Seanan McGuire - Discount Armageddon

I grabbed the rail and pulled myself along, careful to keep my heels from hitting the steps. Stealth isn’t one of my strong suits, but it has its place. Not that I needed to try all that hard; the music inside was loud enough that it was thumping through the wall, providing the outside world with a skeletal downbeat.

The street behind the club ran between two other, larger streets. As I watched, the ghoul came walking along the sidewalk, hand in hand with his date-slash-dinner. I tensed, ready to run after them. I never had the opportunity. The woman tugged at the ghoul’s arm, possibly in reaction to something he said, and started leading him toward the street where I was waiting.

It’s always nice when the thing you’re hunting decides to walk straight into an ambush. I waited for them to get close enough that he wouldn’t be able to run without me catching him. Then I stomped up the steps, my earlier attempts at stealth abandoned in favor of making as much noise as possible. “ There you are, you pig!” I shouted, leveling a finger at his chest. “Cindy told me she saw you here, but I thought she was just fucking around with me again. How dare you?!”

The ghoul stared at me with gratifying surprise. His nightly order of club kid takeout, on the other hand, stepped away from him like he’d been set on fire. That wasn’t a bad idea. Too bad I didn’t have any matches. “You have a girlfriend?” she demanded, ignoring me in favor of glaring at the ghoul.

“Girlfriend?” I echoed, planting my hands on my hips. “Honey, he’s married.”

That was all I had to say. “You asshole ,” she said witheringly, and slapped him hard across the face before turning to stalk away, all drunken indignation. She’d be back on the dance floor within ten minutes, hunting for a guy who wasn’t cheating on someone. I know the type. Hell, I’ve been the type, when I wasn’t working.

The ghoul watched her go, his shocked expression transforming slowly into anger. He swung his head around to face me, eyes narrowed. “You just made a big mistake, little girl. I wasn’t in the mood for blonde tonight.”

“Aw, too bad for you.” I simpered, tucking my hands behind me in a cutesy-pie gesture that concealed the act of drawing the knives from the back panel of my bustier. “See, this is how things are going to work tonight. I’m going to tell you to get out of town, just as fast as you can, and you’re going to agree with me. Won’t that be fun?”

“I have a better idea,” said the ghoul, and grinned. It was a horrible sight. Most of his teeth were blackened and broken, some all the way down to the gum line. He’d grow a new set in pretty short order—ghouls are like sharks, they’re constantly teething—but for the moment, he was basically gumming his victims to death. Not a good way to go. “I’m going to make sure there’s not enough of your body left for your family to identify.”

“I bet you say that to all the girls.” Not the most original line in the world, but originality is secondary to not getting eaten when I’m in the field. I pulled my hands from behind my back and fell into a relaxed starting position, knives ready for throwing. “Come on, big guy. Let’s dance.”

A flicker of consternation crossed his face as he took in my reaction. Then it faded, and he lunged.

You’d think the predators of the world would eventually learn that it’s not a good idea to charge the sort of person who brings throwing knives to a dance club. Then again, if they were smart enough for that, they’d be smart enough to figure out that eating humans is a bad idea. You need meat, go to a steakhouse. You need it raw, go for sushi. But if you think your local nightclub is the place to go for an easy meal, you’d better be ready to pay for it. My first knife caught him in the forearm while he was in mid-lunge. My second knife killed what little was left of his forward momentum when it hit the inside of his leg, just above his left knee.

He went down hard.

Ghouls are badass hunters when all they’re dealing with is drunk, unarmed party girls, but they’re no match for somebody who knows what she’s doing. He was still trying to decide whether he wanted to clutch his knee, his arm, or both when I delivered a hard kick to his ribs, rolling him onto his back. I promptly placed one foot on his breastbone, keeping him there.

“Hi,” I said, pulling the gun from my thigh holster and aiming it at his face. “We haven’t been properly introduced. I’m Verity, and you’re leaving.”

“What are you, Covenant?” he snarled.

“Worse,” I said, pressing my weight down a bit harder on his chest. He moaned as my steel-tipped heel bit into his skin. “I’m a Price. You’re interfering with my ecosystem. Two choices, buddy. Out of the city and off the humanitarian diet, or down into the sewers to feed the mole people. What’s your preference?”

Naturally, he chose to live another day, swearing he’d never touch living human flesh again. We’d never tangled with him before, so the family code said I had to let him off with a stern warning. If we heard about him so much as thinking the words “long pork” ever again, we’d come down on him so hard he’d barely have time to shit himself before he shuffled off this mortal coil. I was feeling generous, and he hadn’t actually managed to bleed on me. I told him he had forty-eight hours to get out of New York City entirely.

My name is Verity Price. I’m a cryptozoologist. And this is why I can never get a goddamn date on a Saturday night.

A semilegal sublet in Greenwich Village, the next morning

THE SOUND OF CHEERING filtered through the bedroom wall and across the edges of my consciousness, disrupting a really pleasant dream about teaching Christian Bale to dance the samba. Groaning, I rolled over and pulled the pillow over my head. The cheering didn’t stop.

“Oh, come on ,” I muttered, trying to burrow into the mattress. All I wanted was ten more minutes. Just ten more minutes, and the chance to finish teaching Christian where I wanted him to put his hands…

The cheers rose to a fever pitch, becoming impossible to ignore. I yanked my head out from under the pillow, pushing myself onto my elbows as I shouted, “If you make me come out there, you’re gonna be—”

Something smashed.

“—sorry.” I let myself fall back to the mattress, going as flat as I could. Becoming one with the bed didn’t help. “It’ll be fine, Very,” I said, imitating Mom’s perpetually upbeat tone. “It’s just a splinter colony. You’ll barely even know they’re in the apartment. Besides, you know they love you. How are they going to feel if you go off and abandon them?”

Another smash. Another cheer. I sighed, dropping back into my own voice as I answered myself, “Probably better than I feel about them breaking all the dishes.”

The clock on the bedside table said it was almost seven o’clock in the evening; I’d been in bed less than six hours, and I was definitely feeling it. Three hours of club crawling, the fight with the ghoul, and two more hours at the club before hitting the studio for my morning workout and rumba class had taken its toll, leaving me with the strong desire to stuff wads of cotton in my ears and try to steal a few more hours of sleep.

I might have done it, too, if there’d been any point. It was almost seven; I had to be at work by nine. That’ll teach me to swap shifts with Kitty.