Page 114 of Aftermarket Afterlife

Mistake two: he didn’t frisk me, either before we left the park or after we entered the deserted, echoing concourse of the Manhattan Mall. He just assumed that I wasn’t a danger to him, and let me walk alongside in my fully-armed glory.

The shopping center must have been beautiful when it was thriving, a monument to modern commerce and innovation. Now it felt like walking through the world’s biggest Spirit Halloween Store in waiting, empty storefronts and closed metal grates on all sides. The man, who had yet to introduce himself, led me straight down the center of the mall toward the JCPenney’s, which was as empty as most of the stores around it, a gaping maw leading to a cavern full of naked mannikins and abandoned store fixtures.

Most of the metal grating in front of the dead department store had been pulled down like all the rest, but one of the three pieces that made up the barrier was raised by about five feet, leaving a gap a fully grown adult could easily duck through. I pretended not to notice. It would have been easy to miss—it blended well with everything around it, and with so many stores gated off, it only made sense for the eye to fill in the gaps.

“This way,” said my escort, and gestured for me to follow him into the abandoned department store.

I paused to ask myself what a dragon who was desperate enough to sell out her Nest would do at this point, following a sworn enemy of her species into an off-site location, and stopped walking. “Nuh-uh,” I said. “Out here, if I scream, maybe someone comes. In there? I scream, no one shows up, you take me apart so you can brag to all your Covenant buddies about how much you murdered me. I’m not taking another step without compensation.”

“Are you fucking serious?” he snarled, and for a moment, he wasn’t the calculatedly neutral lookout who’d been lucky enough to snag a dragon without the common sense to stay clear. He was a warrior for God whose placid, accommodating target was suddenly pushing back, and he didn’t like it.

I took a step backwards, away from him. “I don’t like the way you’re talking to me,” I said, putting a quiver into my voice. “Maybe this is a bad idea.”

He sighed in obvious, unconcealed frustration and pulled out his wallet, producing three crisp hundred-dollar bills. “Here,” he said imperiously, shoving them at me. “An advance. You’ll get the rest of your money once my superiors have heard what you have to say.”

I took the money and shoved it into the pocket of my yoga pants, pretending not to notice that he had just changed the deal from paying me for information to paying me for information if his superiors liked it. It didn’t matter. He’d never been planning to pay me anyway. A single helpful dragon wasn’t enough of an asset to bother cultivating like that.

No, if he had a coherent plan, it involved chaining me to something and removing parts of my body with bolt cutters until they were absolutely sure I’d told them everything I knew. I just hoped that the fact he’d taken the bait so quickly meant they weren’t done interrogating Madison. They had no reason to be gentle with her—or with me, as long as they thought I wasn’t human. Zealots are nasty like that.

I walked beside him into the gutted JCPenney’s. He paused once we were inside, turning to pull the grate down and snap the deadbolt into place. How cute. I wasn’t supposed to get out of here alive. I mean, I’d known that, but I hadn’t expected him to be quite so blatant about it. He would never have been able to cut it in the competitive field of serial killing, that was damn sure.

The escalators were still running, whether or not the mall’s ownership knew that, and he led me over to one of them, the two of us heading together up to the top floor of the department store—the one without a view of the street or the rest of the mall. I scanned my surroundings, forcing my expression to stay neutral, as if nothing about this smelled bad to me in the slightest. Nope, nothing unusual here. Just a nice man leading an innocent little lamb off to her death.

I was so going to enjoy breaking this fucker’s fingers.

At the top of the escalator, a section of the store had been cordoned off with tarps. He pulled one aside, and led me into what looked like a generic tech-company call center, complete with makeshift cubicles. Most of them were empty, but a few were occupied by workers in clothing just as far from appropriate business casual as his own. I kept looking around myself, trying to project an air of “distracted innocent with no idea what’s about to happen to her.” Inwardly, I was punching the air, almost giddy with delight.

This was the headquarters we’d been looking for this whole time. Who could have known it would be as easy as walking up and turning myself in? Of course, it probably helped that they’d lost a lot of agents when Grandma and Grandpa were in town, and while they’d been replacing them as quickly as they could, the replacements were the less-experienced kind, people who’d finished their training but might never have seen a field mission before. Looking around, I counted six Covenant agents, not including my escort, and no sign of Madi. No blood, either, which I chose to take as a good sign.

Not like I had many others.

One of the men stood and walked cautiously toward us, hand hovering over his hip in what was all too clearly the preparation for drawing a weapon. I wanted to smack him for that level of amateurish broadcasting, and probably would have, if it hadn’t been working in my favor.

“Who’s this?” he asked, and at least showed the sense not to use his companion’s name.

“Alicia,” said the first man. “She approached me in the park. She’s looking to sell information about the local dragon Nest.”

“Is that so?” The second man gave me an assessing look. “We already have one adult. Why do we need another? You were supposed to be watching for those juveniles you lost earlier.”

Creep number one scowled briefly. “We didn’t realize they were with her,” he said. “And information given under duress is always harder to trust than information given freely.”

“Is that so?” Number two looked at me. “You’re offering to give us information that can be used against your own kind?”

“My own kind? Puh-leeze. They’re not my ‘own kind.’ They’re a bunch of cheap, petty b—”

“All right,” he said, interrupting me. “I just need to be sure.” He looked to number one. “What did you promise it?”

So even when we were pretending that I was an ally, not an asset, I didn’t warrant a gender? Romance languages gendertables. I narrowed my eyes slightly, deciding that my current persona allowed me that much. “Uh, fivethousanddollars, cash,” I said. “And I don’t say a word until I get it, got it?”

Number two frowned briefly, leading me to wonder whether my little pantomime was going to be cut short by the need to defend myself. Then he nodded, and said, “Get it from petty cash. I’ll entertain our...guest.”

Number one scuttled off. I frowned a little at number two. “What do you mean, ‘you already have one’?” I asked. “Did you already buy this information?”

“That’s none of your concern,” he said. “What I need from you is the location of the central Nest. We know it exists. We know you have a male there, and we know he can’t be moved. That means we’ll have to go to him. Weverymuch want to meet him.”

His smile was too wide, and showed too many teeth. Even the most naïve dragon wouldn’t have been able to look at that and believe in the purity of his intentions. That was a smile that wanted to finish what its ancestors started. That was the smile a species saw before its own extinction.

I swallowed, hard, and it wasn’t entirely a put-on. “I’m not sure I should tell you that. Who is it that you have?”

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