Half-Off Ragnarok: Book Three of InCryptid (35 page)

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.

“Once upon a time there was a little boy who lived with monsters, and the monsters swore that they would never hurt him, because even monsters dream of living happily ever after.”

—Kevin Price

Facing a gorgon hybrid in a supposedly abandoned barn attached to a hidden gorgon community in the middle of the Ohio woods, which is absolutely a terrible place to be right now

S
HELBY WAS IMMOBILE AND
unconscious; I had to save myself before I’d have any hope of saving her. I dodged aside and allowed Lloyd to slam into the mattress. He whirled, hissing, but I was already halfway across the barn, my pistol in my hand and aimed at him.

“You didn’t have to follow me,” he said.

“I thought you just said I’d saved you a lot of trouble,” I replied.

“You did and you didn’t. I was going to hunt you down, and I don’t have to do that now, but it might have hurt you less if you’d just let my cockatrice take care of business.” He shook his head, his snakes setting up another chorus of hisses. “I liked you well enough, while we both worked at the zoo. You were always nicer to me than you had to be, given our positions. Had to lie to you, of course; couldn’t just go announcing I was a freak of nature, given your family history. I could still have offered you a mostly painless death.”

Spoken like a man who had never been partially petrified. Phantom pains flared in my eyes as I offered the only reply that I could think of: “We left the Covenant generations ago.”

“But you still hold yourselves as judge, jury, and executioner when you feel like it’s appropriate, don’t you? You wouldn’t be here otherwise.” Lloyd remained next to the bed, straightening slowly, until he stood taller than I had ever seen him. It wasn’t just a matter of hunching or not hunching; his torso seemed to have elongated, adding a serpentine cast to his silhouette. “That’s why you had to go before I could have my revenge. Andrew was an accident, you know. I was planning to put my cockatrice in your office, take care of the biggest threat around before things got started. So I put it in your yard, and even that couldn’t get rid of you. Slippery bastard.”

“Sorry I didn’t want to die.”

“I shouldn’t have expected anything different from a Price. Self-appointed saviors of the cryptid world, who know what we need better than we do.”

“You know, I’m used to people being mad at me because of who my ancestors were, but most of the time, they’re pissed off because someone I’m related to killed someone they were related to, not because my great-grandfather helped their parents get married.”

Lloyd laughed bitterly. “You’d best change your thinking, then. You do more damage when you let us live than you ever did when you let us die.”

“So you put the cockatrice in my yard—then what? Why keep letting it kill random people? Why set Shelby’s building on fire? Why did you need revenge in the first place?”

“You would have caught me eventually. I needed to get rid of you, even if it meant hurting
her
.” Something about the stress he put on the word “her” made me profoundly uncomfortable. “As for why I needed revenge . . . those bastards told me I’d be retiring at the end of the year. They said I was too old to do my job and that it was an oversight I’d been allowed to stay as long as I had. Said their insurance didn’t like it when they kept on old men past a certain point. No telling what kind of health problems we could have. Wouldn’t want to see us dropping dead in front of the paying customers. So they were cutting me loose after sixty years of service, and all because I had the nerve to survive past the point where I was
convenient
.”

“There are other jobs,” I said, aware of how inane that sounded almost as soon as I spoke.

It was too late to take the words back. Lloyd sneered. “Maybe for you. When I took that job, no one asked for high school diplomas or proof of residency. It was enough that I showed up for work every day. But you humans, you never stopped hunting us, did you? Not really. You just built different traps. Red tape and fences everywhere. I’m trapped.”

“I could help you . . .” I tried.

Lloyd wasn’t listening. “You humans, you make your rules, and you never consider what they’ll do to the people who get in their way. Retirement ages and well-meaning meddling, and for what? So you can feel powerful when you’re the only damn things in the world who don’t have an advantage past ‘thumbs’? Lots of critters have thumbs. You don’t see us prancing around shouting about being the lords of creation.”

“Hold on a second, okay? Just . . . hold on.” I shook my head. “What are you mad about? Are you mad that you were born, or that you got old, or that the zoo fired you, or that paperwork exists, or something else altogether? Because people have died over this, and I’d really like to understand why.”

“I’m mad about all those things,” said Lloyd. “And I’m mad about you and Doctor Tanner, too.”

I froze. “What do you mean?”

“You’re not much of a catch, are you, Price boy? She’s a pretty girl, and she could have done a lot better than a weedy science boy with glasses and scuffed shoes. But she didn’t look twice at anybody else, especially not the old man at the gate. Not even when I brought her flowers and didn’t check her ID on mornings when she was running late. She didn’t
see
me. I was willing to let her burn for that, but I came up with a better idea.” He shook his head. “She’s going to see me now. And then she’s going to stay with me forever.”

“But . . . you’re not even a
mammal
,” I said, before I could think better of it. The horror of him turning Shelby to stone and keeping her as his captive bride was too much to focus on, and so I went to the safe haven of biology.

“You think that matters?” Lloyd’s voice took on a sneering tone. “My mama is a crossbreed, and my daddy was a Pliny’s gorgon who wanted nothing to do with me. He couldn’t even look me in the face. My species cast me out a long time ago.”

“They still take care of you. They let you live here—”

“Only because they’re so scared of Ma that they don’t know what else to do,” Lloyd spat. “Pa founded a whole new place because he didn’t want to look her in the eye.”

“The fringe,” I guessed grimly.

“Why do you think I went there for my cockatrice?” He laughed. “Can’t keep your hands clean forever, no matter how hard you try. Can’t hide forever, neither. Eventually, the world’s going to figure out we’re still out here, that
all
the monsters are still out here, and then there’s going to be hell to pay. You can’t blame me for trying to hurry that along.”

Actually, yes, I
could
blame him. At least three people were dead, assuming no one had died in the apartment fire, and a lot more people had been hurt, either physically or emotionally. Not all damage is visible to the eye. “You didn’t have to take Shelby. She needs medical care.”

“We have a doctor,” said Lloyd. “Once I get rid of you, Frank will have to patch her up. Then, when she’s awake, I’ll offer her a deal: be my girl like she was yours, and I won’t feel the need to look her in the eyes.”

“No thank you,” said Shelby’s voice, weak and welcome. Relief flooded through me. Until she’d spoken, I hadn’t realized just how afraid I was that she was never going to speak again.

“What?” Lloyd whipped around to face her. She hadn’t moved so much as a muscle, and was still a dark, huddled form on the bed. That forced him to lean in closer, and I saw my chance, beginning to cautiously pick my way through the darkened barn as I tried to line up a clear shot on him.

Hannah, I’m sorry,
I thought. It was him or me, him or Shelby, him or a lot of other people . . . maybe Lloyd was right, and my family was too quick to judge the cryptid world. Most of us were human. So what made us qualified to decide who lived and who died?

He had a point. I didn’t care. If I had to choose one of them, I chose Shelby.

“I said, no thank you,” repeated Shelby. Her voice was a broken echo of itself, washed out by pain and blood loss. “I have no particular interest in becoming your next meal, or your tethered love slave, or anything else that you may have been considering for me. Alex is quite sufficient to suit my needs. Now do me a favor and go fuck yourself.”

“You . . . you . . . you
mammal
,” hissed Lloyd, and did exactly what I had been hoping he wouldn’t do: he grabbed her, pulling her halfway into a sitting position and shaking her. Shelby made a small sound that was halfway between a whimper and a gasp. “Forget healing you. Open your eyes! You stupid human bitch, open your eyes!”

“No thank you,” said Shelby, for the third time.

I couldn’t get a clean shot, not in the dark with him half-blocking her from sight. With as much blood as she’d already lost, I wasn’t sure Shelby would survive even being grazed by a flying bullet.

“Put her down, Lloyd,” I said. “She’s not the one you’re mad at.”

“I’m mad at all you bastards,” he said, and shook Shelby again. “Open your eyes and
look at me
.”

“Shoot him, Alex,” said Shelby, still hanging limply in Lloyd’s hands. “Don’t worry about me. Just shoot him.”

“You bi—”

Lloyd’s insult was cut short by Crow, who came screeching through the door with talons extended and feathers fluffed until he looked twice his actual size. He slammed into Lloyd’s arm, slashing with his beak and feline hind claws for an instant before releasing and rocketing toward the rafters overhead, where he proceeded to start shrieking at the gorgon below. The whole thing happened in seconds. Lloyd dropped Shelby back to the bed, screaming and clutching at his bloody arm.

And then, as if that weren’t chaotic enough, a lindworm crashed through the barn wall.

Where there is one lindworm, there is probably another: this is a fact of the natural world, much like “don’t put your hand in the manticore,” and “try not to lick the neurotoxic amphibians.” We’d killed the female lindworm in the forest, and tagged the male back in the swamp. I hadn’t thought to check and see whether he’d come looking for his mate. Apparently, my Church Griffin was smarter than I was.

The lindworm let out an enraged bellow and charged for the most distinctive smell in the room: the smell of blood, which was flowing freely from Lloyd, thanks to Crow. Lloyd shouted. The lindworm roared, which would have been an impressive sound even if we
weren’t
all stuck in a confined space.

“We’re going to die,” I said, dazed, just as the lindworm crashed into Lloyd.

The gorgon security guard shouted something incomprehensible as he grabbed for the lindworm’s head, trying to force it to meet his eyes. It responded by snarling and snapping at him, driving him farther back against the wall. I stared for another few precious seconds, knowing I was wasting time, and yet unable to tear myself away. This was something no one had ever seen before, so far as I knew; it might be something no one was ever going to see again.

And that didn’t change the fact that Shelby needed me. I made my way quickly around the edge of the barn, trying to avoid doing anything that might catch the lindworm’s attention. I wasn’t nearly as worried about catching Lloyd’s attention, which was a nice change. I made it all the way to the bed where Shelby lay crumpled without being seen.

Shelby made a protesting sound when I touched her arm. I shushed her quickly. She recognized my voice and dared to crack one eye open, sagging into my arms with relief. I smiled as encouragingly as I could, grimacing a little as I realized how much blood had soaked into her clothing. Lloyd’s shaking must have reopened her wound, and given where the damage was located, I couldn’t even throw her into a fireman’s carry, which would have left my gun hand free. Instead, I had to carry her with both arms, and hope that we’d make it out of the barn unchallenged.

The lindworm was still roaring as I made a beeline for the door, and the sound masked my footsteps enough that I actually started to believe that I might get away with it. Then I heard Lloyd shout behind me, sounding offended and enraged all at the same time. I glanced back to see him shoving the lindworm away from himself, that strange, serpentine bend in his torso expanding as fabric shredded and he emulated his mother’s “turn your lower body into a giant snake” trick.