Page 67 of Backpacking through Bedlam

“Stop talking and come on,” said Mary, grabbing my arm to haul me along. She felt only half-substantial, like a cloud of thick, icy fog. I blinked. While walking through walls and doors and the like was pretty standard procedure for her, and something she was more than happy to do when asked, she was usually either fully solid or fully intangible, not hanging out in whatever weird in-between state she was presently occupying.

She tried to undo the locks on the door. Her hands went right through them. She swore, trying again, with the same effect.

“Mary,” I said, voice as level as I could make it despite the swelling panic, “you need to focus. Think about the kids. Think about me. We need you solid.”

She shot me a desperate glance, and I realized the dragon who’d been behind the counter every other time we’d come through here was gone. We were alone.

Mary took a deep breath and tried for the locks again, this time undoing them with the normal amount of resistance. She shoved the door open and rushed through. We followed her.

“Is she going to explain?” asked Sally.

“Eventually.”

The short hall was empty. The courtyard was similarly deserted, save for the red rubber ball, which had rolled to a stop in one corner. Somehow, that was the most unnerving thing of all: seeing that ball abandoned, bereft of the children who had been playing with it.

Mary gave me one last, despairing look, and opened the door into the slaughterhouse. We followed her through.

The semi-reassuring hum that meant a Johrlac who was already attuned to my mind was on the premises kicked in as soon as I was inside, and I looked around the chaos that the slaughterhouse had become, scanning for a familiar black-haired figure. I didn’t see her.

What I did see was several dozen dragons, adults and children, all of them shouting at one another like they thought they could somehow yell the world back into making sense. The Inuit woman I’d seen before was pacing, a lacy parasol over one shoulder and a fierce glower on her face; she had been joined by the man whose lap she had been sitting in. He was following a few steps behind her, looking worried.

Verity and Dominic were at the center of one of the clusters of dragons, both talking rapidly, although I couldn’t hear them over the din. Dominic had Olivia against his hip and was bouncing her as if he could distract her from the fact that all the adults were yelling. Mary flickered out, reappearing next to him and taking the toddler out of his arms. She was always solid when there was a small child involved. Her sometimes-erratic relationship with physical reality didn’t struggle that much.

Dominic promptly turned in our direction, touching Verity on the elbow to get her attention. She straightened, and the two of them walked away from their conversational partners, heading toward us at a fast clip. Some of the dragons stopped yelling to watch them go, and more than a few glares were cast in our direction.

Okay, this wasn’t good. And maybe that was stating the obvious, but it’s never once been a positive thing when I come back from a shopping trip to find the world cast into chaos. I crossed my arms and frowned at the pair of them.

Verity stopped a few feet away, sighing and dragging one hand through her short blonde hair. The gesture caused it to stick out in all directions, like a startled hedgehog.

“Grandma,” she said. “We have a problem.”

“Got that from the yelling,” I said. “Where’s Thomas?”

“That’s not—”

“I swear to God, Verity, I love you more than I love myself, but I just spent fifty years looking for that man, and if you think I’m going to be okay with stepping into this much of a cacophony and not knowing where he is, you don’t know me very well.” I glared at her. “So I know you weren’t about to tell me his location wasn’t important.”

“I was—” she began, before catching herself and admitting, “I was about to say it wasn’t important. You got me. I promise, he’s safe. I just need to talk to you.”

“About what? What the hell is going on?”

“You left,” said Dominic. “You didn’t return, for much longer than your errand could explain. Sarah came back with the coffee and said she hadn’t picked up any traces of you during her walk. And about that time, Cara was supposed to be showing up with a group of children.”

That was a new name. I presumed “Cara” was either another dragon or an ally; either way, it wasn’t as important as the fact that she apparently hadn’t shown up. “How was she transporting them?”

“Dry-cleaning van full of cheap old rugs,” said Verity. “We have a few underground access points to William’s cavern. Park there, load the kids into the back, pile blankets over them in case the van gets pulled over, and then drive them to the pickup spot. We roll the boys inside the rugs, then carry them in that way while the girls walk.”

“Uh-huh. And are you using the same routes regularly?”

“We’re not amateurs, Grandma. We’ve been rotating through eight different routes, and we never do a pickup run the same time twice. This was routine. It should have gone off without a hitch.”

“Except that it didn’t.” I shook my head. “Sally and I were late because we got nabbed by a Clutch of yong who knew you had boys in here. They don’t want one—wrong species, it wouldn’t help them with their genetic bottlenecking—but they want access to William—”

“Absolutely not,” snapped a nearby dragon. She had clearly been listening in, and just as clearly wasn’t sorry about it. She shook her head, expression a twisted mask of disapproval. “Our husband is not some sideshow attraction to be shared with every cryptid who expresses an interest.”

“They’re a sister species whose continued existence may depend on them finding a male of their own,” I said, soothingly. “If there’s any chance William knows something about where any surviving yong males might be hiding, they deserve to know.”

“We’ve asked him about other Western dragons, and about laidly worms, but we haven’t asked about yong, long, or Tatsu,” Verity admitted, slowly. “I knew there were some clusters of their females left, but it hasn’t been a priority, with everything else that’s been going on.”