“Uncle Mike!” I didn’t lower my pistol. “What’s the password?”
“There is no password,” he replied. “If you need a password, you’re probably already dead, and that makes it a moot point. Now get in here before you scare the neighbors.”
I beamed, clicking the safety on my pistol into place before replacing it in its holster and stepping through the open door. The mice—who had been obeying my edict never to let themselves be seen from the hall, and were consequentially plastered against the wall just inside—cheered loudly. “What are you doinghere?” I asked, while I closed and locked the door. I sniffed the air. “Is that pot roast?”
Uncle Mike just looked at me, eyebrow still raised.
Oh, right. “Before you scare the neighbors” was the first half of the family passcode. “I mean, the neighbors don’t scare easy,” I said. “I’m pretty sure they’ve seen it all before.”
“Your father called me and said you needed backup,” he said, finally lowering his crossbow. “And yes, it’s pot roast. I figured you’d be going largely nocturnal for the duration of the shit that’s about to hit the fan, and there’s no such thing as too much readily available protein.”
“Hail!” chorused the mice. “Hail the High Priest of Goddammit Eat Something Already!”
I grinned. “See, I almost didn’t need to get a passcode from you. The pot roast would have been effective proof of identity.”
“Yes, but if you hadn’t confirmed my identity, I would have shot you on general principle,” said Uncle Mike. Then he smiled. “Come over here and give me a hug, or I may shoot you anyway.”
I went over there and gave him a hug. It wasn’t an unpleasant experience. Uncle Mike—full name Michael Gucciard, a cryptozoologist from the Chicago area who specializes in water-based cryptids—was large, solid, and an excellent hugger. He also wasn’t related to the family in any biological sense, but anyone who puts up with as much of our crap as he does should get to be an honorary relation, or at least get hazard pay. (Being an honoraryrelation is why he’s only a High Priest, and not a God. If you want to be a God, you need to bang a Priestess, and Aunt Lea wouldn’t approve.)
“Where’s Aunt Lea?” I asked, pulling away. I paused. “Please tell me she stayed home.”
“She stayed home,” he said reassuringly. “I love your family, and you know there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for your father, but the day I bring my wife into the path of a Covenant purge is the day the papers report on my mysterious drowning.”
I relaxed slightly. “Good.” Like so many cryptozoologists, Uncle Mike had fallen in love with his work—specifically with an Oceanid he met in Palm Beach. The Covenant had a history with Oceanids. It wasn’t a pretty one. Then again, the Covenant didn’t have a pretty history with anyone, so far as I could tell.
“Your security is terrible,” Uncle Mike informed me, pleasantries apparently completed. “I picked the locks in under a minute. No one came out to see what I was doing. I even passed someone in the downstairs hall, and he asked if I was heading for the second floor, since he didn’t want to carry a misdelivered newspaper all the way up the stairs.” He scowled briefly. “It’s a miracle you’re still alive.”
“I tell myself that every day,” I said. “Where are you staying?”
“Here, at least for tonight,” he said, in a tone that left no room for arguing.
I looked around my postage stamp of an apartment and considered arguing anyway. “ Where?” I asked.
“There’s a couch,” he said. “I fold.”
“Uncle Mike—”
“Your father gave me a précis on the whole situation, Verity, including your on-again, off-again boyfriend.” He fixed me with a stern eye. “I’m the last person who’s going to tell you who you should be dating—”
“Yeah, at this point, everybody else has already had their shot,” I muttered.
“—but if you think I’m going to leave you alone while he and his compatriots run loose in this city, you got another think coming. If it were up to me, we’d be relocating to somewhere more secure. We may have to do that anyway, but I figured I’d hear your game plan before I started packing your bags for you.”
“That’s very considerate, thank you,” I said dryly. “Do you want the update, or do you want to lecture me some more about how lousy my apartment is?”
To my surprise, he grinned. “Honey, I live in Chicago. I understand that this is a perfectly reasonable apartment for someone on your budget. But your security is shit, your neighbors are basically cannon fodder, and there’s no one close enough to help if things get bad. We shouldn’t stay here.”
“You’re right.” Even the admission hurt. Not as much as the one that came after it: “Dominic knows where I live. He’s known for a while now. I can’t trust him not to tell the Covenant where to find me.”
There was a pause while Mike looked at me, trying to figure out whether I was serious. Finally, deciding that I meant what I was saying, he asked, “There a reason you haven’t moved house already? Aside from wanting to be here to see my smiling face—and that’s a lousy reason, by the way, since you didn’t know that I was coming. I don’t recommend trying to convince me of that one.”
“This has all happened really fast, and I didn’t totally believe it until this morning,” I said. I shrugged. “Besides, where are we supposed to go? I can’t stay with Sarah, that’ll just put her in the line of fire. The dragons won’t have me, and I’m pretty sure my boss would kill me herself if I tried sleeping at work.”
“Don’t you still dance with that goat-sucker guy?”
“You mean James?” In my alternate identity as Valerie Pryor, professional ballroom dancer, I was usually partnered with a very sweet, very gay chupacabra. He didn’t mind that I kept guns under my tango costume, and I didn’t mind that he occasionally turned into a semi-reptilian quadruped and went hunting deer in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Like any partnership, our association was based on mutual trust. I trusted him not to sell me out to the Covenant. He trusted me not to shoot him in the head.
“Yeah. He lives around here, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, he does, and if I tried to hide at his place when I potentially had the Covenant of St. George on my tail, his husband would kill us both. Dennis puts up with a lot for James’ sake, but there are limits.” I paused. “I need to call him anyway, and tell them both to get out of town.”
Mike sighed. “You’ve made a pretty good mess for yourself, kiddo. Isn’t there anywhereyou could go that the Covenant doesn’t know about?”
“Wait—maybe.” I started toward the living room, mice dodging out of the way of my feet as I walked. “The dragons used to have a Nest in the old meatpacking district. They’d been living there for more than a century, and that means they must have managed to ride out previous purges. The place is essentially a fortress.”
“Sounds great,” he allowed. “But where are the dragons now?”
“They couldn’t get their husband out of the cavern he was asleep in, so they’ve relocated to be closer to him,” I said. “They seem perfectly happy down there.” Then again, they were female dragons in the presence of the first male anyone had seen in centuries. Between that and the heaps of gold they’d been amassing since they arrived in North America, they had everything they could possibly have needed.
“Great. You think they’ll let you use this Nest?”
“I may have to sell a kidney to pay what they’re going to ask for it, but there’s a chance.” I ran a hand through my hair, leaving it sticking up in untidy spikes. “I need to call home and give Dad an update on the situation. You want to listen in, so I don’t have to do it twice?”
“Just put the phone on speaker,” he said. “I’ll take care of the pot roast while you deliver the bad news.”
“Thanks, Uncle Mike,” I said—and I meant it. Having another person with combat training standing next to me made the odds feel a little less imbalanced, and a little more survivable. Maybe I was kidding myself. But there’s nothing wrong with some healthy self-delusion once in a while, especially when there’s an ancient organization of monster hunters involved. Since my boyfriend was one of the monster hunters, and they considered my family a type of monster, I figured I was entitled to a double dose.