Seanan McGuire - Discount Armageddon

I stood, scanning the room for an idea of the direction we’d need to flee in. There were several tunnels leading in and out; presumably, at least one of them would lead to the surface. The servitors were focusing their attentions on Candy. Wiping the worst of the blood from the soles of my feet onto the dead cultist’s robe, I took off running in her direction.

“Verity! On the left!”

I spun without hesitating, shooting the cultist who’d been charging me squarely in the chest. Two bullets left. His eyes widened in surprise, and he fell, momentum carrying him past me to land in a crumpled heap on the floor. It wasn’t until after he’d stopped moving that I realized who’d warned me—Sarah—and that the warning had been verbal, not telepathic. Eyes wide, I turned.

Dominic De Luca was standing at the entrance to the room, flinging knives at cultists with clinical precision. Those he wasn’t impaling had problems of their own, in the form of Ryan, who’d abandoned his human shape for something a hell of a lot more intimidating: a seven-foot-tall raccoon-man with talons longer than most kitchen knives, really sharp teeth, and the ability to block attacks by turning parts of his body into stone. Those were some cultists who were having a seriously lousy day.

Sarah was standing behind Dominic, her eyes so white that at this distance they seemed to glow. One of the servitors charged at the pair while Dominic was throwing a knife in the opposite direction, and she raised her hand, palm-out. The servitor promptly froze.

“What the—”

He can’t remember how his muscles work. I can’t hold him for long. Now go help Candy!

“On it,” I said, and took off running, slowing only to shoot a servitor before he could smash a lead pipe into the side of Ryan’s head. Candy was still shouting, her commands starting to take on a pleading, terrified note. I kept running toward her, elbowing a cultist in the throat and vaulting over two bodies before plunging into the knot of servitors surrounding her. Several of them were on the ground, bleeding from a variety of inexpertly placed bullet wounds. Three had moved to stand between Candy and the others, hissing and clicking furiously. Those had to be the ones she’d talked around to her side. Four others were trying to claw past them to get to her.

“I am so fucking tired of fighting with Sleestaks,” I grumbled. I only had one bullet left. I aimed at the nearest servitor, fired, threw the gun aside, and charged.

We were making a lot of noise. Between the screaming, the shooting, the rending, and the tearing, we were getting close to loud enough to wake the dead. Since that isn’t actually possible without some very complicated ritual magic, we managed to achieve the next best thing. One of the servitors went down with a final, ear-splitting shriek after I stabbed it in the neck, and then the Voice of God—or at least the Voice of James Earl Jones as God—came rumbling out of the darkness, so deep it seemed to shake the ground beneath our feet:

“ What is going on here?”

The servitor that had been attacking me hissed and cringed back, posture turning subservient. Candy stopped shouting, the gun slipping from her hand to clatter to the ground as she stared with wide eyes into the space behind me. I turned.

The dragon looked at me.

“Oh,” I said faintly. “Hey, Candy, guess what? I found the dragon, and he speaks English.”

Candy whimpered.

Somewhere below the streets of Manhattan, hoping dragons don’t usually wake up cranky

THE DRAGON’S EYES WERE a luminous pumpkin orange, like giant jack-o-lanterns burning in the face of the largest lizard the world has ever seen. He was still mostly prone, but his head was raised like the head of a snake getting ready to strike. The few remaining cultists cheered, apparently thinking he’d finally woken up at their command, and would now be happy to do their bidding. I wasn’t completely sure they were wrong.

“You!” One of the cultists ran forward, pointing imperiously toward me and Candy as she addressed the dragon. “Destroy these infidels!”

The dragon looked down at the cultist before turning those jack-o-lantern eyes back on the two of us. Sarah and Dominic were still near the door, and Ryan was kneeling next to Istas, trying to get her to wake up. As a fellow therianthrope, he probably had a better idea of what she needed than anybody else in the room. No one moved to attack anyone else; all of us were waiting to see what the dragon would do.

The dragon lifted one enormous hand and slammed it down on the cultist, smashing her the way I might squash a bug. There was a long pause as everyone considered this. Then the remaining cultists went back to screaming and running away. Candy stepped around me and broke into a run of her own—but unlike the cultists, she was running toward the dragon. The servitors stayed frozen where they were. I ran after Candy, but more slowly. I was, after all, covered in blood and dressed like a cultist; I wanted the dragon nicely distracted by the female of his species before I started bothering him.

Dominic and Sarah started moving when I did. We met at the center of the room. Dominic grabbed my arm, pulling me to a halt, and then—before I could protest that I was trying to get to the giant lizard—pulling me into a hug. “You frightened the life from us,” he said, without letting go.

“I’m sorry I got captured by a snake cult.” I hugged him back. It seemed like the easiest course of action, and it wasn’t an unpleasant position to be in. He hugged solidly, without crossing the line into hugging too hard.

“This is sweet and all, but dragon? Remember, dragon?” Sarah tugged on the sleeve of my borrowed robe. “It’s really big, and it’s really confused right now, so this would be the time to tell it that you come in peace.”

“How do you know?” asked Dominic, pulling back and giving her a wary look.

“Telepath, remember? Now come on.” She grabbed my arm, pulling me out of his embrace and starting toward the dragon. I didn’t put up any resistance. This was, after all, a real live dragon we were talking about. That’s not the sort of thing a cryptozoologist gets the opportunity to meet every day.

Candy beat us to the dragon by a considerable margin. She wasn’t actually saying anything when we got there; just standing with her hands pressed against her mouth, looking up at the dragon and crying silently. I shook my arm free of Sarah’s grasp and put a hand on Candy’s shoulder, looking up at the dragon.

“This wasn’t in the manual,” I murmured to Sarah, before saying, more loudly, “Um, hello, Mr. Dragon. I’m Verity Price. This is Candice. She’s a dragon, too.” Dominic and Sarah both gave me startled looks. Candy kept crying. The dragon wasn’t saying anything, and so I added, “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Who are these others?” asked the dragon, lowering his head to what passed for eye level. He had an accent, faintly British, that made me think of period dramas about the American Revolution on PBS. “Who has sent you? What is going on here?”

“Um, no one sent us, and what’s going on is sort of a long story. This is my cousin, Sarah Zellaby.”

“Hi,” said Sarah.

“And this is our friend Dominic De Luca.”

Looking unsure as to whether or not he was doing the right thing, Dominic bowed to the dragon. “Sir,” he said.

Candy took her hands away from her mouth and pointed at Dominic. “He’s from the Covenant,” she announced. Catching my expression, she added, “But he came to help save you from the snake cult.”