—Enid Healy

The Freakshow, a highly specialized nightclub somewhere in Manhattan

A WEEK HAD PASSED since the manananggal incident, giving me sufficient time to file my reports, update the family field guide (this just in: manananggal are venomous), and pay two follow-up visits to St. Giles’ Hospital, where Dr. Morrow and the Caladrius nurse (whose name turned out to be Lauren) were happy to patch me up free of charge. The manananggal’s claws didn’t even leave a scar. I had resolved a threat, and saved a bunch of babies—and their mothers—from being eaten. Not bad for a ballroom dancer from Portland.

I hit the stairs leading down from the nightclub roof almost five whole minutes before my shift was scheduled to start. For me, that’s practically getting to work early, especially these days. We had a little snake cult incident last year, and the city’s cryptids are still all worked up about it. That’s meant more mediation, more handholding through interactions with the human world, and, unfortunately, more hunting, since some of the more predatory types of cryptid took the destabilization of Manhattan as an invitation to move in and start chowing down on the locals. It seems like I’m out on the streets every other night, teaching some idiot that you don’t act like that in my city.

Candy was standing by the base of the stairs, eating a ham and gold leaf sandwich. (It’s a house special. Angel calls it “the Adam Lambert,” and serves it with a pickle and a shot of Goldschläger. Bartenders are weird.) “You’re late,” she called, as I went blowing past her like my shoes were on fire.

“I have five minutes!” I shouted back, and kept on running until I hit the dressing room, and dove into chaos.

Picture a medium-sized room, maybe twenty feet by twenty feet square. Now add standing lockers cannibalized from a high school gym, with the requisite long wooden benches stretching between the rows. Great. Now add half a dozen women, all of them jockeying for position at the single long mirror lining one wall, and you’ll have some idea of what I was walking into.

Sometimes I think I’d rather deal with a herd of angry unicorns than a bunch of women trying to get themselves ready for work. “I’m here,” I announced to no one in particular as I walked past the throng and made my way between two racks of lockers to my assigned spot. The “real world skills” I’ve learned from my years of struggling to launch a dance career are mostly limited to things like putting on mascara on a moving bus, but I definitely know better than to come between an amateur kick-line and their own reflections.

I opened my locker and tossed in my bag before starting to squirm out of my street clothes. Five minutes was cutting it close for getting into my uniform and putting on my makeup. I’d done it before, but that didn’t mean I could waste time watching the clown car antics unfolding in front of the mirror.

The dancers and cocktail waitresses fighting for space squabbled like wet hens as they applied lip gloss, fixed their eye makeup, and tried to keep from being bitten by Carol’s hair, which was making its usual attempt to escape from her elaborate beehive wig. Carol stuffed the tiny serpents back into the weave as quickly as they slithered free, but it was a hopeless fight—like all lesser gorgons, she was seriously outnumbered by her own hair.

Under normal circumstances, Carol would have had at least three feet on either side of her, since only Marcy was willing to sit any closer. Marcy’s an Oread, and her skin is way too thick to be punctured by anything as plebeian as a snake bite. That was under normal circumstances, not during shift change. During shift change—especially shift change to the night shift—real estate at the mirror was too valuable to leave open just because you might wind up getting chomped on by a cocktail waitress’ hairdo.

Distraction makes you careless. One of the new girls squealed and jerked away from Carol, clutching her hand to her chest. I sighed as I fastened the last few snaps on my uniform bodice and pulled on my ruffled cancan skirt. Once that was done, I grabbed the at-work first aid kit from my locker and walked over to the mirror.

“I’m so sorry, tomorrow’s feeding day, they’re all cranky,” Carol was saying to the girl her hair had taken a chunk out of—a wide-eyed human whose normally coppery complexion was underscored with a sudden sickly pallor. Carol kept stuffing as she spoke, trying to get the snakes back into her wig. They weren’t cooperating. Her agitation was transmitting itself to them, and they were beginning to writhe and snap wildly, making her blonde beehive wig pulse like a prop from a bad horror movie.

“Here, Carol.” I pressed my emergency can of Mom’s gorgon hair treatment into Carol’s hand. She shot me a grateful look. Neither of us really understands why a mix of concrete dust, eggshells, and powdered antivenin has a sedative effect on the snakes, but it doesn’t hurt them, and it keeps them calmer than anything else we’ve been able to come up with. Carol gets three cans a month. I get one in the same shipment, for emergencies just like this one.

The new girl was still sitting there, looking terrified. I tried to remember who’d recommended that we hire her. Humans are great dancers, but most of them really aren’t all that comfortable with the cryptid world—and there’s good reason for that. You need to worry about a lot in a normal chorus line; being bitten by the other girls’ hair isn’t on the list.

“You.” I pointed to another of the new girls, a green-haired siren with eyes only a few shades lighter than her heavily hairsprayed curls. “Take her to the manager’s office. There’s antivenin in the fridge there.”

“Okay,” said the siren, the whistling sweetness of her voice betraying her anxiety. She took the bitten girl by the elbow, pulling her away from the mirror. “Come on, Nye. Let’s get that taken care of.”

The bubble of silence that followed their departure held for only a few seconds before the room exploded back into its previous level of chaos. The hole at the mirror left by the siren and her human friend was almost instantly filled. That’s show business for you.

Marcy dusted Carol’s hair with sedative powder as Carol shoved the suddenly-passive little snakes back into her wig.

A quarter of the mirror had been claimed by four of the gorgeous blondes we spent centuries calling “dragon princesses” before we learned that, no, they were just the female of the dragon species. Three equally gorgeous Chinese girls were crammed in there with them, all of them doing their makeup with grim precision. They were visiting representatives of another dragon subspecies. They were in town to grill William—the dragon who lives under downtown Manhattan, and yeah, I’m still pretty flipped out about that—about whether any of their males might have survived, and, like all dragons, they were happy to spend their off hours making a few extra bucks by waiting tables.