Krakens and Lies (23 page)

Miss Sameera turned out to be the perfect passionately devoted worshipper the unicorns had always wanted. Zoe's mom didn't think it was safe to just send her back into the world, and they didn't want to try kraken ink again in case
they needed her for finding Abigail. But the librarian seemed perfectly happy to camp out on their couch indefinitely, if it meant she got to see unicorns every day.

Logan and Zoe took Marco to the Aviary to try to interview Nero. The phoenix was strutting around, deliberately getting just close enough to Pelly's nest for her to see him but out of her snapping range. She had her head under her wing but kept poking it out to glare at him.

“Hey, Nero, can we talk to you?” Zoe asked.

“ME?” he said with delight. “You need to talk to MEEEEEE?”

“It's really important,” Logan said.

“Let's find somewhere more PRIVATE,” Nero said, shooting a significant look at Pelly. “So no one will EAVESDROP on our PRIVATE IMPORTANT CONVERSATION. With MEEEEE.” He puffed up his chest and strutted ahead of them to a secluded corner of the Aviary.

“This is Marco,” Logan said.

“Wererooster,” Marco filled in. “Wow,
the
actual one and only phoenix. I'm a big fan.”

Nero preened, fluffing out his tail feathers. “You're quite rare yourself,” he said. “I've only met three other wereroosters in my lifetime.”

“Please don't explode into flames,” Zoe said, “but we want to ask you about the night Pelly was abducted.”

Nero flung his wings wide. “DANGER!” he shrieked.
“VIOLENCE! In my VERY HOME!” He paused, and then settled his wings back down. “Although if she was going to steal someone, I don't know why she wouldn't have picked ME, the TRULY exceptional and most UTTERLY UNIQUE creature in the WHOLE MENAGERIE. Taking Pelly is more like doing the rest of us a favor. If only she hadn't sent her back!”

“She?” Zoe said sharply. “It was a woman? Did you see her?”

Nero hesitated. “No?” he tried.

“Buddy,” Marco said, crouching beside the beautiful bird. “We don't want to put you in any danger, but you are the only one who can help us, you know? Literally the fate of the entire Menagerie is riding on
your
wings.”

“OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH,” Nero said, enchanted. “LITERALLY!”

“Depending on what you can tell us,” Zoe said. “Weren't you knocked out by the tranquility mist, too, like the other birds?”

“Oh no,” said Nero. “It must have gone off while I was still in my egg, being reborn. By the time I crawled out, all the other birds were asleep—except Aliya, who I could smell had been knocked out by a tranquilizer dart. JUST IMAGINE the TERROR I felt! A newborn phoenix chick, utterly defenseless! Woe is me!”

“So who did you see?” Zoe asked.

“Save the day now, my friend,” Marco said.

“Fate of the Menagerie,” Logan added.

Nero leaned closer to them. “WELL,” he said, and paused.

Zoe's pulse was racing. Did he really see someone? Were they about to find out who the saboteur was?

“It was . . .” Nero paused again, took a dramatic breath, and said, “IT WAS . . . a WOMAN.”

Zoe and Logan exchanged glances. “A woman?” Zoe asked. “Any particular woman? Anyone you know?”

“Well,” he said again. “It was . . . a TALL woman!”

“Taller than Mom?” Zoe asked. “How tall?”

“Taller than YOU,” he said.

“Everyone's taller than me.” She frowned at him.

“I'm guessing most people seem tall to Nero,” Logan said in a low voice.

“But you'd never seen her before?” Marco prompted.

“I . . . may have,” Nero said. He stared up into the trees with a deep, thoughtful expression.

“Nero! Did you or didn't you recognize her?” Zoe demanded.

“Well,” he said slowly. “My eyesight was not . . . completely sharp yet.”

Zoe sighed. “You mean you had newborn baby bird eyesight,” she said. “So you couldn't see her very well at all, is what you're saying.”

“I know it was a woman!” he said, bristling. “She made an
enormous mess of that goose's nest and then absconded with her! She smelled of anxiety and lies and fire! Oh wait, the fire part might have been me.” He poked his beak under one of his wings and sniffed.

“Can you tell us anything else about her?” Marco asked.

“Please?” Logan said.

Nero ruffled his feathers and eyed them with an indignant expression. “I think I have told you PLENTY,” he said. “Just because you don't APPRECIATE it, doesn't mean I haven't been ENORMOUSLY HELPFUL. I know nobody loves me! But you could at least show a speck of gratitude! I am so very long-suffering!”

“All right, calm down,” Zoe said, pulling out a box of chocolate-covered jalapeños. “I brought you these. But don't you dare give one to Pelly like last time. I was bringing her honey tea for weeks.”

“Oooooooooooh,” Nero said, distracted and delighted by his favorite treat. He wrapped his wings around the box and strutted off into the foliage.

“That didn't help much,” Logan said, sounding discouraged. “A woman?”

“One of the mermaids,” Zoe guessed. “Who else could it be?” She hesitated. “Unless it could be Ruby . . . but she wasn't in town at that point, that we know of. And she's awful, but I believe she didn't know what the Sterlings were up to. She
wouldn't help them ruin us.” She was at least 95 percent sure of that. She thought.

Logan and his dad went home soon after that. Zoe was worried about him. He'd barely said a word while he was helping with the chores. He'd been distracted even when he was covered in a pile of bouncing griffin cubs.

Marco went home, too, but Matthew went and pulled out a sleeping bag for Elsie, setting up a space for her in the living room, next to the bed they'd made for Miss Sameera on the couch.

The selkie girl emerged from the lake toward evening. Zoe was at the dining room table, extremely reluctantly doing homework because her parents had insisted on it, with Captain Fuzzbutt snoozing beside her. Elsie and Uluru came through the sliding doors, bringing a gust of chilly night air with them. Elsie was scrunching her curly wet hair with a towel. Her sealskin was back in her shoulder bag, which dripped damply across the floor.

“Hi, Elsie,” Zoe said. “Dad's making dinner, Mom is out in the Menagerie with Sameera, and Matthew is up in his room studying. I have no idea where Keiko is. Can I get you anything? How'd it go?”

“Great,” Elsie said, tossing her towel on the back of a chair. “They're all very sweet. My mum said I can stay as long as you need help.”

“Thank you,” Zoe said sincerely. “We'd be in trouble without you.”

“Is Keiko the kitsune?” Elsie said. “I saw her on her way up to the dragons.”

Zoe blinked at her. “No way. Keiko hates the dragons.”

Elsie shrugged. “She went up about an hour ago and hasn't come back down yet.”

Is Keiko “furball the small”?
Zoe wondered. Was Keiko secretly friends with Firebella? On the one hand, they had almost the exact same personality, so that sort of made sense. On the other hand, why would Keiko pretend she and the dragons hated each other? Why keep their friendship a secret?

So she wouldn't have to do any dragon chores
, she answered herself.
We never send her up there to clean out the caves or anything because we thought there was a major dragon-kitsune feud going on. Very crafty
.

Or was it sinister? Was Keiko up to something?

“GORM,” the bunyip observed.

“I know, I remember,” Elsie said to him. “Where's Abigail Hardy's kid?” she asked Zoe, pulling out a chair to sit. Uluru flopped to his belly on the floor beside her. Captain Fuzzbutt looked at him askance, eyeing the bunyip's damp fur, and sidled a bit closer to Zoe.

“He went home,” Zoe said. “There's a whole thing going on with his mom—you know she's missing—well, she may
have been kidnapped, and we think we know who has her but not where.”

“I have a message for him,” Elsie said. “Maybe it's connected.”

“A message?” Zoe said, sitting up straight. She closed her math book. “From who?”

“From the kraken.” Elsie reached over and grabbed a few carrot sticks from the bowl in the middle of the table. “She says she's been trying to tell him for a week now. But you know krakens. Her idea of trying could be waving the occasional tentacle at him from the lake as he walks by. Krakens always think everyone is paying much more attention to them than we really are.”

“Why would the kraken have a message for Logan?” Zoe asked.

“Someone's been sending it to her through the water. She broadcast an image at me.” Elsie pulled a napkin toward her and sketched out a small head with long wiggly lines coming out of it. “Someone like that? Sorry, I can't draw at all, I know it's kind of terrible.”

Zoe blinked at it. It was beyond terrible; she couldn't even tell if it was supposed to be human. Was that a mustache?

“Um . . . maybe Matthew can help. He's a great artist,” Zoe said. “Matthew! Elsie's back!”

She heard her brother's door open and he came pounding down the stairs. His feet stopped running right outside
the living room, and then he wandered in nonchalantly. “Oh, hey,” he said. “How's everything?”

“Elsie got a message from the kraken,” Zoe said.

“But you know krakens,” Elsie said again, shrugging apologetically. “It's all images and everything has this blurry underwater quality and you can hardly figure out what they're trying to say at all.”

“Right,” Matthew said. “Except no, we never get images from her, or messages of any kind. It must be a fellow sea creature thing.”

“Can you figure out what this is?” Zoe asked, nudging the napkin toward him. “This is who the message is coming from, she says.”

Matthew studied the scribbled drawing seriously, his mouth twitching.

“All right, go on and laugh,” Elsie said, shoving him.

“No, I'm not! It's a good—well, the effort is—it's clearly a—huh.”

“I have other skills,” Elsie said amiably.

“Maybe I can draw it. Can you describe it to me?” he asked. He pulled a sketchbook off one of the bookshelves and a pencil from the emergency drawer and sat down next to her.

“It's small, and sort of reddish, with these long whiskers—”

“So it's a creature,” Matthew confirmed. “Not a mustachioed Picasso person.”

“Of course it's a creature,” she said. “Uluru, I think he's making fun of me.”

“GROBAGOG,” the bunyip observed without moving from its prone position.

“All right, settle down,” she said. “I've never seen one before myself, but the picture looked like a blurry Chinese dragon, maybe.”

“What?” Zoe jumped to her feet. “The Chinese dragon? The one with Abigail? It sent a message to the kraken?” She covered her mouth to keep more questions from pouring out and took a deep breath. “Tell us everything she said.”

“It wasn't much, right?” Elsie said apologetically. “The dragon is probably sending a kind of distress signal whenever it gets to be in water, and if it's in something where the streams or underground rivers or whatever connect back to this lake, then the kraken is picking it up. It's not a conversation, exactly. The kraken can't send a message back or anything.”

“Still,” Matthew said. “What was the distress signal?”

“It's four images,” Elsie said. “Its own picture first.” She tapped Matthew's sketchbook, where he was doodling a beautiful little Chinese dragon. “Then a picture of Abigail Hardy—I recognized her, of course, which is why I figured the message should go to Logan. Then a picture of a box with bars across it—I think that's just to signal that they're trapped or imprisoned somewhere. And finally, Jabba the Hutt.”

Zoe and Matthew stared at her.

“It's probably not actually Jabba the Hutt,” Elsie amended. “Now that I think about it.”

“More description?” Matthew asked. “Maybe?”

“It's gray and kind of a triangular shape with a big round head at the top,” she said, leaning closer to him to watch his pencil sweep across the paper. “Two closed eyes, a human nose, squiggly things on the top of the head—no, not antennae, you loon. Like little circles, like a hat with a dome on top of that. There might be hands in the middle of the triangle. And it's up on a short flat stone pedestal.”

As Elsie kept describing it, Zoe came around to the other side of Matthew to watch. Something about the drawing was starting to look familiar. She closed her eyes to think. Could it be a statue? A big stone statue? She opened her eyes again and saw it.

“I know what that is,” she said. “Matthew! That's the giant stone Buddha in the Sterlings' backyard!”

“What?” he said, stopping to study it.

“Whoops,” Elsie said. “I was just really culturally insensitive, then, wasn't I?”

“Why would the dragon send an image of that statue?” Matthew asked. He looked up at Zoe with a small puzzled line between his eyebrows.

“It's a clue,” Zoe said, feeling excitement rising up through her chest and shooting out to her fingers. “Think about it.
The dragon is trying to tell us—
that's
where the Sterlings are keeping him and Abigail.”

“That makes no sense,” Matthew argued. “It's a statue, not a building.”

“I'm going over there to check it out,” she said.

“You are definitely not,” Matthew said. His hand shot out to catch her wrist before she could charge off to the front door. “Zoe! The Sterlings are having a massive campaign dinner right now. It's so big, even I know about it. There are cars parked for miles along the street, almost all the way to our house. That garden will be swarming with people. There's no way you'll be able to sneak over the wall and poke their statuary tonight.”