Urban Allies: Ten Brand-New Collaborative Stories Read online

  I took a long, cold pull from my beer before answering. Defeating rogue necromancers is thirsty work. “It appears so.”

  “I could get in touch with Valva.” He glanced at Ava and Leo, who’d both started at the name. “That’s my wife. She’s in Irkalla with the kids to visit their grandma and grandpa.” He didn’t mention that “Grandma and Grandpa” were the King and Queen of the Dark Races underworld. “Anyway, I could have her ask around, but she’ll probably nag for like an hour.” He winked at Leo. “Women, am I right?”

  Leo cleared his throat and took a sip of beer while avoiding the cat demon’s eyes.

  “Thanks, Giguhl. I’m overdue for a visit to Irkalla, anyway.”

  “So what are you going to do about him?” Ava asked.

  “Clovis?” I shrugged. “I’ll figure something out. First I need to talk to my twin sister, Maisie, who lives in the underworld. She might be able to tell me where he is.”

  Ava squinted at me. “You have a sister who lives in the underworld?”

  I laughed. “Who among us has an uncomplicated family?”

  Ava saluted me with her beer. “Touché.”

  “How about you two?” Adam asked. “Where will you go now?”

  Ava and Leo exchanged a glance. In my opinion, it was not the shared glance of two platonic friends, but the intimate glance that communicated a world of information without a word being spoken. But I wasn’t about to point that out, since those two seemed about as ready for a healthy relationship as I’d been when I’d met Adam so many years ago.

  Leo answered for them. “We’re going to head up to Minnesota. Got a line on a thing.”

  I didn’t question him despite his cagey language. My life had had plenty of those moments where the less anyone knew about my activities the safer everyone was. “Well, if you ever come our way again, you’ve got a place to crash,” I said. “Just call ahead next time.” I reached out and clinked my beer bottle with Ava’s.

  She smiled back. “Trust me, we will. I don’t think I could handle stumbling on Giguhl in his birthday suit again.”

  The cat looked up from his bowl of beer. “You know when you’re in dog form everyone can see your butthole, right?”

  Ava’s cheeks flamed immediately. “Maybe so, but at least I’m not a pussy, Mr. Giggles.”

  “You know what?” Giguhl said. “You’re not half-bad for a bitch.”

  I braced myself for Ava’s reaction to that comeback, worried it might spark a real shit show of a fight between the two.

  “Same goes.” Ava leaned forward and frowned at the demon. “And for the record? We can see yours, too.”

  There’s really no laughter like the kind shared over a round of beers following a battle. We were all warriors in our own right, but there’s real satisfaction in teaming up with other fighters. That night, I think we all learned a thing or two about teamwork. As we finished our drinks and said our goodbyes, I wasn’t sure if we’d ever see Ava and Leo again. But one thing was for sure. If I ever needed someone to have my back in a fight, I’d be giving them a call.

  Tailed

  SEANAN McGUIRE AND KELLEY ARMSTRONG

  VERITY

  A low-rent motel on the outskirts of Albany, New York

  MARCH 2012

  “I hate everything,” announced Sarah, voice muffled by the pillow covering her face. She was sprawled across one of the two beds in our shabby budget motel room, her arms and legs akimbo. The fact that she was using her outside voice when she was this exhausted told me how the Pet Expo had been for her. Normally, if she’s too tired to stay on her feet, she goes straight to telepathic communication, and forget any illusions I might have about privacy. Sometimes life with telepaths means never getting to say “That’s a secret.”

  We’d been in a warehouse packed to the gills with people for two days now, and it was getting to her. Not just her; it was getting to me too, although with less “psychic migraine” and more “urge to start stabbing people who invade my personal space.” The upstate New York Pet Expo was proving to be more challenging than I’d expected. It had looked so simple on paper. Put on practical shoes and a brown wig, stick close to Sarah, and go looking for exotic animal poachers among the stalls of guinea pigs, fancy rats, and interestingly colored ball pythons. Piece of cake.

  Sarah, in addition to being telepathic, was a natural ambush predator; most people tended to forget she existed five minutes after meeting her, and if I was with her, the effect sometimes extended to me. It helped if I wore drab clothing and didn’t smile too much. She had a lot of survival advantages, mostly because everyone who met a member of her species wound up wanting to kill them. It was a matter of evolutionary necessity.

  “Come on, you can’t hate everything.” I pulled off my wig, plucking the bobby pins out of my short-cropped blonde hair. “You like gravity.”

  “No. Hate it.”

  “You like ketchup.”

  “Hate it.”

  “You like calculus.”

  Sarah lifted her head and glared at me. “No fair bringing religion into this.”

  “Love you too,” I said, blowing her a quick kiss. “I’m sorry you had to spend the day surrounded by filthy human minds.”

  “You should be.” She rolled onto her back, staring mulishly at the ceiling. “Some of the things they were thinking about doing to each other were horrifying. Murder things, sex things, credit card fraud things—um, that reminds me, the guy who was selling tarantulas near the hot dog stand? We should probably call in a tip about him to the local police. He’s like, way into identity theft.”

  “The world is a panoply of wonders,” I said. Our motel room was small enough that the bathroom was more of a closet with a shower tucked into the corner. The sink and mirror were at the back of the sleeping area, in an arrangement I was sure the architects considered “discreet,” and I thought was actually sort of gross. I drifted that way and peered at my reflection before reaching for the makeup remover. Without the wig, this much eyeliner was not a good look for me. “No one was thinking about poaching?”

  “Everyone was thinking about poaching. Half the snakes we saw were wild-caught, and don’t get me started on the lady with the sugar gliders. One of the rabbit vendors also breeds jackalopes, but he didn’t bring any to the expo.”

  “Selling jackalopes isn’t illegal,” I said, wiping the left side of my face clean. The antlered lapines were far from critically endangered, and if he was breeding his own and not selling them to scientific research facilities, he wasn’t my concern. “What else did you get?”

  “You mean apart from the migraine and the desire to go full-cuckoo and wipe out the human race?” Sarah sighed. “Nothing. I got nothing.”

  I paused in the act of wiping away my makeup, looking at her reflection in the mirror. I didn’t say anything. Neither did she.

  The human race has a tendency to think that just because we have all the good toys—thumbs and knives and cable television—we’re at the top of the food chain, and we try to ignore the fact that we only hold that precarious position because we killed almost everything that could challenge us. The dragons, the giants, all the competitors for the top-dog spot; we built an empire on their bones, consigned them to legend, and forgot about them. But the others, the things we didn’t kill . . . they didn’t forget about us. The reality of what we’d done was the world they had to live with every day.

  Most people don’t know that humanity isn’t alone. That’s an inconvenient truth they were swift to forget. Others, like the Covenant of St. George—assholes—remember and do their best to finish the purge of anything they don’t consider “natural.” And then there’s me, and people like me. We’re cryptozoologists and monster social workers and conservationists, trying to make up for the murder in our family trees by protecting what’s left of the preternatural world. But that sword cuts both ways, and when something most people don’t believe in becomes a danger to humanity, we have to make sure that no one gets hur
t.

  No one innocent, anyway.

  Sarah was my cousin, thanks to the wonders of adoption. She was my friend, thanks to the fact that she was funny, smart, and usually willing to go along with whatever bizarre scheme I’d hatched. But she was also a telepathic ambush predator from a species of killers, and the fact that she was usually content to read comic books and do Sudoku puzzles didn’t mean she wasn’t potentially a danger. We all knew that one day things could change.

  “Sorry,” said Sarah in a small voice.

  I finished wiping the makeup off. “Have you been following my internal monologue again?”

  “You think loudly sometimes. It’s not like I can help it.” She propped herself up on her elbows and gave me a wry look. “I wouldn’t wipe out the human race. There’s no X-Men without the human race.”

  “We are saved by the strangest things.” I turned away from the mirror and crossed to the dresser. I hadn’t gone to the expo unarmed—I was undercover, not stupid—but there was a difference between the kind of weapons I was willing to carry into a crowd and the kind I wanted in the woods. “Look. You stay here, chill out, watch some cable, drink some ketchup, and try to refrain from getting overly murder-y. I’m going to wander around the woods and see if I can figure out where the local tailypo are nesting.”

  “You really think we have a poacher?”

  “There’s someone selling ‘long-tailed raccoons’ on Craigslist. Either we have a poacher, or we’ve had a small nuclear spill and no one thought to tell the locals.” I felt better with half a dozen throwing knives in my pockets. Every girl has her own version of the security blanket. “They weren’t at the expo today, but they’ll be here. I just need to find the adults before this asshole comes along and scoops up all the local juveniles.”

  Tailypo don’t breed well in captivity. Tailypo don’t do anything well in captivity. They’re essentially the raccoon version of the lemur, and they don’t enjoy being held against their will. People were going to get hurt if they insisted on keeping tailypo as pets, which was inevitably going to lead to the tailypo being identified as a “new species,” and there was nothing good at the end of that chain of events. Looking too hard at the tailypo would lead to looking for their habitat, and there were things that tended to cohabitate with our long-tailed friends that we wanted to keep hidden, at least for a little while longer.

  “Okay,” said Sarah. She flopped back down onto the bed. “Don’t get dead. Your parents would never forgive me.”

  “I won’t,” I promised, and slotted my gun into its holster before leaving the room. Sarah would be on the computer before I made it to the trees, sending a chat request to our cousin Artie in Oregon and wailing about her day. It would be good for the both of them.

  My family is weird, but we get by, and we’re good at what we do. The forest spread out in front of me like a homecoming, and I stepped into the welcoming gloom.

  ELENA

  When Clayton and I decided to have kids, there’d been only one issue I was very clear on—that our children would be properly socialized into the human world. That’s obvious to most people, but not so obvious to werewolves, who prefer the insular company of their Pack. Also really not obvious to Clay—the former child werewolf who’d spent most of his early school years growling in a corner, counting down the minutes until he could go home to Jeremy and escape the clutches of human children who might do something unbearable, like talk to him.

  So our children were being integrated into the human community. They went to a normal school . . . well, okay, a private one, when the other didn’t quite work out. They were enrolled in normal childhood activities . . . well, swimming and art and other independent pursuits, after the preschool-soccer fiasco. They were encouraged to have friends . . . well, a friend, please, Kate, just one, and no, your brother doesn’t count.

  At eight years old, the twins’ socialization was still a work in progress. A serious work in progress for Kate. Logan accepted it, but “accept” was the key word. “Humoring his mother” might be a better way of putting it.

  The biggest problem, though? Good parenting is about teaching by example, and since Clay sure as hell wasn’t tackling this one, it was down to me. Which meant signing up as a parent chaperone on this overnight trip to Albany. I’d further encouraged the twins to use this opportunity to make new acquaintances, starting by choosing bus seatmates they didn’t know well. So, of course, I had to do the same.

  I shared my seat with a mother who began by announcing she was into “scrapping.” Conversation had seemed much more promising when I thought that she meant she liked to fight. But apparently “scrapping” was her term for scrapbooking, and I didn’t really understand what that was, so she proceeded to explain . . . for the entire two-hour trip. The moment the bus pulled into the parking lot, I bolted from my seat with a murmured, “Need to check on the kids.”

  The aisle was already jammed with eight-year-olds equally eager to escape forced confinement. Kate was off the bus, probably first in line. I spotted Logan, still seated, carrying on an intense conversation with his seatmate . . . another parent chaperone. Apparently, I’d needed to specify that I meant “sit with another child.”

  We disembarked, and I joined the growing cluster of parents and children at the head of a forest path. The class trip would begin with a science project—a late afternoon “scavenger hunt” in the woods. I was actually looking forward to this part, as were the twins, and as soon as I stopped at the crowd’s edge, Kate zipped over, her worksheet in hand. Logan joined us a moment later.

  “Elena,” said a voice behind me, and I turned to see MaryAnne, one of the mothers I knew less well—by choice. Her BFF, Charlene, followed. “I barely even recognized you without your husband at your side.”

  “He is very attentive,” Charlene said. “He never seems to let you out of his sight. I must admit, I do find that . . . troubling.”

  “Yeah,” Kate said. “He keeps her locked in the cage in our basement, but we know where he hides the key.”

  “Oh, Kate,” MaryAnne said with a chuckle. “You are something, aren’t you?”

  Charlene’s snort said my daughter was indeed something. My hackles rose, but MaryAnne continued, murmuring, “Now, personally, I wouldn’t mind being locked in a cage with your—”

  “We should get closer,” I cut in. “So we can hear the teacher.”

  “Bitches,” Kate muttered as we walked away.

  “Kate,” I said. “Language.”

  “Note that she’s objecting to the profanity of the word choice,” Logan murmured. “Not the meaning.”

  Kate snickered. I gave Logan a look. He turned wide blue eyes on me. “I’m agreeing with you, Mom. Kate shouldn’t call them that. It’s an insult to real bitches.”

  I growled under my breath. He gave me a rare grin, and we continued over to the teachers.

  After giving us final instructions, the teachers told us to break into groups. I started looking around.

  “Here,” Logan said, taking his sister’s worksheet and giving her another page. “I got an early copy and reorganized the items, classified by object type, subclassified by—”

  “Serious?” Kate said. “You’re such an old man, Lo.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Do you want to test how old I am? Remember the last time—”

  “Enough,” I said. “We need to find another group to join.”

  “No, we don’t,” Kate said. “They’ll just slow us down.”

  Before I could argue, Logan said, “She has a point, however tangentially. If we team up with others, in the excitement of the hunt, we may forget to hide the fact we can smell better and hear better. Our scent may also send wildlife into a panic, which will raise questions. It’s safer if we do this by ourselves.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m just thinking of the Pack,” he said. “Minimizing an exposure threat, which is everyone’s job.” He looked at me. “Especially the Alpha’s.”

&
nbsp; I rolled my eyes but waved them into the forest, and we took off before anyone could stop us.

  It had been unseasonably warm for March, and after a half hour of hiking, we’d shed our jackets and tied them around our waists. We’d also knocked off most of the scavenger hunt items. This part of the class trip was intended for urban kids, who’d be lucky to have a stand of trees behind their neighborhood playground. We had acres of forest in our backyard, and the twins seemed to spend half their lives there, endlessly exploring. Finding acorns and silver birch and even cranberry bushes wasn’t exactly difficult for them.

  The best part of a forest, though, is the wildlife. Not surprisingly, that’s what fascinates Kate and Logan most. Unlike their father at their age, they don’t see tracking and studying animals as developing predatory skills. To them it’s pure interest, the expression of a kinship with nature that’s wondrous to see.

  We were peering into a hollowed-out log, watching a fox and her newborn kits while the mother slept, wrapped around her babies. One had wriggled free of its littermates and was trying to explore, more rolling than walking.

  The twins watched the kit, and I watched them, the delight in their faces, my “babies” who had not been babies in far too long, growing up surrounded by adults. Here, though, even Logan’s eyes glowed in childlike wonder.

  When the mother fox seemed to realize one kit had wandered, she opened her eyes and we moved away quickly, before we alarmed her.

  “Can we come back tomorrow, Momma?” Logan asked as we walked to the path. He used to call me that when he was little. It’s rare these days and every time it makes me smile.

  “The hotel is only a couple of miles away,” he continued. “And we’ll have time when the other kids go to the pet show.”

  “Since we aren’t going,” Kate grumbled.

  Her brother shot her a look, and she acknowledged it with an apology. I’d told the teacher they have allergies, but that’s a lie. They really can’t go, and that isn’t me being an overprotective parent—it’s the animals I’m protecting, the ones who’d go nuts at our scent.