“I know you are,” she said. “Now go on. I need to take Verity to see Osana, and I don’t want any of you making our guests feel like they’re being spied on.”
The girls nodded and scattered, running past the adult dragons who were closing, more sedately, on our location. It was hard to determine exact numbers, but going by the number who were awake and in the Nest, I was placing this group as slightly larger than the Manhattan group. They clearly had the space, the resources, and the cover story necessary to keep expanding for a while yet before they’d need to talk about creating a new Nest. That was good. Male dragons were essentially solitary creatures, due to their size, functional immobility, and the resources needed to keep them healthy, but female dragons did better when they lived in higher numbers. They were social creatures, even if they were fairly antisocial toward most non-dragons.
The first of the adults reached us and stopped at a polite distance, although the way they looked us up and down was anything but polite. Alice looked calmly back. Malena squirmed. I smiled my brightest stage smile, and waved.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Verity Price. It’s a pleasure to meet you all.”
“So, the famous Verity finally came to see what she’d be bringing our new husband into.” The other dragons parted, allowing the speaker to walk toward me. I blinked.
Brenna was unusually tall for a dragon; this woman, on the other hand, was unusually short, even shorter than me. Her hair wasn’t blonde, which was normal for the European exemplars of the species; it was red-gold, almost matching the freckles on her nose and cheeks.
She smiled. “Laidly worm,” she said.
I blinked again. “I beg your pardon?”
“I said, laidly worm,” she said.
“I thought you were extinct,” said Alice.
The woman—Osana—turned to my grandmother and said, “No offense, but that’s what we wanted you to think. Those of us who survived have been living with the dragons for centuries. We make good administrators, and the dragons have been happy to accept us as full members of their Nests. That’ll change if we can find a husband of our own, of course. Our species are similar, but not that similar. I don’t suppose you’ve heard tell of any great worms sleeping in the earth, have you?”
“Not yet, but I’m starting to feel like I’ll have a lot of spelunking in my future,” I said. “Osana, I presume?”
“The very same,” she said. “My family’s been here since the Nest was founded. Since my mother was the former Nest-mother, I took over when she passed on. It usually goes to the eldest, but Catherine is a little slow these days. It was better to let her have her space.”
I tilted my head. “I hadn’t heard about dragons having senility issues.”
“We’ve been cloning ourselves for hundreds of years, with no new genetic material,” said Osana. “I did go to college. I read a lot on parthenogenesis. It seemed relevant to my life. If you’re a member of a species that has both sexual and asexual reproduction—”
“You need both to remain healthy,” I said. “Got it.”
Osana nodded. “Now you see why we were willing to empower Brenna to approach you, and why we haven’t set an upper limit on what’s to be paid. Finding a husband for the girls here won’t save me or my sisters, or our daughters, but it will save our family. That makes it worth whatever it costs. We’re even willing to send them one of our own to act as a financial adviser, if that would sweeten the pot. We’re even better with money than most of our kind.”
The more I learned about the damage the Covenant had done in their blind rush to protect humanity above all else, the more convinced I became that the real monsters had won. But that was a conversation for another time. “We’re here because Brenna wanted us to tell you what’s been going on at the theater.”
“Oh?” Osana’s attention shifted from me to Brenna, going hard and cold at the same time. It was suddenly easy to see how this tiny woman had been able to convince a whole Nest to let her be in charge. She had a way about her that was pure Nest-mother, ruthless where the protection of her people was concerned. “What’s been going on, Brenna?” What haven’t you been telling us? floated behind the question, as clear as if it had been spoken aloud.
“I just found out tonight,” said Brenna, shooting a pleading glance at me and Malena. We were the ones she knew: Alice was the terrifying new factor.
Having mercy on Brenna wasn’t hard. She’d been my friend for a long time, and she’d always been kind to the dancers, even when they had nothing to offer her but their good regard. “There’s a snake cult operating out of the theater,” I said. “They’ve been killing the eliminated dancers every week, using them to fuel a summoning ritual. They’ve killed at least eight people so far.”