Half-Off Ragnarok: Book Three of InCryptid (17 page)

“Couldn’t they be trying some sort of double agent scenario? Train a British operative to act Australian and send her here to . . .” I stalled out. I was reaching, and I could tell.

So could Dominic. He chuckled. “If the Covenant knew you were there, you would have more than a lone pseudo-Australian agent to contend with, and if they were going to try something so complicated, they would have sent her to Australia, not to the middle of nowhere.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“It is only the truth. She cannot be one of the Covenant’s agents. It makes no sense.”

“Good to know. Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome. Now, if you will excuse me, a dead woman is trying to convince me to drink something that comes in layers.” Dominic sniffed. “I expect to be carrying your sister back to the motel.”

“Thanks for not adding the ‘again’ on that sentence,” I said dryly. “Love to Verity, ongoing tolerance to you.” I hung up. Phone manners have never been a big thing in my family.

So Shelby wasn’t likely to be working for the Covenant. That was a little bit of a comfort. Now I just had to hope that she was still among the living.

I trotted down the stairs, half eager to get back to the gathering in the kitchen and half afraid of what I was going to find when I got there. I didn’t
think
they could fit an entire human body in the garbage disposal. Maybe more importantly, I didn’t want them to kill Shelby for the crime of wanting to protect me from a deadly predator. It wasn’t her fault she’d decided to protect me from the one Johrlac in the world who truly wouldn’t hurt a fly if she had any choice in the matter.

“Is everything all right in here?” I asked, pushing open the kitchen door.

“Of course, Alex,” said Grandma, who was seated at the table across from Shelby. Grandpa was at the stove, stirring a pot of what appeared to be milk. No one was bleeding or even visibly injured, and the mess from our first aid adventure had been cleared away. All good signs. Grandma smiled encouragingly, motioning for me to take the chair next to Shelby. “We didn’t shoot her or threaten her or anything.”

“Your grandfather’s making us more cocoa,” said Shelby, sounding faintly stunned. “He’s heating the milk for it now.”

“Grandpa makes really good cocoa,” I said, trying to be reassuring. I turned back to Grandma. “I talked to our Covenant expert, and he confirmed that they don’t have any Australian recruits. We may not be able to reach the Thirty-Six Society directly, but the odds are good that she’s not Covenant.”

“That’s nice, dear,” said Grandma. “Sit down and have some cocoa.”

I eyed her as I slipped into my chair. “Does the fact that she’s not Covenant and we’re all having a second round of cocoa mean you’ve decided not to threaten Shelby anymore? Because seriously, that is not the way to help me have a healthy relationship.”

“We’ve come to an agreement,” said Grandma. “She doesn’t attempt to kill anyone who lives in this house, I don’t arrange for her sudden disappearance. Largely because you’d be a suspect, and I’d rather not get you taken in for police questioning.”

“
Angela
.” We turned to my grandfather. He was standing with his hands on his hips, scowling at his wife. “The young lady explained her reasons for being here, and even you have to agree that they were good ones. Your species does a lot of damage. No one knows that better than you do. Now stop tormenting the poor kids. Alex has already been punished enough for having company over without permission, what with the whole, ah,” he gestured vaguely at his face, “eyes getting turned to stone business.”

Grandma sighed. “I’m sorry, Martin. I just don’t appreciate having my house rules violated like this.” And
there
was the glare I’d been expecting.

I put up my hands. “I would never have invited her over if there hadn’t been a petrifactor at the zoo—which brings us back to the cockatrice, if you don’t mind talking about something other than how much trouble I’m in or how much you’d like to be allowed to kill my girlfriend.”

“How sure are you that it was a cockatrice?” asked my grandfather.

“I took a direct hit,” I said, letting my hands drop to the table. I leaned back in my chair, feeling suddenly tired. “The lighting and the circumstances meant that I didn’t get the best look at it, but when we prepared the treatment, I used the cockatrice antivenin.”

Now it was Grandma’s turn to blink. “You didn’t use the general gorgon? But, Alex—”

“I was sure it was a cockatrice! Well, almost sure. Eighty percent sure. If we’d used gorgon antivenin, my eyes would have remained partially petrified. I couldn’t risk it.” There’s no place in the field for a cryptozoologist who can’t see. Oh, I’d have opportunities for work—if nothing else, I’d be better equipped than anyone in the world to continue my basilisk studies—but I’d be removed from active duty for the remainder of my life. That wasn’t something I’d been willing to let happen. “So I told them to use the cockatrice antivenin, and it worked.”

Shelby looked at me, horrified. “You mean you were
guessing
?” she demanded.

“You got almost as good a look at the thing as I did, Shelby, and you didn’t contradict me.” I shrugged. “That seemed like a good sign.”

“Of course I didn’t argue, you idiot!
There are no cockatrices in Australia
!” Shelby grabbed the front of my shirt as she shouted at me. “You could have been killed! You could have been turned to stone, and it would have been my fault, you—you—you
Price
!”

“I can see why you like her,” said Grandpa, putting a cup in front of each of us. “She’s enthusiastic about her work.”

“And definitely understands that you’ve been bred to take idiotic risks in the name of science. That’ll serve her well,” said Grandma, accepting her own cup. The liquid inside was a toxic-looking orange rather than brown.

“The key word here is ‘science,’” I said, scowling at both of them. “I made a determination based on what I had observed, and I was correct. My eyes are fine.”

“Better yet, we know what probably killed your coworker,” said Grandpa. He walked back to the counter, picking up his own cup of cocoa. “I doubt we have two petrifactors running loose in this town.”

I froze in the act of reaching for my cocoa. “Say that again.”

“I said that I doubt we have two petrifactors running loose in this town. Not counting the local gorgons, of course. They’ve been good neighbors for decades. They’ve got no reason to stop now.”

“But we’re miles from the zoo.” I stood. “The average cockatrice has a range of less than a square mile. They’re not migratory, and they don’t like to move too far from their dens.”

“Alex . . . ?” said Grandma.

It was Shelby who realized what I was saying first. She reached for her gun, saying, “Either this isn’t the same cockatrice, or—”

“Or someone brought it here,” I finished grimly. “Somebody brought it here and set it loose in our backyard. This wasn’t a random encounter. This was an attack.”

There was a long moment of silence before my grandmother said, uneasily, “You can’t be sure of that.”

Cuckoos aren’t fighters. They weren’t built that way, unlike us monkeys, who were basically born to defend our territory. To my surprise, it was once again Shelby who spoke first. “Are they clever things, these cockatrices?” she asked.

“Not particularly,” I said. “Why?”

“Back at the zoo, Andrew’s body was pushed into the bushes. There’s no way he was that well-covered from just falling,” said Shelby. “Whatever turned him to stone could have been a dumb animal, but he was moved by someone who was smart enough to know what they were doing.”

I paused. “Are you sure?” I’d been so focused on the unusual circumstances of his death that I hadn’t been looking for signs that anything else was involved.

“Lions and tigers usually bring down prey and then drag it a ways before they eat it, right? There’s always a trail when that happens, and there was a trail today. Andrew was dragged into those bushes. Trust me, I know what a dragged kill looks like.”

“Cockatrice aren’t big enough to drag a dead human, and they don’t work together well.” I glanced to my grandparents. “There’s a cockatrice loose in the neighborhood, and it may have a handler. We need to get out there and stop it before anyone else gets hurt.”

“I was wrong about you, Alex,” said Shelby, with a small smile. “You really do know how to show a girl a good time.”

“Shoot first, but aim for the foot, hand, or other non-life-threatening extremity. That way you’ll still be able to ask questions later.”

—Alexander Healy

In the basement of an only moderately creepy suburban home in Columbus, Ohio, getting ready to go on a cockatrice hunt

I
MIGHT BE WILLING
to go out at night hunting for a creature capable of turning me into solid stone. I wasn’t willing to do it without proper preparation. On a normal day, I have the gun on my calf, three or four knives, and a garrote. This called for something a little less, well . . . basic.

Shelby looked around the basement with the saucer-wide eyes of someone who has just been allowed to glimpse the hills of Heaven, and has found them to be very pleasant indeed. “This is an
armory
,” she said.

“Not compared to the weapons room at home, but it does well enough,” I said, picking up a brace of throwing knives and making them disappear, one by one, into my coat. “Check the drawer underneath the pole arms. There should be some polarized glasses in there. You’ll need a pair if you don’t want to become a really confusing new lawn ornament.”

“This is all horrible,” said Shelby, even as she obediently opened the drawer and started rooting through the assorted forms of protective eyewear. “I don’t understand how you can be so calm about people being turned to
stone
.”

“Grandpa?” I picked up a second pistol and started loading it.

My grandfather, recognizing a request for information when he heard one, sighed and said, “Petrifaction is the process of flesh or plant matter being converted into stone.” Shelby looked at him blankly. “Basilisks, cockatrice, and stone spiders are all petrifactors. They can, one way or another, turn flesh to stone.” Shelby continued looking at him blankly. “Don’t you have any of these things in Australia?”

“I think the crocodiles ate them,” she said flatly. “Can we go back to the core question here? How can a person be turned into
stone
when nothing’s been injected or dumped on them?”

“You saw my eyes,” I said, tucking my new pistol into the waistband of my pants. I rubbed the corner of my right eye with a finger, dislodging another bit of gravel. I was going to be putting in eye drops for the next few weeks, while I waited for the moisture levels to get back to normal.

“You explained that, though,” she said. “Visual allergies.”

“Calling petrifaction a ‘visual allergy’ is pretty accurate, but it doesn’t describe the whole process,” said Grandpa.

“You’d be better off calling it poison that you see,” said Grandma, stepping into the room with a jar of bilberry jam in her hand. “In the case of visual petrifactors, like the cockatrice, it enters via the eye—making it most dangerous to actually lock eyes with one of them—and travels down the optic nerve to the rest of the body. From there, it will begin petrifying whatever it encounters.”

“Cockatrice petrify from the inside out, starting with the eyes and internal organs, while basilisks petrify from the outside in, starting with the eyes and skin,” added Grandpa. “A basilisk will actually leave most of its prey unchanged, counting on suffocation to provide the killing blow.”

“Why?” asked Shelby.

“Crunchy outside, chewy inside,” I said, taking the jar of jam from my grandmother and shoving it into my pocket. “They peck their way through the hard stone shell and have a nice meal all pre-packed and waiting for them. The two species do have one thing in common, though.”

“They’re horrible?” ventured Shelby.

I laughed. “No. They both start with the eyes.”

“So do some gorgons,” said Grandpa pointedly.

“I know.” I shook my head. “I think the presence of a cockatrice in our backyard is a pretty strong indicator that a gorgon didn’t kill Andrew. Yes, a Pliny’s gorgon could have turned him partially to stone. It can’t have been a greater gorgon. There would have been no flesh left.” I didn’t want to think of a Pliny’s gorgon being responsible for this. Dee had been as shocked as the rest of us.

Dee had spent her entire adult life pretending to be human, and doing it well enough to fool almost everyone she’d ever met. Dee disguised her history, her culture, and her species on a daily basis. If she was a good enough liar to manage all that, why wouldn’t she be good enough to fool me by looking surprised when a dead man was found on zoo property?

“You know you have to consider it,” said Grandma.

“I know,” I said miserably.

“Hang on a second,” said Shelby. “There’s different kinds of gorgon?”

I turned to eye her. “What do they teach you in the Thirty-Six Society?”

“Not
that
,” she replied. “You may have a Eurocentric view of the cryptid world—which doesn’t make much sense to me, mind you, since you lot are living in North America—but it’s not the only view there is, and we’re an island ecology. Mostly, we try to keep the native species from eating each other, and we only worry about the non-native ones when they turn invasive.”

Given the climate and geographical isolation of Australia, I’d be stunned if there weren’t at least a few families of gorgons living there. That doesn’t necessarily say anything about the skill of the members of the Thirty-Six Society. The chupacabra predates European colonization of the Americas, and we didn’t know they existed until about fifty years ago (as far as I know, the Covenant still thinks they’re just werewolves with a skin condition). When something has good reason to stay hidden, it finds a way.

“Since we’re about to go looking for a cockatrice that we know was responsible for partially petrifying at least me, is it okay if we save that particular natural history lesson for later?” I asked.

Shelby nodded. “Yes, although I suppose I ought to ask: is there a way to
find
a Pliny’s gorgon? Are there any in this region?”

My thoughts went to Dee again. “There are a few,” I admitted.

“That makes them strong suspects,” said Shelby. Then she paused and eyed the three of us, expression turning suspicious. “You’re being awfully forthcoming with all this information, you know. With as long as you’ve been living under the radar, I’d expect more restraint.”

“It’s simple.” Grandma smiled sweetly, showing more of her teeth than she really had to. Something about that expression triggered a reminder at the back of my mind, telling me that I was basically a very advanced monkey, and that even very advanced monkeys need to worry about bigger predators. “We can always kill you later if it turns out you can’t be trusted.”

“
Grandma
,” I said sternly. “Please stop threatening my girlfriend.”

“I’ll threaten anyone I want to,” said Grandma.

Shelby laughed. We all turned to look at her. She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I know I should be taking this all terribly seriously, but this is so much like listening to my own family argue that it’s actually very relaxing. Do let me know if we reach a point where I should be running for my life, all right?”

“Good lord, there’s more than one of them,” said Grandpa.

“Okay, well, that’s a disturbing concept for all of us, but I think we should get moving if we want to track this thing before it disappears again,” I said, sliding a pair of polarized goggles on over my glasses and motioning to Shelby to put hers on. “Shelby, you’re with me. Grandma, I want you to stay here and keep an eye on Sarah. Grandpa—”

“I’ll go out front and look for suspicious cars,” he said.

“Great.” I grinned. I couldn’t help myself. “Let’s go commit some senseless acts of science.”

Even with the kitchen lights on, the backyard was dark enough that Shelby and I had to pause for several minutes in order to let our eyes adjust. She stuck close beside me, her gun in her hand. I would have told her to put it away, but she seemed to be treating it more as a security blanket than a weapon. I couldn’t blame her for that. Even coming from a cryptozoology background, this had to be a pretty major shock to the system.

It had definitely been a shock for me. I adjusted my polarized goggles and began walking slowly forward, stepping as lightly as I could. “Cockatrice have internal ears, like snakes,” I said, pitching my voice low. “They’ll hear you coming mostly through vibrations in the ground.”

“So it’s safe to talk, yeah?”

“Yes. Just don’t stomp.” My grandparents had chosen their home partially for its spacious yard, which had seemed perfect when they were planning to start a family. Now, it seemed too large, and the old swing set by the back fence was surrounded by strange shadows, where anything could be lurking.

“I’m not much of a stomper,” said Shelby.

She matched my pace step for step. I took my eyes off the ground long enough to steal a sidelong glance at her. In the moonlight, her hair seemed to almost glow, and the expression of intense concentration on her face was one of the sexiest things I’d ever seen. I frowned, forcing myself to look away. She was a distraction. I didn’t need that. Not here, not now—and maybe not ever.

“So were you really planning to break up with me when you realized I had a Johrlac nearby?” I tried to keep the question light. My bitterness still seeped through.

“You meant it when you said we could talk, huh?” Shelby shook her head, a quick blur in my peripheral vision. “This doesn’t seem like the best time . . .”

“Really? You don’t think this is the best time?” We had reached the bushes that grew up against the fence. I stooped, pulling the LED flashlight out of my pocket. It had a red lens, to protect our night vision and hopefully keep from startling the cockatrice if we found it.

“No, not really.”

“Well, I think that the aftermath of you threatening to shoot a member of my family is the
perfect
time for a relationship discussion. Since most people who threaten my family don’t have much time for conversation afterward.” There was nothing under the bush, not even tracks. I straightened, turning the flashlight off again.

“You know, threats make it a little hard to have a conversation.”

“Then you
should
break up with me. This is how we communicate.” The cockatrice had been standing in the middle of the yard when it locked eyes with me. I backtracked to the place where I estimated it had been, crouching down to study the grass. Here, at least, there were signs of its passage: bent grass, churned-up bits of earth. “I wish the damn thing didn’t have wings. It’s always harder when they can fly . . .”

“Dammit, Alex, you’re not making this any easier for me.”

“I’m sorry, Shelby. I didn’t know that ‘making it easier’ was part of my job.” I turned my flashlight back on, sweeping it across the grass. The faint indentation that marked the cockatrice’s passage swerved off to the left. “It went this way.”

She sighed and followed as I straightened and started toward the fence. “All right, yes. I was planning to break it off with you. Happy now?”

“Not so much, no, but thank you for being honest.” I kept my eyes on the ground. No matter how much I wanted to be looking at Shelby, I wasn’t going to let myself be distracted again.

“I started seeing you socially because it seemed like a laugh, and I was bored. You weren’t the same kind of boring.”

“Not making me feel any better, Shelby.” The tracks stopped about a foot before the bushes on this side of the fence. I walked a little faster, running my light along the top of the bush. There were broken twigs there. The cockatrice had left the lawn, landed on the bush, and then taken off again.

“Still being honest, like you asked. You’re not . . .” Shelby made a frustrated noise. “You cancel dates. You keep secrets. You talk about lizards at the dinner table. You’re a geek, Alex, and that’s fun for a while—I like smart men—but you weren’t willing to let me see anything deeper. You wouldn’t even watch bad science fiction shows with me, and most geeks love that sort of thing.”

“I should introduce you to my sister.” I squinted at the fence. It was about eight feet high, and the neighbor on that side didn’t have a dog. “Come here.”

“Why?” asked Shelby suspiciously.

“I’m going to boost you up so you can see into the next yard. It looks like our cockatrice went over the fence.”