Half-Off Ragnarok: Book Three of InCryptid (8 page)

“Did you stop to consider that that might be someone else’s lunch?” I asked.

Crow swallowed the rat before turning his back resolutely on me and beginning to preen his left wing. I sighed again, harder this time.

“That almost certainly means no. You’re a flying vacuum cleaner, you know that?” No response from my misbehaving pet. I smiled fondly. I’d been wondering for a while if he could open the fridge. Now I knew that it was time to invest in a padlock.

I grabbed my coat off the back of the chair and moved to get my bag lunch out of the fridge, where it had been sandwiched between a sack of dead rats (for the pythons) and cubed raw chicken (for Dee’s hair). There was a hole in the sack of rats. “Be good, all right?” I said to Crow. “If you’re going to eat anything else, just try not to puke it back up on the rug.”

Crow continued to groom himself. Chuckling, I opened the office door and stepped back into the reptile house. It had been a long morning, and I was going to need to do something relaxing after I separated Chandi from her boyfriend. What could be more relaxing than having lunch with my own beautiful, blessedly mammalian not-a-girlfriend?

Things Shelby Tanner didn’t specialize in: relaxing. She was sitting atop the picnic table we had claimed as our own, waving a turkey drumstick like a conductor’s baton as she punctuated her own points.

“—so I said, Nicole, it’s lovely that you’re taking an interest, but do you think you could take a step away from the snow leopard enclosure? Possibly before you get your throat ripped out and make a bunch of paperwork for me to handle? There’s a good girl.”

“Nicole’s the new girl, right?” I asked, between bites of my ham-and-cheese sandwich. I was focusing less on her words and more on the way the sunlight glinted off the tiny golden hairs on the back of her knee, where I knew she was sensitive in all the best ways.

“Yeah, the really
keen
one.” Shelby said keen like it was a bad thing. From her perspective, it probably was. Being keen in the Australian sense—overeager, enthusiastic, and extremely hungry for praise—wasn’t what I’d call a survival trait when you’re working with large predators. “She’s been nothing but one problem after the other since the start of her assignment.”

“So did she get eaten? Because it sounds like that would solve the problem.”

Shelby laughed. “Not quite, but not for lack of trying. Mimi, our big female, was almost on her when I finally got her to move away from the bars. Poor kitty looked awfully betrayed, seeing her midmorning snack step out of range like that.”

I grinned. “I’m sure she’ll find the strength to carry on.”

“Don’t much care if she doesn’t; we’ve only got Nicole for another two weeks. Then she’s off to harass the keepers responsible for the elephants, and good riddance, too.” Shelby’s smile was fast, and showed far too many teeth to be comforting. “If she disappears after
that
, nobody’s going to be looking for incriminating evidence inside my kitty cats.”

“That’s fast. The transfer, I mean, not the murder plot. If we had someone that careless in the reptile house, I’d probably have fed them to the snapping turtle by now.” That was an exaggeration . . . but not by as much as many people would think.

Shelby shrugged. “What can I say? We’ve got a double crop of interns this year.” The big cats saw a much higher turnover rate than the reptile house, since working with the flashy carnivores was a plum position for trainees and interns. We could hold onto people for as much as a year before someone else wanted their slots. Shelby was lucky if she got to keep someone long enough for them to learn not to feed themselves to the lions. It wasn’t just the big cats, either. Pretty much anything mammalian was more attractive to your average aspiring zookeeper than a bunch of snakes and snapping turtles, even though I’d never personally seen the appeal.

“Earth to Alex, come in, Alex.” I turned to see Shelby leaning forward, elbows on her knees. She looked faintly annoyed. “I’ve been doing all the talking again, and you’ve been letting me. I thought we’d talked about this. I want you here when you’re here, or we shouldn’t even bother.”

“Well, you talked about it, mostly,” I said, trying to elicit a laugh.

It didn’t work. Her annoyance deepened. “If we want this to work out, Alex, we’ve both got to do our share of the heavy lifting. That means sometimes you’ve got to tell me about your day, even if you’d rather not.”

“Ah. Sorry—distracted.” It was hard to talk about my day when I had to constantly revise it to remove the feathered frogs, the supposedly mythological creatures, and the little girls who liked to cuddle cobras. Shelby was a smart girl. That was part of the problem. She could see the holes. “It was hectic at the reptile house this morning. Three back-to-back school groups, and one of the juniors didn’t show up, which meant poor Dee had to do half the feedings for me.”

Shelby blinked. “Your assistant? But she’s not even a zookeeper. Is that safe?”

“She’s been working here for a lot longer than the interns, and you hand them raw meat and put them in front of predators.”

“Yes, but they’re doing it for college credits. We
pay
her.”

I snorted laughter. Shelby shrugged.

“Just being pragmatic, although I’m sorry you’ve had a lousy morning. Who’s on shift now?”

“Kim and Nelson came on just as I was getting ready to start lunch. Dee’s finally doing her own job, which has got to be a relief for her. I’ll be able to work on my research during the afternoon.”

“Oh? Does that mean you might be done in time to grab a spot of dinner with me?” Shelby tried to make the question sound innocent, but I could see the pointed interest in her eyes. I did a quick mental count of the nights since our last official date, and winced.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really can’t. But we’re still on for tomorrow, right?”

“Tomorrow,” she said. “You can’t blame a girl for trying, can you?” She didn’t sound happy about it. I could hear the inevitable future beginning to unspool in her tone. One more canceled date and she’d start having better things to do with her time when I asked if she wanted to catch a movie or go out for something to eat. Not long after that, I’d get the “This isn’t working” talk, possibly with a side order of “We should be friends, it’s better if we can stay friends.”

That was probably what was best for both of us. She had her work, her research, and eventually, her life back in Australia, where we wouldn’t have been able to meet for dinner if we’d wanted to. It wasn’t like we’d ever officially become a couple. That didn’t make the thought any easier.

“I guess I can’t.” I dropped my sandwich back onto the paper bag it had come off of and stood, trying to make it look like a natural stretching gesture. It didn’t work. I was too stiff, and too obviously unhappy. Shelby sighed.

“I’m not breaking things off with you, Alex, all right?” she said. “I’m not thrilled that we’ve had so little time lately, but you’ve got to stop thinking that every road bump is the beginning of the end. You don’t throw out the car just because you’ve run over an echidna.”

I stopped. “Please tell me that isn’t something you actually say in Australia.”

“What, you don’t like my folksy Australian sayings?” Shelby put her turkey leg down next to my sandwich, shaking her head. “It’s incredible just how many people around here are totally willing to believe that we really walk around talking like that.”

“To be fair, Australia does sound sort of fictional if you’ve never been there.”

“I get told that a lot. Doesn’t feel like a very fictional place to me.” She picked up a napkin, beginning to wipe the grease from her fingers. “I mean it, though. You need to relax. You’re too tense, and you’re taking everything far too seriously. Are you having trouble with your research?”

“Not trouble, it’s just . . . taking some turns I didn’t anticipate, that’s all.” I began to pace, trying to look like I was raptly drinking in the scenery that I’d seen a hundred times before. Anything to keep Shelby from pressing, and me from being forced to lie to her.

The tiger garden was definitely one of the zoo’s better-kept secrets, a picturesque little quirk of the landscaping that no one had yet thought of tearing out in order to install a new enclosure or walkway. It was only a matter of time before somebody looked at an aerial map of the zoo and went, “Hey, that spot is so isolated that it’s only going to get used by zookeepers and horny teenagers looking for a place to make out. Let’s level it.” (Sadly, whatever unnamed bureaucrat was eventually responsible for that decision probably wouldn’t take into account the existence of horny zookeepers who didn’t like making out right next to where they fed the lions. Such are the trials of the working world.)

Thick greenery ringed the circular garden on all sides, surrounding the brick patio flooring and lone picnic table with a concealing veil. Hardy, just-exotic-enough flowers bloomed riotously among the general wash of green, planted by gardeners who enjoyed their privacy as much as Shelby and I did. Even the noises of the zoo were dampened here, muffled by the vegetation, until we could pretend that we were someplace much less artificially designed. A real jungle, maybe, albeit one with an inexplicable amount of landscaping.

“You want to talk about it?” asked Shelby.

“I honestly don’t know where to begin. Do you know much about colony collapse disorder?”

“Isn’t that the thing with the bees?”

“Yeah, it’s . . . the thing . . .” I tapered off mid-sentence, losing the thread of what I’d been trying to say as I stared at the object protruding from one of the decorative hedges.

“Alex?” I heard Shelby sliding off the table. She sounded alarmed. I couldn’t say for sure that it was the wrong emotional response.

The object in question was a shoe. Just a simple white sneaker, the laces still tied. That wasn’t unusual, in and of itself: lots of people manage to lose shoes at the zoo, for reasons that I have never quite understood. No, the problem was what was protruding from the shoe.

The problem was the human ankle.

I stepped closer to the hedge, leaning forward to gently part the branches and look down into the greenery. Shelby stepped up behind me, resting her hands on my shoulders as she craned her neck to get a better view. I didn’t ask her to move back, even though all my years of training were telling me that I should be doing exactly that.

“Well,” I said, after a long moment of silence had passed between us, “I guess I know why Andrew didn’t show up for work this morning.” I released the hedge. It mercifully sprang back into its original formation, blocking the horrified, distorted face of the junior zookeeper from view. I turned, and Shelby put her arms around me, folding me into a strong embrace. I closed my eyes. It didn’t help. Even with my eyes closed, I could still see his expression.

Worse, I could still see his eyes, which had been gray from side to side. Something had turned them to stone. Something that had killed him at the same time. Something not human.

We had a serious problem on our hands.

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It’s much easier to be brave when you don’t believe that the monster under your bed is real.”

—Alexander Healy

Ohio’s West Columbus Zoo, telling polite lies to the local police to avoid panic, institutionalization, or institutional panic

I
ADJUSTED MY GLASSES
with one hand, resisting the urge to glance toward the unfortunate Andrew’s half-calcified body. My fingers itched. I wanted—no, I
needed
—to get my dissection tools and dig into his remains. Whatever had petrified him would have left traces, subtle cues in the striations of the stone that had replaced an undetermined amount of his original substance. The local medical examiner would never be able to decode those markers. Even if I stole a copy of his autopsy report (and let’s be honest here: I was
going
to steal a copy of his autopsy report), I wouldn’t have all the data. We’d still be essentially flying blind.

“Now, you say that you were simply enjoying lunch with your—what did you say your relationship to Miss Tanner was, again?” the officer asked.

“She’s my girlfriend.” The words were out before I realized they were a relationship upgrade. I winced, but pressed on, saying, “We’ve been seeing each other socially for about three months.”

“I see. And is your relationship public knowledge?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Are you asking if I arranged for the bizarre death of one of my junior zookeepers because Shelby was some kind of dirty little secret? Zoo management is completely aware of our arrangement. It was the zoo’s HR director who introduced us. We don’t work in the same part of the zoo, we don’t answer to the same managers, and a little fraternization is encouraged if it means we’re more likely to volunteer for overtime and double-shifts.” Like when your significant other had already been drafted by her own manager, thus canceling yet another in a long string of canceled dates.

Shelby was on the other side of the tiger garden with another policeman, sitting atop the picnic table and giving her version of the story. From the occasional words that drifted my way, I was willing to venture that her version matched mine in the broad strokes, but was both more carnal and more profane in its details.

“Now, I don’t know whether I would have said that about your coworker’s heritage,” I said mildly, after Shelby made a particularly salty comment.

My policeman narrowed his eyes. “Please pay attention to your own situation, and not your girlfriend’s, Mr. Preston. Can you account for your whereabouts this morning between eight and eleven?”

“Yes, I can,” I said. “I was at the reptile house for most of the morning, along with my assistant, Deanna Taylor-Rodriguez. She’s still there now. I arrived at work about a quarter after eight. Lloyd was the guard on duty at the front gate.” For the first time, I found myself grateful for Lloyd’s slavish dedication to following the letter of the law. He’d have a triple-checked timestamp verifying exactly when I arrived.

That meant he probably had one for Andrew, too. I made a mental note to check with Lloyd once I was done explaining my innocence to the local police.

“Did this Lloyd gentleman walk you to the, ah, snake house?”

“No, he didn’t,” I admitted. “But if you check with Dee, you’ll find that it took me a maximum of ten minutes to cross the grounds to the
reptile
house.” I subtly stressed the word “reptile.” I wasn’t trying to mock him or piss him off. I just wanted him to remember that I knew my own business. “I honestly have no idea what happened to Andrew. Whatever it was, it probably took more than ten minutes.”

The first part wasn’t entirely a lie: there were a number of things that could have turned my unfortunate junior zookeeper into stone, and most of them were viable suspects, since he was still meat-based enough that he could have been zapped by anything from the bottom to the top of the power scale. The second part was one hundred percent fiction. Depending on the strength of the creature doing the petrifaction, it takes a few seconds, sometimes less. When something that’s capable of doing that to living flesh makes eye contact with a mammal . . . game over. I could easily have turned Andrew into stone and still made it to the reptile house on time. Except for the part where I’m human.

The policeman frowned at his notes. I seized the opportunity to add, a little more sheepishly, “Also, if I did . . . whatever it is . . . do you honestly think I would have brought my girlfriend here? I mean, I was hoping to have sex again in this lifetime, and most girls get sort of upset when you take them to see a dead body.”

Most girls. Not, apparently, Shelby, who was now laughing with her policeman, both of them appearing to have a grand old time as they reviewed her statement. I didn’t know how she did it, but I loved her for it in that moment, just as I’d loved her for every similar thing I’d ever seen her do.

My policeman followed my gaze to Shelby. Then, to my surprise, he smiled. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “You’re free to go back to work. Please don’t leave town, Mr. Preston, we may need to speak to you further about this incident. I have your contact information, and I assume that your paperwork with the zoo office is up to date?”

“Yes, sir, it is,” I said. It was all fake, of course—Alexander Preston had only existed on paper before I brought him to the Columbus Zoo, and he’d cease to exist as soon as I moved on to my next assignment—but everything about him was designed to pass even the deepest of examinations. He had a good college GPA, glowing letters of recommendation from his professors, and even contact numbers for his next of kin. He was a pretty well-liked guy, and I was going to miss him when it came time for me to move on to being someone else.

I didn’t have a choice, sadly. Verity could maintain a single identity for her ballroom dancing, because the Covenant wasn’t looking for us in that community. Anything related to professional zoology was more likely to catch their attention. No identity was secure enough to risk using twice.

“All right, then,” said the policeman, and turned his back on me, moving toward the cluster of EMTs and police personnel who were examining Andrew’s body. Shelby waved, mouthing the word “later,” and went back to talking to her policeman.

I waved back, a little hesitantly, and left the tiger garden, heading back to the reptile house as fast as I could. I kept my eyes away from the ground as I walked, just in case a cockatrice had been responsible for what had happened to Andrew. Cockatrice like to stay low, and for all that I knew, it was still at the zoo. Under the circumstances, avoiding an accidental staring contest was the safest thing I could have done.

Let’s talk about things that can turn you to stone.

There are a surprisingly large number of them extant in the world, and there used to be even more, before the Covenant of St. George compared notes with some Greek gentlemen and figured out all those spiffy little tricks with smoked glass and reflective surfaces. That cut down on the things-that-turn-you-to-stone population both dramatically and quickly, but “cut down” is not the same thing as “eradicated.” Good thing, too, as many of the things that can turn flesh to stone serve very important roles in the world’s ecology. This probably doesn’t make it any nicer to lock eyes or swap venom with them.

My original purpose in coming to Ohio actually involved things that turn people to stone. When I wasn’t counting frickens, I was supposedly administrating a basilisk breeding program. Technically I still was. It was just that my breeding pair of basilisks were currently hibernating—or had been as of ten o’clock the previous night; I’d been so busy dealing with the reptile house when I got to work that I hadn’t checked on them yet—and basilisks can hibernate for ten years at a stretch. It’s part of what made them so hard for the Covenant to eradicate. It’s hard to kill something that can go off and be a small boulder when it wants to take a long nap.

(Of course, they’re so sensitive to changes in their environment that moving them can cause them to hibernate even longer, which is why the breeding program had to take place in Ohio, where my pair had acclimated enough that they were unlikely to sleep for more than a year at a time—plus, with my middle sister on the East Coast and my parents and youngest sister on the West Coast, it was good for me to be in the Midwest. I could react quickly if there was an emergency, and it helped increase the number of air strikes required to wipe us all out.)

But back to the larger subject. All known petrifactors (IE, “things that can convince the minerals in your body that they really want to change formation and become different types of mineral”) are members of the Ophion family, a group of synapsids which includes everything from gorgons to cockatrice. This is more a matter of convenience than any strong scientific evidence proving their evolutionary relationship. They range in size from the greater gorgons, who are substantially larger than humans, to basilisks, which are the size of irritated chickens. Really, they only have one absolute unifying feature. All of them are capable of turning flesh to stone, to one degree or another.

Lesser gorgons stun with their gaze and petrify with their bite, although you’d have to work to find traces of petrifaction in most of their victims. They prefer their meat to be, well, meaty, not filled with delicious veins of silicate and carbon. Pliny’s gorgons like Dee could stun
and
petrify with their eyes, although they were better at the stunning part, and needed to have their hair uncovered if they wanted to petrify, or even stun something particularly large. They needed the extra eyes. Greater gorgons . . .

If we had a greater gorgon, I was going to be tempted to grab Shelby, my family, and anyone else that I was fond of and declare that it was time for a month-long vacation somewhere very, very far away. Like Hawaii. Or the moon.

Petrifaction can be stopped if you catch it early, but once it’s gone far enough, there’s no known treatment. If it happens, it’s happened, and there’s no force in this dimension or any other that will undo it. It’s supposed to be a very painful way to die. Personally, I never want to find out.

But Andrew found out. On that somber note, I reached the reptile house, pushed the door open, and stepped inside.

Kim and Nelson were working with the latest school group, a bunch of bored-looking sixth graders who clearly thought of themselves as far too cool for anything as jejune as a bunch of stupid snakes. I waved to the other zookeepers and kept walking, noting in passing that Shami was back in his tank.

Dee’s office door wasn’t locked. Good; that meant she hadn’t let her hair out of its confinement. I opened the door and stepped inside, closing it behind me. “We have a problem,” I announced.

“You just came into my office without knocking,” said Dee, lowering the sandwich she’d been about to bite into. It was dripping red. I was willing to bet it wasn’t because she’d used too much ketchup. “I’ll say we’ve got a problem. We’ve discussed privacy and appropriate boundaries before, Alex, and this is—”

“Andrew’s dead.”

Dee froze. Seconds ticked by while she stared at me, apparently too stunned to move. I waited as long as I could before snapping my fingers. She jumped in her seat, an audible hissing sound coming from beneath her wig.