Page 50 of Backpacking through Bedlam

“I did,” Thomas allowed. “It seemed like the best choice remaining to me when it happened, and I still don’t regret it. Not even after everything that followed.”

“You’re close to unique that way,” said Darius. “Not just in that—the Queen doesn’t speak well of petitioners. Says they’re greedy and shortsighted, and deserve whatever punishment they receive. She speaks well of you.”

Sally, who had made a bargain of her own, for reasons just as good as Thomas’s, squirmed in her seat, but didn’t say anything. Sometimes there’s nothing you can say.

“Queen says your granddaughter wouldn’t exist if you hadn’t made that deal, and she’s the one who untangled the crossroads from our arteries, kicked them out of this reality. The Ocean Lady owes your family a debt of gratitude for what you did for us.”

I blinked. The idea of a god owing us a favor was daunting, if reasonable enough.

“Regardless of the divinities in play,” said Thomas firmly, “I made my bargain and was sent into exile for my trouble. Sally did much the same. She’s been fighting by my side for the last decade, and while her bargain was as compassionately made as my own, she had less idea of what she was doing. I had the benefits of a Covenant education and a long acquaintance with a crossroads ghost. She had an untrained sorcerer reading from his mother’s journals and trying to make sense of a world he was barely brushing up against. This is her first true encounter with the forces humanity shares this world with. Try not to invoke things she knows only as children’s stories. We don’t want to overwhelm her.”

“I’m not a child,” snapped Sally. “I won’t get overwhelmed.”

“If we tried to tell you everything at once, yes, you would,” said Thomas. “Any rational person would. Covenant training begins when children are young and malleable enough to accept whatever they’re told, and it includes breaks for them to stare at the walls and panic when needed as they begin to understand how complicated the world really is. We’ll tell you everything as it becomes relevant, I promise. It may just take some time.”

“That’s the most rational thing I’ve ever heard a sorcerer say,” said Darius. Glancing at Sally in the rearview mirror, he explained, “My kind don’t care much for his kind. Our magic is sort of like a house that’s run off solar power. We generate it and we draw it from a willing source. It’s very self-contained and self-renewing. His kind, they take it from the world around them without asking.”

“But that’s an ethical debate for another time,” said Thomas.

“What do you know about the Covenant in New York?” I asked.

“I know they announced themselves by burning down a burlesque club that had the bad luck to be owned by a bogeyman,” he said.

“I heard about that,” I said. “My oldest granddaughter worked there, and she was helping the locals recover from the fire when I left to find Thomas.”

“That’s a start,” he said. “Things have gotten worse since then.”

“Worse” was something of an understatement. After burning down the Freakshow, the Covenant had started hunting the cryptids of New York, beginning with the ones who, like the bogeymen, had been hiding in plain sight. Bakeries, dry cleaners, nail salons, all targeted and destroyed. People died. The Freakshow had been lucky: the waheela they had on staff had smelled the accelerant and been able to evacuate the place before it went up. There had been no casualties.

None of the other businesses had gotten off so lightly, and after several years of unrelenting attacks, people had started abandoning their homes, moving away from everything they’d always known. And that was when the Covenant had expanded their attacks further outside the city, to New Jersey and other neighboring states. They were sending regular patrols into the Pine Barrens, tormenting and slaughtering the cryptids who lived there, and chasing the sasquatch and boo hag populations toward the Canadian border.

And through all of this, the human population had been kept in peaceful ignorance. The Covenant’s desire to go unseen was probably saving more lives than we could count. As long as they were trying to stay under the radar, they’d restrict themselves to small fires and the occasional abduction. If things came out in the open, all bets would be off. They’d love the chance to reestablish themselves as a vital line of defense for the human race, protecting humanity from the “monsters” that lurked in every shadow. They just needed the right opportunity to come forward. Which meant Verity’s television appearance had probably done more damage than any of us had known at the time.

According to Darius, people were still debating whether her final fight had been CGI or practical effects, and since the latter was winning, the argument had begun to pivot toward whether it had been faked at all. If enough people came down on the side of “a giant snake really came through the stage and ate some dancers, giant snakes are real, we’re all in a lot of trouble,” the Covenant would have their opening.

For the moment, most of the cryptids remaining in the city were staying as out of sight as possible while still keeping their jobs and roofs over their heads. The cryptid hospital in Manhattan, St. Giles, had also managed to stay open thus far, thanks to being literally underground and protected by basically every intelligent cryptid in the area. None of them wanted to see their only chance for species-appropriate treatment go away. The real issue was the dragons.

The dragons who kept their Nest in Manhattan couldn’t evacuate with the rest of the cryptids. Literally couldn’t, since the last known adult male of their species was under the city. I blinked when Darius reminded me of that fact, unsure when it had become common-enough knowledge that a random routewitch would know about it. Adult male dragons were bigger than buses, and while they could move under their own power, they mostly preferred not to, building themselves large lairs and surrounding themselves with wives who would happily feed them and keep them company.

That may seem lazy by human standards, but it’s really more like the queen bee of a hive trading freedom for a life of pampering and luxury. Even the oldest, largest male dragon could still protect his wives, and would do so with force, fire, and fury. They were the reason the Covenant had been founded in the first place, in part due to an unpleasant cultural misunderstanding: female dragons looked exactly like human women. It was a great piece of mimicry when what you wanted was to blend into the population of the fast-breeding mammals near you, but it was a terrible one when you didn’t want those same mammals to fall in love with you and try to spirit you away to be their brides.

Basically, a lot of medieval assholes couldn’t take “no” for an answer, and spun stories about dragons kidnapping princesses to encourage populations to rise up against them. Not every dragon was a nice person. According to the histories, a lot of them were assholes in their own right, and were perfectly happy to lay waste to the local human settlements. It didn’t really matter that they couldn’t fly. When a giant fire-breathing reptile storms down from the mountains and torches your house, you don’t stop to say “that would have been more impressive if you’d been in the air.” You scream, you char, and you die. So the Covenant had come together to make the dragons stop.

They didn’t know there was a male dragon in Manhattan, but they were starting to suspect. People had been careless with the news, spreading it to dragon enclaves around the world, letting the women know there was a male in the world again, and more, the female dragons of Manhattan—called “princesses” by people who hadn’t known any better—weren’t leaving, implying that they had something to protect. The Covenant had apparently started focusing their attention on suspected dragon princesses, snatching them whenever they could, trying to confirm the rumors, trying to find their way to the ultimate prize for an organization of dragon-hunters that had long since run out of dragons to fight.

Things could have been worse, but they could have been a hell of a lot better, and they were on the cusp of turning even uglier.

We were silent as Darius finished his explanation and turned off his latest frontage road, suddenly, impossibly driving onto the Queensboro Bridge. “Almost there,” he said, more subdued than he’d been before he started telling us what was actually going on. The Covenant wasn’t targeting routewitches yet, but that would come soon enough. When they ran out of “monsters” to destroy, they would move on to the humans who had the audacity to tangle with powers the Covenant thought should be reserved for them alone. A witch was fine when they were working for the “forces of good.” Not so when they were just trying to live their lives and not be told what to do by monster-hunting bigots.

I patted my bag reassuringly, trying to comfort the still-silent Aeslin mice. The Covenant is much of why my family’s colonies are among the last in the world, if not the last. They didn’t like talking rodents so blatantly harmless that no one could quite figure out why they were considered unnatural, and they disliked the fact that Aeslin generally refused to lie even more. If an Aeslin mouse saw you kill someone, they told people about it. If they saw you commit a crime, they told people about that, too.

Really, it was a miracle I got away with as much as I did when I was younger, given the combination of my father’s paranoia and the resident colony of Aeslin mice.

“Thanks for the ride,” I said.

“Wish you hadn’t needed it. I wouldn’t be anywhere near New York if the Lady hadn’t asked, and I’ll probably wind up taking a few of the locals out of town when I go. Call it a fare for the favor of the road. The Lady doesn’t want the world to lose any more backroads or byways than it already has.”

Sally was goggling out the windows, staring at a city she might or might not have seen as a kid, when she’d been growing up in Maine, but that she’d definitely seen on television and in movies. Something familiar and human that was absolutely still here. Thomas was doing something similar, although a bit more discreetly. They were reentering the world like comets plummeting toward the ground. I just hoped we’d have slightly more survivors.