Page 108 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“Yes, because I would be a widow for the rest of my life, which would be very long and very lonely,” said Candice. “Verity is human. She has uncounted options for remarriage, should she choose to mate again, and her life will extend another fifty years at most—probably less, given her approach to personal safety. She has less cause to grieve than I would have. She’s weeping for herself. I would be weeping for my species.”

I sniffled again, wiping my nose with the back of my hand. There was something charming about her blunt self-interest. I always knew where I stood with the dragons, and while it might not always be a flattering assessment, it was always an absolutely honest one. Wiping my hand on my borrowed sweatpants, I straightened and let go of the arm she had used to catch me.

“I’m very sad,” I said. “Humans tend to mourn very intensely when we lose our mates.”

Candice gave me a withering look. “You don’t need to explainhumansto me,” she said. “You’ve been the dominant species on this planet for eight hundred years. We learned your culture and its rules and how to pass for part of it because we wanted to survive, and we didn’t have another choice. I might need to explain myself to you, but you never need to explain yourself to me. We didn’t have the luxury of ignorance.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and wiped my nose again. Making a disgusted face, she produced a real cloth handkerchief and offered it to me.

At my surprised expression, she shrugged. “One handkerchief can be reused for years, and used for drying the tears of children as well as blowing your nose. A box of tissues is gone in a week,andit costs money.”

Leave it to the cheapness of dragons to bring back the hankie. I laughed, the sound still thick with tears and snot, and accepted the handkerchief, using it to dry my eyes before wiping William’s neck clean. I wanted to blow my nose, but by the time I’d accomplished those two things, the hankie was well and truly sodden. I turned back to Candice.

“Is there a hamper or something where I could put this?” I asked. “I don’t think you want to just take it back.”

“Well, you can’tkeepit,” she said, sounding more horrified by the idea of me wandering off with her personal possessions than by the idea of being handed my snot-soaked hankie. Priorities. “There’s a laundry hamper over there.” And she pointed past the café tables to what looked like an iron lockbox.

“Fireproof,” explained William. “I try to keep the flames under control, but sometimes a man gets excited, and well...”

“Say no more,” I said—half-begged, really—and walked over to deposit the handkerchief in the lockbox.

We don’t know how dragonfire works. We’d need a male dragon to dissect if we wanted to figure that out, and since William is the only available specimen, we’re willing to settle for ignorance and observation. We’d always assumed it was a trait evolved for protection—a little extreme, sure, but there are lizards that bleed from their eyes and snakes that shoot venom. Breathing actual flames isn’t that much more over the top, especially not when your species had a tendency to cluster in large, vulnerable groups protected by a single dominant male. And then we’d found William, and established friendly relations with a functional Nest for the first time since leaving the Covenant, and, well . . .

It was also a mating thing. Male dragons used their flames to sterilize an area before reproduction, guaranteeing that no other male’s sperm would somehow work its way into the mix, and protecting their wives from contaminants and bacteria. This also raised the female’s internal body temperature, and it was something about that heat that triggered the mechanisms for sexual, rather than parthenogenic, reproduction.

Somehow, thinking through the scientific mechanisms for dragon reproduction—as we had managed to figure them out without an invitation to a dragon orgy or something—helped to settle my nerves. I’m not the most scholarly of my siblings. I’m probably the least scholastic, and that includes my in-laws. Neither of whom has actually married in, but Alex and Shelby have a kid, and Sam is like a bear trap that snores. They’re not going anywhere.

Scholarly or not, I enjoy the science. Focusing on it gave me something to think about beyond my grief, and so I kept thinking about it as I walked the hankie over to the laundry box and tossed it inside, onto a snarl of fabric ready for the laundromat. Or whatever sort of washer system the dragons had syphoning water off the city utilities, more likely, since going to the laundromat would cost money, and if there’s one thing a dragon doesn’t do if she can help it, it’s spend money.

Their penny-pinching actually has a biological basis. All that gold they focus on collecting is biologically necessary. The mechanism is unclear, but without reliable access to reasonably pure gold, dragons fail to thrive. Worse yet, their birth rate drops, and for a species that’s already holding on with a wish, a prayer, and a grappling hook, that’s just not acceptable. Every cent they get, they keep, until they can turn it into gold. There are whole dragon communities dedicated to searching yard and estate sales for underpriced gold necklaces and rings, anything that pings their incredibly well-developed sense of the metal, which they buy for the below-market asking price and then sell on to their sisters at a reasonable markup. Every dragon we’ve ever asked about the system has been firm that the hunter Nests would never take advantage of the rest of them; gold is too important.

It’s the center of their physical and spiritual lives, it enables them to survive, and it matters more than anything else, even money, which brought me full circle back to the laundry. A trip to the laundromat could be expensive, especially with the swarms of children the dragons had running around at any given time; a washer and dryer would be even more expensive, in the beginning, but I had all faith that any such appliances the dragons had would have been obtained secondhand, if not third- or fourth-hand, repaired, and then installed in some hidden tunnel where the dragons could make use of them, and also charge the local bogeyman and hidebehind communities for laundry services.

If there’s an angle to be exploited, the dragons will find it, grab it, and squeeze it until it cries for mercy. I could admire that, a bit, even as I turned back to William and Candice, beginning to trudge back toward them. My legs felt too heavy, like they’d been swaddled in cotton laced with lead fishing weights, but I kept going, forcing myself not to stop. If I stopped moving, I might never start again.

I had almost reached Candice when a little blonde girl in jeans and a T-shirt advertising a 1993 Walt Disney World parade slammed into my hip, wrapping her arms around me and jerking me to a halt. I turned to blink down at her. She beamed guilelessly up at me, her grin revealing a missing front tooth with just the beginnings of its replacement poking out through her gum. A gamin grin if ever there had been one.

“Auntie Verity, where’s Olivia?” she asked, in a bright, sweet voice. “We want to play with her.”

My daughter was very popular with the dragon girls, who viewed her dark hair as a curiosity—dragons being uniformly blonde—and liked having a human child they could cast as the terrifying monster in their games of tag. Olivia didn’t seem to mind, and would gleefully make hand-claws as she chased her draconic playmates around their shared space. I had expected the dragon mothers to be wary of her, in the beginning, but they had welcomed her with open arms, showing me considerably more kindness in the process.

“A human child is good camouflage,” Candice had explained to me, when I expressed surprise over that strange fellowship. “A few dozen would be better. She’ll teach them how to blend in more easily than the rest of us do, and their children will benefit for it.”

It was hard to argue with logic like that.

“Sorry, kiddo,” I said. “Livvy’s with her grandparents for a few weeks, until all this business with the Covenant is over and done with.”

The dragon child looked up at me, eyes wide and blue and fringed in thick golden lashes. She could have been a killer in print advertising; she had the sort of face that begged to sell me something. “It’s going to end?” she asked.

I forced myself to nod, swallowing past the lump in my throat. “It’s going to end. We’re going to end it. I promise.”

“And then Livvy will come back?”

“And then Livvy will come back,” I confirmed.

She let me go, taking a step backward. “Pinky swear,” she commanded.

I extended my hand, and she hooked her pinky through my own.

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