Page 104 of Aftermarket Afterlife

And then she’d been more than just an idea. Then she’d beenreal, our Olivia, a fussy little bundle of opinions and ideas that didn’t match up with mine, or with Dominic’s. Her hair had been a shock to us both. The blonde in my family apparently comes from our Carew ancestors, and Dominic seemed to view their genes as completely dominant, to the point where both of us had been expecting a blonde child. Not that it mattered; she was perfect as she was, and I at least liked how much she looked like her father. I didn’t fall in love with the man for nothing.

And at first, I’d been too tired to dance, too occupied with trying to keep this strange new miracle of mine alive and prevent her from grabbing and squashing the Aeslin mice, all of whom were way too casual about getting into baby-hand range. She had the grip strength of a gymnast when she couldn’t even lift her head yet, and her tiny nails had been like razorblades. I’d been genuinely afraid that she would crush one of the mice, and worse, that when the rest of the colony ritualized the event, they’d decide it meant annual sacrifices. They’d have been happy to do it. Aeslin mice are always happy when they’re following their faith. That didn’t mean I wanted it to happen.

But then she’d been old enough to be away from me for a few hours, and she’d been sleeping through the nights, and I’d been going slowly out of my mind with idleness. I’d started to move again, training with all the fervor I could muster, but I hadn’t beendancing. My kind of dancing requires a partner to feel like it’s really happening, and not just another practice. Practice is essential. It just doesn’t fulfill me the way real dance does.

So the fact that I was spinning and stepping in Dominic’s arms now made me feel like I was whole for the first time in weeks. His hand cupped my waist, providing the anchor I needed while I went through my own steps, and the crowd outside the dancefloor made the appropriate sounds of pleasure and delight every time we successfully completed a trick. Dominic had never been a professional dancer, but he’d danced with me enough to know how to hold his own, and no one knew how to anchor me better than he did. I could dance for the rest of my life and never find a better partner.

The music swelled and stopped as he spun me out into a trust fall and spun me around the floor like he was using my body as a compass needle and needed me to find true north. Then the audience was applauding, and the judges were calling out their scores, but I couldn’t hear them, because of that damn beeping.

“Can you make thatstop?” I demanded, climbing off the floor and turning toward Dominic in my agitation. Then I froze, blinking blankly for several seconds before I screamed.

The audience didn’t react, just continued to applaud while I screamed my heart out. Dominic, his eyes filled with blood that leaked down his cheeks in thin ribbons, blinked.

“Verity, what’s wrong?” he asked.

This whole time, I’d thought he was wearing a red suit, but now I could see the dots of white at the cuffs, and understood that it was blood. It was all blood, dyeing the fabric, and my red dress wasn’t red either—it was a sodden piece of gauze, wrapped around me to catch the blood and keep it off the dance floor. I screamed again. He let go of my hand and I stumbled back, still screaming.

“I’m sorry,” he said, reaching for me. “I’m so sorry, Verity. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to slip. I didn’t mean to get hurt.

“I didn’t mean to die.”

The beeping got louder, until my ears were ringing. I staggered farther from him, evading his grasp, and clapped my hands over my ears, trying to block out the sound. It dimmed the beeping, but did nothing to muffle the sound of my own screams, which echoed inside my skull, ricocheting back and forth like a rubber ball dropped into a box. I dropped to my knees, and the dead man in my husband’s suit stopped advancing, sparing me the touch of his bloody hand. His flesh was beginning to wither and pull away from his skull, rapidly making him unrecognizable.

I kept screaming, closing my eyes to shut away the sight, until everything was screams and beeping, and then the screams fell away, but the beeping remained. I breathed harder and harder, until I started to hear words through the beeps.

“—unharmed but dehydrated.”

That was Dr. Morrow. I knew him. I trusted him.

“And her bill?”

The second voice was familiar, as well. Female, pitched somewhere above alto, with a hectoring note that told me who the speaker was more clearly than her words could ever have done: Candice, the dragon who was William’s first and most loyal wife. She sounded furious, like she was on the verge of launching herself at the doctor.

“No bill,” said Dr. Morrow. “The service she has done for this community and this hospital means her money is no good here.”

“You takeourmoney!”

“You have substantially more money, and have done less in the manner of community service,” said Dr. Morrow.

“Is she going to wake up soon?”

“We hope so.” He sighed. “We’ve done everything we can for her. Honestly, we don’t have the experience working on humans that we wish we had. Prior to Ms. Price arriving in Manhattan, we never needed that experience.”

“Humans get everything else; why should we accommodate them?” asked Candice, in a mulish tone.

“Because she keeps getting hurt in our service,” said Dr. Morrow. “And because she could reveal our presence if she went to a human hospital. People say things when drugged or coming out of sedation; one poorly timed comment and a rumor of our location reaches the wrong ears.”

“I’ll take her from here,” said Candice. “You’re dismissed.”

That was all the warning I had before she grabbed me by the shoulders and shook vigorously, hard enough that my head bounced against the pillow I was only just becoming aware of.

“Wakeup, you big stupid mammal!” she snapped. “I don’t have all day to hang around here watching you sleep.”

Right. I opened my eyes. Candice was looming over me, face screwed up like she had just smelled something unpleasant. If she hadn’t been making that face, she would have been quite pretty, in a deceitfully “All-American girl” kind of way. Oh, she fit both of those requirements—she had been born in America, so far as I was aware, and she was definitely the female of her species—but the people who coined that term were probably thinking of humans, not highly evolved synapsids masquerading as humans to avoid extinction.

Her hair was a rich caramel blonde, her skin was flawlessly clear save for a scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose, which only added to her general “farmer’s daughter” air, and her eyes were very blue. She looked like the kind of woman who knew the labels of every piece of clothing she owned, and didn’t allow anything from a department store to touch her skin. A glance below the neck put that part of her appearance to bed; everything she was wearing had clearly been mended more than once, and had probably stopped off at a thrift store at some point in its life cycle.

Which was really what I would expect from a dragon. They’re incredibly focused on money—obtaining it, retaining it, and transforming it into gold. I’m pretty sure that we could crash the world gold standard by cracking into a couple of well-established dragon Nests, which probably goes a long way toward explaining why the Covenant of St. George has managed to maintain such a high level of hate for them when dragons haven’t been truly dangerous for centuries.

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