Discount Armageddon: An Incryptid Novel Read Online Free PDF

didn’t have to. “How’s the crowd tonight?”
    “Insane,” Carol responded, not looking away fromthe mirror. She was trying to fit her wig into place, and her hair wasn’t helping, hissing and snapping at her fingers as she shoved the individual tiny serpents under the weave. She’d been hired a week after I was, and most of the girls had offered to help her get changed during her first few days. They stopped when it became apparent that getting too close to her head before the wig was on meant a good chance of getting bitten. And the snakes she had in place of hair were venomous.
    “Good insane, bad insane, run screaming from the building because this isn’t worth it insane?” I pulled off my T-shirt, wadding it up and tossing it into the bottom of the locker.
    “Somebody put our name on another tourist website and we’re getting swarmed by sweaty businessmen who think it’s okay to play grab-ass with anything in a short skirt.” Marcy snapped the top of one knee-high white sock, cracking her gum at the same time for punctuation. “Candice went home sick. Said it wasn’t worth the tips.”
    Marcy looked unconcerned, despite the alarming implications of Candy’s departure. Candy was a dragon princess, and she pursued money the way a cop in a buddy movie pursues donuts. I blamed it on the fact that Marcy had the emotional and physical sensitivity of a rock. No, really; all the research on Oreads has concluded that they have the durability and resilience of quartz, assuming quartz decided to turn into an attractive young biped and go out for a stroll. No amount of grab-ass was likely to cause her more than brief annoyance.
    “Who gets Candy’s tables?” I asked, trying to ignore the sinking sensation in my stomach as I unloaded my weapons into the locker.
    “You do.”
    Sinking sensation, officially impossible to ignore. “Great.” I grabbed my uniform. “Just what I always wanted. Extra tables.”
    “With extra grab-ass on the side,” Marcy said.
    “I wish you’d stop saying that.”
    “I wish I had a pony.” Marcy gave her socks one last adjustment and strode out of the changing room, leaving me alone with Carol.
    “You’d probably eat the pony,” I muttered.
    Carol shot me a sympathetic look in the mirror. “Aren’t you glad you’re working overnights for Kitty?”
    “Ecstatic,” I said, and unbuckled my pants.
    Every profession since the dawn of time has had its own uniform, its own special set of signals used to broadcast the identity of its practitioners to anyone who meets them. Sadly, the uniform of the cryptozoologist is “whatever is going to help you blend in with the locals.” The need to blend in led, in a roundabout way, to Dave’s Fish and Strips, the only gentlemen’s club in New York City almost exclusively staffed by cryptids.
    I had the utmost respect for the other humans on the staff. They weren’t lucky enough to receive my early training in human/cryptid interactions, but they all did just fine—for values of “all” that mean “the three of them,” anyway. Dave didn’t practice discriminatory hiring; most humans were simply seized with the uncontrollable urge to scream and run away after spending more than ten minutes in a room with him …and he wasn’t the strangest thing on staff.
    The strippers didn’t have an official uniform, since they’d just take it off, and the bartenders were allowed to wear jeans or skirts and T-shirts with the bar’s logo. The waitresses weren’t so lucky. Dave seemed to be under the deeply mistaken and deeply regrettable impression that pleated plaid micro skirts, knee-high socks, black heels, and midriff-baring white shirts with the club’s logo on the front combined to project an aura of “class.” Or maybe he was going for an aura of “ass,” since that’s what the uniforms actually managed to project.
    I stepped into my heels and walked over to the mirror. Carol moved to the side, giving me room for my