So I forced myself to smile, and I said, “I’ll do whatever I can to make the dragons of New York understand how good you’d be for their son, and why they should listen to your request. William’s a friend of mine. I’m sure he’ll pay attention when I speak.”

Chantelle clapped a hand over her mouth. “Thank you,” she squeaked, voice muffled by her fingers.

“Verity’s nice that way,” said Brenna. She put her hand on my shoulder, steering me toward the office door. “We’ll be back in a bit, all right? Keep watch on the register.”

“Yay, guard duty,” said Chantelle, dropping her hand—but she was smiling, and her eyes were bright with tears.

Alice waited until we were through the door to the manager’s office before she asked, “What was that all about?”

“We’ve asked Verity to help us purchase a husband from the dragons of New York,” said Brenna blithely, as she pulled a set of keys out of her pocket and walked to the door on the other side of the room. “They should be having sons about now, and we have only daughters, naturally enough. We’d like to get some new blood in.”

Alice said nothing.

Brenna must have interpreted her silence as a criticism, because she turned back and said, with great good cheer, “I know it’s not the human way, but it’s the way we have, and we need a husband for our little girls.”

“I wasn’t judging,” said Alice. “I was just thinking about the logistics, that’s all.”

“Baby dragons are small,” said Brenna. “They have to be. Females have human-esque hips, and we’re the ones who lay the eggs.” She unlocked the door and pushed it open, revealing a tunnel on the other side. “Come on, then. Osana will have seen the light go off on the security board, and she hates it when people dawdle in the tunnel.” With that, she started into the dark, leaving the rest of us with little choice but to follow her.

The tunnel ran the length of a football field, passing under the motel before beginning to slant up again. The walls were shored up with concrete and wood pilings, and looked similar in construction to the sub-layers of the Crier Theater. “How long has this been here?” I asked.

“The original tunnel was built in 1922, when we acquired the property that would become our main Nest,” said Brenna. “We hired local contractors for the bulk of the work. The expense stung, of course, but better to pay for something that would last than to be patching and renovating every ten years, right?”

“Local contractors,” I said. “Not human ones, right?”

Brenna looked appalled. “And have humans know where we lived? No offense, Verity, you and your family . . . you’re a special case. But most of the species is dangerous, callow, and not to be trusted.”

“Preaching to the choir,” said Malena. “There’s a reason most humans didn’t even think chupacabras were an urban myth until fifty years ago. We’ve always been there. We just didn’t feel like getting skinned and sold to tourists in six-inch squares.”

Alice didn’t say anything. But I could see her profile, and the downturned corners of her mouth made it clear that she was far from happy. Whether she was upset by the defamation of humans or thinking about all the humans she hadn’t killed in the last fifty years was harder to say. My grandmother wasn’t much on species loyalty. None of the members of my family are, when you get right down to it. It’s just sometimes difficult to know where her loyalties actually lay. She isn’t a danger to people she’s related to. Everyone else is a different story.

I had another question, and this one felt considerably more pressing. “If the same people built the tunnels here and the ones under the Crier Theater, why were you able to hold on to your property while they lost theirs? Why didn’t you help them?” I was wagering she would know what I was talking about.

I was right. Brenna shot me a startled look. “We kept our property because we invested in the local area, and made sure the place was run-down and unappealing to human residents. We own half the buildings in a three-block radius. We do have humans living here—we couldn’t manage absolute control—but with us fighting gentrification and them happy to have rents they can afford and a relatively low crime rate for an area in this apparent state of disrepair, they mostly keep to themselves. They even afford a reasonable smokescreen if someone from the Covenant comes sniffing around.”

Dragons frequently became black holes for an area’s wealth. I had never heard of them investing in infrastructure before, but it made a certain amount of sense: they could always recoup their money by selling some of their property, since anything in the Valley would go for way more today than they had paid for it fifty years ago.