Half-Off Ragnarok: Book Three of InCryptid (23 page)

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.

“Gorgon society is fascinating in its complexity, especially since, until you know what kind of gorgon you’re dealing with, there’s no way of knowing whether the society is polite or not.”

—Jonathan Healy

At a hidden gorgon community in the middle of the Ohio woods, where no one is going to hear the cries for help

“T
HIS IS BAD,” said
Dee.

“It’s certainly not good,” agreed Frank. “Does anyone know you brought them here?”

“My grandparents,” I said. “Which means that the rest of my family will know in short order if I don’t come home.”

“Nobody knows I’m here but Alex and his folks,” said Shelby cheerfully. I blinked at her. She shrugged. “No point in lying about it. I figure if I’m going to be eaten, I’ll get avenged when your people come riding in with their guns blazing. Although speaking of guns, this feels like a good time to point out that anybody trying to eat me had better be prepared for a face full of bullets. It’s not a very friendly thing to do, but neither is eating your company.”

“No one’s eating
anyone
,” said Dee firmly. “We don’t eat humans. Pliny’s gorgons are . . . well, we’re not vegetarians, but we’re not people-eaters either.”

“But Hannah’s not a Pliny’s gorgon, is she?” I asked slowly. Dee and Frank both turned to look at me. I shook my head. “Not entirely, I mean. She’s too tall. Female Pliny’s gorgons don’t get that tall. And her snakes . . . something about the shape of their heads is wrong.”

“Her mother was a Pliny’s gorgon,” said Frank. “Her father was of Medusa’s breed.”

I gaped at him. “Pliny’s gorgons are cross-fertile with
greater gorgons
?” I realized how insensitive the question was as soon as it was out. I winced. “Sorry. That was rude of me. I just didn’t realize . . . anyway. There’s nothing in the books to indicate that’s possible.”

“Then you haven’t read your great-grandfather Jonathan’s notes very carefully. Hannah speaks very highly of him. He spoke in favor of the marriage of her parents, when it became clear that they were going through with their union.”

“I may have missed a few things,” I said. It was a little white lie: whatever I’d missed wasn’t in the house to be read. There are big holes in the information we got from Great-Grandpa Healy’s notes, and they can almost certainly be blamed on his daughter—my maternal grandmother—who burned a lot of his things after he died. In her defense, she had good reason. That doesn’t justify losing whatever knowledge she’d destroyed.

“Hannah’s status as a crossbreed has been debated many times, and is actually viewed as an asset, now,” said Dee. “She’s a bit more . . . potent . . . than the rest of us, and she does a very good job of guarding the community.”

“And as she has no children of her own, she looks after all the children of the community with the fierceness of a mother defending her own clutch,” said Frank. There was something weary in his tone, which I thought was better left uninvestigated—at least for now. “She has been a good leader. You are fortunate to have the opportunity to dine with her.”

Most crossbreeds are infertile. That probably explained why Hannah was so happy to take care of the children of the community. I had the presence of mind not to say that out loud. Instead, I nodded and said, “It’ll be good to learn more. In the meantime . . . does this mean we have to stay here until dinner is served, or are we allowed to look around?”

“You are not prisoners,” said Frank. “It would be a great insult if you were to attempt to leave, but apart from that, you are free to move throughout the community. Within reason. I would not recommend going out alone, and it would be rude to enter a private dwelling without permission.”

“Oh, neither of those things is going to be an issue, I assure you.” I turned to Dee. “Remember those fringe groups you told me about? The ones who may be trying to work with dangerous animals in the name of self-sufficiency?”

“Yes,” said Dee, looking uneasy. She clearly knew where this was going.

There had never been any real question. “This seems like a good time for you to take us there.”

Shelby completely failed to suppress her expression of delight.

We left the medical trailer in a group, Dee at the front, me and Shelby in the middle, and Frank at the rear. Attempts to tell him that he didn’t need to come had been met with a dangerously blank stare. We were taking his wife into what he clearly viewed as unsavory territory. He was coming along.

Privately, I was glad of the extra muscle. It’s hard to make diplomatic inroads after you’ve shot someone. Having Frank with us might help to avoid that. If the farmers got violent, he at least stood a chance of subduing them in a non-fatal manner.

A crowd had formed outside the trailer while we were talking to Frank and Hannah, and while most of them didn’t follow us as we walked away, they weren’t subtle about their staring. I counted at least two dozen adults, plus the children. They were the ones who
did
follow us, running behind the trailers and peeking out at us as we passed. Shelby stuck her tongue out at the little girl with the bows on her snakes. The girl squealed with glee. Shelby smirked.

“Kids are kids,” she said. “All the rest is just details.”

“Remind me to introduce you properly to Chandi after all this is over,” I said. “Dee? Do we need to move the car?”

“No. You’re parked in front of our house, and that’s perfectly fine. We have two parking spaces allotted to us.”

“Why?” I asked, before I thought better of it. “I mean—”

“You’re pretty good about hiding the fact that you want to study me most of the time, Alex, and I appreciate that, but that doesn’t mean I don’t
know
,” said Dee, sounding wearily amused. She kept walking as she continued, “Megan is away at school right now, but when she’s home, she needs a place to keep her car. After she graduates and becomes a full adult, she’ll either get a home of her own, or find a husband in another community and move away from us. I admit I’m kind of hoping she’ll choose to stay. Even with the Internet and the changes in rapid transit, each community is fairly isolated.”

“I can’t imagine never seeing my parents,” I said. “It seems like it must be really hard.”

“It is, but it is the only way,” said Frank. His tone was sharp, accompanied by a warning glance at Dee. “If no one can betray anyone else, then there need be no fear of betrayal. We keep communication to a minimum when not bartering or making marriage arrangements.”

“Still. It sounds lonely.”

“It is.” Frank increased his stride, outpacing the rest of us. Now it was Dee following him, and our back was entirely unguarded. That didn’t worry me as much as it might have; we were almost to the edge of the spiraling mobile homes, striking out across the green farmland.

“He knows where we’re going?” asked Shelby.

Dee nodded. “Everyone knows where the fringe is.”

“From the way you talked about them before, I was expecting them to be the only farming around here,” I said, and gestured to the left, where a large patch of ground had been dug into furrows and planted with what looked like some sort of melon. “What’s all the rest of this?”

“We do as much of our own agriculture as possible. It can be hard to buy enough produce, and we appreciate the self-sufficiency, even if it isn’t absolute. The issue is livestock.” Dee shook her head. She should have looked incongruous; a woman in business casual clothes with snakes growing from her head, walking into what was basically an amateur farm. She looked like the most natural thing in the world. “There are very few creatures that can share space with a petrifactor without being in danger. None of them are what I’d call ‘friendly.’”

“My basilisks are okay,” I said, feeling oddly defensive toward the little feathered bowling balls.

“Basilisk eggs are toxic, or they’d be a viable candidate. As it stands, we could eat them, but we’d have to devote a lot more time and money to raising them than we spend just buying bulk raw chicken at Costco.”

“That’s a problem.”

“It is.”

We stopped talking for a while after that, and just walked. The patches of farmed ground gave way to fields with people in them, weeding and hoeing as they worked the land. They straightened as we passed, watching us go. Most were bareheaded, but a few were wearing straw hats with the tops cut out, providing them with a small measure of shade while also allowing their “hair” to move freely. I saw one man thrust his head suddenly into the corn, and come out with the back half of a mouse squirming in the jaws of one of his larger snakes.

Shelby followed my gaze. “Bet that’s a mouse that’s not going to be singing any hosannas any time soon.”

“This is why the Aeslin mice stay home,” I said.

“Quiet,” said Frank, looking back over his shoulder. “This is where we are quiet, and stealthy, and hope that we are not attacked. Yes?”

We were approaching the woods. I frowned. “Your own people would attack us?”

“I’d like to think not, but Frank’s right,” said Dee. “Strange things have been happening in this stretch of wood. The fringe farmers swear it isn’t them, and yet . . .”

“Strange things like what?”

“Men being bitten in two,” said Frank. “Is that strange enough for you?”

“Maybe.” I looked to Dee. “You couldn’t bite a man in two—”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

“—but that lindworm we saw earlier could, and we’re only about five miles from where we tagged it. That’s well within a lindworm’s normal territory. Do you have any wild onions growing around here?”

Dee blinked. “Yes. We passed a patch a little ways back.”

“Can we get some? I think six bulbs or so would be sufficient.”

“And that will keep the lindworm from attacking us?”

“If it’s the lindworm, yes. If it’s something else, we can at least make it cry as it eats us.” I shrugged. “If we have to go through this patch of trees regardless, we may as well try for the solution that doesn’t end with us being digested slowly in the stomach of a giant lizard.”

“I appreciate non-digestive solutions,” said Frank. “Deanna, you wait here. I’m faster.” With that, he turned and trotted back toward the promised onions.

I shook my head. “If it’s not one thing, it’s something else.”

Minutes ticked by while Frank gathered onions in the distance. The sun was high enough to make me wish that I’d thought to bring sunscreen. Portland isn’t really sunburn country. I slapped at a fly that had landed on my arm, and said, “Hey, Dee? While we’re waiting, you want to fill us in on what we’re walking into?”

“Sure,” said Dee. “It’s not like I’m going to convince you to turn around now.”

“Pretty sure that ship has sailed,” said Shelby, who was eyeing the nearby foliage with trepidation, as if she expected it to attack at any moment. Then again, she came from Australia: she probably
did
expect some sort of vegetable ambush.

(Australia. The only continent designed with a difficulty rating of “ha ha fuck you no.”)

Dee took a deep breath, appearing to gather her thoughts, and said, “Most Pliny’s gorgons live in communities like this one, close enough to mid-sized human cities to be able to blend in, but far enough away to have some autonomy. We tend to move on when the cities get too large, since the alternative is discovery, and that never ends well for anyone.”