“Could you?” Carol whirled to face me, clutching her wig to her breast and looking at me like I was the answer to all her prayers. “I didn’t want to ask, but…”

“It’s no big. Really.”

Here’s a fun fact: there are over nine hundred races of cryptids on the planet, and maybe eighty of those look roughly human, ranging from the Sasquatches and gorgons to dragon princesses and cuckoos. Here’s another fun fact: most of those races have only started coming into intentional contact with humans during the last hundred and fifty years, as our expansionistic tendencies brought us to them. Many have little to no idea of their own biology, and still practice a form of folk medicine that the human race abandoned centuries ago.

Which is where my mother comes in. Evelyn Price, formerly Evelyn Baker, is the closest thing to a cryptid physician most of them will ever meet. She’ll even make house calls if you can find her a teleport, and her rates are more than reasonable.

Carol burbled a series of thanks before she went back to trying to cram her snakes into the wig. I took her distraction as the opportunity it was and dug my weapons out of the locker. I always feel better with a knife, and better yet with a firearm or two. I was only carrying a simple underarm holster, but that was fine; those are the easiest to hide. Pulling on a windbreaker, I shoved my street clothes into my emergency backpack and shrugged it on before scooting for the hall. I didn’t see the point in changing. After a mice-related kitchen incident, a boob-grab by an asshole, and a private talk with Dave, I was more than ready to get out on the rooftops. Running in a skirt may be a little bit indecent, but I don’t mind doing it as long as I’m not going to need to talk to any humans.

The night had matured while I was inside, ambient noise going from the mindless cheer of early evening to something deeper and more classical. A siren wailed in the distance; horns honked on the street below; a baby’s crying drifted out of an apartment window. It only needed a saxophone or maybe some feel-good easy listening music to make the stereotype complete.

I took several deep breaths of the night air, letting the tension slip out of my shoulders before backing up, putting my back against the rooftop door, and breaking into a run. If I couldn’t take my aggressions out on Dave’s customers, I’d do a quick circuit, head home, call Sarah, and go clubbing.

It’s always the best plans that fall through. I think the universe has some sort of law.

Ever wonder why pigeons need to breed so fast when they’re living in an environment that’s entirely man-made, offering all the comforts and amenities a brainless ball of feathers and pestilence could desire? If you just look at the immediately visible evidence, they should outbreed the cities and cast us all into the depths of a Hitchcock remake.

What most people don’t realize—what most people don’t want to realize—is that the urban cryptid population does us the enormous favor of keeping the pigeon population at a reasonable size: they eat them. The larger your city, the more pigeons you’ll have, and the more cryptids they’ll attract. Nature works in mysterious ways. Sometimes those ways involve air-breathing flying manta rays camouflaged to blend in with concrete walls.

My first stop was the top floor of a high-rise six blocks from Dave’s, where the family of resident harpies offered to share their pigeon stew. They were trying to bribe me into agreeing to keep picking up their mail. The youngest daughter’s wings were coming in, making her unsuitable for interaction with the bulk of the city for at least six years and keeping the rest of the family housebound until she finished the dangerous stages of her molt. I agreed to the mail and begged off dinner. Without a bezoar to purify the stuff, I’d probably have managed to catch some new and interesting variety of plague.

Normally, my rounds would have kept me making social calls for the next several hours, but there had been reports of an ahool living somewhere on the rooftops in Midtown. Ahool are like giant bats with monkey heads and nasty claws. They’re also cooperative hunters who bring down prey by means of the bacteria swarming in their foul little mouths. An ahool takes a chunk out of a person and then waits for them to die. If the ahool isn’t hungry, it takes a chunk out anyway, just in case another ahool in the area wants a snack. If the reports were accurate, and the thing wasn’t found, we’d have a flock living in Manhattan before very long. That sort of thing would definitely get the attention of the Covenant.

Most of my nondance hours were devoted to serving, studying, and supporting the cryptid community. Sometimes the only way to serve them was to keep them from drawing too much attention to themselves, and, in the case of the nonintelligent predatory species, that could activate the second part of my job description. Not “cryptozoologist”: monster hunter. I’d try relocation first, and if that didn’t work…

I’d avoid more final solutions for as long as I could. That was the best that I could offer.

Free running takes a lot of attention, especially at night on unfamiliar ground. Free running while scanning the skies and likely hiding spots for giant carnivorous bats really leaves no room to watch for anything else. I’ve had years of training at spotting traps and deadfalls. I’ve even managed to beat Antimony a few times at games of hide-and-seek, and that’s damn near impossible. So nothing but distraction and simple carelessness can excuse my failing to see the snare before I jammed my foot straight into it.

The rope snapped taut, the loop closed around my ankle, and all I had time to think before the deadweight hit the side of my head and knocked me into unconsciousness was how much Alex was going to laugh at me for this one.

Then the weight came down, the snare whipped me into the air, and I wasn’t thinking of anything for a while.

Five

“When in doubt, play dead. Well, unless you might be dealing with a ghoul, or a basilisk, or something else that likes its meat a little ripe. Actually, when in doubt, just start shooting.”

—Alice Healy

Upside down in a really short skirt somewhere on the rooftops of Manhattan

THERE IS NO SHAME IN BLACKING OUT when whipped abruptly into the air, especially if you were running when it happened. Seriously, if there was shame in it, Alex and I would have died of embarrassment before Antimony turned nine. Having a little sister who sets traps for fun definitely made us a little blasé about getting caught in them. Any trap you can walk away from was probably set by someone who wasn’t trying to kill you. Not immediately, anyway.