Half-Off Ragnarok

Ten

Still in the kitchen of an only moderately creepy suburban home in Columbus, Ohio, now dealing with a heavily-armed grandmother

“HI, GRANDMA,” I said, without taking my hand away from my face. “Have you met my colleague, Shelby Tanner? I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned her. I’m sort of dating her. She’s with the Thirty-Six Society. I know I didn’t tell you that part before. I just learned it myself.”

“She has a gun and she’s in my kitchen,” said Grandma. She sounded very calm. That wasn’t a good sign.

“Well, I have a gun and I’m in your kitchen,” I said, trying to be reasonable. “And technically, right now, the table has her gun.”

“You’re allowed to have a gun in my kitchen,” said Grandma. “Young women to whom I have not been properly introduced most emphatically are not.”

“Your grandmother is Johrlac?” squeaked Shelby, sounding more unsettled than I’d ever heard her.

Confused, Grandma asked, “You know what I am?”

“She knew what I was, and threatened to shoot me several times to avenge her brother’s death,” said Sarah blithely.

There was a moment of silence. I uncovered my face to find Grandma looking at Sarah, although her crossbow was still pointed at Shelby. Using the voice she reserved for my cousin, Grandma asked, “Sarah, sweetheart, did you kill this woman’s brother?”

“I didn’t kill anyone that I’m aware of,” said Sarah, and took another sip of juice. “But she helped mix the goo to make Alex’s eyes stop being stone. I like her.”

There was a long, dangerous pause before Grandma said, “What?”

“The cockatrice!” I’d been so preoccupied with more immediate issues—keeping my eyes from turning into balls of granite, keeping Shelby from shooting Sarah—that I’d forgotten about more potentially long-term threats. I shoved myself away from the kitchen table so fast that my chair went clattering to the floor. Running to the sliding glass door, I hit the switch that would flood the backyard with light. I didn’t look to see whether I had disturbed anything; I just grabbed the hanging curtain and pulled it closed, blocking the yard from view.

I turned to find everyone, even Sarah, staring at me like I had just grown a second head. “Er,” I said, and released my fistful of curtain. “I can explain.”

“I think that might be a good idea,” said Grandpa, finally stepping into the kitchen. Shelby gasped, a small, strangled sound that she clearly tried to swallow. It didn’t do her any good. Grandpa looked down at her, frowning. “This is my home, young lady. Be polite.”

I forced myself to stop looking at Grandpa Martin as my beloved grandfather and to see him as Shelby would: a hulking giant of a man with subtly uneven facial features and heavy cords of scar tissue running along the joins where flesh from his various donors met. He’d removed his sweater before he and Grandma realized there was a problem, and the different skin tones of his hands and forearms were very apparent. Honestly, looked at like that, I couldn’t blame Shelby for gasping. Especially when he was carrying a cudgel too large for most men to safely lift, much less wield.

She recovered fast. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said, remaining seated. Good call: she was less threatening if she wasn’t moving. “I didn’t realize . . . I mean, we’ve never been properly introduced, and I thought . . . I mean . . .”

“She thought you and I were being held captive by Sarah, who she’d somehow managed to get a look at . . .” I glanced at Shelby, curiously.

Looking abashed, she shrugged. “I stole your phone the day the skinks got loose in the reptile house, and went through your pictures. I wasn’t jealous!” she added, seeing the look on my face. “I didn’t think it was another woman or anything, but you kept canceling dates to look after a ‘sick cousin,’ and it was the sort of excuse I’d heard before. I wanted to figure out whether I could break it off with you and still keep the moral high ground.”

“I don’t have any pictures of Sarah in my phone,” I said, confused.

“No, dear, but you have pictures of me,” said Grandma. “Cuckoos have so little facial variation.”

Again, I paused to look at my grandparents, trying to see them as a stranger would. Grandma looked older than Sarah, but not enough older to reflect her true age. I would have placed her in her mid to late thirties if forced to take a guess. When looking for a single cuckoo . . .

“I guess that’s true,” I allowed.

“If I’d known there were two Johrlac present, I would never have brought a gun into your home,” said Shelby fervently.

Grandma turned to Shelby, eyeing her sternly. “Oh, no? What would you have done instead?”

“I would have chained the doors shut while you were sleeping and burned the place to the ground.” Shelby stole an apologetic glance at me. “It would have been the only way to be sure.”

I blinked. Grandma blinked. And then, to my surprise, my grandfather burst out laughing.

“She’s got you there, Angie,” he said, putting his cudgel down on the counter. “Now come on. Put down the crossbow and let’s hear about this cockatrice that’s made such a mess in our kitchen.”

“I’d like more juice, please,” said Sarah.

I knew my cue when I heard it. “Shelby called and said she was uncomfortable being alone after what happened to Andrew . . .” I began, as I stood and walked to the fridge. I continued as I prepared Sarah’s mixture of orange juice and A-1, summarizing the events of the evening. I tried to hit the high points without dwelling too much on things like “letting Shelby into the house.” As I put Sarah’s juice down in front of her, I said, “I didn’t get a good enough look at the cockatrice to tell you subspecies, age, or gender, but as soon as I locked eyes with it, I felt a stabbing pain all the way to the back of my retinas, and . . .” I shrugged helplessly.

“His eyes began turning to stone,” said Shelby.

“I didn’t see it happen, but I sure as hell felt it,” I said. “I walked Sarah and Shelby through preparing the bilberry poultice and combined it with the appropriate antivenin. It worked, because the petrifaction was reversed. If Shelby hadn’t been here, I think I would have lost my eyes.” And possibly my life. The petrifaction hadn’t been able to progress to its natural limits, and it was hard to say how large a dose I might have received.

“She saved his life, Angie,” said Grandpa gently. “Put the crossbow down.”

“I like her,” said Sarah. “Blonde ladies with guns remind me of Verity. I miss Verity. Will she be back from dance camp soon?”

This time the silence that fell over the kitchen was sad, the brief, shared quiet of a family that had, for just a few seconds, managed to forget that it was broken. Grandpa was the one to break it, saying, “Alex, why don’t you take Sarah up to her room? We’ll stay here with your little girlfriend, and make sure she doesn’t run off before we can finish having this talk.”

“Grandpa . . .”

“I promise we won’t kill her and dump her body in the nearest ravine,” said Grandma, sounding annoyed. “Just go, all right?”

“Okay.” I cast Shelby a half-worried, half-apologetic look as I stood and walked back to Sarah’s chair. “Come on, Sarah. Let’s go upstairs.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s where we left your math notebooks, and you have homework for tomorrow.”

“But I never got my sundae.”

“After the homework is finished. I promise.”

Sarah lit up. It was the only way to describe the smile that suffused her face, making her look heartbreakingly like her old self. “Okay!” she said, and stood, clutching her juice glass in one hand. I took the other, and led her out of the kitchen, leaving my grandparents and my girlfriend behind. Hopefully they would all be alive when I got back.

Getting Sarah situated in her room was relatively easy, made easier by bringing Crow across the hall and dropping him onto her bed, where he curled up, stuck his head back under his wing, and went to sleep. Sarah sat down next to the “kitty” with her math workbook open in her lap, happily starting to fill in fractions with a number two pencil. I stayed long enough to see that her answers were almost entirely wrong, and then left the room, shutting the door behind myself.

She was getting better all the time. She was still a long, long way from being well.

I returned to my room, shutting the door behind myself, and fished my cell phone out of my pocket. Grandma’s specific non-threat—“we won’t kill her and dump her body in the nearest ravine”—had been a coded instruction to do something I really didn’t want to do right now. She wanted me to call my sister.

Verity had left New York after defeating the Covenant field team that had been sent to begin the Manhattan purge. She felt staying in the city would be tempting fate, and she was ready to go home. Of course, flying is hard when you carry an arsenal on your person at all times, and it’s harder when you have your own private colony of talking mice. So she’d packed her belongings, her mice, and her (ex-Covenant) boyfriend into a U-Haul and set off for Oregon the long way. She called it a road trip. I called it an exercise in self-indulgence.

Then again, Verity had survived being shot in the stomach and helped save untold cryptid lives when she and Sarah convinced the Covenant that the denizens of New York were not the droids they were looking for. I guess she’d earned a little self-indulgence.

The phone rang twice before Verity’s voice came on, informing me with sugary sweetness, “This is an unlisted number. Now hang up before I call the police.”

“Hello to you, too, Very,” I responded. “Where are you?”

“Alex?” She sounded puzzled, trending into pleased. “Is that you?”

“In the thankfully unpetrified flesh. Do you have a minute?”

“Sure! We’re just rolling into New Orleans to check out a party that Rose told us about, but I can always make time for you.”

I paused. “Rose as in Rose Marshall, the hitchhiking ghost?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Very . . .”

“It’s a dead man’s party. Don’t worry about it. Everybody’s welcome.”

I swallowed the urge to groan. My sister was a grownup. She could take care of herself. “Okay, well, try to keep your soul inside your body, I don’t feel like going wandering around the afterlife trying to put you back together. Is Dominic there?”

“What?” Verity’s tone turned suspicious. “What do you want Dominic for?”

“I need to ask him a question, okay? Now can you put Dominic on the phone?”

“What—”

“The girl I’ve been sort of dating is in the kitchen right now, and she says she’s with the Thirty-Six Society. Since I don’t have any contacts in the Society right now, I just need to confirm that she’s not Covenant. So please, can you put Dominic on the phone?”

“Oh, um, sure. One sec.” I heard Verity put her hand over the phone, followed by the muffled sound of her voice as she relayed the situation. There was a louder scuffing noise before Dominic’s voice came on the line, briskly saying, “Hello?”

“Dominic, hey. It’s Alex.”

“Yes, Verity told me,” he said, his faint Italian accent growing stronger as he started to get impatient. “What did you need to discuss with me?”

“Do you know of any Australian Covenant agents currently on assignment in North America?”

There was a pause before Dominic said, sounding bemused, “No, because there are no Australian Covenant agents. Not unless they’ve managed to recruit an expatriate—and that would be unusual enough that I would have heard about it if it had happened before I quit the Covenant. Since I didn’t hear about it, any Australian recruits would have to have joined quite recently, and would not have completed training, much less been given field assignments. Why?”

“My girlfriend, Shelby Tanner. She says she’s with the Thirty-Six Society. I don’t have a way of confirming that for sure.”

“Well, I can assure you she’s not one of o—one of theirs.” He stumbled a little as he finished the sentence. I felt bad for him. Dominic’s resignation from the Covenant was still recent. Maybe sometimes, he even managed to forget that he’d turned his back on the only life he’d ever known. “Miss Tanner may not be who she claims, but she is not Covenant.”

“Couldn’t they be trying some sort of double agent scenario? Train a British operative to act Australian and send her here to . . .” I stalled out. I was reaching, and I could tell.

So could Dominic. He chuckled. “If the Covenant knew you were there, you would have more than a lone pseudo-Australian agent to contend with, and if they were going to try something so complicated, they would have sent her to Australia, not to the middle of nowhere.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“It is only the truth. She cannot be one of the Covenant’s agents. It makes no sense.”

“Good to know. Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome. Now, if you will excuse me, a dead woman is trying to convince me to drink something that comes in layers.” Dominic sniffed. “I expect to be carrying your sister back to the motel.”

“Thanks for not adding the ‘again’ on that sentence,” I said dryly. “Love to Verity, ongoing tolerance to you.” I hung up. Phone manners have never been a big thing in my family.

So Shelby wasn’t likely to be working for the Covenant. That was a little bit of a comfort. Now I just had to hope that she was still among the living.

I trotted down the stairs, half eager to get back to the gathering in the kitchen and half afraid of what I was going to find when I got there. I didn’t think they could fit an entire human body in the garbage disposal. Maybe more importantly, I didn’t want them to kill Shelby for the crime of wanting to protect me from a deadly predator. It wasn’t her fault she’d decided to protect me from the one Johrlac in the world who truly wouldn’t hurt a fly if she had any choice in the matter.

“Is everything all right in here?” I asked, pushing open the kitchen door.

“Of course, Alex,” said Grandma, who was seated at the table across from Shelby. Grandpa was at the stove, stirring a pot of what appeared to be milk. No one was bleeding or even visibly injured, and the mess from our first aid adventure had been cleared away. All good signs. Grandma smiled encouragingly, motioning for me to take the chair next to Shelby. “We didn’t shoot her or threaten her or anything.”

“Your grandfather’s making us more cocoa,” said Shelby, sounding faintly stunned. “He’s heating the milk for it now.”

“Grandpa makes really good cocoa,” I said, trying to be reassuring. I turned back to Grandma. “I talked to our Covenant expert, and he confirmed that they don’t have any Australian recruits. We may not be able to reach the Thirty-Six Society directly, but the odds are good that she’s not Covenant.”

“That’s nice, dear,” said Grandma. “Sit down and have some cocoa.”

I eyed her as I slipped into my chair. “Does the fact that she’s not Covenant and we’re all having a second round of cocoa mean you’ve decided not to threaten Shelby anymore? Because seriously, that is not the way to help me have a healthy relationship.”

“We’ve come to an agreement,” said Grandma. “She doesn’t attempt to kill anyone who lives in this house, I don’t arrange for her sudden disappearance. Largely because you’d be a suspect, and I’d rather not get you taken in for police questioning.”

“Angela.” We turned to my grandfather. He was standing with his hands on his hips, scowling at his wife. “The young lady explained her reasons for being here, and even you have to agree that they were good ones. Your species does a lot of damage. No one knows that better than you do. Now stop tormenting the poor kids. Alex has already been punished enough for having company over without permission, what with the whole, ah,” he gestured vaguely at his face, “eyes getting turned to stone business.”

Grandma sighed. “I’m sorry, Martin. I just don’t appreciate having my house rules violated like this.” And there was the glare I’d been expecting.

I put up my hands. “I would never have invited her over if there hadn’t been a petrifactor at the zoo—which brings us back to the cockatrice, if you don’t mind talking about something other than how much trouble I’m in or how much you’d like to be allowed to kill my girlfriend.”

“How sure are you that it was a cockatrice?” asked my grandfather.

“I took a direct hit,” I said, letting my hands drop to the table. I leaned back in my chair, feeling suddenly tired. “The lighting and the circumstances meant that I didn’t get the best look at it, but when we prepared the treatment, I used the cockatrice antivenin.”

Now it was Grandma’s turn to blink. “You didn’t use the general gorgon? But, Alex—”

“I was sure it was a cockatrice! Well, almost sure. Eighty percent sure. If we’d used gorgon antivenin, my eyes would have remained partially petrified. I couldn’t risk it.” There’s no place in the field for a cryptozoologist who can’t see. Oh, I’d have opportunities for work—if nothing else, I’d be better equipped than anyone in the world to continue my basilisk studies—but I’d be removed from active duty for the remainder of my life. That wasn’t something I’d been willing to let happen. “So I told them to use the cockatrice antivenin, and it worked.”

Shelby looked at me, horrified. “You mean you were guessing?” she demanded.

“You got almost as good a look at the thing as I did, Shelby, and you didn’t contradict me.” I shrugged. “That seemed like a good sign.”

“Of course I didn’t argue, you idiot! There are no cockatrices in Australia!” Shelby grabbed the front of my shirt as she shouted at me. “You could have been killed! You could have been turned to stone, and it would have been my fault, you—you—you Price!”

“I can see why you like her,” said Grandpa, putting a cup in front of each of us. “She’s enthusiastic about her work.”

“And definitely understands that you’ve been bred to take idiotic risks in the name of science. That’ll serve her well,” said Grandma, accepting her own cup. The liquid inside was a toxic-looking orange rather than brown.

“The key word here is ‘science,’” I said, scowling at both of them. “I made a determination based on what I had observed, and I was correct. My eyes are fine.”

“Better yet, we know what probably killed your coworker,” said Grandpa. He walked back to the counter, picking up his own cup of cocoa. “I doubt we have two petrifactors running loose in this town.”

I froze in the act of reaching for my cocoa. “Say that again.”

“I said that I doubt we have two petrifactors running loose in this town. Not counting the local gorgons, of course. They’ve been good neighbors for decades. They’ve got no reason to stop now.”

“But we’re miles from the zoo.” I stood. “The average cockatrice has a range of less than a square mile. They’re not migratory, and they don’t like to move too far from their dens.”

“Alex . . . ?” said Grandma.

It was Shelby who realized what I was saying first. She reached for her gun, saying, “Either this isn’t the same cockatrice, or—”

“Or someone brought it here,” I finished grimly. “Somebody brought it here and set it loose in our backyard. This wasn’t a random encounter. This was an attack.”

There was a long moment of silence before my grandmother said, uneasily, “You can’t be sure of that.”

Cuckoos aren’t fighters. They weren’t built that way, unlike us monkeys, who were basically born to defend our territory. To my surprise, it was once again Shelby who spoke first. “Are they clever things, these cockatrices?” she asked.

“Not particularly,” I said. “Why?”

“Back at the zoo, Andrew’s body was pushed into the bushes. There’s no way he was that well-covered from just falling,” said Shelby. “Whatever turned him to stone could have been a dumb animal, but he was moved by someone who was smart enough to know what they were doing.”

I paused. “Are you sure?” I’d been so focused on the unusual circumstances of his death that I hadn’t been looking for signs that anything else was involved.

“Lions and tigers usually bring down prey and then drag it a ways before they eat it, right? There’s always a trail when that happens, and there was a trail today. Andrew was dragged into those bushes. Trust me, I know what a dragged kill looks like.”

“Cockatrice aren’t big enough to drag a dead human, and they don’t work together well.” I glanced to my grandparents. “There’s a cockatrice loose in the neighborhood, and it may have a handler. We need to get out there and stop it before anyone else gets hurt.”

“I was wrong about you, Alex,” said Shelby, with a small smile. “You really do know how to show a girl a good time.”