I was still looking sulkily in her direction when Ryan waved a hand in front of my eyes, calling my attention back to him. “Earth to Verity, come in, Verity. You checked out on me for a minute there. Have the mice been letting you sleep?”

“I think letting me sleep is against their religion.”

“You are their religion.”

“And in their cosmology, the gods have no need for silly little things like ‘sufficient rest.’” I picked up the club soda Ryan set in front of me. Tonight’s garnish involved a lemon wedge, a chunk of mango, and yes, a little paper umbrella. “Seriously, though, I’ve been interviewing hidebehinds all week, and I’m a little worn out.”

Ryan started to answer me, but stopped himself before the first word could form. Straightening to his full height, he fixed his eyes on a point just behind me in the crowd, all but glowering. “You have company.”

There’s only one man I know in New York City who can get that kind of rise out of Ryan. I took a deliberate sip of my club soda before removing the paper umbrella from the glass, drying its toothpick handle on my napkin, and sticking it jauntily behind one ear. Then I turned, cocking my head and directing a winsome smile at the man standing there.

“Want a drink?” I asked. “I’m buying.”

“We need to talk,” replied Dominic.

That’s the Covenant for you: never using five words when four extremely ominous ones will do. I slid off my hard-won bar stool, taking one more drink from my club soda before putting it down on the bar. “I’ll get my coat,” I said, and stalked toward the dressing room door, leaving Dominic De Luca waiting alone in the crowd that clustered around the bar.

I couldn’t even get a little peace and quiet in a cryptid-owned burlesque club. What’s the world coming to these days?

Three

“Any man who doesn’t believe in carrying weapons on a first date is not a man worth knowing.”

—Frances Brown

The halls of the Freakshow, a burlesque club for the adventurous soul

THE HALL OUTSIDE the dressing room and employee break room was briefly deserted, thanks to the shift change. One shift’s-worth of dancers and floor staff were out in the main club, working, while the other employees were taking their scheduled opportunity to grab a drink, a smoke, or whatever else their biology demanded. The dragon girls were probably doing Goldschläger shots at the bar. It sounded more extravagant than it was, since they never paid for anything. What’s the point of being a preternaturally hot chick in a club full of men if you can’t get someone to buy you the occasional drink? Carol was almost certainly in Kitty’s office, drinking a cobra-venom cocktail while she waited for her hair to wake up. That’s how it goes when you work in a cryptid-owned establishment. I’ve had time to get used to it. Honestly, it’s even sort of fun. I mean, how many people have jobs where they can say “I didn’t sleep last night because the mice wouldn’t stop talking” and get sympathy rather than a referral to a psychiatrist?

I walked briskly through the empty dressing room to my locker. If I was going to have a chat with Dominic, I wanted to do it while I was wearing pants, and more heavily armed than it was possible to be in lace and petticoats. In addition to being a waitress and Ryan’s girlfriend, Istas served as Kitty’s costume designer, and she believed firmly in snaps and zippers and quick releases. Being a waheela—a type of Inuit therianthrope—meant she understood that sometimes people need to get out of their clothes in a hurry. That made them practical for work-wear, but not so much for the sort of things I was likely to get up to with Dominic De Luca.

Well. Some of the sort of things I was likely to get up to with Dominic De Luca, maybe. My work clothes would definitely be practical for the sweaty, naked things I sometimes wound up doing with Dominic, since I’d be able to strip in something approaching record time. That would be a nice change. During our last opportunity for naked fun times, I’d been wearing a Kevlar vest and a pair of cargo pants that practically had to be removed with the Jaws of Life. Getting naked before he had a chance to change his mind would be awesome.

I had just pulled my shirt on and was checking my hair in the tiny mirror inside my locker when the locker door slammed shut, nearly catching my fingers in the process. “Hey!” I yelped, turning to face whoever had interrupted my styling regime. “I was using that!”

Kitty looked at me coolly, one eyebrow arched in an almost perfect impression of my younger sister (who always said she was impersonating Mr. Spock, so that’s probably what my boss was actually trying to do). She was still wearing her ringmaster’s gear, which didn’t look quite as spectacular in the empty dressing room as it did on the carefully-lit stage. People with a naturally gray skin tone shouldn’t wear black leather unless they want to look like they’ve been standing in a smokestack for an hour or so. I’m just saying.

“Your Covenant boy is here again,” she informed me.

“I know. That’s why I’m leaving.” I reopened my locker, grabbing a brush from the top shelf and starting to rake it through my hairspray-stiffened hair. “What’s up, Kitty?”

“I thought I told you that I didn’t want him here.”

“You did. And I told him. Unfortunately, because I am not actually the boss of the Covenant of St. George, he chose to ignore me. I don’t know why he decided to ignore me this time, hence the putting on pants and going to talk with him.” I squinted at my reflection. I either looked pleasantly punky, if you were willing to squint and be generous with your definition of “pleasantly,” or like a bleached hedgehog. Given that I was about to go have a clandestine chat with my not-a-boyfriend no-really-honest, I decided to vote for “pleasantly punky.”

“You need to tell him again. He upsets the dancers.”

“Uh, no, he doesn’t, not really. I mean, Ryan isn’t too keen on him, but that’s just because he thinks Dominic is going to turn me in to the Covenant and kill everyone who works here. The dragons love him, Istas tolerates him, and even Carol says he’s basically okay, for a homicidal maniac.”

Kitty glowered at me. “He upsets me.”

“That’s different.” I replaced my brush on the shelf, removed my backpack from its hook, and shut the locker door. “Look, I’ll talk to him, but you know Dominic. He never makes a phone call when an ominous, Batman-like appearance will do. Unless you want to start posting men with guns on all the doors and windows, he’s going to keep showing up.”