Half-Off Ragnarok

Six

Ohio’s West Columbus Zoo, attempting to surreptitiously search the zoo grounds for a creature capable of converting living flesh into stone

I WALKED SLOWLY DOWN the path connecting the tiger garden to the main courtyard, trying to keep my eyes on the ground without being too blatant about it. My glasses weren’t helping. I’d swapped my normal pair for a pair with tinted lenses, and the prescription was slightly off, making it harder to be sure of the details in the bushes around me. I made a mental note to visit the optometrist as soon as possible. I hadn’t been hunting petrifactors in the wild since arriving in Ohio, and I’d allowed my tools to get outdated. That was a good way to get myself killed.

My current search was running off one major assumption: that Andrew had been killed by something low to the ground, like a cockatrice, rather than something arboreal, like a basilisk, or something human-shaped, like a gorgon. I was basing that assumption on the area where he’d been found, which had had plenty of bushes, but no trees and very little foot traffic.

We’d be able to narrow down what had killed him after I got a look at the autopsy report. If I was wrong, all I would have lost was a few hours. It was a risk. It was also a necessary short-term decision. If Andrew had been killed by a gorgon, they were probably long gone by now, or else had an agenda I didn’t understand yet. Either way, if our petrifactor was a gorgon, no one else was likely to be in immediate danger.

But if I was right—if the local gorgons were too smart for this kind of stunt, and there was a wild basilisk or cockatrice loose in the zoo—I couldn’t afford to wait for the results. I needed to find the thing that had killed Andrew before anyone else got converted into garden statuary.

At least Lloyd had confirmed my guess about when Andrew arrived at the zoo, and hence when he was likely to have been petrified. The old security guard had looked at me oddly for asking. Hopefully, he wouldn’t tell the police that I’d come to him to tighten up my alibi. And if he did . . .

Well, I’d figure something out. That was part of my job, after all.

Something rustled in the bushes to my left. I tensed, my hand tightening around the mirror in my coat pocket, and prepared to spring . . . only to see one of the zoo’s endless supply of Canada geese waddle into the open. It looked at me disinterestedly before waddling on, feet slapping against the brick pavement, and vanishing into the bushes on the other side of the path. I let out a breath, feeling some of the tension slip out of my shoulders.

“Little on edge, aren’t you, sweetheart?” asked Shelby, directly behind me.

I jumped as I whirled to face her, and only years of training prevented me from pulling one of the knives I had hidden inside my coat. Heart pounding, I forced my hands to unclench as I offered her my best sheepish “oh, it’s nothing” smile. “I was just thinking,” I said. “Are you finished with the police?”

“A bit ago, yeah,” she said. My obvious distress must have leavened my smile into something she could believe this soon after the death of one of my coworkers, because she put her hand on my elbow, a sympathetic look on her face. “I came looking for you, but Dee said you’d already gone. She was pretty shaken up, the poor dear.”

“I think we all are at the reptile house.” I didn’t know if that was true—I hadn’t spoken to Kim or Nelson before racing out of there and starting my search of the grounds. I pulled my hand out of my pocket, wishing there was a way I could keep hold of the mirror without being obvious about it. “How are you holding up?”

“Not thrilled about the situation, obviously, but I didn’t know him as well as you did.” She left her hand on my elbow. I stifled the situationally inappropriate urge to put my arms around her. “I’m assuming you left for your walk before the police got there to chat with Dee?”

I nodded. “I didn’t think they’d appreciate my presence, given the whole ‘maybe we suspect you’ vibe that they were giving off during my interview.”

“Aw, pish, that’s just their job,” said Shelby, waving my concern away. “Look, though, that means you didn’t hear that we’re closed.”

“What?” I blinked at her.

“The zoo. We’re closed. Everyone’s going home, since there’s just been a death in the family, as it were.” Now it was Shelby’s turn to smile, a trifle wryly. “Don’t tell me you were thinking so hard that you didn’t notice there was no one else about.”

“Um . . .” I rubbed the back of my neck with one hand. I didn’t have to work to look sheepish. “Like I said, I was thinking. You know how I get.”

“Yeah, it’s a good thing you’re not Australian. You’d have been eaten by a bunyip by now.”

“Probably not, since I don’t usually hang out near the edges of billabongs smelling like fish,” I said automatically, and winced when I saw the look on Shelby’s face. “Er, a bunyip is a kind of crocodile, right?”

“Not quite, but nice try.” She looped her arm through mine and started walking, pulling me along in an odd two-person Wizard of Oz formation. “So our working day has just ended several hours early, with the tragic loss of a peer. There are two ways we can deal with this.”

“Those being?” I asked cautiously.

“Option one, we go out to a local pub and get righteously smashed before stumbling to our beds. We wake up tomorrow with hangovers the size of Queensland, and a feeling of satisfaction over a death well-mourned.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “And option two?”

“We go back to my place, order in a pizza, and have a more private wake for poor Andrew.”

Given what I knew about ghosts, there was a more than reasonable chance that “poor Andrew” would show up and haunt her apartment looking for a show if we did that. “I can’t,” I said. “I wish I could, but . . .”

“Whatever plans you have tonight, I’m sure whoever they involve would understand you needing to spend a little time with your girlfriend in the wake of a coworker’s death, Alex,” said Shelby. The way she stressed the word “girlfriend” made it clear she’d heard me talking to the police. “Unless you’re ashamed of me for some reason?”

“God, Shelby, no. I am . . . believe me, I am anything but ashamed of my hot, brilliant, capable, uh, girlfriend.” I was going to pay for that label later. I could see it in her eyes. “But I’m supposed to look after Sarah tonight. I promised my grandparents I’d stay home with her.” I realized guiltily that I wasn’t lying. This was supposed to be their date night, and I was about to ruin it by coming home and telling them that we had a petrifactor loose at the zoo. “They’ve had these theater tickets for weeks. I can’t back out on them, and Sarah won’t tolerate a sitter she doesn’t know.”

Shelby sighed. “Your dedication to your family is one of the things I love about you. Maybe if I keep reminding myself of that, my needing to go home and spend the night sitting alone in my apartment, right after I’ve seen a dead man . . . well, maybe it won’t sting as much.”

It was a statement calculated to make me feel bad. It was sincere enough that I didn’t mind. She had every right to fling that particular arrow at me: if I was supposed to be her boyfriend, I was doing a shitty job of it. “I’m really sorry,” I said. “Look—I’ll call, okay? I’ll get Sarah settled with a video or something, and I’ll call.”

“If you don’t, I shall hunt you down tomorrow in the parking lot and remove your kidneys with a spoon,” she said blithely.

“Deal.” I kissed her cheek. Anything else would have required us to stop walking, and I wanted to get to my . . . I stopped in my tracks, hauling Shelby to a stop along with me. “Oh, hell. Shelby, I’m sorry, I forgot something back at the reptile house. I gotta go.” Whatever had rustled in the bushes would be long gone by now, if it had ever been there in the first place. My imagination was playing tricks, and I wasn’t properly equipped to do this on my own.

She blinked at me. “That’s all right, I’ll walk with you.”

“No!”

She blinked again, eyes widening. Then they narrowed into a stubbornly murderous expression that I knew all too well, since I’d been seeing it from most of the women in my life since I was born. “No? What did you forget, Alex, your pet monster?”

Considering that what I had forgotten was Crow, the guess was closer than I was comfortable with. “No, but you’re not certified for venomous snake handling, and I forgot to milk our tiger snake in all the excitement. We’re supposed to make a delivery to the local hospital tomorrow. We can’t do that if I don’t milk the tiger snake.”

“I’m Australian, and you’re seriously telling me I’m not safe around snakes.”

“I’m sorry, zoo rules, I’ll call you tonight.” I kissed her cheek again. Then I turned and ran, putting her behind me as quickly as I could. I didn’t want to see the betrayed expression I knew was on her face.

Running through the closed zoo right after a man had been found dead might have looked suspicious. I was willing to risk it, since it could also just look like normal human discomfort over hanging out where a corpse had recently been. “Reacting normally around dead things” had been one of the hardest lessons for my parents to teach to my sisters and me, since frequently, after we’d reacted normally, we were expected to take the dead things home for further study. My being a scientist alleviates that somewhat; I’m expected to react oddly, and a little morbidly, when I encounter bodies. I’ve never been sure how Verity manages. As a ballroom dancer, she’s pretty much expected to flip her shit if she sees so much as a rat.

I burst back into the reptile house. Kim and Nelson were gone. Dee was still there, turning off lights and peering anxiously into enclosures. She turned at the sound of my footsteps. “Anything?”

“No,” I said. “The zoo is—”

“Closed, I know. I’m just double-checking the cages.”

“I came back for Crow.” I started for my office door. “Do you want me to walk you to your car?” I felt guilty as soon as the offer was made. I’d left Shelby alone, with a monster or a killer potentially loose in the zoo, and here I was offering to escort my assistant.

“I’m good,” said Dee. She tapped her glasses. “This isn’t my first rodeo. I’ll call you when I get home tonight, just so you know I got there safe.”

Pushing away the images of a petrifactor rodeo—which would probably be very slow—I said, “Can you also ask around and see if anyone knows anything?”

Dee nodded. “I can, but people are going to assume you’re accusing them. You’re braced for that, right?”

“I’d rather they make a few assumptions than we wind up with a bunch of dead bodies on our hands. I mean . . . any death is horrible, but what if it hadn’t been a staff member? What if whatever petrified Andrew had found a bunch of school kids on a field trip?”

“I’ll never understand the human idea that children are invariably more valuable than adults,” said Dee. “If you have twenty adults and twenty children, and half of them are going to die, you can’t save just the kids. They’d all starve to death.”

Pragmatism is a gorgon trait. That sort of thing is important when you’ve spent centuries being hunted down and slaughtered for being something that humans think of as monsters. “I don’t disagree with you,” I said carefully, all too aware of my own human prejudices, “but remember that we’re in a human-dominant culture. If it had been a dead kid, or worse, dead kids, we’d have news crews crawling all over this place looking for answers, in addition to the police. That would make it a lot harder for us to find the killer and make it stop.”

“Do you really think it’s still here, whatever it was?”

“I think it would be stupid to assume it wasn’t.”

Dee sighed heavily. “This isn’t what I signed up for when I took this job, you know. I thought the worst thing I’d have to deal with was my hair biting someone.”

“Welcome to my world.” I unlocked my office door, stepping inside, and crossed to the window. It was still light outside: that made this trick a little more dangerous, but I couldn’t leave Crow in the office overnight. He’d freak out when he realized I wasn’t coming back, and the amount of damage he could do was limited only by his imagination.

Crow was curled in my desk chair. He lifted his head, watching my progress across the room. The rat bag was on the office floor. It was empty.

“At least that means I don’t need to worry about feeding you,” I said, and opened the window. “Crow, car.”

Crow made an inquisitive croaking noise. He could see as well as I could that it was still daylight outside.

“Crow, car.”

He stood, performing a languid cat stretch before flattening and stretching out his wings like a raven. I stepped hurriedly to the side, and even then, he barely missed me as he took off and launched himself at the open window. I shut it behind him and left the office, moving fast now that I needed to race my griffin to the car. He’d beat me there, of course—he had wings, I had feet and gates I couldn’t just fly over—but I wanted to minimize the amount of time he was likely to spend sitting out in the open, casually preening himself.

Wild miniature griffins move in flocks, and the ones that have survived into the modern day have learned to hide from humans, since natural selection—and men with guns—took all the ones who didn’t hide out of the gene pool years ago. Crow had none of those instinctive reactions. He was more like a house cat, raised from birth to believe that all humans existed solely to be a source of food and entertainment for him. If he tried to make friends with one of the other zookeepers . . .

That was a bad thought. I set it aside and kept walking.

I didn’t see Shelby again as I made my way to the parking lot. I was still feeling guilty about having lied to her, and I could recognize the start of a vicious cycle. My guilt would grow and grow until I saw her next, and then, just as I was getting it under control, I’d need to lie to her again. The conflict between what I could say and what I wanted to say was becoming a serious problem—and worse, it was messing with my focus. I couldn’t prioritize her life over anyone else’s. That didn’t stop me from wanting to.

It wasn’t fair. My father found a woman who’d been raised by cryptids and saw nothing in the least bit unusual about them. My Aunt Jane married an incubus, which neatly sidestepped the issue of “how do you explain that not everything that looks human actually is.” And my sister went and hooked up with a member of the Covenant of St. George. Shelby was the first girl I’d met in a long time—who was I kidding; the first girl I’d met, period—who seemed right for me. She was perfect, except for the part where if she met my family, she’d scream and run away.

Crow was nowhere to be seen when I reached my car, but judging by the angry squawks of the geese, he was definitely nearby. I unlocked and opened the door before calling, “Crow! Home!”

He shot out of the midst of the gray-feathered waterfowl like a charcoal-colored missile, arrowing past me and through the open car door to land on the passenger seat. He had several goose feathers clasped firmly in his beak. Dropping them, he turned to me, beak open in what I would have sworn was silent laughter.

“Yes, you’re a mighty hunter,” I said, and got into the car. “Come on, mighty hunter. Let’s go home.”

Driving through Columbus during the middle of the workday was strange. Doing it with Crow wide awake and spun up from playing with the geese was nerve-racking. I kept waiting for the moment where he would pop up in the window like a demented jack-in-the-box and scare the holy hell out of the drivers around me. To my surprise, he did no such thing. Instead, he compacted himself into the classic cat loaf position, tail wrapped tight around his entire body, tucked his head under his wing, and went to sleep. I smiled a little. The world could end, and anything morphologically feline would find a way to take a nap.

Grandma’s car was gone, but Grandpa’s car was parked in its place. I scooped the still-snoozing Crow out of the passenger seat and made my way up to the house, unlocking the door and letting myself inside. It was even stranger to come home and not smell dinner in progress, or hear my family moving around.

Speaking of family . . . I paused and looked uneasily around the hall. Sarah sometimes liked to lurk in corners, perfectly still, waiting for something to attract her attention. It wasn’t normal cuckoo behavior, but what about Sarah was normal these days?

She wasn’t there. I walked into the living room, put Crow down on the couch, and went looking for my grandfather. Date night was always on the evening of his day off.

I found him upstairs in the office he shared with my grandmother. He was seated at his computer, glasses perched on his nose and sleeves rolled far enough up that I could see the faint discoloration where one body’s skin ended and the next began. He was usually careful to conceal his seams, unless he was certain that he wasn’t going to be seen by anyone who might find them strange.

I rapped my knuckles against the doorframe. He turned toward the sound and blinked, frowning slowly. “Alex? What are you doing home?”

“They closed the zoo early.”

There was a pause as he ran through the reasons this might have happened. Finally, he said, “Either a kid got into one of the big predator enclosures again, or there’s been a murder.”

“We don’t know yet whether it was actually a murder, versus an accidental death, but yes.” I walked across the office and sat down in Grandma’s chair, explaining the situation with Andrew as quickly and succinctly as I could. Grandpa only interrupted a few times, asking terse questions about where the body had been found and exactly what the vegetation around it had looked like.

When I finished, he sighed. “You realize what this means, don’t you?”

“That a man is dead?”

“That’s a problem for him, but for the rest of us, it means there’s an increased chance we’ll catch the Covenant’s attention. That’s not good.”

I nodded. “I know. I’m going to need you to get me a copy of the autopsy report. If it doesn’t say anything particularly shocking, maybe they won’t catch wind of this death.” Grandpa was a coroner for the City of Columbus. Dead bodies didn’t bother him, since he’d been one (or two, or three) himself at one point, and while he didn’t need replacement parts—all the ones he had were good for at least another forty years, barring accident or assault—others weren’t always so lucky. By working where he did, he was able to keep the Revenants, ghouls, and other humanivores of the city from bothering the living population. It was really a public service, and one that was helped along by the number of people who got into truly stomach-churning automobile accidents.

“I assumed you’d be asking for that,” he said. “Although we may have a problem.”

“What’s that?”

“They may decide to send his body someplace like the CDC for autopsy, since this is the sort of thing that qualifies as ‘unusual circumstances,’ and petrifaction could be mistaken as some sort of strange new disease. If that’s the case, we’re going to need to work much harder to get those results.”

“And there’s a much higher chance the Covenant will get involved,” I said slowly. “Is there any way you can find out who’s going to do the examination?”

“I can make a few calls.” Grandpa made a small “shoo” gesture with his hand. “Go get some food in you and call your father.”

“What?”

“We both know that as soon as you’re done with me, you’re going to call home and update everyone on what’s going on. I endorse this, since it will allow me to check in with the morgue without you hovering over my shoulder. Now go on, scat.” He smiled, making the scar on his cheek pull upward. “I can take care of this part by myself.”

“You’re the best, Grandpa,” I said.

“I know.”

Feeling better than I had since we found Andrew’s body in the bushes, I turned and left the office. Grandpa was right. It was time for me to work on my part of the plan.

Dad picked up the phone on the third ring. “This is an unlisted number,” he snapped.

“You know, Dad, I don’t mean to push, but there’s this thing called ‘caller ID’ that you can get these days. It might mean being a little less rude to your children when they call home.” I reclined on the bed, watching the Aeslin mice systematically dismantle the plate of cheese and apple slices I’d prepared for them.

“Ah, but what if someone steals your phone?” Dad countered. “What then? Maybe I answer with ‘hello, beloved only son, how are you today,’ and that confirms your identity as my eldest child to the horrible monsters that have kidnapped you for their own nefarious purposes.”

I laughed. It was impossible not to. “Nefarious purposes, Dad? Really?” My parents raised us to answer the phone like we hated the entire universe and wanted it to go away. It was supposedly part of the smokescreen that protected us from the Covenant of St. George. Given how memorable it was, I suspected that Dad actually just enjoyed having an excuse to snarl at people for a change.

“It could happen,” he said serenely. “Verity got taken by the Covenant last year.”

“Yeah, and she called us after she’d kicked their asses.” One of the mice led a conga line across the floor, all of them singing the praises of cheddar. “Is Mom there? I’ve got some information, and it’ll be easier if I don’t need to repeat myself.”

“She’s at the flea market with your sister.”

“Mom and Antimony at the flea market? Really? Is there a betting pool on what the body count is going to be?” It’s not that I thought my baby sister was a danger to life and limb, exactly. It’s that I knew my baby sister was a danger to life and limb, and I was happier when my mother wasn’t the only member of the family inside her potential blast radius. Mom wasn’t very good at defusing an angry Antimony.

“We needed more cleaning supplies.”

“Got it.” Given the family business, it was no surprise that we went through enough bleach, lye, hydrogen peroxide, and other questionable chemicals to pass ourselves off as a crime scene recovery service. Most of those things are traceable when bought in large quantities . . . unless you happen to, say, buy them off the back of a truck at the local flea market. It’s amazing what you can obtain without leaving a paper trail if you’re willing to put the hours in. The dealers we bought from most frequently probably thought we were a family of serial murderers, but hell. That’s not the worst thing that’s been said about us.

“So what’s going on that’s important enough for you to need to call? I’m afraid I didn’t have time to read your report. Did you find conclusive evidence that the fricken population is increasing?”

In all the chaos, I’d almost forgotten about the frickens. “I can’t prove an increase, but I can prove some new species in the area—previously native to surrounding states, never sighted in Ohio before—and that they’re not suffering the same sort of fungal infections that the frogs are. If the frog population continues to decline the way it has been, I’d say we’re looking at reclassification of the fricken from ‘cryptid’ to ‘normal’ within the next five years. Maybe less if this is a worldwide phenomenon.”

“Which it almost certainly is,” said my father grimly. “That’s bad news.”

“I know. It’s still not the reason I called.”

There was a pause. Then, tone sharper, he asked, “Did Sarah get out?”

Sarah escaping from the house was currently the family’s greatest nightmare: an uncontrolled, unstable cuckoo who we had nurtured to adulthood getting loose amongst the local population. There was literally no telling how much damage she could do. We’d never dealt with a case like hers before. But since the only way to be sure she wasn’t going to hurt anyone was to kill her, we were living with the fear. Sarah was family.

“No, Sarah’s fine, or as fine as she gets right now,” I said. “One of the other keepers from the reptile house was killed sometime between closing time last night and lunch today.”

“Murder?”

“Unclear. Whatever killed him was a petrifactor.”

There was another pause, longer this time, before he said, “Alex, the basilisks . . .”

“Are still hibernating. I checked them myself, and their skins are too calcified for them to have woken up—or been woken—left the enclosure, turned a man partially to stone, and gone back to sleep. Not that they would have gone back to the enclosure anyway. They didn’t do this. And before you ask, yes, I also talked to Dee. I don’t think she had anything to do with it.”

“That’s a relief.”

“It is, except for the part where I started out with three petrifactors who could have been responsible for this and promptly eliminated all three of them as possible candidates.”

“So what are you thinking?”

“If it was a gorgon, it was murder. The victim’s eyes were definitely stone. Lesser gorgons can’t truly turn you to stone, and Pliny’s gorgons can’t always stone you with a glance; they’d need to have either uncovered their hair and locked eyes with him for long enough, or milked their hair beforehand for venom and sprayed him with it. I can’t rule out a Pliny’s gorgon, but it’s more likely that we’re looking for a purely glance-based petrifactor.”

“The greater gorgon is glance-based.”

“Yes, I’m aware. You’ll forgive me if I try to find any other possible answer before I go to the place where I get eaten alive, won’t you?”

“Your mother would never forgive me if I encouraged you to take any other course of action. There’s always the simpler answer, you realize.”

“I thought of that. A cockatrice would fit the situation as I currently understand it. It’s glance-based, it likes to hide in low bushes . . . it’s perfect.” And it wouldn’t be murder. Your average cockatrice makes an iguana seem like a super-genius. When animals kill people, it’s tragic, but it’s not malicious. “There’s just one problem with that theory.”

“Lots of things aren’t native to Ohio, Alex. You’ve just said that some of the frickens you’ve caught aren’t native to Ohio.”

“Yes, but there’s a big difference between something moving into an open ecological niche and something like a cockatrice showing up for no good reason.”

“So maybe there’s a good reason.”

That wasn’t the sort of statement that inspired confidence. I sighed, removing my glasses and putting them on the bedside table before pinching the bridge of my nose. “Maybe. Grandpa’s going to see about getting me access to the autopsy records. We should know more after that happens.”

“Keep us posted. You know we’ll be right there if you need us.”

“I do.” I also knew a family invasion of Ohio would mean things had gotten very bad. I wasn’t too proud to ask for help, but mobilizing the troops was the sort of thing that should only be used as a last resort. “Tell Mom I said hi and send my love when she gets home.”

“Any messages for your sister?”

“Tell her to stay out of my room.”

Dad laughed. We exchanged farewells and I hung up, slumping over backward onto the bed. Crow hopped down from the dresser to curl up, catlike, against my side. I stroked his wings absently, and he purred in response.

“It’s a mess, Crow,” I said.

He made a contented churring noise. I sighed and closed my eyes, continuing to stroke his wings. I had a lot of work to do, but other than preparing my notes on the situation, there wasn’t much that I could do now. I lay on my bed and listened to the joyful songs of the mice, trying to let my worries slip away, just for the moment, just for now. I needed to get some food in me like Grandpa had instructed. I didn’t want to move.

If this situation turned out to be as bad as I was afraid it was going to be, I wasn’t going to have any more moments like this one for a while. So I stayed where I was, and tried to enjoy the moment while it lasted.

I tried.