Page 113 of Aftermarket Afterlife

Alicia waited for the light to go green, then charged across the street to the small, wedge-shaped park on the other side. It wasn’t the kind of park that had playground equipment or climbing structures; it was mostly just a narrow slice of greenery and open seating in the heart of the city, and for children who spent most of their time underground, it was probably a paradise.

Various office workers and tourists milled around the little tables, drinks and easy eats in hand. You could tell the locals from the visitors by the gawking they were doing. Locals didn’t look up nearly as much, or jump when a flock of pigeons exploded near their feet. Not literally exploded—I think everyone would have jumped if someone had tossed a bottle rocket into a flock of pigeons, and because this was New York, they would have beaten the shit out of anyone who did something like that about five seconds later. No, this was a more ordinary explosion, pigeons launching themselves into the air in a mass of churning wings and flying feathers for no apparent reason. Locals were used to it. Tourists...weren’t.

One man, sitting alone at a table with a latte in his hand, jumped. He was dressed like an office worker from one of the surrounding businesses; he shouldn’t have jumped. A few pigeons should have been old news to him. He was scanning the park with quick, anxious motions of his head, and his attention seemed to linger just a beat too long on anyone blonde, from a group of middle-aged women having a book club meeting at one of the tables to a toddler gamely attempting to escape from her parents. Interesting.

“Go hang out on the other side of the park,” I said to Alicia, keeping my voice low. “Find a nice spot in the shade. Anddon’t leave the park. Not for any reason.”

“Not even the Mister Softee truck?”

“We both know you wouldn’t waste money on ice cream, try another one.”

She huffed but nodded, and as I approached the man, she broke away and vanished into the crowd, heading for the back of the park. Good girl. It wasn’t a large area, and being a little away from me wouldn’t give her that much cover, but anything to keep her out of the line of fire was worth doing, however minor it might be.

The man didn’t look my way until I was practically on top of him, pulling the open chair away from his table. Then he waved a hand, eyes still on the other side of the park, and said, “You can take it. No one’s sitting there.”

“I am,” I said, and plopped down. “Subtlety” is not a word with which I am very often associated. “Wrecking ball” is a bit more in line with my usual approach. “You look like someone I should be talking to.”

He turned in my direction, frowning and making an inquisitive noise at the same time. The motion gave me a chance to study his jacket, making note of the way it fell across his shoulders. It was reasonably well fitted, especially considering that it had been tailored to account for the sidearm he had strapped to his side, and needed looser sleeves than normal so he could access the brace of throwing knives around his right bicep. Just scanning him, I could spot five different ways to kill somebody, and I was sure a strip search would have given me more.

Like most of the Covenant operatives I’d had the misfortune of meeting, he had clearly been trained in multiple weapons and in close combat, and not in how to blend properly within a human city. They were still using a playbook that assumed most of their fights would take place in the countryside, brave knights riding against ravenous dragons, and they weren’t keeping pace with the rest of the world.

I was just fine with that, since it gave me a reasonable advantage in most of the situations I found myself in.

There was no recognition in his face. “Who are you, miss?”

“An interested citizen who heard that you were looking for information.” This part was a gamble. The Covenant couldn’t tap into the bogeyman gossip networks the way the family could, which meant they were usually shooting in the dark. It was just that sometimes, shooting in the dark hits something that shouldn’t have been hit. “About pretty ladies like me.” I gestured to myself, and watched his expression change from politely schooled curiosity to blatant disgust.

He shifted in his chair to put another few inches between us, radiating revulsion. I risked a glance around. No one was paying attention to us. Which was good, since if any of the local police caught sight of the way he was looking at me, I was likely to get arrested for either public solicitation or panhandling. Not the way I wanted to end a day that had started with my husband dying.

If it was even the same day. My sense of time was pretty shot by this point.

I leaned toward him, still smiling, and said, “That bitch Madison didn’t want to pay me for my silence. Well. You know what they say about dragons and money, don’t you?”

“I don’t think I do, no.”

“Never stand between us,” I said. “I know more than she wants me to, and all I asked for was a few hundred dollars, so I could take my egg and go off to start a Nest of my own. But do you know what she said? She said, ‘I would sooner see you make an omelet than walk away with a penny.’ Wouldyoustand for that sort of disrespect?”

He blinked. “No, miss . . . ?”

“Alicia.” She was staying out of this; she’d never know I’d borrowed her name. “If she doesn’t want to pay me to keep quiet, I figured I’d come and see the other side, see if maybe you’d pay me fornotkeeping quiet, if you know what I mean. I know you work with witches. Surely one sweet, harmless little princess isn’t such a stretch?” I batted my eyelashes, looking at him like he was the judge of a regional dance competition I was hoping to sweep.

He seemed to be buying it. That’s the thing about nice people who think of themselves as holy warriors on a sacred mission: it’s so easy to convince them that God put you in their path to make it easier on them. It’s like they’re so entitled that they can’t see the ends of their own noses anymore. Relaxing a little, he leaned back toward me, face smoothing toward something like neutrality. “What would you want for the location of the Manhattan Nest?”

“Five thousand,” I said. “Inflation, you know.” I waved a hand. “Double it and I’ll tell you how many dragons are down there and how to disable the defenses.”

“I think we could come to an agreement,” he said, with a smile. “But I’m afraid I don’t have that kind of money with me. We detained one of your...cousins . . . in this park earlier today, and I was assigned to watch for more, just in case.”

“Well, then, it’s both of our lucky day,” I chirped. “Do you want to walk with me to the bank?”

Dragons don’t really do wire transfers or virtual money. The questions of whether or not they legally exist aside—a surprising number have social security numbers and full citizenship, having come over with the colonists during the days of theMayflowerand vicious American expansionism. An equally surprising number don’t. Because they’re reproducing parthenogenically, it’s not uncommon to meet whole groups of dragons who can pass themselves off as identical twins. A lot of them don’t see the point in paperwork. And none of that matters, because to a species that cares about money because it can be converted into gold, numbers on a screen aren’t “real” enough.

The only dragons I’ve ever met who understood bank balances as a form of wealth have been in Los Angeles, where they’re more likely to have jobs with health insurance and direct deposit, and where the Nest is managed by a laidly worm named Osana, whose biological drive to acquire gold is less severe.

The man shook his head, very slightly. “No,” he said. “I have a better idea.”

• • •

Mistake one: he didn’t verify that I was actually a dragon—or dragon princess, as he probably still thought about them—before we left the park. I could have been anyone. I could have been a rogue cryptozoologist with a bone to pick, who saw tricking him into taking me back to his base as a way to deal with some of my well-placed aggressions.

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