Chaos Choreography (InCryptid, #5)(97)

“And quite pure,” said Brenna. “We have a few Cash for Gold franchises scattered around the city. We melt the cheaper pieces, clean out the impurities, and make them into coins before we bring them here. It keeps the atmosphere nicely balanced.”

Alice was narrow-eyed as she looked around. I paused, realizing what had to be wrong.

“Betty isn’t here, Grandma,” I said quietly. “She was in New York. She’s dead.”

Alice cast me a startled look, eyes going back to normal. Then she nodded, and said nothing.

Betty was a dragon—a dragon princess, according to what we’d known when we’d first encountered her—and she’d hated my family for reasons I still didn’t understand, but which had originated when Grandma and Grandpa Thomas had been active. There was clearly some history there. If I was going to keep working with the dragons, I was going to need to find out what it was. And this was not the time.

“Actually, it looks like nobody’s here,” said Malena. She looked to Brenna, shoulders suddenly tight with tension. “Is this a trap?”

“No, it’s a safety precaution,” said Brenna. She cupped her hands around her mouth and called, “All’s clear! It’s me, with Verity and her friends. We need to talk to Osana.”

There was a moment of silence, broken only by the ghost of Brenna’s voice echoing in the high, gold-coated rafters. Then doors began slamming open, and piles of gold leaf and gold chain began to explode with little golden-haired girls who climbed out and swarmed toward us in a sea of prepubescent pseudo-mammalian excitement.

“Verity?”

“The Verity?”

“We watch the show every week! I voted for you!”

“I voted for you twice!”

“Don’t listen to her, she forgot and slept through the whole thing!”

Brenna put her hands up, laughing despite herself, and said, “Girls, girls! There will be no swarming of our guests! We want them to see how respectable and dignified we are!”

Her words had an electric effect on the younger dragons. They skidded to an immediate halt before shuffling themselves around into a configuration that would have looked perfectly natural at a finishing school for young ladies. Their clothing broke the illusion: they were dressed in patched hand-me-downs and thrift store finds, as well as a wide assortment of clearly homemade sundresses, some of which had started life as sheets, curtains, and pillowcases.

“We’re sorry, Auntie Brenna,” chorused the girls.

“I know you are,” she said. “Now go on. I need to take Verity to see Osana, and I don’t want any of you making our guests feel like they’re being spied on.”

The girls nodded and scattered, running past the adult dragons who were closing, more sedately, on our location. It was hard to determine exact numbers, but going by the number who were awake and in the Nest, I was placing this group as slightly larger than the Manhattan group. They clearly had the space, the resources, and the cover story necessary to keep expanding for a while yet before they’d need to talk about creating a new Nest. That was good. Male dragons were essentially solitary creatures, due to their size, functional immobility, and the resources needed to keep them healthy, but female dragons did better when they lived in higher numbers. They were social creatures, even if they were fairly antisocial toward most non-dragons.

The first of the adults reached us and stopped at a polite distance, although the way they looked us up and down was anything but polite. Alice looked calmly back. Malena squirmed. I smiled my brightest stage smile, and waved.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Verity Price. It’s a pleasure to meet you all.”

“So, the famous Verity finally came to see what she’d be bringing our new husband into.” The other dragons parted, allowing the speaker to walk toward me. I blinked.

Brenna was unusually tall for a dragon; this woman, on the other hand, was unusually short, even shorter than me. Her hair wasn’t blonde, which was normal for the European exemplars of the species; it was red-gold, almost matching the freckles on her nose and cheeks.

She smiled. “Laidly worm,” she said.

I blinked again. “I beg your pardon?”

“I said, laidly worm,” she said.

“I thought you were extinct,” said Alice.

The woman—Osana—turned to my grandmother and said, “No offense, but that’s what we wanted you to think. Those of us who survived have been living with the dragons for centuries. We make good administrators, and the dragons have been happy to accept us as full members of their Nests. That’ll change if we can find a husband of our own, of course. Our species are similar, but not that similar. I don’t suppose you’ve heard tell of any great worms sleeping in the earth, have you?”

“Not yet, but I’m starting to feel like I’ll have a lot of spelunking in my future,” I said. “Osana, I presume?”

“The very same,” she said. “My family’s been here since the Nest was founded. Since my mother was the former Nest-mother, I took over when she passed on. It usually goes to the eldest, but Catherine is a little slow these days. It was better to let her have her space.”

I tilted my head. “I hadn’t heard about dragons having senility issues.”

“We’ve been cloning ourselves for hundreds of years, with no new genetic material,” said Osana. “I did go to college. I read a lot on parthenogenesis. It seemed relevant to my life. If you’re a member of a species that has both sexual and asexual reproduction—”