Chapter 2
Two
“People will always make assumptions about you based on who your family is. Whether you prove them wrong or right is up to you. Pick whichever suits you better.”
—Alice Healy
The smaller bedroom in a rent-controlled Manhattan apartment
ONE MOMENT, I WAS IN the kitchen with my family, and the next moment, I was standing in the room I rented in New York.
Unlike my childhood bedroom, it was barren, almost austere in its lack of decoration or clutter; there was a bed, for the times when I absolutely couldn’t get out of sleeping here, and a dresser with a week’s worth of clothing, but there wasn’t much else.
It was, however, all spotlessly clean. I creaked open the door, and the sound of Latin pop drifted down the hall, accompanied by the smell of frying eggs and hot bacon grease.
I could pick up Malena’s thoughts from the kitchen, as bright and electric as her music.
She was in a good mood. That was an excellent thing. An unhappy Malena can be dangerous.
Like me, Malena is a cryptid capable of passing for human.
Unlike me, her species is actually native to this dimension.
She’s a chupacabra, a synapsid therianthrope whose biology would give most scientists the most confusing orgasm of their lives if they got an hour to study her.
Is she a mammal? Is she a reptile? Is anyone going to figure it out any time soon?
Most of the time she’s a Mexican-American woman who works as the handyman in the dragon-owned apartment building where my cousin Verity lives.
Malena likes pop music, dirty fried eggs, and ballroom dance; while she no longer danced professionally, she had been teaching local classes, and had managed to acquire a loyal following of amorous retirees, aspiring competitors, and Broadway hopefuls.
She and Verity originally met on a reality dance competition show, Dance or Die, where they’d technically been up against each other, but had actually formed an alliance when the other contestants started showing up dead.
They weren’t the best of friends back then, but after Verity’s husband died, Malena had shown up on her doorstep to drag her out of her depression.
It hadn’t worked well enough to make them roommates, but it had worked well enough to make Malena a semi-permanent fixture.
I was quietly glad of that. She only needed one bedroom, and was happy to sublet her spare to me for use when I was in the city.
That kept me from needing to either rent a whole apartment on my own or—even worse—stay with Verity and her kids.
Livvy and David are great kids, very sweet, very friendly, and very unaccustomed to spending extended periods of time around a telepath.
It’s the mental equivalent of going to the mall on Black Friday without earplugs.
Reaching out, I could tell Verity and the kids were in the building, and I’d be able to check in with them before heading to the hospital. I started walking quietly down the hall, following the sound of Malena’s music.
I was almost there when she said, voice bright and friendly, “If you’re not Sarah, you should know I don’t have any of those silly human compunctions against killing people who invade my den, and maybe turn around and go the other way.”
“Definitely Sarah,” I said, stepping around the corner into the narrow, cream-colored kitchen.
Malena was standing in the center of the room. She folded her arms, eyeing me. “You ever hear of calling first? Texting? Maybe drawing up a nice schedule so I know when to expect the sudden appearance of my occasional roommate? I could have been in the middle of eating my breakfast.”
“I don’t care if you need to eat around me,” I said. “It doesn’t bother me.”
She unfolded her arms in order to shake her spatula in my direction. “It will, once I put everything in the blender.”
Chupacabra don’t handle solids well. They’re not strict sanguivores like Huldra, but they get horrific indigestion if they eat things that aren’t pureed, or have less than about eighty percent animal protein.
There was an industrial-strength blender next to the stove, already half full of what looked dauntingly like raspberry jelly.
Coagulated pig’s blood is an acquired taste, and as a chupacabra who lived among humans, Malena had acquired it. Seeing me looking, she picked up her frying pan and began scraping bacon and eggs into the blender, a challenging buzz at the top of her thoughts.
Sometimes I like to imagine what it would be like if I could look at people’s faces and know what they were thinking, rather than looking at their thoughts and guessing at what they actually wanted me to see. I guess the grass really is always greener on the other side of the fence.
“You want some?” she asked.
“No, thank you,” I said. “There’s a juice bar near the entrance to St. Giles’s that does tomato-ginger smoothies, and I’m going to grab one before I go to see Dr. Morrow.”
Some of the challenge faded, replaced by guilt. “This is a Mark visit, huh?”
Malena never met Mark—he showed up well after the producers of Dance or Die decided it was a good idea to summon a giant snake from another dimension on live television—but she knew his deal.
He’d been at St. Giles’s for long enough to have become a fixture, and Verity had visiting privileges, just in case he woke up while I wasn’t available.
As the only adult we knew of in the city with Kairos heritage, she stood the best chance of putting him down if he opened his eyes and started breaking things.
“Yeah,” I confirmed.
“Is it a good Mark visit?”
“Not so much, no. I think Dr. Morrow needs the bed. That, or they’ve seen something on their scans that worries them enough for them to want to discuss it with me in person. Either way, I can’t see that meaning anything great, can you?”
“No,” she said, with a sigh. “I’m sorry, Sarah. And I didn’t mean to snipe at you. Of course you can come home whenever you need to. It’s your room. You’re a better roommate than someone who’d want to actually be here all the time. It’s just been a hard week.”
“Problems in the building?”
“Just the usual. Rats got into the basement again.”
“I thought free snacks were a part of your payment.”
Even I could tell that the number of extremely sharp teeth in her grin was unusual.
“Oh, and they are. I just have to catch them live and keep them for three days to be sure they haven’t been poisoned with anything that might upset my stomach.
No, rats got into the basement and half the tenants wanted to parlay that into a rent reduction. ”
I winced. A rent reduction is never an easy ask in Manhattan. A rent reduction in a dragon-owned building is sort of like asking the sun to turn blue for the weekend to fit the aesthetics of your outdoor wedding. “How many evictions?” I asked.
“None. But things were tense and shouty around here for days.”
“Ick.”
“Tell me about it.” She put the lid on the blender and hit the puree button. The blender’s contents mixed into an unpleasant shade of greasy brown, streaked with red from the pig’s blood jelly. I watched impassively.
My diet isn’t precisely human-normal, and it takes more than a blood smoothie to upset me.
Malena turned off the blender and poured its contents into a glass, sticking a straw into the slurry and taking a long drink.
She watched me as she did, and I could feel her confusion grow as I didn’t recoil or look away.
“I don’t know why you want to fight with me right now, but I’m tired and I’m worried about Mark and I only came through the apartment so I could check in with Verity, not because I needed some recreational arguing,” I said. “I’m gonna go.”
Malena lowered her glass with a sigh. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to fight, I’m just—I’m in a rotten mood, and you surprised me.”
“I hope you feel better,” I said, and started for the door.
It always feels a little odd to get around normally right after I’ve opened a spatial tunnel between two points. Like being able to do it means I should do nothing else. But even birds walk, and they have wings. Sometimes the supposedly easy method isn’t the best one available.
Malena didn’t follow or call me back, just let me go.
That was almost certainly for the best. She might be in the mood to fight, but I wasn’t, and I didn’t want to hurt Verity’s most reliable babysitter.
People tended to assume that because I wasn’t a physical fighter, I would be a soft or easy target.
People can be so good at being wrong.
The hallway outside the apartment smelled of boiled cabbage and fried onions, which wasn’t indicative of anything currently being cooked.
Those halls were virtually designed to trap and retain smells, developing unique olfactory footprints over time.
You could tell a lot about a building’s demographics by the way the hallways smelled.
I liked it. It was a very domesticated method of peeing on a fencepost, a way to mark territory without breaking any social norms. I passed closed door after closed door on my way to the elevator, then pressed the call button and stepped inside.
Verity had been managing this building for the dragons since the family drove the Covenant of St. George out of the city.
It was part reward for the work she’d already done, part bribe to keep her from heading back to Portland to raise her kids.
See? it said. We couldn’t save your husband, but we can provide you with affordable housing near a good school district.