—Evelyn Baker

A semilegal sublet in Greenwich Village, about thirty seconds later

“WHAT?” I REPEATED, loudly enough that the mice actually stopped celebrating for a few seconds. They’ve lived with my family long enough to learn that, sometimes, shouting means it’s time to scramble for the nearest hidey-hole.

Their exultations resumed when my question wasn’t followed by gunfire. The mice may have learned some self-preservation, but there’s nothing in this world or any other that can interrupt Aeslin religious rites for very long.

Dominic, on the other hand, looked genuinely upset. “This wasn’t my idea, Verity, you have to believe me. I tried to convince them that there was no reason for them to send a team to check up on me, but my superiors feel that this is too large a territory for me to control on my own. They want to see for themselves that things are going as well as I’ve claimed.”

“And are they? Going as well as you claimed? How many cryptids do they think you’ve killed?” I couldn’t quite keep the edge out of my tone. It wasn’t his fault, and I knew it—if Dominic had wanted to sell me out to the Covenant, he would never have warned me that they were on their way. That didn’t stop all the old demons from rearing their heads, the ones that said this was always going to be the way things ended. That Covenant boys don’t change what they are just because Price girls are occasionally stupid enough to fall into bed with them, and I’d been a fool for trying to tell myself otherwise.

“That’s not fair,” he said quietly.

“When are they going to get here?”

“Soon.”

“Could you be a little more precise? Tomorrow? Next week? Next month? Should I even bother to run?”

“Goddammit, Verity, can you stop being angry with me for one second and just think? I’m not telling you this because I want to gloat! I’m trying to help. I’m trying to give you a chance—”

“You can’t.” My anger was suddenly gone, replaced by a resignation so deep it felt like it ran all the way down to my bones. “There’s no way I can evacuate the entire cryptid population of Manhattan. Even if I wanted to try, they’d have nowhere to go. It would be chaos. And if I can’t get them all out, I can’t go.”

“Verity. They’re not—” He stopped speaking so abruptly that for a moment, I thought he might have actually bitten his tongue. Somehow, that just made me feel even more resigned.

“You were about to say that they weren’t worth staying here and maybe getting myself killed over, weren’t you?” He didn’t answer me. “Come on, Dominic. Tell me that I’m wrong. All I’m asking you to do is look me in the eye and tell me that I’m wrong.”

“I can’t,” he said, very quietly.

I nodded. “I sort of figured that was what you were going to say. Did you really think I could run and leave them all here to die? Did you think I was that much of a coward?”

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. The look on his face was all the answer that I needed from him, and it broke my heart a little bit to see it.

“I see.” I took a breath, drawing myself as upright as I could. It helped if I told myself that this was another form of Paso Doble, the only form of Latin dance whose competitive form was as much a battle as anything else. “Thank you for the warning. I’ll take it from here.”

Dominic’s eyes widened in visible alarm. “Verity, please. Don’t do anything rash.”

“I’m a Price girl, remember? We specialize in rash, with the occasional side order of outright stupid.” I straightened a little. “I think you’d better go.”

“I wish you wouldn’t be like this.”

“If wishes were horses, we’d have a way easier time feeding the chupacabras. Now please. Go.”

The mice were still celebrating in the kitchen, but that sound seemed to drop away, leaving nothing but Dominic, and me, and the sudden silence stretching out between us. I’d always known that we came from different worlds, and that we’d have to go back to them someday. I’d just been telling myself that we’d have longer than this. And I’d been wrong.

“Very well,” he said finally. He walked back to the door, shoulders ramrod-straight beneath that damn pretentious duster he was so fond of. The mice cheered louder as he approached them, and he nodded genially in their direction—a small kindness, but one that showed how much he’d grown. How much I thought he’d grown. I was starting to realize I’d never known him at all.

He only looked back once, dark brown eyes pained above a mouth that was set as firmly as his shoulders. Then he opened the apartment door, and he was gone, leaving me alone.

The sound of a door swinging shut had never seemed so final.

It felt like I was moving in slow motion as I walked across the living room to where I’d dropped my bag. My cell phone was tucked safely into the front pocket. It took me three tries to make the zipper work, and another five tries before I could successfully access my contact list and call the one number that had a prayer of helping: Home.

Covenant “purges” are legendary in most cryptid circles, including the ones my family moves in. The Covenant of Saint George sends in a team of their best men, and when the dust clears and the blood has been hosed off the streets, nothing inhuman remains standing. When Dominic had first arrived in Manhattan, I’d asked my father to look up any historical records relating to purges in the New York area. The things he’d been able to find were bad enough to give me nightmares for weeks, and that was saying something, given all the other nightmare fodder that particular summer had offered me.

Some people call the Covenant “monster hunters,” and if there’s anything that demonstrates how wrong that label really is, it’s the way they purge a city. True hunters spare the children and the pregnant females, allowing the population to remain stable. That’s how they ensure that they’ll always have something to hunt. The Covenant has no such concerns. They don’t want to ensure that they’ll always have something to hunt. They want to wipe every breathing cryptid off the face of the planet. I don’t know that they give out merit badges for confirmed extinctions, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

The members of the Covenant aren’t monster hunters. They’re exterminators.