“An Offering must be Made!” replied the mouse priest, without hesitation. I could actually hear the capital letters in the middle of the sentence.
I thought about what was in the fridge for a moment before saying, “Tomorrow’s grocery day. Will you accept a box of Hostess cupcakes and some sharp cheddar for now?”
This required a quick conference with the mice around him before he looked up and nodded, banging his kitten-bone staff against the floor to signal his acceptance. “It will suffice,” he intoned.
“Great. Dominic, I’ll meet you in the living room.”
“Naturally.” He was only shuddering a little as he turned and beat a hasty retreat away from the colony. That was a big improvement. Dominic might be tolerant of my cryptid-loving lifestyle, but the Aeslin mice still creeped him right the hell out, maybe because they insisted on staring at him constantly, waiting for him to prove his godhood. And this is why neither I nor my siblings ever brought home any dates during high school.
It took me about five minutes to get the mice sufficiently placated, and hence out of our hair for at least the next half hour. They were still doing their rapturous dance in celebration of the Coming of Cheese and Cake when I left the kitchen and walked down the short hall to the living room. Dominic was sitting on the side of the couch that wasn’t completely covered by my dance costumes.
“All done,” I said, moving to lean up against an open patch of wall. “So what did we need all this privacy for?”
“Verity . . .” Dominic hesitated. Then he stood, looking at me solemnly. “I must ask—no, I must beg—that you not become upset until you have heard everything I need to say. It is very important that you understand everything I have come here to tell you, and why this discussion needed to happen both immediately and in secret. May I have your assurance that you will remain calm?”
“Dominic, what’s going on?” I straightened, unconsciously trying to match the seriousness in his stance. “Is everything okay?”
“Please. Your assurance.”
“Yeah, sure. I’m a pretty calm person, you know that.”
It was a sign of how concerned he was that he didn’t even roll his eyes at such a blatant lie. Instead, he continued, “I have become fond of you, frustrating and impossible as you are, and I have learned a great deal about the unnatural races with which we share this planet through our association. It’s difficult to view them all as monsters when so many of them seem to be genuinely decent individuals, damned solely by the accident of their birth.”
“I’ll be sure to tell Sarah you said so,” I said dryly.
Dominic ignored me. “I do not wish any harm to you, or to the people—and yes, I admit now that they are people—to whom you have introduced me. Please understand that.”
“Dominic?” I bit my lip, looking at him warily. “You’re starting to freak me out a little bit here.”
“Good,” he said, with surprising fervency. “You should be ‘freaked out.’ You need to leave, Verity. You need to take your mice, and your cousin, and anything and anyone else you care about in this city, and leave.”
My eyes widened. “What?”
“Get out of here. Please, while you still can.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I took a step forward, shock fading into anger as I scowled at him. “Stop talking like Covenant and start speaking English, or I swear to God, I will start introducing you to my knives.”
“I’ve already met most of them,” said Dominic, and sighed, shoulders slumping. He reached out one hand, pressing his fingers against my cheek. “Verity, the Covenant is coming. They’re coming here. They want to check my work. They want to verify my reports.”
“What . . . ?” I breathed.
Dominic nodded very slightly, like the gesture pained him. “They’re coming to see how close I am to beginning the purge. Run, Verity. Run now, while you still can. If you’re here when they arrive, they’ll kill you.”
Four
“The question you have to ask yourself before you run away is this: am I running because I have no choice, or am I running because I’m afraid? And if I’m running because I’m afraid, will I actually escape, or will I just delay the inevitable?”
A semilegal sublet in Greenwich Village, about thirty seconds later
“WHAT?” I REPEATED, loudly enough that the mice actually stopped celebrating for a few seconds. They’ve lived with my family long enough to learn that, sometimes, shouting means it’s time to scramble for the nearest hidey-hole.
Their exultations resumed when my question wasn’t followed by gunfire. The mice may have learned some self-preservation, but there’s nothing in this world or any other that can interrupt Aeslin religious rites for very long.
Dominic, on the other hand, looked genuinely upset. “This wasn’t my idea, Verity, you have to believe me. I tried to convince them that there was no reason for them to send a team to check up on me, but my superiors feel that this is too large a territory for me to control on my own. They want to see for themselves that things are going as well as I’ve claimed.”
“And are they? Going as well as you claimed? How many cryptids do they think you’ve killed?” I couldn’t quite keep the edge out of my tone. It wasn’t his fault, and I knew it—if Dominic had wanted to sell me out to the Covenant, he would never have warned me that they were on their way. That didn’t stop all the old demons from rearing their heads, the ones that said this was always going to be the way things ended. That Covenant boys don’t change what they are just because Price girls are occasionally stupid enough to fall into bed with them, and I’d been a fool for trying to tell myself otherwise.
“That’s not fair,” he said quietly.
“When are they going to get here?”
“Soon.”
“Could you be a little more precise? Tomorrow? Next week? Next month? Should I even bother to run?”
“Goddammit, Verity, can you stop being angry with me for one second and just think? I’m not telling you this because I want to gloat! I’m trying to help. I’m trying to give you a chance—”
“You can’t.” My anger was suddenly gone, replaced by a resignation so deep it felt like it ran all the way down to my bones. “There’s no way I can evacuate the entire cryptid population of Manhattan. Even if I wanted to try, they’d have nowhere to go. It would be chaos. And if I can’t get them all out, I can’t go.”
“Verity. They’re not—” He stopped speaking so abruptly that for a moment, I thought he might have actually bitten his tongue. Somehow, that just made me feel even more resigned.
“You were about to say that they weren’t worth staying here and maybe getting myself killed over, weren’t you?” He didn’t answer me. “Come on, Dominic. Tell me that I’m wrong. All I’m asking you to do is look me in the eye and tell me that I’m wrong.”
“I can’t,” he said, very quietly.
I nodded. “I sort of figured that was what you were going to say. Did you really think I could run and leave them all here to die? Did you think I was that much of a coward?”
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. The look on his face was all the answer that I needed from him, and it broke my heart a little bit to see it.
“I see.” I took a breath, drawing myself as upright as I could. It helped if I told myself that this was another form of Paso Doble, the only form of Latin dance whose competitive form was as much a battle as anything else. “Thank you for the warning. I’ll take it from here.”