwing knives into the air while I was on top of an air mattress was maybe not the smartest idea barely even crossed my mind. I was too busy thinking.
I came to New York to dance. The cryptozoology was supposed to be a sideline, something I did to keep my parents happy while I proved that I could have a career if I wanted one. But somewhere along the way, the proportions got reversed. I started spending more and more time with the cryptids who needed my help, and less and less time fighting my way through the cutthroat world of ballroom dance. My partner, James, had to chase me down for rehearsals. If it weren’t for the fact that he was cutting back his own availability while he prepared for chupacabra mating season, he would probably have talked to me about seeing other partners by now. As it was, I was braced for that conversation.
(James was decidedly gay, and extremely devoted to his husband, Dennis, who put up with more than any human married to a goat-sucker could reasonably be expected to endure. But sexual preference didn’t matter during mating season. Chupacabra never raise their young in the presence of both biological parents—something about it increasing the odds of the pups being eaten before they get old enough to become intelligent. The ways of chupacabra biology are strange, and not for me to understand. Yet.)