“I don’t think there are any alligators down here, you know,” I said, playing the beam from the flashlight over the sewer wall. A rat ran by on urgent rat business.

Istas watched it go, emotional weather briefly shifting to “hungry” before swinging back to her usual calm contentment. “No, there are not,” she agreed. “There used to be, before the bugbears, servitors, and other carnivores removed them. There is, however, always the potential for a pleasant surprise. There have been rumors which indicate that a sewer kraken may be making its home downtown. I would enjoy the opportunity to battle something with that many limbs.”

Given the way Istas was dressed, the idea of her fighting a sewer kraken was disturbingly like something from the kind of anime Artie liked to pretend he never watched, and I liked to pretend I didn’t know about. I gave her a sidelong glance. “Um, Istas, it was nice of you to insist on coming with me and everything, but you doknow what we’re doing down here, right?”

“I am not stupid, Sarah Zellaby,” she said, in a voice that was much quieter than the one she’d been using only a moment before. “I realize I wear frilly clothing and impractical shoes, and that by many people’s standards, I am odd, but I am not stupid. You are here because you want to ask the dragons to assist in recovering your cousin. I am here because Verity is my friend, and would look on me with sadness if I were to allow you to come to harm. Friendship is a rare thing among my people. We do not practice it often, and most of us do not practice it very well. I am hoping to be a better friend to Verity than my brothers and sisters were to me.”

“Oh.” I kept walking. Beside me, Istas did the same, spinning her parasol lazily with each step. Finally, I said, “I forget sometimes that I can’t treat you like you’re human. I mean, I don’t forget, exactly, but . . .”

“Your mannerisms and reactions are human enough, despite the fact that you are biologically even less human than I am, that you sometimes forget not all hominids will follow the same behavioral patterns.” Istas shook her head. “It is a common, if unfortunate, trap of the mind. I am sorry you have fallen prey to it. I will not take offense at your ignorance.”

The worst part was that she meant it: for Istas, the matter was already forgotten. I had made the mistake of treating her like a human being, she had corrected me, and as long as I didn’t do it again, there was nothing left to discuss. Being a waheela had to be pretty simple compared to being a cuckoo.

Then again, being a real cuckoo—an amoral sociopath who existed only for the sake of making other people miserable—is probably pretty easy. It’s being a cuckoo like me that’s hard. Sometimes I feel like neither nature nor nurture did me any favors. Here, Sarah. Have a moral and ethical code that means you’d feel bad killing people for your enjoyment, and have a set of instincts and hereditary skills that means you’re not really built to do anything else. It’ll be fun!

It’s not fun.

The sewer floor got gradually cleaner as we walked, until the sludge was gone, and the walls showed subtle signs of having been washed recently. Dragons don’t like wallowing in filth any more than the rest of us. They just lived in the sewers because William had been asleep during the construction of Manhattan, and now a good sized chunk of downtown was built over his head. Until someone figured out a way to get him out of his cavern without destroying the city, he was stuck.

Not that he was complaining. Fresh air is nice, but not being slaughtered by the Covenant of St. George is nicer, and as long as he stayed underground, he was safe from most forms of detection. Most, not all: if the Covenant had Verity, and if they were able to break her . . . the dragons wouldn’t be able to move William. We weren’t ready for this. We never thought we’d need to be.

Istas looked around as we moved into the final branch of the sewer. This one looked absolutely filthy, and smelled filthy, too, until we were about ten feet from the entrance. Then the smell of sewer was replaced by the smell of bleach and cheap air freshener. “The dragons have a good working relationship with the hidebehinds,” I said. “It’s a camouflage measure.”

“Clever,” allowed Istas. “I have not been here since the snake cult attempted to sacrifice me to wake their sleeping dragon. I have never met William while awake.”

That explained the little hat: she was trying to make a good impression. “He’s nice,” I said. “He even beats me at chess sometimes.” We kept walking, and the darkness around us abruptly went away, replaced by a pleasant level of soft illumination. Istas jumped, whirling so that her back was pressed against my shoulder. I kept walking. “More hidebehind tricks. They use darks for that part of the passage, so that curious sanitation employees don’t wander down here.” I personally doubt that anyone would be curious enough about a dark, smelly tunnel that isn’t part of the currently in-use sewer system to wander down it, but Verity swears I should never underestimate human curiosity. Humans are weird.

“I do not like this,” proclaimed Istas.

“That’s part of the point.” The tunnel ended at a bare wall eight feet, five inches across. I knocked lightly at a point exactly four feet, two and a half inches from either wall, stepped back, and motioned for Istas to wait.

A few minutes passed. Then a door—a simple, normal, wooden door—swung open in what had appeared to be solid stone, and a blonde woman in a baggy New York Giants sweatshirt peered out through the opening. I smiled pleasantly, reaching out with my mind just far enough to tap the surface of her thoughts and confirm her identity.

“Hi, Priscilla,” I said. “Is Candy here? I need to talk to her.”

Priscilla’s ever-present frown deepened as she looked past me to Istas, who was doing her best to look through the open door into the Nest beyond. “Why did you bring the waheela?” she demanded.

“Because Verity was unavailable, and it’s not safe for anyone to go out alone right now.” Most of the female dragons picked up shifts at the Freakshow every now and then, and several of them worked there full time. There was no way Priscilla didn’t recognize Istas. She was just being prickly, which was something the dragons specialized in. “Now please, can we come in before we attract attention standing here?”

Frowning even more, Priscilla said, “Fine,” and opened the door the rest of the way, beckoning us inside.

“Thank you,” I said, and led Istas into the Nest.

Some clichés exist for a reason. Dragons and gold, for example. They love it. It’s biologically and psychologically vital to their well-being, and consequentially, they collect the stuff the way Artie collects comic books. Since male dragons are larger than Greyhound buses when fully grown, they serve as guardians of the hoard, while the females find ways to go out and get more gold. That used to involve highway robbery, infiltrating kingdoms, and occasionally mining. There are a lot of female dragons living in California, thanks to the Gold Rush. These days, about half the “cash for gold” franchises out there are operated by dragons, while the rest work tirelessly at whatever jobs they can get, immediately turning around and converting their paychecks into more gold for the Nest. As for what they didwith all that gold . . .

We walked through the door into Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory as reinterpreted by King Midas and Salvador Dali. Cardboard structures scavenged from closing Halloween specialty stores were studded around the room, all covered in a thick layer of genuine, structurally-reinforcing, 24-karat gold. It made a weird maze of haunted houses without backs, abandoned tunnels, and crooked graveyard fences. William enjoyed metalworking, and he was his own forge, so he just let the girls bring home whatever they thought would go well in the Nest. If it didn’t work out, he could always re-melt the gold and try again.