“. . . Lyra!”
The crowd went wild. Lyra’s hand was pulled from Valerie’s as she covered her mouth and began to sob. Valerie turned to hug her, feeling like her entire body—her body, which had always listened so well to her commands, carrying her through so much—had gone numb.
“Congratulations,” she whispered. She wasn’t sure Lyra heard her. The other woman was too busy grinning through her tears, and being handed a bouquet of red roses bigger around than her chest, and then one of the stagehands was there, helping Valerie back, out of the spotlight, out of the way.
Valerie Pryor closed her eyes. Verity Price opened them. It had been fun to be someone else for a little while. She’d even allowed herself to hope it might be forever. But nothing was forever, was it? Valerie Pryor was just a mask she’d been wearing, and now . . .
Now she had work to do.
One
“If at first you don’t succeed, try again with a bigger gun.”
—Alice Healy
The bank of the main civic reservoir, in the middle of the night, Portland, Oregon
Now
TOO MANY EYES TO COUNT watched us from the surface of the reservoir. Every time I swept my flashlight across the water, I found another two or three dozen pairs glowing in the darkness. All of them were focused on the flashlight, which meant all of them were focused on us. Way to make a girl feel loved.
“Forgive me for stating the obvious, but we’re outnumbered,” murmured Dominic. He wasn’t holding a flashlight. His hands were empty, for now. If something moved, so would he, and given how many knives he could conceal in his leather duster—which may have been cool fifteen years ago; now it was just a weird, if practical, affectation—he wouldn’t have any trouble fighting it off.
“Yup,” I agreed, continuing to play my flashlight across the water. Eyes, eyes, eyes. Everywhere eyes. I ran down the checklist in the back of my head, trying to find something they could belong to that wasn’t a sudden and inexplicable infestation of swamp hags. Swamp hags don’t belong in city reservoirs. Adults don’t move between territories very often, and the size of the eyes I was seeing implied an infestation of adolescents. Which made no sense at all. They would’ve had to be carried here, and who the hell thought that was a good idea? Why—
A bullfrog’s sonorous croak split the air. I blinked twice before I burst out laughing, earning myself a sidelong look from Dominic.
“What is so funny?” he asked.
“We’re here because Artie heard a rumor about ‘something weird at the reservoir,’ right?” A nod. “And we both assumed the eyes were the weird thing, hence your comment about us being outnumbered.” Another nod. I grinned. “The only thing that’s wrong here is how many frogs are swimming in the drinking water. Somebody should probably tell the city.”
“Frogs.”
“Yup. Frogs.” I picked up a rock and lobbed it toward a cluster of eyes. The cluster scattered. Several plump bullfrog bodies were briefly visible in the flashlight beam. The rest of the eyes didn’t budge. I lowered my flashlight. “They get hypnotized by the light—hence the staring. They’re an invasive species, but they’re not our problem.”
Something splashed a little farther out in the reservoir.
“Ah, Verity,” said Dominic.
“People introduced them all over the country, sometimes by mistake, sometimes on purpose, and sometimes because they were trying to feed the family manticore,” I said. “Manticore are surprisingly chill about eating amphibians. You’d think the whole ‘cold blood’ thing would be a problem, but you’d be wrong.”
“Verity, I must insist,” said Dominic.
“Insist on what?” I turned to face him, the beam of my flashlight striking his chest and illuminating his face. He had his serious expression on, the one that implied an asteroid was about to smack into the planet and wipe out all human life, thus sparing him the indignity of putting up with it for one minute more. It used to piss me off when he made that face. These days I find it funny as hell. Nobody fights harder for the survival of the people around him than Dominic, and it’s not his fault he sounds like a stuffed shirt half the time.
He is a man of many excellent qualities, which is why I married him.
“I must insist you look back at the water.” He was starting to sound faintly strangled. That wasn’t normal. It probably wasn’t good. I turned my flashlight back toward the reservoir.
The light gleamed off the scales of a long, slender column that stretched from the water to some unseen higher point. Mouth suddenly dry, I played the light upward, confirming that a) the column was a neck, and b) the neck belonged to something carnivorous in the long-necked plesiosaur family.