Verity Alice Price

After saving her from the Sleestacks--pardon, the servitors--Candy had first dragged Verity onto the Metro and then back off not far from the warehouse district. The dragon princess had informed Verity that she was being brought home with her; there were too many unanswered questions that they needed to discuss before Verity hared off and got herself killed. Verity would have liked to protest that, but considering Candy had just saved her ass from what would probably have been a very gruesome murder by Sleestack, she was willing to let it go.

Going through a maze of blind alleys and sudden turns--and even through a cramped and dirty bodega run by another dragon princess named Priscilla who'd looked at Verity like she held the last hope of the world in her hands--they ended up in front of a squat, ugly building. The building had started life as a slaughterhouse, and didn't appear to have changed much since. The alley door led into what had once been the holding pen for sheep or cattle; the floor was concrete, with spilled-wine bloodstains worked deep into the stone. A few of the low holding walls were gone, replaced by empty space. Overhead, the walkways and management offices hung in the gloom like spiderwebs, gray and sterile. ( The light was uniformly low, and an air of decay hung over the entire place, like no one had been there for years. )

[Adapted from Chapter 19 of Seanan McGuire's Discount Armageddon with wonderful coding help from my fave, firstofitskind. WARNING FOR NPC DEATH. First post is here, and here is the previous post. NFI, NFB, OOC is love]