The Shambling Guide to New York City by Mur Lafferty Page A

since he can go and watch people and see who’s best at entertaining coterie.”
    Ursula, John, and Koi were on some sort of business trip to Boston, and Zoë was glad not to have more complications. She could get used to only so many new creatures at once.
    However, one thing she had to do that week was interview new writers. She found it illuminating, as she met coterie she had never even heard of. Since the company had little need of marketing yet, Zoë begged Morgen to act like her assistant so she could warn Zoë of what kind of coterie was coming through the door.
    She interviewed a scab demon, a minor Norse deity (Eir, goddess of healing, she had said), and Bertie, a wyrm, who called himself a baby dragon at “only” two hundred years old. He was a knowledge devourer, and wanted to eat as much of the city as possible, and he assured her that he could maintain his human shape for some time. He almost never lost his human shape when it was “really important.”
    Almost never
, thought Zoë.
    All of the applicants looked human, in fact, except that the scab demon was covered in hideous scabs, and Zoë tried very hard to calmly meet her eyes without staring.
    “Why are you not working at a hospital? Why a publishing company?” Zoë asked Eir.
    The goddess, a tall, broad woman with spiky yellow hair, pulled herself up even taller in her chair. “I failed out. To work in a hospital, I must go through years and years of medicalschool that I don’t need, learning practices that are pointless. Why should I learn the strains of syphilis if I can cure it with a wave of my hand?”
    “You can cure syphilis but can’t conjure up a medical degree?” Zoë asked without thinking. The goddess’s eyes grew wide and she gasped. She stood up and looked very tall while Morgen and Zoë stayed seated, stunned.
    Is she going to throw lightning at us?
Zoë thought wildly.
    Eir stomped out.
    “Don’t worry about it. The Norse are prickly. At least you didn’t piss off a thunder god,” Morgen said as Zoë banged her head on her desk. “What’s this one going to do after being offended, anyway? Heal you
really hard
?”
    Zoë was more careful with the baby dragon and the scab demon, and decided that the dragon deserved a second interview. The scab demon was new to the city and wasn’t sure which island was Manhattan and which was Long Island.
    During the afternoons Zoë researched New York guidebooks for humans, making notes of the best things to see and do. She left lodging and restaurants to the writers’ discretion, as she doubted a scab demon could get into the New York Athletic Club or a table at Sugiyama.
    She took her lunches outside and alone, needing sunlight and human contact.
    All in all, it wasn’t a bad job.
    Training with Granny Good Mae was another thing. Every morning she had to get up and run through Prospect Park to increase her endurance, and every evening Granny Good Mae would meet her after work and drag her to some private area fortraining. Every time Zoë messed up, Granny Good Mae would hit her on the head and yell, “Dead! You’re dead now.”
    She was learning a mix of kung fu, self-defense, and dirty street fighting. Each day they focused on a different coterie type, its fighting style, and how to defeat it.
    “Fire demon,” Granny Good Mae said on Thursday after she took Zoë to the train station.
    “Yeah?” Zoë said, fearing the woman would attack her with a branding iron. She still had healing puncture wounds where the woman had hit her with a stick covered in thumbtacks to imitate a vampire.
    “No defense. Unscrew a fire hydrant. Lesson over!” She turned to go.
    Zoë reached out to catch her arm, then thought better of it. She ran after her instead. “Wait, that’s it? No beating me up, no calling me dead?”
    “No. With fire demons you either burn or you open a hydrant. You can’t punch a bonfire.”
    “I don’t even know how to open a fire hydrant! Don’t you need a giant