Half-Off Ragnarok

Fourteen

Driving through the woods half an hour outside of Columbus, Ohio, struggling to remain positive about the situation

DEE HAD ALWAYS STRUCK me as a careful driver, someone who obeyed traffic laws and tried not to attract the attention of the police. What I hadn’t considered was that she might be different when stressed out and taking us to meet her family. Once we reached the woods, it was every man for himself: Dee hit the gas, and I was forced to violate several local and state ordinances if I wanted to keep up with her. (She’d been unwilling to give directions to the local gorgon enclave, saying we could follow her home if we insisted on coming for a visit. I was starting to wonder if that wasn’t because she thought she could lose us before we got anywhere near the rest of the colony.)

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I muttered, following Dee as she took a sharp turn across two lanes of freeway and down an exit with a name I couldn’t have pronounced if you paid me.

“Sorry?” asked Shelby.

“No, I’m sorry,” I said, keeping my eyes on the road. If I looked away for so much as a second, I was going to wind up slamming into a tree and killing us both. “I swear I thought she could drive.”

“Alex. Have you ever driven down the Great Ocean Highway?”

“Uh . . . which would be where, exactly?”

“It’s in Australia.”

Dee took another sharp turn, onto a narrow road I hadn’t seen through the trees until she was already heading down it. She hadn’t even used her blinker. I hauled hard on the wheel. The tires squealed as we changed direction and went rocketing after my runaway assistant.

When I was breathing normally again, I said, “Then, no, I haven’t. I’ve never been to Australia.”

“Oh, we’ll need to fix that,” said Shelby, with a degree of joy that would have been disturbing if I hadn’t been focusing so intently on keeping Dee in sight. Maybe that was a life lesson in disguise: when there’s any chance your girlfriend is going to exhibit an unnatural amount of glee over something that seems perfectly mundane, take her on a high-speed car chase. It’ll take the edge off. Then she sobered. “Didn’t expect you to call me today.”

“Shelby, is this really—”

“You made me have a relationship talk while we were hunting monsters, I think this is fair. Thought we were probably finished after last night.”

“I needed your help.”

“Is that all we are now? People who help each other?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I’d like to be more, maybe. But I can’t afford to be distracted right now. And then there’s the whole thing where your introduction to my grandparents involved waving a gun at their adopted daughter, so . . . yeah. I recommend not pulling out any more firearms unless there’s a really excellent reason.”

“I suppose ‘being a Johrlac’ isn’t an excellent reason, right?” Shelby’s tone was unsteadily wry, like she was trying to make a joke but wasn’t quite sure how appropriate it was or how it was going to be received.

I sighed, still focusing on the road, where Dee was doing her best to set speed records. “No, it’s not. They’re my family, Shelby. If we want this to work out, knowing what we both know now, you’re going to need to learn to be okay with that. They’re not the Johrlac who came to your country and hurt the people that you cared about. They’ve been here this whole time, not hurting anybody.”

“Are we, then?” asked Shelby.

“Are we what?”

“Are we going to try and get this to work out?” Shelby twisted in her seat to face me.

I was silent for a moment. “Do you want to?” I finally asked. I knew it was unfair of me, but I needed to know.

“It’s different, now that we don’t have to hide anything. But . . . I don’t know if I would have gotten involved with you if I’d known you were a cryptozoologist.”

“Ah, but if you had, I wouldn’t have needed to make nearly as many excuses.” I shook my head. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we need a dating service.”

“How would you keep the Covenant from signing up?”

“That is why we’re never going to have a dating service.” I laughed. It felt good. So did Shelby. That felt better.

And then Dee turned again, this time into what looked like a wall of solid green. There was no opening there: nothing but undifferentiated trees and the broken, rocky ground between them.

Illusions happen. Whispering a quick prayer to anyone who might be listening, I followed her, tensing myself against a crash that never came. Instead, the turn ended with us driving onto a smooth, gently curving private road. Dee was just ahead, and she’d slowed down enough that I had to slam on the brakes to keep from rear-ending her. Apparently, we no longer needed to drive like maniacs to avoid being followed.

“Holy . . .” breathed Shelby. I glanced to the side. She had her hands pressed flat against the passenger side window, and was close to doing the same thing with her nose. I craned my neck, trying to get an idea of what she was looking at.

The road followed a natural curve in the landscape, winding down into a bowl valley of the type that are common in some forested areas. The trees had been cleared within the valley itself, opening up a wide swath of farmable land. In the middle of the bowl was what looked like a small mobile home park. The individual homes were arranged in a circle that mimicked the bowl itself, and would be a great mechanism for reducing traffic jams if they ever needed to drive out of here. They could start up the lead mobile home and unwind the whole community like a vehicular snake, slithering its way up the road and on to some new safe haven.

I chuckled. Shelby turned away from the window, raising her eyebrows.

“Something funny?” she asked.

“Just that I’m already starting to think in really tortured reptile metaphors,” I said. “Don’t let me try to talk dirty until we’ve been away from here for a few hours.”

“Don’t be silly, Alex. I never let you talk dirty to me if I can help it. You’re a great kisser, and you’re better in bed, but your idea of romance has always been way too centered around reptiles.” She pressed her nose back against the window. “I see corn, tomato plants, there’s even a small apple orchard. These people must have been living here for years.”

“At least twenty, I’d say.” The road was well-maintained, but it must have been put in before wide Internet surveillance was possible. If it were more recent, people would have noticed the construction, illusions over the entrance or no. “I wonder if this place appears on Google Earth . . .” I made a mental note to check when I got home.

“I’ve got cell service in here, if that makes a difference.”

“That makes sense, actually. A lot of Pliny’s gorgons go into day trading or technical writing or other professions that don’t necessarily bring them into contact with people on a regular basis.” I smiled a little. “There’s at least one romance writer who never goes to conventions, because she’s actually an eight-foot-tall grandfather.”

“Why do they do that? Dee does fine with humans. I’d never have guessed.” Shelby grimaced. “Although to be fair, I wasn’t looking. I should probably have suspected something.”

“Dee’s very good at fitting in. And as for why Pliny’s gorgons arrange their lives that way, well, it helps them hide the fact that they—the males at least—are a lot taller than humans. Females top out between five and seven feet, but males can be up to nine feet tall. Not so useful if you want to pass for human, so they get jobs that don’t require them to try.”

“So what, they’ve got their own cell tower?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. They probably had DSL before most of the rest of the state.” A surprising number of telephone company technicians are cryptids, or know cryptids exist and have simply chosen not to care. Once you’ve determined that the giant ball of fangs and tentacles isn’t going to eat you, there’s no good reason not to fix its phone service.

“Huh.”

“Pretty much.” We had reached the bottom of the hill. The road continued around the base of the bowl, avoiding the farmed areas, to wind its way into the mobile homes. I kept following Dee. It seemed like the only safe thing to do.

People were starting to emerge from the trailers to either side, looking curiously toward my car. A few of them were wearing baseball caps, and most of them were bareheaded. Why shouldn’t they be? This was their home, and Shelby and I were the invasive species. One little girl had red bows tied around the necks of her snakes. Their scales were so pale that they looked almost white. I wondered whether they would darken as she aged. Immediately after, I wondered how rude of me it would be to ask.

Dee parked in front of a trailer. There was another space next to her, and so I slid into it, killing the engine. Shelby reached for her door. I put a hand on her arm, stopping her.

“Hang on,” I said, and produced a pair of polarized goggles from my pocket. She looked at me quizzically. “The gaze of a Pliny’s gorgon can stun if they’re not wearing specially tinted glasses. These will keep you from getting hurt.”

“And you think you weren’t planning to get me involved in all this,” she said, taking the goggles and sliding them on. “What about you?”

I tapped the arm of my glasses. “I’m already set. These are specially polarized. So is the reflective coating on my car windows. I plan ahead.”

“You say the sweetest things.”

“I try,” I said, reaching for the door. “Come on. Let’s go see how much trouble we’re in.”

The gorgons had started to move as soon as we stopped. By the time Shelby and I were out of the car, we were surrounded. Size didn’t seem to be a factor: even the little girl with beribboned snakes was standing there, clearly confident that she could take us if she had to. Given her natural advantages, she probably could.

“They’re with me,” Dee announced, stepping between me and the rest of the gorgons. That left Shelby alone between the two cars. I wasn’t sure I was comfortable with that. We should probably have planned this better.

A thin man with bronze skin and black-scaled snakes pushed his way through the crowd. He was wearing blue hospital scrubs that left the bottom foot or so of his legs exposed. He must have been seven feet tall. My animal hindbrain began a vigorous argument with the rest of my mind over the virtues of running vs. asking if I could perform a physical examination.

“And who, exactly, are ‘they,’ Deanna?” he demanded.

“They’re my guests, Frank,” said Dee, sounding unruffled. She reached up and removed her wig, causing her own brown-and-red snakes to uncoil and stretch to their full length. Several of Frank’s snakes stopped writhing in order to watch hers intently. “If that’s not enough for you—”

“It’s not,” said Frank dangerously.

“—allow me to present Alexander Price, and Shelby Tanner. Shelby belongs to the Thirty-Six Society.”

“Cheers,” said Shelby, solving the “separated from the group” issue by sliding across the hood of my car and landing on her feet beside me. “Nice . . . village? Village works as well as anything, I suppose. Nice village you’ve got here. How often are you doing crop rotation?”

“Every season,” said Frank automatically. Then he scowled. “Hang on. I’m not going to answer any questions about how we’re living. You’re the ones who should be answering questions.”

“Frank.” I could practically hear Dee roll her eyes. “They’re my guests. Behave.”

“They’re humans,” said one of the children—a little boy in a Pokémon T-shirt. Some things are apparently universal. He looked curious. The reason was revealed as he continued, “I’ve never seen humans before. Can we keep them?”

“No,” said Frank. “They won’t be staying. Or at least, they won’t be staying alive.”

“Do you lot always threaten company?” asked Shelby. “Like, is this a normal social thing, and I should start threatening you back if I want to be civil?”

“Please don’t,” said Dee.

“Go right ahead,” said Frank.

“When in doubt, we uninvited humans like to listen to the people who have a known track record of not trying to kill us,” I said hastily, before things could get any worse. “Look: we’re here because I asked Dee to bring us. She’s been a good friend, and I’m really glad to have been able to assist your community by supplying antivenin and other needed medical supplies. I take it you’re the community doctor, Mr. . . . ?”

“Franklin Javier Lusczando de Rodriguez,” said Frank, drawing himself up to his full height and looking haughtily down his nose. He had a lot of height, which made the gesture more impressive than pretentious, although it was a narrow margin.

“Ah, so you’re Dee’s husband.” I stole a glance at Dee, who wasn’t looking at me at all. This was probably not the top of her list of “ways I want my boss to meet my husband.” I looked back to Frank. “Anyway. Dee has been a huge help since I came to Ohio, and I want to help her in return. I know it would be devastating for you if a Covenant purge were to get started over all this silly cockatrice business.”

As I had expected, saying the word “Covenant” in the middle of a gathering of gorgons was like dropping a lit match into a barrel full of salamanders. Hissing filled the air as people turned to their neighbors, talking in quick, panicked voices. I held my ground, watching Frank. His snakes were still mostly calm, although they were twisting together in a way that could have indicated anything from confusion to guilt.

Finally, he frowned. “Silly cockatrice business?”

I blinked, glancing toward Dee again. She still wasn’t looking at me. “Well, this is going to be fun,” I muttered, and turned back to Frank. “I can see we have a great deal to discuss. Is there someplace we can go to talk about this, preferably where we won’t start a panic?”

Frank kept frowning as he studied me. At long last, he nodded and said, “I have a place. Come with me.”

Frank’s “place” turned out to be one of the larger mobile homes, set off from the rest by almost fifteen yards—unheard of privacy in a community where everyone shared the same open space as both a common area and a means of getting from one place to another. The reason for the privacy was apparent as soon as he opened the door to reveal the gleaming operating table and state-of-the-art dentist’s chair. There was even a maternity area, with several large incubators and a comfortable bed for mothers recuperating from their labor.

“This is your hospital,” I said, looking around with a practiced eye. Everything was clean and well-maintained. If more than one person was sick or injured at a time they would need to share the same room, but apart from that . . . “This is fantastic. You could give my parents tips on how to maintain a private emergency room.”

As I had expected, Frank preened a bit, walking past me to stand in front of the operating table. It came up to his waist. “It can be hard, getting equipment that’s large enough for us to use here,” he said. “It doesn’t help that we need two sets of everything. My apprentice and both our nurses are under six feet tall.”

“Did you go to medical school, then?” asked Shelby.

Frank nodded. “I was young. I still fit in the desks.” The snakes atop his head made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a snicker.

“Good for you,” said Shelby.

“Apprentice?” I asked.

“Yes. Our physiology isn’t exactly like yours, and as you need a license to practice human medicine if you want to get access to most of the stronger painkillers and antibiotics in this country, he and I both went to human schools. Now he’s studying with me to become a proper doctor. When his training is done, he’ll be able to move to another community, and be a great asset to them.”

Given the way Pliny’s gorgon communities handled their families, “great asset” probably meant “attract a better wife.” I nodded. “It’s a good arrangement.”

“We think so. Now.” Frank’s expression turned grave. “What do you mean by ‘silly cockatrice business’?”

“Two men have died at the zoo where Dee and I work, and another died near my home,” I said. “All have shown outward signs of petrifaction. I was able to gain access to the man who died outside the zoo. There was internal petrifaction as well, although it didn’t continue much past the point where it would have been fatal.”

“Then it could have been any number of things. Stone spiders—”

“There was a cockatrice in my backyard last night.” That stopped him. I shrugged as I continued, “We locked eyes; petrifaction began. If I hadn’t had someone with me, I wouldn’t have survived long enough for the solution to be assembled. I’m not going to be able to pull off a trick like that again. Keeping me from losing my eyesight—or my life—meant using most of the cockatrice antivenin we had in stock.”

Frank blinked. “You saw the cockatrice.”

“Yes.”

“Forgive me if this seems a bit . . . blunt . . . but are you lying to me right now? You’re human. You can’t have locked eyes with a serpent and lived.”

“He didn’t,” said Shelby. “He locked eyes with a cockatrice. I know. I was there. It would have been me, but he pushed me out of the way before the bugger could get close enough to do any damage.” She hesitated before she added, “I could have been killed.”

“Serpent is slang for both cockatrice and basilisks,” I explained. To Frank I said, “If Shelby hadn’t been there and able to follow my instructions, I would have died. Believe me, I have no reason to lie to you about this.”

Frank nodded slowly. “You’ll excuse my dubiousness.”

“Absolutely. I’d think you were full of it if you were the one telling this story. But there’s more.”

“More?”

“In examining the body we were able to obtain, we found fang marks.” I pulled out my phone, opened the gallery, and scrolled to the picture of the back of Mr. O’Malley’s leg. I held it out for Frank to see. “In your professional opinion, what bit this man?”

Frank frowned. “May I?” he asked, half-reaching for my phone.

“You may.” I let him take the phone, and waited as he studied the picture, his eyes darting from side to side as he took in the small cues to scale and perspective. His snakes even got in on the act, darting forward until their noses nearly brushed the screen, tongues flicking in and out the whole time.

“I want to tell you that you have no business here,” he said finally, and handed the phone back to me. “I want to tell you that you are not only wrong and misguided, but you are trespassing and possibly in danger of your lives.”

“But you’re not going to tell me any of those things,” I said.

“No.” Frank shook his head. The snakes curled back against his scalp with the motion, hissing and slithering against each other. “I can’t. These marks . . . they could have been made by my own fangs.” He paused, eyes widening as he realized what he’d said—and who he’d said it to. “I didn’t mean—”

“I know,” I said. “It can’t have been you. It’s literally not possible. Not only would your bite radius be substantially bigger, but there’s no way a man of your stature could have come into my neighborhood, bitten my next-door neighbor, and gotten away without being seen. Someone would have called the police about ‘that really tall guy,’ and we’d have more to talk about right now.”

“See, honey,” said Dee, sounding relieved. “I would never have brought them here if I thought there was a chance you were involved.”

I would have been annoyed by that announcement if I hadn’t understood it so very well. Family has to come first in this world. Sometimes that means making decisions that you really don’t want to make. “So the problem becomes clear,” I said. “There’s a cockatrice somewhere in Columbus, and we don’t know where it’s going during the day, or how it got there. I think someone brought it there, and is recapturing it somehow. There’s no other reason it would have been at both my place of work and where I live.”

“So you think someone is trying to kill you?” asked Frank, frowning.

“That’s the problem: I’ve got no idea.” I shook my head. “It’s hard to see the cockatrice showing up at my house as anything other than an attack, but who was it an attack on? I don’t live alone, and Shelby was there. If we’re talking about someone who keeps a cockatrice crammed into a cat carrier, they would have had plenty of time to tail her, dump it in the backyard, and get out of sight.”

“Gosh, I’m going to sleep great tonight,” said Shelby.

“Sorry.” I shrugged. “So maybe they’re trying to kill me, or Shelby, or they’re attacking the zoo and having two employees in the same building was too much to resist. Or maybe it was a coincidence. I guess we’ll find out when the cockatrice shows up at my house again. Until then, I’m more worried about who’s using a poor dumb animal like a weapon.”

“You’re not here to kill it?” asked Frank, frowning.

“If you’re Dee’s husband, you know I’m running a basilisk breeding program at the zoo,” I said. “I’m not in the business of killing innocent creatures because they were temporarily inconvenient.” The three dead men probably wouldn’t have liked me calling their deaths “inconvenient,” but it was true as far as it went: the cockatrice hadn’t meant them any harm. It was whoever put the cockatrice into their paths that I wanted to get my hands on.

“What will happen if you capture it?”

“If it’s been partially tamed, enough that it’s going to keep wandering into human habitations, I’ll see if there’s anyone with a breeding program or private facility who we can trust and who’s currently looking for a cockatrice,” I said. “There are a few carnivals still running traditional sideshows, and most of those have both the enclosures and the equipment needed to safely display a cockatrice. It’s not the best solution. The poor thing will never be free again. But it won’t have to die, and it won’t kill anyone else. If it’s still wild, all of this is moot; we’ll relocate it to one of the cockatrice ranges in the Appalachians, and forget that it was ever here.”

“And what of the one who made those bite marks you showed me?”

This was going to be the tricky one. “Whoever bit my neighbor was a ‘who,’ not a ‘what.’ The thing about ‘whats,’ like the cockatrice, is that they don’t do what they do out of malice, or out of anything other than instinct. ‘Whos’ are different. They’re people. And people should know what’s right from what’s wrong.”

Frank narrowed his eyes. “So you get to make that determination all by yourself? That sounds suspiciously like Covenant thinking.”

“Not unless there’s an immediate threat to the lives of those around me. I’m not Covenant. I don’t think like that. But I’m not going to let the sins of my fathers keep me from reaching for a gun when someone is trying to kill me.” Belatedly, I realized that the gorgons hadn’t taken our weapons away. They were that confident about their ability to overpower us. “At the same time, if I find out that it’s someone from this community doing the killing, I will expect you to stop them, through whatever means are necessary. I don’t care if you exile them, imprison them, or what, but you can’t let this go on. It’s going to attract the attention of the Covenant. That wasn’t an idle threat.”

“I never thought it was,” said Frank. He turned to face the back of the trailer, where a blue curtain walled off whatever was on the other side. “Have you heard enough?”

“I have,” said a mild female voice with a thick Saskatchewan accent. The curtain was pushed aside, and a female gorgon with skin the color of rattlesnake scales in the moonlight stepped into the main trailer. I couldn’t tell her subspecies on sight. Her snakes were long, falling all the way down to the middle of her back, and Frank’s head only came up to her collarbone, making her at least nine feet tall. She didn’t look old, but she felt it. I swallowed the urge to bow.

The older gorgon studied us through narrowed, sand-colored eyes. Finally, she offered me her hand, and smiled, showing teeth that were more like an alligator’s than a human’s. “Hello,” she said. “My name is Hannah. You are Jonathan’s boy, are you not?”

I took her hand. Her skin was cool. “Jonathan was my great-grandfather,” I said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“Great-grandfather? How time flies.” She shook my hand gently, only squeezing a little before she let me go. “He was a good man. He helped my parents to wed. I am grateful for that.” She turned searching eyes on Dee and Shelby. “You are the newest Healy girl?”

“Sorry?” said Shelby.

“She’s my partner, yes,” I said. If Hannah had known my great-grandfather, then she must have also known my great-grandmother, Fran. Until that moment, I hadn’t considered quite how much Shelby looked like her, and like every other woman in the last three generations of my family, with the possible exception of Antimony, who looked more like my grandfather than anyone else. One more thing to talk about with the therapist I didn’t have.

“Hmm.” Hannah nodded. “She will do. Now, Deanna. Did you really think that bringing humans to our home was the best choice you could have made?”

“Under the circumstances, yes,” said Dee.

“So long as we are not lying to each other.” Hannah turned back to me. “Because you are Jonathan’s boy, I will trust you enough to listen. You will be my guests for dinner this night. Once we have eaten, then we will discuss what will happen next.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” I said.

She smiled, displaying the sharp tips of her lower canines. “Thank me after we have eaten,” she said. “Anything less would be folly.” She turned and walked out of the trailer, leaving us all staring after her.

Frank’s wide hand fell heavily on my shoulder. I looked up at him.

“Well, I hope you were planning on sticking around,” he said. “You’re about to have an interesting evening.”

I managed not to gulp.