Half-Off Ragnarok

Thirteen

The reptile house of Ohio’s West Columbus Zoo, about an hour and a half before the zoo is supposed to open, waiting for a gorgon to come to work

BETWEEN THE BODY DISPOSAL, cleaning the kitchen, and analyzing the samples we’d taken during our makeshift autopsy, I was too spun up to sleep. Oh, I tried. And when four o’clock in the morning arrived without my catching so much as a wink, I gave up. I’d spent the hours between then and leaving for work doing research, drinking coffee, and emailing home to ask for more details about the Thirty-Six Society—which I didn’t have, naturally, since everyone else in my family was smart enough to go to bed.

My car was one of the first into the parking lot. I got out and started down the path to the front gate, noting as I passed the pond that even the geese were still asleep. It was like I had the place to myself. Then again, that could have been a side effect of sleep deprivation.

I walked around the curve in the path and smiled, the feeling of isolation dissipating as I saw Lloyd already manning his position at the gate. “Good morning,” I called.

He jumped, coffee slopping over the lip of his mug as he turned to stare at me. “Dr. Preston?” he asked.

“I know, I’m early.” I shrugged. “I couldn’t sleep. How about you, Lloyd? They always make you come to work this early?”

“My shift starts as soon as there’s staff on the grounds,” he said, recovering some of his composure. He put his coffee down and reached for his clipboard. “ID?”

I shook my head as I pulled out my ID card and handed it to him. “Every day.”

“There were police here yesterday,” he said, in an overly patient tone. “Management wants to be extra sure they know who’s coming and going.” He found my name on his clipboard, checked it off, and handed my ID back to me. “Welcome to the zoo, Dr. Preston.”

“Thanks, Lloyd,” I said, and waved as I walked through the gate. He didn’t wave back. When I glanced over my shoulder he looked away, and I frowned. I must have been really early if my presence was this confounding to security.

The zoo was as deserted as the parking lot. I walked quickly, scanning the ground. I was wearing my glasses with the polarized lenses and carrying a hand mirror, just in case. Crow was still at home. If things went as badly as I feared that they might, he didn’t need to be here.

Unlocking the reptile house was like coming home after an annoyingly short absence. Many of the reptiles were still active after their long and exciting night. Some of them froze when they saw me walking by, their instincts kicking in and causing them to pretend to be bits of fallen wood or pieces of the wall. Others ignored me completely, so accustomed to humans that I was no more important to them than an empty room. If I came back with food, maybe then they’d give a crap about me.

Shami rose in the classic cobra “stand” position when I passed his enclosure, flaring his hood slightly as he looked at me. I stared into his unblinking eyes, trying to guess what he was thinking. It was easier with wadjet females. At least they looked mostly human, and could be counted on to show their emotions in the same way.

“Alex?” Dee sounded confused, like I was the last person she’d been expecting to find in the reptile house at this hour. The sound of the front door swinging shut followed her question. I turned to face her.

She was wearing a smart-looking blouse and pencil skirt combination, one that was just a little old-fashioned, and hence went perfectly with her impeccable beehive wig. Only the uneven curves of her painted-on eyebrows told me that she was as exhausted as I was. That was a good sign. I didn’t want it to be Dee. Whatever was going on, whoever was involved with it, I didn’t want it to be Dee. I somehow mustered a smile.

“Hi, Dee,” I said. “How are you this morning?”

“What are you doing here? It’s not even seven o’clock.” she asked, walking toward me, and then continuing on past me as she made her way to her office. “You never beat me into the office. Is everything okay at home?”

“We had sort of an exciting night last night.” My eyes were still dry, and I’d found sand on my pillow when I’d finally given up and gotten out of bed. “Do you have a minute to talk?”

“Sure. Come on in.”

Dee’s office was impeccable, unlike mine: every surface was cleaned to within an inch of its life, and only the most essential items were allowed to claim territory. There were a few carefully curated “personal touches,” including a forced-perspective picture of Dee, her daughter Megan, and her husband, whose name I realized I didn’t know. The camera angle had been chosen to make it harder to tell that he was in the neighborhood of seven feet tall, and it worked, mostly, if you didn’t know what you were looking for.

“Did you sleep last night?” she asked, putting her purse on her desk and leaning over to switch on the computer.

“Not really,” I said, following her into the office and closing the door. “I had a lot to do. Sleep wasn’t on the agenda.”

“Oh?”

There were a lot of places I could begin. I didn’t want to tell her about Shelby—not yet. That wasn’t my secret to share, and as long as Shelby wasn’t endangering the local cryptids, I didn’t have to force the issue. Instead, I went for the biggest shock value: “There was a cockatrice in my yard last night. I looked into its eyes.”

Dee’s gasp woke her hair. It hissed softly beneath her wig. “Alex! Oh sweet Athena! Are you all right? You’re all right, aren’t you?” She paused, almost visibly moving on to the next thought. “How are you all right? If you met its eyes, you should have . . . you should . . .”

“Luckily, my cousin was on hand, and I got a good enough look at it before my eyes started turning to stone that I was able to tell her which antivenin to use on me. It was a closer thing than I enjoy, but I’m fine now. A little dehydrated. Nothing a few bottles of Gatorade can’t fix.”

“So a cockatrice turned Andrew to stone?” Her voice was heavy was bald relief . . . and with eagerness. The only question was whether she was eager to have the mystery of Andrew’s death resolved, or eager to have me convinced of what had killed him.

“Yes,” I said, and watched her brighten. “Also, no.” She dimmed just as quickly, expression turning puzzled.

“I . . . I don’t understand. How was it a cockatrice if it wasn’t a cockatrice?”

“It wasn’t alone.” I pulled out my phone, opening my gallery. The most recent image—the puncture wound on Mr. O’Malley’s leg—filled the screen. I held it toward Dee, like Perseus holding his mirrored shield between himself and the fabled Medusa. “Look familiar? Because I checked these against the field guide, and they have the same diameter and spacing as the bite of a Pliny’s gorgon.”

The hissing was louder now, her wig beginning to pulse as her snakes worked themselves up into a fury. “I . . . I don’t . . .”

“We found this wound on my next-door neighbor’s leg after he died of petrifaction. I took venom samples from the surrounding tissue. They tested as gorgon. I didn’t get enough to tell the subtype, but we both know this bite wasn’t made by a greater gorgon, and the bite radius is pretty compelling.” I lowered my phone. “So you tell me, Dee. Please. How was this man killed by a cockatrice if he was bitten by a gorgon? Why was there a cockatrice in my yard? I can’t imagine the two things are unconnected. Then again, I’m the least imaginative member of my family. Maybe I’ll believe you, if you can explain.”

“I . . .” Dee’s shoulders slumped as she reached up to steady her pulsing wig. “I swear to you, Alex, I don’t know. I can’t say for sure that I’d tell you if I knew it was a member of my community who’d done this, because I’ve never been in that position, but I can tell you it’s not any member of my community who I know. They would never have done this.”

“You have to know how this looks.”

“Yeah, well, maybe so does somebody else, did you consider that?” She glared at me, the familiar fierceness back in her eyes. “Anybody who knows I work for you could have mocked up those bite marks as a way to make you accuse me.”

“To what end?”

“To keep you from looking for the real killer.”

I paused. “That’s not a bad theory,” I said, after a moment of thought. “There’s just one problem.”

“What’s that?”

“We’re right back at it being something other than just a cockatrice. So if it wasn’t a Pliny’s gorgon, what was it?”

Dee stared at me for a moment, eyes wide behind her tinted lenses. She started to open her mouth, presumably to offer an answer.

The sound of someone knocking on the office door stopped her cold.

With me and Dee both inside her office, the reptile house wasn’t officially open; what’s more, unless I’d been more careless than I thought, the outer door shouldn’t have been unlocked. We exchanged a glance. I nodded, and she reached up to put one hand on the arm of her glasses, clearly ready to pull them off. I couldn’t draw a firearm on zoo property without doing a lot of explaining, and so I just turned to the door, prepared to leap out of the way, and opened it.

Chandi didn’t flinch. She had eschewed her fancy clothes today, instead wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt advertising a brightly colored, presumably age appropriate puppet show called Lazy Town. There were alligator-shaped barrettes in her hair. “Am I going to be allowed to see my fiancé as we agreed?” she demanded, frowning.

“Chandi.” I returned her frown. “The reptile house isn’t open yet. How did you get in?”

Her eyes darted to the side. “The front door was unlocked.”

“No, it wasn’t,” said Dee, stepping up behind me. “Chandi, do you have a key? I thought we discussed this . . .”

“I have a key for emergencies,” said the little girl sullenly. “Humans being murdered inside the safe haven we arranged for Shami constitutes an emergency. I am allowed to use my key under these circumstances.”

“Okay, hold on a second,” I said. “Chandi, did you knock before you let yourself in?”

“No,” she admitted.

“So that’s where we draw the line, all right? You need to knock before you assume you’re allowed to let yourself in, whether or not you think we’re having an emergency.” I paused. “Wait—the zoo isn’t open yet. How did you even get to the reptile house?”

“I just told you that,” said Chandi. “Humans are being murdered.”

The thought struck me and Dee at the same time. We exchanged a horrified look. “Lloyd,” she said.

“Chandi, I need you to listen to me very carefully.” I turned back to her. “Was the man at the front gate alive or dead when you came inside?”

“He was dead. Now may I see Shami?”

“Dee?”

“I’ve got it.” Dee stepped past me, putting her hands on Chandi’s shoulders and steering the little girl firmly away from the office door. “You can see him for a moment, sweetie, but if there’s been another murder, they’re going to close the zoo, and you don’t want to be here when that happens, do you? It would come with so many inconvenient questions, and I don’t think you want to explain them to your parents . . .” Her voice faded into so much reassuring muttering, punctuated by Chandi’s objections.

I didn’t stay to listen. I was already running for the front door.

The zoo was still deserted. What did I just do? I thought, racing down the main trail toward the gate. Lloyd had been alive when I arrived at work. Dee came in after me. If she was the killer, then I had decided to leave her alone with a little girl.

A little girl with venomous fangs of her own. We weren’t even sure wadjet could be harmed by gorgon venom, given their immunity to everything else. Chandi had a finely-honed sense of self-preservation, and an even more finely-honed sense of entitlement. If Dee attempted to attack her rather than giving her access to her fiancé, I was betting on the wadjet.

The sound of voices told me I was on the right track. I jogged to a stop where I would be concealed by a large patch of shrubbery and peered through the branches at the crowd that had gathered around Lloyd’s body. I hadn’t realized that many people came to the work this early. His clipboard was on the ground, its utility finally at an end. Although I supposed that if the police went looking for a murderer, it would give them a convenient list of suspects.

There were too many people there for me to risk approaching. They’d ask questions, and later they’d remember that I not only came in to work early, but appeared to conveniently “discover” the body with the rest of them. I turned away, pulling my phone from my pocket, as I walked slowly back toward the reptile house. I didn’t want to get her involved. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to speak to her right now. And that didn’t matter, because I needed the backup.

“Shelby? Hi, it’s Alex. We’ve got a problem at the zoo . . .”

Chandi and Dee were both alive when I stepped through the reptile house doors. That was a comfort. They were shouting at each other. That wasn’t.

“—can’t keep me out! I’ll tell my father! I’ll tell everyone! I’m allowed—”

“—believe your parents will be mad at me for looking out for your best interests? You need to think about your safety—”

“—am I supposed to develop a proper immunity if you don’t let me—”

“—will be time for that—”

I put two fingers in my mouth and whistled shrilly, bringing both sides of the argument to a crashing halt. The two turned to stare at me, eyes wide. For a moment, the only sound was the hissing of Dee’s hair.

“Both of you, listen up,” I said. “Lloyd is dead. Chandi, did you notice anything about the body when you came in?”

“Just that his eyes had turned to stone,” she said, as dismissively as a human child might report an adult with a visible booger.

“What?” said Dee. “But that’s—”

I cut her off. “That’s what I was afraid of. Dee, is there any way we can smuggle Chandi out of the zoo before the police get here?” I raised a hand to cut off her protests before they could begin. “You didn’t check in at the gate, Chandi, because if you’d tried, Lloyd would have made you wait until we opened. That means the police will be really interested in how you got inside, and why you didn’t call 911 as soon as you saw the dead man. Do you want to go through all that?”

“No,” she admitted sullenly.

“I can probably get her out one of the delivery gates if I take her now,” said Dee. “But, Alex, really, we need to talk about this.”

“We’ll talk about it when you get back here. Right now, getting Chandi to safety is more important.”

“I thought you might say that.” Dee frowned. “What are you going to do?”

“Isn’t that obvious?” I shrugged. “I’m going to get us ready to open.”

Dee looked briefly like she wanted to protest, but thought better of it. Instead, she took Chandi by the shoulder and walked her to the door. For once, the young wadjet didn’t object or try to bargain for five more minutes. She just went with Dee, leaving me alone with the reptiles.

I looked at the enclosures around me, sighed, and said, “All right, fellows. Let’s get ready for an opening that’s never going to happen.”

Shelby showed up five minutes before the reptile house doors were supposed to officially open. She was wearing her uniform and looked as fresh as a daisy, even though I knew she’d been awake almost as long as I had the night before. “The zoo’s closed,” she announced without preamble. Then she paused, looking around the open space. “Is Dee in her office?”

“No,” I said. “Dee had to deliver a package to one of the gates. She should be back any minute.”

Shelby’s eyes widened. “You let her go out there alone? Alex—”

“Why shouldn’t he have let me go out alone?” asked Dee, stepping through the door behind my girlfriend. “I’m his assistant, not his prisoner.”

“Oy!” Shelby whirled, taking a large step backward in the process, so that the three of us wound up standing in a loose circle. A loose, extremely tense circle. Shelby eyed Dee suspiciously. “Don’t sneak up on me like that!”

“Don’t stand in front of the door and maybe I won’t,” snapped Dee. She took a deep breath, calming herself, and said, “I’m sorry. That was rude. Did you hear about Lloyd?”

“What do you know about Lloyd, then?” asked Shelby.

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “That’s about as subtle as a hammer, Shelby.”

“Sometimes subtle isn’t the best plan,” Shelby shot back. “Sometimes subtle gets you killed. But you didn’t let me go on. The dead man—it’s not Lloyd.”

“What?” I lowered my hand. “What do you mean?”

“I mean it’s not Lloyd. It’s one of the other guards. They must have traded off before whatever happened.”

“Oh, thank God.” I realized how bad that sounded as soon as it was said. I didn’t waste time trying to take it back. Someone I knew and liked was alive; someone I didn’t know as well was dead. Being relieved was only human. “Dee, did you get Chandi out of the zoo without her being seen?”

Dee nodded, looking incredibly relieved for some reason. “She was really unhappy about it.”

“We’ll make it up to her somehow.”

Shelby blinked, looking more confused than suspicious as she asked, “Chandi? Isn’t that the little girl who’s always lurking about in here?”

“Every chance she gets,” I confirmed. I looked back to Dee. “Do you trust me?”

“You’re the boss,” said Dee.

“Okay. If that’s the case . . . the zoo’s closed. The police should be coming to talk to us all soon, since we were some of the last people to come into the zoo before the murder. Do you have my address?”

Dee nodded.

“Good. When we’re done here, we meet up at my place. All of us.” I could explain the situation to Grandma during my drive home, and Sarah would be fine as long as we distracted her somehow. This was getting bad. This was no longer the sort of thing I could take care of on my own, if it ever really had been—something I now sincerely doubted. Shelby was the closest thing I had to backup. I was going to be stuck with her for the long haul.

Dee’s eyes widened, and she darted an uneasy glance at Shelby. “All three of us? You know, if I’m not going to be working today, I have some things at home that could really use—”

“The man at the gate wasn’t Lloyd, but he was still turned partially to stone,” I said. “So was Andrew. So was Mr. O’Malley. I don’t think you can stay out of this one, Dee. Will you come to my house, or do I need to find yours?” The unspoken threat hung in the air between us, only Shelby’s politely puzzled expression keeping it from turning truly menacing. If Dee wasn’t on our side, if she wasn’t an ally, there was every chance she was an enemy. I couldn’t afford to take that chance.

“I . . .” Dee hesitated. Then her shoulders slumped, and she nodded. “I’ll be there.”

“All right. Shelby? You want to head back to the big cats? Maybe it’s best if the police don’t find us together again.”

“Aye-aye,” she said, snapped a sloppy, mocking salute, and jogged back out the door to the zoo. In a matter of seconds, it was me, Dee, and the reptiles, alone again.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said, with a mistrustful glance. Then she walked away, heading for the closet where we kept the lizard food.

I grimaced and followed. Even if the zoo was being shut down for the day, even if we had a petrifactor to stop, the animals still needed to be fed.

The police arrived while I was tossing trout into Crunchy’s tank. The big alligator snapping turtle was still full from the night before, and took his time making the fish disappear. The officer responsible for taking my statement didn’t look happy about that. It could have been worse; he could have been talking to Dee, who was feeding our rattlesnakes.

The time line I’d guessed at from Chandi’s arrival was confirmed by the interviewing officer: Dee and I were among the last people to enter the zoo before the man at the gate had died. Not, I was relieved to realize, the very last—we were getting the same treatment Shelby and I had received the day before, and I doubted that would have been the case if either of us had been a prime suspect.

“Where can we find you if we need to ask additional questions?”

“I’ll be at home,” I said. If I wasn’t, well. There would be one or more cuckoos at home, and that would keep any policemen who showed up from walking away thinking I’d been uncommunicative.

“Your girlfriend, Shelby Tanner, works here at the zoo, does she not?”

“Yes, in the lion house. She’s a visiting researcher from Australia.”

The officer nodded. “You’re a visiting researcher yourself, aren’t you? California?”

“Yes. I’m on loan from the San Francisco Zoo.” My credentials would check out. The reptile house there was operated by one of the rare dragons who had chosen to go into something other than professional money-making. The rest of her Nest tolerated her bizarre interest in research because it gave them easy access to heated sand for incubating their eggs. “I’m doing a survey of the native amphibians of Ohio.”

“Fascinating stuff,” said the officer, flipping his notebook closed. “We’ll call you if we need anything.”

“Thank you,” I said, and tossed another trout into the tank.

The officer who had interviewed me walked toward the door, beckoning the officer interviewing Dee to follow him. My assistant stayed where she was, freezing with one hand still halfway in the timber rattler enclosure as she waited for the door to close behind the two blue-clad men. I was privately glad she hadn’t frozen like that until their backs were turned. There was something impossibly static about her stillness, a reptilian quality that screamed her inhuman origins more loudly than anything else about her disguised appearance.

Only when we were alone did she relax and start breathing again. She replaced the lid on the rattlesnake enclosure, stepping down from the stool she’d used to reach the opening, and said, “Alex, I don’t know how much of this I can take.”

“You’ll take as much as you have to.” I threw the last of the trout in with Crunchy and closed the hatch above his tank. Hopping down from my own stool, I grabbed it and carried it back toward the closet. “We’ll get through this, Dee. I promise.”

“You don’t honestly think I had anything to do with this, do you?”

I hesitated before shaking my head. “No. I admit, I had a few moments of doubt when we saw the puncture marks I showed you, but there’s no way you’d kill all these people. They’ve all been harmless so far. There’s nothing they could have done to you.”

“They could have found out where my community was located and threatened to expose us,” said Dee. She opened her lips wide enough to let me see the fangs that had unhinged from the roof of her mouth. They folded again before she said, “Because anyone who threatened my family would find themselves between a rock and a bad place.”

“I understand the sentiment,” I said.

“Do you really expect me to come back to your house and talk about this in front of your girlfriend?”

I allowed myself the thinnest stripe of a smile. “I think you’ll be surprised.”

Ambulances and emergency response personnel clogged the front plaza of the zoo as Dee and I walked out and past them. No one looked our way. They all had their own problems to worry about and their own jobs to do; we were just so much moving background noise. I walked smoothly but with the appropriate amount of hesitation as I passed the place where I knew the body had been found, trying to mirror the normal responses of a human male in my situation. The last thing I wanted was for someone to remember me in this moment, or to remark upon my behavior as having been in any way odd.

The upbringing I shared with my sisters didn’t make us monsters, any more than someone like Dee or Chandi was inherently a monster. It just instilled us with a different set of priorities and responses. The man I was pretending to be, Dr. Alexander Preston, had probably never seen a dead body. He worked with his snakes all day and went home to a normal life, a normal world, one that didn’t have anything nasty lurking in the shadows. I was normally pretty good at pulling Dr. Preston across me like a mask, but here and now, I itched to examine the body for clues that might have helped me determine my next move.

Dee was parked across the lot from me. I paused before separating from her, asking, “You’re sure you remember the address?”

“I’ve got it,” she said. “You’re sure you want me to come over?”

“Trust me,” I said. “This is what’s best for all of us.”

She didn’t look like she trusted me. She looked like she wanted to cut and run for the hills. But she wouldn’t have been my assistant if she hadn’t been too smart to pull a stunt like that. Looking uneasy, she nodded. “All right,” she said. “I’ll be there.”

“Thank you.” I turned and walked toward my car, trying to show I believed her by not looking back. It was difficult, and not just because I was half-afraid she wouldn’t come. Another man was dead, this one killed in broad daylight, and I was allowing Dee and Shelby to run around without backup. It had nothing to do with gender, and everything to do with the fact that I didn’t know how good their training had been. Dee was a gorgon. They’re not immune to basilisks, so what about a cockatrice? Would she even know how to handle one? And Shelby—she’d said there were no petrifactors in Australia. What would happen if she was attacked while she was alone?

Those thoughts were bad thoughts, and they would only take me to bad places. I forced them out of my mind, got into the car, and drove.

I waited to call Grandma’s cell until I was halfway home. She picked up almost immediately, greeting me with a cheerful, “Alex! How are things at work?”

“Dee’s clean, or probably clean, and we have a problem,” I said. “One of the guards was found dead this morning. Killed by a petrifactor, after both Dee and I had checked in for work. The zoo’s closed for the day, and Dee and Shelby are planning to meet me at the house so we can discuss our next steps.”

There was a brief pause before Grandma sighed. “You know, I want to ask you why you and your little friends need to have your meeting here, but since three humans are dead, I suppose discussing the situation in public would be a bad idea.”

“Unless we feel like being accused of murder and maybe terrorism, since they’ve got that whole ‘unknown chemical agent’ angle, yeah.” Most of the time, events and issues relating to the cryptid world can be talked about virtually anywhere, since no one will believe you’re talking about anything real. Unicorns? Bogeymen? The thing in the closet? Whatever. Anyone who happens to listen in will assume that you’re a fantasy nut or talking about something from a television program.

That changes when people get dead. It’s not that the fantastic becomes any more believable. It’s just that everyone starts listening differently, and that sort of thing can get you in trouble.

“All right. I’ll get Sarah settled in front of the television. Have you kids had lunch?”

“We were sort of distracted by the whole ‘dead man, closing the zoo, police interrogation’ thing.”

“Swing by the Tim Horton’s on your way, then,” she said. “If Dee or Shelby beat you here, I’ll make them wait in the kitchen.”

I laughed. “Are you asking me to do this because you need donuts to make up for the invasion of your home?”

“I am,” she said. “Get double blueberry.” The connection died as she hung up on me. I laughed again, and kept on driving.

Dee’s car was in front of the house when I pulled up; Shelby’s was nowhere to be seen, which concerned me slightly. I parked in my usual spot behind Grandma, balancing the bag from Tim Horton’s as I got out and walked to the front door. It was unlocked. The sound of laughter greeted me as I pushed it open.

The voices were coming from the kitchen. I stuck my head inside. Grandma and Dee were sitting at the table, each with a mug of what looked like herbal tea (and technically was, if you took a broad enough view of the word “herbal”) in their hands. They looked over as I stepped inside. Dee was grinning, and her fangs had dropped, pushing little indentations into her lower lip.

“You really tried to hug a manticore? Alex, I never thought you had it in you.”

“I was six,” I said, trying to recover my dignity as I put the Tim Horton’s bag down on the table. “It looked like a puppy crossed with a scorpion. Of course I wanted to hug it.”

Something about my frosty tone struck them both as funny, because they started laughing again, even harder than before. Grandma reached out and freed the box of Timbits from the rest of my lunch order, popping it open to reveal the donut holes inside.

“You’re my favorite grandson,” she cooed, popping one into her mouth.

“I’m your only grandson,” I said sourly. Then I paused, looking around the kitchen in alarm. “Grandma, did you remember to bribe—”

“HAIL! HAIL THE RETURN OF THE GOD OF SCALES AND SILENCE!” exulted the mice, emerging from behind most of the appliances on the kitchen counter.

“—the mice.” I groaned, putting a hand over my face. “You asked me to bring home baked goods. You didn’t bribe the mice to stay upstairs. Are you setting me up for a musical number, or do you just hate me?”

“If this Shelby girl is going to be involved with the family business, she’s going to need to handle whatever that involvement might entail.” Grandma took another donut hole out of the box and smiled at me. “Hence the mice.”

For her part, Dee blinked, looking baffled. “Excuse me, but what’s going on?” she asked, in her usual calm, reasonably even tone. She’d been to the house before, and she’d met the mice, but that had been the mice in company mode: three of them had come politely to the kitchen, thanked her for her visit, and asked if she’d like to attend that night’s catechism. This was the mice in full-on celebration. It was a pretty daunting sight even for me, and I grew up with it.

“Grandma doesn’t approve of Shelby, so she’s arranged for an Aeslin bacchanal to convince her to back off.” I pushed my glasses up, glowered at my grandmother. “This is dirty pool, you understand.”

“All’s fair in love, war, and not inviting representatives of barely vouched-for cryptozoological organizations into my home.” Grandma flicked her donut hole into the ocean of mice, where it disappeared, accompanied by the sound of redoubled cheering.

The doorbell rang.

Grandma turned her face to me and smiled serenely. “You’d better get that,” she said. “You wouldn’t want to leave your little girlfriend waiting.”

“We’re going to talk about this later,” I promised, before turning and heading for the door, fighting the whole way not to glower. Intellectually, I knew my grandmother was being reasonable. She was protecting her home. Shelby was a barely-known quantity, and until she could be trusted, embracing her fully was a terrible idea. Grandma had always been a little mistrusting. Being one of the few nonsociopathic members of an entire species had influenced her views of everyone else in the world, and having Sarah home and essentially defenseless wasn’t helping.

At the same time, I needed the help. If Shelby was qualified—which she was—then having her on my side was the best thing I could hope for. I opened the front door. Shelby smiled at me, and held up her Tim Horton’s bag.

“I stopped for donuts,” she said.

I blinked. “There is a God.” I stepped to the side to let her in, and closed the door behind her. “Okay, look. I need you not to freak out. Can we agree on that? That you’re not going to freak out?”

Shelby’s smile faded. “Why would I be freaking out? Has someone else been turned to stone?”

“Not quite. Can I have the donuts?”

“Um, sure?” Shelby handed me the bag.

I took her hand. “Just trust me, okay?” On this confidence-building note, I turned and pulled her with me into the kitchen.

As soon as we stepped inside, the mice began cheering again. It was sort of a reflex with them. “HAIL! HAIL THE RETURN OF THE GOD OF SCALES AND SILENCE!”

“I have returned with company, and with donuts,” I informed them, after waiting for the cheers to die down. “I request a bargain.”

“What bargain?” squeaked one of the mice, its identity obscured by the throng.

“I will give you this bag of donuts,” I held up the Tim Horton’s bag, “the contents of which are a mystery even to me, if you will take it upstairs and stay there until such time as I give you leave or the evening meal arrives, whichever comes first.”

There was a long pause while the mice consulted among themselves. I caught the words “holy,” “mystery,” and “towels.” I didn’t ask. The Aeslin mice were better at making decisions when no one tried to help them do it. Finally, the muttering stopped, and one of the mice stepped forward. “Your Bargain is Accepted,” said the mouse.

“Thank you,” I replied, and placed the bag on the counter. The colony surged forward like a single creature, enveloping the promised treats, lifting the whole thing over their heads, and finally marching out of the kitchen with their prize. There was some singing involved. The whole process took less than a minute.

Grandma took another donut hole from the surviving assortment. “Oh, well,” she said.

Dee and Shelby exchanged a stunned look, briefly united by the sudden understanding that everyone else in the house was seriously weird. Shelby recovered first, asking, “What in the fuck was all that about?”

“The mice have to be bribed if we want them to leave us alone once they’ve gotten interested in something,” I said sheepishly. I rubbed the back of my neck with one hand. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard of Aeslin mice?”

“Those can’t be Aeslin mice,” Shelby said. “They’re extinct.”

“Wait,” said Dee. “Why isn’t she freaking out?”

“They’re not extinct,” I said. “They just don’t get out much.”

“She’s supposed to be freaking out,” continued Dee.

“That’s remarkable,” said Shelby. “Do you think I could talk to them later, see if they know of any colonies in Australia?”

“I don’t see why not,” I said.

“Can we focus on the important thing here, like why isn’t she freaking out?!” Shelby and I turned. Dee was standing, her palms flat on the table, her eyes wide and a little wild behind her tinted glasses. A faint hiss escaped her wig.

I sighed. “I think we should bring everybody up to speed, don’t you?”

Explaining the situation took about half an hour. It would have been faster, but everyone had a different understanding of what was going on, and piecing it all together took more work than I had expected. We ate our way through the donuts I’d picked up from Tim Horton’s. Everyone drank too much coffee, mine and Shelby’s mixed with milk and sugar, Grandma’s mixed with ketchup and pepper, and Dee’s spiked with rattlesnake venom. Since we hadn’t yet reached the “Dee isn’t human” bombshell, her coffee was prepared when Shelby wasn’t looking.

But the bombshell was coming. I was trying to be respectful of Dee’s rights as a sapient individual and not go around blabbing her inhuman nature to anyone who looked like they might be open to a team up. (Discretion isn’t just my watchword: it’s a good way to keep myself from being punched by my friends.) At the same time, I needed help if I wanted to deal with this situation, and the only help I had readily at hand was Shelby. Dee would have to trust her eventually.

Shelby herself was quite forthcoming about her history with the Thirty-Six Society and reasons for coming to this country, now that she knew it was okay for her to talk about that sort of thing in front of Dee. She took a mouthful of coffee and beamed at my assistant across the table. “It’s nice to know that there are so many cryptozoologists in the area,” she said. “Although I have to ask—why Ohio? I’m here because there used to be prides of manticore around here, and I know Alex is here to try and convince basilisks to get it on, but what brings you to the middle of the continent?”

“I grew up in this area,” said Dee vaguely.

“And your husband, is he a cryptozoologist, too?” Shelby continued. “I’ve seen that charming photo in your office. Did you meet through work?”

“Oh, no,” Dee said slowly. “Frank’s a doctor. We didn’t meet until he . . . that is . . . he was the best husband my parents could find, and normally I would have been sent to join him, but he didn’t like the overcrowding where he grew up, and we needed a doctor, so he came out here.”

“Arranged marriage?” Shelby blinked. “I didn’t know that was an American tradition.”

“Not . . . quite.” Dee worried her lip between her teeth, glancing at me. I nodded encouragingly. She looked back to Shelby. “There’s something I should show you. Will you please promise me that you’ll stay in your seat, and not make any sudden or hostile moves?”

“Unless you make sudden or hostile moves toward me, sure,” said Shelby.

“All right,” said Dee, and reached up, and removed her wig. Freed of their confinement, the snakes growing from her scalp uncoiled, stretched, and settled into a loose halo around her head, their tongues scenting the air. The rest of us turned toward Shelby to see what she would do.

Shelby blinked. Then she blinked again, and finally, looking somewhat nonplussed, she asked, “Is anyone in Ohio human?”

“I am,” I said.

“You’re a Price, you don’t count,” Shelby shot back. She returned her attention to Dee, or rather, to Dee’s snakes. “They’re beautiful. Do they bite? Have they got minds of their own? Does this make you a gorgon, then, or is there another species that comes with snakes in place of hair? Do you have any hair? You draw your eyebrows on, and your eyelashes have always looked fake to me, so I suppose not . . .”

Now it was Dee’s turn to blink. “You seem pretty relaxed about all of this.”

“I’m from Australia. I see stranger than women with snakes for hair when I look out my bedroom window.” Shelby shrugged. “Besides, Alex trusts you, and I trust Alex, at least for the moment. So if I’ve already decided to trust you, I may as well focus on the natural marvel which you represent.” She broke into a broad grin. “Evolution is so cool.”

“That’s something I think we can all agree on,” I said, relaxing. “Now that we’ve got that out of the way, can we please focus on the problem at hand? Three men are dead, and whoever—or whatever—killed them either is a Pliny’s gorgon, or is trying to implicate the local community in the deaths.”

“Whoever or whatever?” asked Shelby. “Don’t we already know the answer to that one?”

“If a Pliny’s gorgon is using a cockatrice to commit the murders, or is committing the murders on their own and somehow pinning it on a cockatrice, we’re looking for a who,” I said. “If it’s a cockatrice that’s somehow being covered up for, it’s a what. That’s going to change our hunting strategies dramatically.”

“Pliny’s gorgons don’t like cockatrice any more than anyone else does,” said Dee. “They’re spiteful, smelly things, and being immune to their glance doesn’t make us immune to being pecked and scratched.” She shook her head. “Every group has its fringe element. Ours thinks we should be self-sufficient, which means farming. They keep trying to cultivate things that can’t be petrified. That includes cockatrice. No, thank you.”

“Is there one of those fringe groups around here?”

Dee hesitated before nodding. “Yes. They live about a mile from the main community, where they won’t interfere with anyone else.”

“We need to see them.”

“Alex—”

“Three people are dead, Dee.” She flinched. I continued: “The police only know about two of them. There’s a chance it won’t make the national news if it stops now. It’ll be a blip on a few of the blogs that specialize in weird news, and it’ll go away. But if it continues, it’s going to get some media play, and the Covenant is going to notice. Do you want to risk that?”

Dee paled. “No, but . . .”

“We need to visit the community, Dee. You know that’s how this is going to end.”

There was a moment of silence before she nodded, slowly. “I suppose I did know that. I’d just been hoping there was, well . . . some other way.” She glanced to Grandma before she said, almost guiltily, “I’m sorry, Angela, but I can’t bring a cuckoo where we live. I know you’re, well . . . you . . . but I can’t.”

My grandmother, who could be stubborn sometimes, but who had lived her entire life with the reality of what she was, nodded. “I understand, Dee,” she said, with a small, almost regretful smile. “I never expected you to bring me along.” Unspoken was the fact that out of all the cuckoos in the world, my ailing cousin included, Grandma was the least dangerous. She was a projective telepath, like the rest of her kind, but she didn’t receive. It was why she’d grown up with a normal code of ethics, rather than being overwritten by her mother’s sociopathic nature while she was still in the womb.

“We’ll take two cars,” I said, pushing my coffee away as I stood.

Dee blinked. “What, now?”

Andrew, Mr. O’Malley, and the guard—I still needed to learn his name—weren’t getting any less dead while we sat around and talked. I nodded firmly. “Yes, now,” I said. “Before it’s too late for anyone else.”

“Oh, lovely,” said Shelby. “I’ve always enjoyed field trips.”