Half-Off Ragnarok

Twenty-three

At a hidden gorgon community in the middle of the Ohio woods, which is probably a terrible place to be right now

IT WASN’T A SURPRISE when Dee and Frank led me away from the buildings that made up the bulk of the community, heading toward the woods. We were heading away from the fringe farms, I noted; that was a little more unexpected. The fringe must have come later.

“I wish you’d called,” said Dee, for the third time.

“I wish you’d told me Lloyd was a gorgon,” I said, my temper beginning to fray around the edges. “Maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference. Maybe it would have made all the difference. Now people are dead, and Shelby’s missing, and we’re never going to know.”

“You cannot blame Deanna for protecting her people,” said Frank.

“Like hell I can’t.” I kept walking, locking my eyes on the tree line. Nothing was moving there. Any deer that lived in this stretch of the Ohio woods would have learned to be cautious, to avoid the smell of both humans and snakes. They would have had to be stupid not to have learned.

Snakes have a distinctive smell, dry and ancient, like the wrappings of a mummy or the rot that sleeps at the heart of a rainforest. Pliny’s gorgons like Dee and Frank have a bit of that same smell, but it’s only noticeable if you get right up on top of them, moving into their personal space, which is never a safe place to be. The closer we got to the woods, the stronger the smell became, until it was like we were walking into an old, primal version of the reptile house at the zoo. The hair on my arms stood on end as my mammalian sense of self-preservation kicked in, trying to tell me that I was doing something incredibly stupid. Dee and Frank didn’t seem to share my nerves, probably because they didn’t have any mammalian instincts to tell them that walking into the lair of a giant snake was a suboptimal plan.

I kept walking. No matter how uncomfortable the situation made me, if I wanted to find Shelby, I needed to find Lloyd, and if I wanted to find Lloyd, I was going to need to talk to Hannah. We reached the tree line. Dee and Frank stopped where they were.

“You don’t have to do this,” said Dee. “We can go ahead and ask her if she’ll see you. We can—”

“There’s only one way you’re getting me to stay behind, and I don’t think you’re ready to take that step yet,” I said.

“Don’t be so sure,” said Frank darkly. “You endanger us.”

“No, I don’t. I am saving you.” I glared at him, fighting the urge to start shouting. We were wasting time. Shelby could be bleeding out, and I was standing here arguing about whether or not I had the right to rescue her. “Do you think this can keep happening and no one’s going to notice? You’re one dead body—one more disappearance—away from the feds sweeping in here like the wrath of God, and one rumor on the Internet away from the Covenant coming to see what that raid really uncovered. Lloyd isn’t a professional. Do you get that? He doesn’t know how to make problems go away. He’s making a mess that’s going to land on your heads. Now you can take me to Hannah and I can continue to pretend that I have any interest in being on your side, or you can force me to find her on my own. And after that happens, we are not playing for the same team, got it?”

“I take it you think your team will be the winning one?” asked Frank, a dangerous glint in his eye. His snakes rose into a strike position, hissing. Some of them opened their mouths, displaying dangerously sharp fangs.

“We always have been so far,” I said. “You’re five feet, eight inches away from my current position, Frank. Do you think you can close that distance before I put three bullets in your chest? It’s a math problem. I am very good at math. Unless you’re sure of the answer, I don’t recommend you try to run the numbers.”

“Frank.” Dee put a hand on his arm, her own snakes hissing and slithering over each other like in an eternally moving knot. “We can trust Alex. We have to trust Alex. He’s right. If this doesn’t stop soon, we’re going to be discovered.”

“Mammals,” spat Frank. Then he turned and stepped into the woods. Dee glanced back at me, expression somewhere between apologetic and resigned, and went after him.

I was about to follow two angry gorgons into the woods. I had no cell service, and no one knew where I was. My only potential backup was injured, missing, and presumably being held captive.

“No turning back now,” I said, and stepped into the trees.

The smell of snake was stronger once we were past the tree line, like they had somehow been holding it back, preventing it from coming out into the open. Dee and Frank picked a confident trail through the underbrush, following a series of landmarks that I couldn’t distinguish from everything else around us. I tried to stay close behind them, even as my monkey brain shrieked louder and louder, telling me that I needed to turn back at the first possible opportunity.

As we walked, I started to see glimpses of rock face through the trees. Finally, we moved around a particularly dense clump of elms, and there it was: a cave, cut like a gaping black hole into the side of the Ohio hills. Moss grew thick on the rocks around it, and roots overhung the edge, some of them dangling almost down to the ground. Dee and Frank stopped, allowing me to catch up with them.

“Hannah lives here,” said Dee needlessly. The smell of snake emanating from the cave was so strong that there was no way Hannah could have lived anywhere else.

“I got that,” I said. Neither of them looked inclined to go any further. I eyed them. “Are you staying out here?”

“You’ve been a great boss, Alex, and that’s rare,” said Dee. “You’re even a pretty good guy, which may be rarer. Most of the time these days, I almost forget that you’re a mammal. And none of that is good enough reason for me to go into that cave with you.”

Frank didn’t say anything. He simply stood there, stone-faced and silent, save for the soft hissing of the snakes atop his head.

“Fine,” I said. “Cowards.”

“Better a live coward than a dead hero,” said Dee.

“Dead heroes are sort of the family business,” I replied, and started walking toward the cave. The smell of snake got stronger with every step I took, underscored with a thick layer of old blood and older decay. I took my last breath of semi-clean air, put my hand on the pistol at my waist, and stepped through the curtain of roots into the darkness.

The temperature dropped several degrees as soon as I was inside the cave. The air grew cool and damp at the same time, creating a strange sort of cognitive dissonance. Snakes normally prefer to den in warm places, and the smells of both serpent and decay are hot smells, like chili peppers or sunbaked rock. I slowed my pace, giving my eyes time to adjust to the dimness.

“Hannah?” I called, hand still on my pistol. “It’s Alexander Price. I need to talk to you.”

Something slithered in the dark ahead of me. I swallowed hard, fighting back the wave of panic unleashed by my monkey brain. There were a hundred good reasons not to do this. There were a thousand good reasons to turn around and run.

There was one good reason to be exactly where I was. Her name was Shelby Tanner, and there was a better than good chance that I was in love with her. I kept walking.

“I’m not here to hurt you, and I don’t want to cause any trouble, but I need to talk to you, and I’m not leaving until that happens,” I said.

The sound of slithering came again. It was louder this time, which meant that it was probably closer. I had a real hard time thinking of that as a positive thing.

“I know about Lloyd, Hannah. I know what he’s been doing, and I know you’re protecting him, because he’s your family. I understand how important family is. But do you remember Shelby? The woman who was here with me before? Lloyd hurt her. He stabbed her, and I think he took her, because there’s nowhere else she could have gone. She’s going to die if I don’t find her. Shelby is my family, Hannah. She’s my family, and she didn’t do anything to deserve this.”

Slithering, followed by silence.

“You said my great-grandfather helped you. You said he helped your parents find each other. That means you wouldn’t be here to refuse me without him. Honor his memory. Help me.”

“You would make me choose between you and my son?” Her voice was closer than I’d expected from the slithering; I somehow managed not to jump, but it was a close thing, based more on the fact that I was too terrified to move than on any aspect of my training. “How dare you. I may owe my life to your great-grandfather, but that is all I owe him. I owe the life of my son to no one at all.”

“Your son’s life is his own,” I said. “He’s killing people. You know what that means.”

“You came here to kill us. I knew that as soon as I set eyes on you.”

“I came here for reasons of my own. It was Lloyd who made this a hunt.”

“Yet you have always been a hunter.”

“I’m not here to hunt anyone but Lloyd,” I said. “I just want to stop the deaths and get my girlfriend back.”

“You lie. Humans always lie.”

“Did Jonathan lie to you?”

Silence fell in the cave, broken only by the low, constant sound of hissing. I hadn’t noticed it when she was speaking; either it had just started, or the silence was really that absolute. Finally, she said, “Yes, he did. He told my parents they would be happy here in Ohio. He told them they would be safe here, that they would have good lives here, and that they would never have children. They were happy with their choice and with each other, but were they happy with me?” Her face loomed out of the dark, close enough that this time I did jump, taking an involuntary step back. “He lied when he said I would never be, and when they learned to love the thing I was, he lied again when he said that I would never have children of my own.”

“Biologically speaking—”

“Do not speak to me of science, little mammal,” hissed Hannah, and slithered into the light. Yes, slithered: her legs were gone, replaced by a tail that gripped the rocks like a rock python. Shapeshifting is a trait of the greater gorgon, one they share with the gorgons of legend. She circled me, creating a barrier with her tail when she stopped, her human half raised off the ground in parody of a standing woman. She was naked, having eschewed the trappings of humanity here in her cave, where no one with half a brain would dare to bother her. “Science did not stop my birth, and it did not stop the birth of my son. His father left me when the egg hatched; when he saw what we had done together. Children should be a blessing. Your family took that from me.”

I thought of Sarah, who came from a species the entire world—including Shelby—was ready to write off as beyond redemption, monsters from birth. “Children are a blessing,” I said. “Nature doesn’t define everything that we’re going to be. Love can change us.”

“You think I didn’t love him? I loved him more than any mother has ever loved a hatchling. I cradled him to me and protected him from the world. But the world kept forcing its way in. The world couldn’t let us be.” Hannah scowled, a flash of fang showing through the dimness. “The world deserves whatever it gets.”

“Does Shelby? Do the people you built this community for?” I gestured behind me, trying to indicate the mouth of the cave. “Dee and Frank are outside. They respect your privacy too much to come inside with me.”

“They fear me,” she said.

“They respect you,” I said. “They introduced you to me as their protector, their founder, the reason they’ve stayed safe here while so many gorgon communities have failed. They love you. Whatever may have happened in the past, they love you. But if Lloyd isn’t stopped, if he doesn’t see reason, all of this is going to be lost. Do you get that? You’re not giving the world what it deserves. You’re hurting the people who love you.”

Hannah stared at me, the snakes atop her head hissing. Then, slowly, they began to settle, dropping back into a neutral position. She dipped a little lower, still holding herself off the ground. “You’re here to kill him,” she accused.

“Yes,” I said. “I am. I’m sorry, Hannah. He’s been responsible for the deaths of three people so far—that I know of—and that makes him a danger to all of us.”

“So you will kill him and then what?” Hannah tilted her head, watching me. “Will you walk away? What if your woman is dead?”

“I’ll be honest: I don’t know,” I said. “My first response is that if she’s dead, I’ll burn this place to the ground, but I know that’s not fair to people like Frank and Dee, who didn’t do anything. I’ll do my best to restrain myself. It’s not going to be easy. So really, the best thing would be for me to find her alive, and that means I need to find her soon. Will you please tell me where Lloyd is, Hannah? For Shelby’s sake, and for his?”

She sighed. It was an old, tired sound, like wind blowing over bones. “And what if I kill you right now? Won’t that solve the problem for everyone?”

“I’m getting really tired of playing chicken,” I muttered. “If you kill me, I guess I’ll be dead, and Shelby will probably be dead too, since no one’s going to show up in time to save her. But my grandparents will come looking for me, and when they find out what happened, they’ll call my parents, and my sisters, and a lot more people will die. None of that has to happen. If you tell me where to find Lloyd, we can end this all today.”

“You’ll kill him. You’ll kill my son.”

“Yes.” I looked at her, a strange calm spreading over me. “So I guess this is where you decide. You need to kill me right now, or you need to tell me where to find Lloyd. Otherwise, I’m going to go looking for him, and I’m going to find him, and you’re going to have no say at all in what happens next.”

Hannah froze, holding herself still as only a snake can, like she no longer possessed even the potential for motion. Then she dipped lower, until her eyes were level with mine, and her entire body seemed to slump, giving the impression that she was barely holding herself away from the floor. “He was a good boy once,” she said dully. “It wasn’t his fault.”

“Where is he, Hannah?”

She looked at me. “It is fitting that you’re of Jonathan’s line,” she said. “This is all his fault.”

And she told me where to go.

Dee and Frank looked surprised when I emerged from the cave, probably because they’d both expected to be sending me off to my death. I straightened my coat, pulled the pistol out of my belt, and said, “You need to take me to the old barn.”

“The old barn?” said Dee. “But that was abandoned years ago.”

For a moment, I just stared at her. “You abandoned the old barn years ago, and you didn’t take me there first?” I asked. “You people need to watch more horror movies. Yes, take me to the old barn—just you, though. Frank, you need to go back to your office.”

“What?” He frowned at me, the snakes atop his head hissing quizzically. “Why?”

“Because Shelby’s hurt. Go get your first aid kit, and meet us at the barn.” Hopefully, she would still need whatever help he could give. Hopefully, we weren’t already past the point of her needing any help at all.

To my surprise, Frank nodded and turned without argument, walking briskly into the woods. He was still in sight when he broke into a run, leaving me alone with Dee. She looked up at me and sighed, the hissing of her snakes providing a strange counterpoint to the sound.

“This way,” she said, and beckoned for me to follow her through the trees in yet another direction. Lacking any better options, I matched her stride, letting her lead me.

“It was nice working with you, Alex,” she said, after we’d been walking through the woods for about a minute and a half. “I appreciated having a boss who didn’t mind that I wasn’t a mammal.”

“Why would I have minded? You did your job.” The frickens were creep-creep-creeping in the trees, their tinny, piping voices providing a degree of background reassurance. We were alone here, or at least, there was nothing nearby that the frickens recognized as a threat. “You still have a job, you know, unless this is how you turn in your resignation—and if it is, you have shitty timing, since I can’t really focus on anything but Shelby at the moment.”

“I sort of figured I was fired.”

I bit back the urge to swear. “Look, I know human-gorgon relations aren’t always peaceful, what with us hunting you for your heads and you turning us into stone, but I thought we had worked past that, and I really, really don’t want to have the speciesism conversation when I’m preoccupied with wondering whether or not my girlfriend is dead.”

Dee nodded quickly. “I know, I just . . . this might be the last time I see you. And I didn’t want to let that slip past without my telling you how much I respected you as a boss, and as a friend. You did a good job.”

“Ah.” I gave her a sidelong look as I stepped over a fallen branch. “You’re pretty sure I’m about to get myself killed, aren’t you?”

“Lloyd is older than anyone here, except for Hannah. If you’re walking into his lair, you’re walking into more than you can handle.”

“Age isn’t everything,” I said. “You should meet my little sisters.”

Conversation died as we reached the edge of the woods. I thumbed off the safety on my pistol, standing for a moment at the tree line as I scanned the decrepit old barn in front of us for signs of life. The structure was the sort of classic Americana that looked like it had been assembled over a weekend by the cast of Little House on the Prairie before being left to the elements for twenty years. Patches of iconic barn-red paint remained, but most of it had been ripped away by wind and weather, exposing wood slats the color of old bone. I couldn’t get a real feel for the roof from where I was standing, but it looked like it was on the verge of caving in.

“Alex . . .”

“See you later, Dee,” I said, and walked toward the barn, gun raised and ready. Whatever was ahead of me, I was going to face it, and I was going to bring Shelby home. There wasn’t another option. There never is when things get bad.

Dee remained behind, lurking in the trees as I made my way into the shadow of the barn. I couldn’t blame her, although I felt obscurely betrayed, like she should have been able to put her personal feelings above her loyalty to her species. It was unfair of me and I knew that, but fairness sort of falls by the wayside when the people I love are in danger.

The weeds had been beaten back around the foundation, reducing the fire hazard and probably prolonging the life of the structure itself. That was enough to make it clear that someone had been living here for quite some time. I glanced up. Crow was still circling, and now that I was here, I could see that his loops were centered directly above the barn. It was a risk, but it was a risk worth taking: I put two fingers in my mouth and whistled, short and shrill.

There was a moment when I thought Crow hadn’t heard me. Then his flight path altered, turning from a tight circle into a descending spiral as he arrowed toward the ground. He landed on the nearest tree, tail puffed out to twice its normal diameter, and cawed angrily. I didn’t speak griffin, but I didn’t need to understand him to know what he was saying: Where was Shelby? I’d sent him to find her, and he’d found her, so why wasn’t I getting on with saving her?

I made a hush motion, which he ignored as he cawed again. There was a banging sound from the back of the barn. I froze, recognizing it as the sound a door made when it was slammed open. Lloyd was coming out of the barn, and here I was, standing out in the open, arguing with my Church Griffin.

“Crow, hide,” I hissed, hoping he’d hear me, and took off at a run, heading for the opposite side of the barn. Crow had wings. He could take care of himself, if it came down to that.

I made it around the corner of the building and out of sight just before I heard Lloyd say, angrily, “What in the hell—?”

There was a screech, like a bobcat trying to scare off an intruder, followed by the infinitely welcome sound of wings beating hard. Crow was making his retreat. “Clever boy,” I murmured, and turned my attention to the barn itself.

There was a door not six feet from me, held half-open by a choking mat of weeds. Gun still in my hand, I crept forward and slipped through the opening, into yet another snake’s lair.

The inside of the barn was brighter than I’d expected, largely due to the aforementioned issues with the roof: there were large holes where the wood had rotted away, allowing the sunlight to slant through them into the room. A makeshift sort of home had been built around those holes, with everything pushed into the spaces where the rain wouldn’t reach. There was a table with two old, rusty lawn chairs; a wardrobe that looked like it had been mended with pieces of cardboard; and a kitchen area that consisted primarily of a fire pit and two racks of chipped old dishes. A faint smell of snake hung over the whole place, overlaid with the twinned scents of mold and ancient, rotten wood.

I took all that in as I scanned the space, waiting for my eyes to adjust and searching frantically for some sign of Shelby. Then, in the darkest corner of the barn, I made out what looked like a bed. It was a big, amorphous shape, lumpy with what could either have been too many pillows piled into a heap . . . or Shelby.

It took all my waning supply of self-control not to run across the room, potentially knocking things over and almost certainly bringing Lloyd back into the barn. Instead, I made my way carefully around the edge of the barn, until I was close enough to that dark corner to whisper, “Shelby? Are you there?”

There was no reply. My heart sank, and I took the last steps into shadow feeling considerably less hopeful.

Despite the broken patches in the roof, there was enough shadow that I couldn’t see any real detail I reached out with my free hand, leaning down until my fingers hit the cool skin of a humanoid shoulder. I closed my eyes and ran my hand along the curve of the shoulder, identifying it as belonging to a female. Reaching a little higher, I touched her hair. Human. I brought my fingers to my nose. Unless Lloyd was fond of kidnapping women who all used the same shampoo, it was Shelby. She wasn’t moving, but when I placed my fingers against the side of her neck and focused, I could find a pulse. It was faint, weak enough that I could just as easily have missed it. It was there, and that was all I had it in me to give a damn about at the moment.

“Shelby.” I knelt, blinking as I tried to force my eyes to adjust faster. I slid my hand along the side of her torso, trying to figure out how best to pick her up without making too much noise or attracting too much unwanted attention. To my surprise, my questing fingers encountered expertly applied bandages circling her stomach, wound tight enough to stop the blood, but not so tight that they would cut off circulation. Lloyd had provided her with basic medical care. Thank God.

The bandages made it more likely that I would be able to move her, although I wasn’t sure how far I’d need to carry her through the woods in order to get her back to the car. It didn’t matter. “It’s going to be okay, baby,” I murmured. “I’m getting you out of here.”

“That’s a pretty sweet thought, Mr. Preston—or should I call you Mr. Price now, since we’re not on the zoo grounds anymore?” Lloyd’s voice was as familiar as always, holding its customary mix of deference and apologetic nosiness. For the first time, however, I could hear the hard edge underneath it. He sounded like someone who’d been given plenty of reasons to be angry with the world, and was planning to make use of every single one.

“Hello, Lloyd,” I said, turning slowly to face him.

Even through the shadows, I could see that he wasn’t wearing his hat. Short, stunted-looking snakes cast malformed shadows on the wall.

“Hello,” he said. “Mighty kind of you to save me the trouble of hunting you down.” That was all the warning he gave before he lunged.