Midnight Blue-Light Special i-2

by Seanan McGuire

  Some people call the Covenant “monster hunters,” and if there’s anything that demonstrates how wrong that label really is, it’s the way they purge a city. True hunters spare the children and the pregnant females, allowing the population to remain stable. That’s how they ensure that they’ll always have something to hunt. The Covenant has no such concerns. They don’t want to ensure that they’ll always have something to hunt. They want to wipe every breathing cryptid off the face of the planet. I don’t know that they give out merit badges for confirmed extinctions, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

  The members of the Covenant aren’t monster hunters. They’re exterminators.

  The phone rang for what seemed like forever but was probably only a few seconds. Then my father’s voice was in my ear, asking in that warm, familiar tone, “Why shouldn’t I hang up on you? You have five seconds.”

  My family has been answering the home phone as rudely as possible for as long as I can remember. It’s a mechanism for screening calls without raising suspicion from the wrong quarters. As far as we’re concerned, that’s pretty much everyone who isn’t a relative or on the extremely short list labeled “allies.”

  “Dad, it’s me,” I said.

  “Verity!” he said, delighted. “That’s an excellent reason not to hang up on you. Hello, sweetheart. What’s going on? Shouldn’t you be at work?”

  “Yes. Normally, I would be. Daddy, there’s a problem.”

  His tone sobered in an instant. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Honey, you don’t sound fine. Is it Sarah?”

  “Not yet.” Any purge of Manhattan would naturally affect her . . . assuming the Covenant could find her. There’s nothing in this world or any other that hides as well as a cuckoo that doesn’t want to be found, and that includes the hidebehinds.

  “Then what’s going on?”

  “It’s the Covenant, Daddy.” I walked back to the couch and sat down, covering my face with my free hand. That helped, a little. Maybe if I stuck my head under something and waited patiently, the Covenant would go away. “Dominic says they’re coming to check his work. They want to see how far along he is in preparing the city for a purge. Which means the next step is either them figuring out that he isn’t prepared at all, or the Covenant starting the purge.”

  There was a long pause before my father asked, “Did he tell you this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he there with you now?”

  “No. I asked him to leave.”

  There was another, longer pause. Finally, my father said, “I don’t think you should have done that.”

  “What?” I straightened, pulling my hand away from my face. “Who are you, and what have you done with my father?”

  “If he was willing to tell you that the team was coming—”

  “—but not willing to stand up to the Covenant! Not willing to stop them from—”

  “—then he may be willing to work with you to minimize the damage to the population.” My father’s tone was firm, and left little room for argument. He’s been in charge of our branch of the family since before I was born, and that means he’s had time to get very, very good at giving orders to people who aren’t very good at taking them. “I know it’s hard. I can tell that you feel betrayed right now.”

  “Um, just a little. Why are you on his side?” I stood, pacing across the living room to the hallway door. The mice were finishing up their celebration. I stopped there, leaning against the wall and watching them. At least the mice could still find things to be happy about. “I thought we hated the Covenant.”

  “I also thought you’d decided that Dominic deserved to be judged as an individual.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  Dad sighed. “Verity. Please. I’m glad you called me. That was the right thing to do, and I’ll do my best to get you some backup. But that doesn’t mean you can neglect the resources that you already have at hand. I’m not telling you to trust him. I’m telling you to use him, for as long as you possibly can.”

  “Hold on a second,” I said, my stomach sinking. “Are you telling me that you might be able to send me backup, and that until then, I have to work with the man who may or may not be in the process of selling me out to the people we’ve been hiding from since before I was born?” I paused. “I lost track of that sentence somewhere in the middle. Dad, you can’t. You can’t expect me to work with him. Not now.”

  “You have to.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Are you saying that because you think it’s the right thing to do, or because he hurt your feelings by not cutting ties with everything he’s ever known as soon as it came into conflict with what you wanted?” I didn’t have an answer for that, so I didn’t even try. Dad kept talking: “I know this is hard. I will do everything I can to get you the help you need. But Dominic is right there, Very, and he wouldn’t have told you if he didn’t want to help, at least a little.”

  My voice was very small as I asked, “What if he doesn’t want to help me anymore? I turned him down hard.”

  “Then we’ll figure something else out.”

  “Okay.” I pushed away from the wall, turning my back on the mice. “What do I tell Sarah?”

  “Tell her that she should come home. She has no business staying in that city while a purge is going on.”

  I wanted to make a snarky comment about how he’d leave me to die while he evacuated my adopted cousin for her own good. I couldn’t do it because he was right. I was raised fighting, whether I wanted to or not. Sarah was raised doing her homework, obeying curfew, and trying to pass for human without constantly rearranging the brains of the people around her. She could keep herself out of sight better than damn near anyone else in the world, but she wouldn’t be any help if things got really bad.

  “I’ll tell her,” I said, quietly. “I can’t promise that she’ll listen.”

  “Of course not,” he said, and laughed. “She’s a member of this family, isn’t she?”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “She is.”

  * * *

  Dad and I talked for a few minutes after that, but if anything of substance was discussed, I didn’t remember it after I hung up. All I really remembered was the tone of his voice, struggling to reassure me without letting his own panic show. It’s times like that that make me wish my parents were just a little better at lying to me. It would be nice to have them say, “Don’t worry, honey, everything’s under control,” and actually be able to make myself believe them.

  I found myself back in the kitchen doorway, watching the mouse acolytes as they dutifully cleaned up the remains of their celebration. I don’t really understand the full details of the Aeslin religious structure. I don’t think anyone human—or even demi-human, like Sarah or my Uncle Ted—can. The logic of the Aeslin is not like our Earth logic.

  One of the acolytes noticed my observation and straightened, tiny oil-drop eyes fixed on me in rapt fascination. “Priestess,” it said, solemnly. “I am Blessed by your Observance.”

  Nobody pronounces capital letters like an Aeslin mouse. “Hey,” I said. “Do you know when the night prayers will be over? I need to talk to the Head Priest at some point.”

  “The Catechism of the Patient Priestess is to be recited tonight,” said the acolyte. “It should conclude with the sunrise. Would you like me to go to the Head Priest, and request his Attendance upon your Holiness?”

  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 ca
techism 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 would help 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.

  “I’m sorry about before,” I said awkwardly, sitting down across from him. “I know you were trying to help. My reaction was out of line.”

  Dominic sipped his cocoa. “Yes,” he agreed. “It was. To be fair, however, it was unexpected information. You had good reason to react as you did. I may have hoped that you would respond better, but I knew not to place all my faith in hoping.”

  “Dad said . . . I mean, he thinks, and maybe I think, too . . . I mean . . .” I stopped, sighing, and took a deep breath before I continued. “Dominic, there’s no way we can evacuate this entire city bef
ore the Covenant gets here. And there’s no way for you to prevent them from coming. I’m going to need help making sure they do as little damage as possible. Please. I need your help.”

  Dominic’s answer was delayed by Rochak’s arrival. He was carrying a plate of the café’s rightfully famous gingerbread. He also had a cup of hot cocoa for me. “Hello, Verity,” he said, with an honest smile.

  “Hey, Rochak.” For a man who accused me of killing his sister the first time we met, Rochak has mellowed a lot where I’m concerned. I stood as he put the dishes down, giving him a quick hug. “How is everything?”

  “It’s been better.” His eyes darted toward Dominic as he pulled away from me. “Is there really a purge coming?”

  “Yes.” There was no percentage in sugarcoating things. So to speak. “That’s what we’re talking about now.”

  “Sunil and I won’t leave.”

  I bit back a sigh as I settled into my seat. “I didn’t think you would. So I guess we’ll just have to keep you under the radar.”

  “I guess so,” said Rochak, and smiled again before he turned to slip out of the nook.

  I looked back to Dominic, who was watching me with unguarded affection. “You are insane, infuriating, and in dire need of aid if you’re going to survive this,” he said. “My help was always yours. All you had to do was ask for it.”

  “I’m asking,” I said.

  “Then I’m yours.” He nudged the plate of gingerbread toward me. “Gingerbread?”

  “Gingerbread and tactics,” I agreed, picking up a piece of piping-hot baked goodness. “Now that’s a date that I can really get behind.”

  Dominic laughed. After a moment, I joined in.

  Five

  “The Covenant of St. George isn’t evil, simply misguided. This doesn’t mean you can’t shoot them, but it does mean you should apologize to their next of kin, should the opportunity ever arise.”