Half-Off Ragnarok: Book Three of InCryptid (27 page)

My place had my grandparents, either of whom could hold their own in a fight; Crow, whose contribution was mostly in the “making a lot of noise” area, but which could very well be enough to frighten off a cockatrice; and Sarah, who, even wounded and occasionally discombobulated, could at least confuse anyone who intended to do us harm.

It also had the mice.

In the end, there was no question of where we were going to wind up. I parked in one of the visitor spots at Shelby’s apartment complex, pausing to text Grandma with my location before I got out of the car. She sent back an immediate one-word reply: “FIGURES.” I snorted, shaking my head.

“Something funny?” asked Shelby, looking back over her shoulder as she walked up the short path between the parking area and the building. Her key was already in her hand, but she wasn’t watching the bushes for signs of movement. I’d have to talk to her about that.

Later. Much, much later. “Just checking in with home,” I said, scanning the landscaping as I moved to stand behind her. “Grandma says ‘hi.’”

Shelby laughed as she unlocked the door. “Bet that’s not
exactly
what she said.”

“No, but she didn’t say anything nasty, so I’m calling it a win.” I caught the heavy door before it could slam on my foot, shouldering my way past it. It slammed behind me with a bang that sounded like it should have shaken the whole building. “Oof. Has that thing ever killed anyone?”

“Don’t know, didn’t ask. The rent was low enough to make it tolerable. You know what kind of money I make.” The air in the hall was hot, with that strange pseudo-humidity that only seems to materialize in housing complexes and zoo buildings. Following Shelby up the stairs to the second floor was a lot like walking into the big cat house in the morning, even down to the distant smell of boiled meat.

“I save most of my salary by living at home,” I admitted. It made a huge difference. When I was trying to maintain my own place, I’d been calling home to ask for ammo at least twice a month. Now I could afford my own supplies, even if I couldn’t stretch my funds to pay for much more than that.

“Not an option for me, I’m afraid,” said Shelby. She opened the door to the second-floor hall, freeing another gust of hot air to slap us across the faces. “The commute would be
murder
.”

“And it’s best to avoid murder when possible,” I agreed.

The hallway carpet was worn so thin it provided no cushion at all; you could actually hear our footsteps as we walked the thirty or so feet between the stairwell door and her apartment. Shelby undid the locks and stepped inside, one hand going to the gun I now knew she had concealed beneath the waistband of her tan business casual slacks. She scanned the darkened living room before clicking on the light and scanning again, visibly searching for anything that had been moved or taken.

After a few seconds, she relaxed, flashing me a smile. “Come on in, then. We’re safe.”

“You realize I believed you when you told me your little ‘checking the room’ routine was born out of the fear of huntsman spiders,” I said, closing the door. I flipped the deadbolt with my thumb, and it locked with a satisfying “snick.”

“That part was sort of true,” she said, shrugging out of her jacket and slinging it over the back of her Goodwill-brand couch. She grinned sharp and quick as she unbelted the holster from around her waist. “If you’d ever seen a huntsman spider, you’d be as paranoid about them as I am. Bastards can hug your entire face with all their horrible, horrible legs.”

“I bet they’re fascinating,” I said.

“Yeah, a spider that can hug a human face, ‘fascinating’ is absolutely the word for it.” Shelby stepped closer to me, close enough that I could smell the remnants of her deodorant under the wild onion that we had rubbed all over ourselves back in the field. I’d almost stopped noticing it.

I smiled, reaching out to smooth back a lock of her hair. “You smell like onion field.”

“You’re no bed of roses yourself,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “You proposing a way to fix the problem?”

“I think I am, yes,” I said, and told her.

Fitting two full-sized adults into Shelby’s shower was difficult, but not impossible, as long as we were willing to be very, very friendly with one another. After we finished with the all-important business of washing off the onion, we found being very, very friendly to be an easy task indeed.

Shelby pushed me up against the wall once the . . . friendliness . . . had scaled back a little, resting her elbows on my chest and smiling at me like a cat with a mouthful of canary. I put my hands on either side of her waist, lending just a little bit of extra stability.

“Hello, Mr. Price,” she practically purred. “My, that name suits you. Got any more lies you want to stop telling me?”

“Um . . . I probably
was
checking out your ass at the work Christmas party, but in my defense, you asked me to.”

“Mmm. So just the normal lies, then.” She leaned in and kissed me, her breasts a distracting pressure against my skin.

Almost as distracting as the water that was running down my face. I tried to surreptitiously shake some of it away.

Shelby pulled back, and snorted. “Little damp, are you?”

“That’s the point of the shower, isn’t it?” I reached around her, fumbling until my hand found the faucet. Shutting the water off, I continued, “But sometimes dry can be nice.”

“You sweet-talker, you,” said Shelby, delivering another kiss before she peeled herself away from me and opened the shower curtain. Her bathroom was small, and with her clothes, my clothes, and my weapons covering every available surface, it looked even more cluttered than the rest of the apartment.

Shelby stepped out of the bathroom long enough to grab two towels from the adjacent closet, dripping all the way. As she came back, she thrust one of the towels out toward me, and said, “You know, this is the first time you’ve let me see you undress.”

“I’m sure you can see why,” I said, with a nod toward the tidy array of knives, handguns, and other accoutrements that I had made atop her toilet tank.

“I would have looked at you a bit askance when you pulled the brass knuckles out, it’s true,” she said, beginning to rub the side of her head. She was still naked, and if the weight of her breasts had been distracting, the way they jiggled as she towel-dried her hair was downright enthralling.

Pulling my eyes away from her breasts, I wrapped my own towel around my waist and reached for my glasses. “I’m always armed. That’s been hard to explain sometimes. One of the girls I dated in college was convinced I belonged to a very strange branch of Mormonism, since I was perfectly happy to let her see me naked, and even happier to see her naked, but I never let her see me take my clothes off.”

“Discussion of ex-girlfriends, eh? I guess fighting a giant lizard really is the sort of thing that brings a couple closer together.”

Shelby’s tone was light, but that didn’t tell me much—Shelby’s tone was almost always light. She was the sort of girl who could sound laid-back and utterly pleasant as she was removing your spleen with a claw hammer. I put my glasses on as I turned to look at her.

She was still holding the towel, but she wasn’t making any effort to dry herself off. Instead, she was just looking at me, a complicated mixture of sadness and exhaustion in her face.

“Shelby?”

“I just . . .” She shook her head, slinging her towel around her shoulders. “No. It’s silly, and it’ll just spoil a pleasant evening.”

“Shelby.” I took an awkward half-step around the sink, reaching for her hand. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Everything. I just . . . oh, come out of the bathroom, will you? This is a terrible place to have any sort of conversation that isn’t about soap.” She turned, moving a little faster than was strictly necessary, her wet feet leaving a trail of dark spots on the plain brown carpet.

I raked wet hair out of my eyes as I followed her to the apartment’s lone bedroom. It was as small and hastily-furnished as everything else, with a queen-sized bed that was really just two mattresses stacked on top of each other and left in the middle of the floor. But she had plenty of pillows, and her linens always smelled like eucalyptus, thanks to the essential oils she added to the laundry every time she had to wash the sheets. (She said it made her feel more like she was home when she was trying to go to sleep. I couldn’t fault the sentiment; I didn’t add pine oil to everything, but I’d been known to buy scented Christmas candles for the sole purpose of pretending that I was back at home in Portland).

Shelby dropped her towel into the hamper next to her bedroom door as she walked to the bed. She smoothed the duvet with an almost fussy motion before she turned to face me and sat, folding her hands tightly together in her lap. Something about the solemnity of her pose made me feel like I was the one who was exposed, even though I had a towel around my waist, while she was completely nude.

“Alex, what are we doing?” she asked.

I froze. There were half a dozen possible answers to that question, ranging from flippant to overly serious, and I had no living clue which one was appropriate. After standing silent for what felt like way too long, I settled on the most honest answer of them all: “I don’t know.”

“And here I was hoping at least one of us did.” Shelby shook her head. “I thought we were having a bit of fun, you know? You were the American zoologist who didn’t know anything about anything—not even that he’d got Johrlac preying on him—and I was going to go home with a clear conscience when everything was done. At least you’d have gotten laid, and that’s payment enough, for most men. Only now you’re a Price. You’re part of the world I come from.”

Suddenly, I understood what she had been trying to tell me earlier in the car. “I was your vacation fling, and now I’m not, and you’re not sure how to deal with that,” I said.

Shelby bit her lip and nodded.

“Look, Shelby . . . if it helps at all, I didn’t expect things to go this way either. I’m not suddenly going to propose,” even though I sort of had, back when we were standing over the lindworm’s carcass, “and I’m not going to hate you forever and badmouth you to all the American cryptozoologists if we break up.”

“You promise?” she asked, looking up at me through her eyelashes.

“I promise. This just means I don’t have to come up with stupid excuses when I have to work. Maybe you and I can even help each other out sometimes. You can learn more about North American cryptids before you have to go back to Australia.” I walked over to the bed and sat down next to her, taking her hands. “Does this change things? Well, yeah, and it’s probably good that we’re talking about it, even if I might have waited to have the conversation until there wasn’t a cockatrice running around the zoo and—anyway, what I’m trying to say is that we can make this work without it turning into anything we don’t want it to be.”

“I’m glad you think so.” Shelby turned her head enough to smile at me, suddenly radiant even in the harsh white light of her bedroom, and my heart gave a lurch.

Oh, hell,
I thought, almost distracted, even as she leaned over and pressed her lips against mine. My body, noting the lack of guiding intelligence coming from the brain, decided to get on with things. Even as she pushed me over backward on the bed, I was thinking, and what I was thinking was simple and complicated all at the same time:

I could tell her I wasn’t going to make things serious on her, and I could tell her I was done lying, and I could do both those things as much as I wanted.

I was still lying.

I was in love, and I was so screwed.

“Love doesn’t care what you want. Love doesn’t care if it’s convenient. Love pursues its own agenda, and there’s no bullet in the world that can take it down. More’s the pity.”

—Jonathan Healy

A rundown apartment in Columbus, Ohio, sometime after midnight, waking up on a bed that could really use more lumbar support

S
HELBY WAS NESTLED AGAINST
my side when I woke up. Some subtle change in the atmosphere of the room had disturbed me, although I had no idea what it was. Grainy gray light filtered in through the half-closed blinds, providing enough illumination for me to find my glasses, fumble them open, and slide them onto my face. Shelby made a small protesting noise, her arm still draped across my chest. I moved it carefully out of the way. This time, the protesting noise was louder, and continued as she rolled over, taking the blankets with her. By the time I finished standing, she had formed a cocoon, with only the crown of her head proving that there was a woman inside the mass of bedclothes.

Clothes . . . our clothes were in the bathroom, along with all my weapons. Swearing softly but steadily under my breath, I crept out of the bedroom and started down the hall, listening for clues as to what had so abruptly awakened me. I’m not a heavy sleeper—no one in my family is a heavy sleeper; waking easy comes with the job—but I don’t wake up for no reason at all. Something in the apartment was wrong.

Whatever was making the hair on the back of my neck stand up didn’t put in an appearance as I made my way to the bathroom. A pair of pants, three knives, and a handgun later, I felt confident enough to slip back into the hall.

I took a glance into the bedroom. Shelby was still sleeping soundly in her blanket cocoon. Holding my gun in front of me, muzzle to the ground, I stepped into the living room. The blinds were open, letting the streetlights shine right into the room. That made it a little easier for me to assess my surroundings, looking for anything that was out of place. I found nothing.

I was starting to think I was being paranoid, and that Shelby had kicked me in her sleep or something, when I heard a sound from the hall. It was soft, and probably would have been inaudible if the carpet had been less than twenty years old: just a foot striking against the floor. Not that unusual—people walk—but most people don’t walk with the distinctive gait of someone trying not to be heard. This late at night, whoever was out there should either have been hurrying to their door, or drunkenly weaving without giving a damn who they woke up. This person was creeping.

Shifting my gun to my right hand, I crossed the living room, undid the deadbolt, and opened the door with my left hand—or tried to, anyway. The deadbolt turned easily, but when I tried to twist the knob, it refused to move. The whole mechanism had somehow been jammed from the outside.

“Shit,” I muttered, and put my gun on the knickknack table before dropping to the floor and trying to peer under the door. I couldn’t quite manage it, but my change in perspective did let me do one thing: it let me smell the gasoline soaking into the thin carpet of the hall.

“
Shit
,” I said again, with more fervency. Shoving myself back to my feet, I grabbed my gun and ran for the bedroom. “Shelby! You have to wake up now! Shelby!”

She didn’t respond.

Only the fact that she had rolled herself in blankets when I woke up kept me from panicking, deciding she was dead, and making things even worse. Instead, I clicked on the light, shoved my gun into the waistband of my pants, and crossed to shake her shoulder through the blankets. “Shelby. Wake up. We have to move, it’s not safe here anymore.”

“Fuck off,” she mumbled sleepily.

It says something about me that I found that endearing. This wasn’t the time or the place, however, and so I shook her again, harder this time. “
Shelby
. I’m not kidding. Your door is jammed, and someone’s getting ready to set the building on fire. Wake.
Up
.”

“What?” She finally stirred, pulling an arm free of the cocoon in order to push herself into a half sitting position. Her hair was a tangled mess, covering her eyes. “Alex? What are you yelling about?”

“Building. Fire. Get dressed, we’re leaving.”

She shoved her hair back as her eyes widened. “The building’s on
fire
?”

“No, but it’s about to be. Now move!” I ran back to the bathroom to grab the rest of my things, trusting her to at least find pants before I got back. This was not a situation that I wanted to go into without as many knives as I could carry, and possibly a few more, just in case.

Panic is a remarkable motivator. By the time I had my shirt on and my weapons tucked in the appropriate places, Shelby was running down the hall, fully clothed, with an old-fashioned travel suitcase in one hand. Before I could say anything, she snapped, “I’m not running around naked for the rest of the week if this place burns down.”

There was no point in arguing with her, and if my house were on fire, I’d have a lot more to worry about saving. “Do you have an ax?”

“What?” She stared at me. “The building’s about to burn, and you want to know if I have an
ax
? Are you sure you’re not just having a really odd nightmare?”

“You got dressed,” I pointed at her. “The door is jammed. Someone broke the knob so that we can’t escape.” I sighed. “I’m going to need to kick the door down.”

“Oh, brilliant, that’s not dangerous at all,” said Shelby.

“Got a better idea?”

She looked away.

The smell of gasoline was stronger when we walked out into the living room; there was no way to pretend that I was just having a very vivid nightmare. I moved toward the door and fell into a position I’d learned during my long-ago karate classes, hoping I wasn’t about to splinter my ankle.

“Stop!”

“What?” I turned to see Shelby shaking her head frantically. “What’s wrong?”

“Just hold on, all right?” She stepped in front of me, shoving me aside as she leaned forward and pressed her hand against the door. She pulled it quickly away, looking grimly back at me. “It’s hot.”

“What?”

“I said, it’s hot.” She dropped to the floor, pressing her cheek to the carpet. “I smell smoke. Not much, not yet, but enough. We can’t go out this way. The building’s already on fire.” She rolled back to her feet, grabbing her discarded suitcase.

“Of course the building’s already on fire,” I muttered. “Call 911?”

“On it.”

While Shelby dialed, I ran to the living room window, looking outside. The lawn was clogged with people, some of them pointing up at the building like everyone else might have come outside for a nice midnight stroll, instead of fleeing from the fire. I tried to open the window, and groaned as it refused to budge. “Shelby?”

“Fire’s already been reported, firemen are on their way,” she replied, running to my side. She frowned. “You can’t open that, Alex, it’s been painted shut.”

“
Shit
.” Smoke was starting to come through the crack under the door, finally overwhelming the smell of the gasoline. “What about the bedroom windows? Do those open?”

“Yes!” Shelby realized what I was really asking before I could voice it. This time, she grabbed my hand, pulling me after her as she whirled and ran back to the bedroom.

There was no crowd of people outside the bedroom window. Instead, it looked out on the roof of the parking area—which was, naturally, on fire.

“Better outside on fire than inside on fire,” I muttered. “Wait here.”

“What? Alex!”

I ignored her as I grabbed our discarded towels off the floor, running with them back to the bathroom, where a few seconds under the showerhead soaked them—and me—all the way through. I ran back to where Shelby waited, flinging one of the towels at her. She squawked when it hit her, glaring at me.

“What—”

“Follow me!” Before I could lose my nerve, I stepped up onto the windowsill, wrapped the towel around my shoulders, took a deep breath, and jumped.

It was a ten-foot fall to the carport roof. The impact would have been enough to jar every bone in my body if I
hadn’t
been leaping into the middle of a blazing inferno. As it was, even my sister, Verity, who never met a building she didn’t want to jump off, would have been impressed. I began slapping the roof around me with my towel as soon as I landed, trying to clear something of a safe zone for Shelby. The smell of burning hair wasn’t as bad as the smell of smoke, but it was more immediate, since it meant that part of my body was on fire.

My shoes were waterlogged, but the fire was stronger than thirty seconds in the shower. It bit through the thin fabric, and I yelped, the last of my clean air escaping. Breathing in would mean getting a lungful of smoke, and then . . .

Well, there wouldn’t be much “and then.” I glanced up, still flailing around with the towel, and saw Shelby standing on the ledge, clearly trying to find the nerve to follow me. I beckoned with one arm, hoping that she would see the need to move. I could see the fire now, consuming the building all around her. Whoever had jammed our door had done us a favor: if we’d opened it, the fire would have come into the apartment, and we’d already be dead.

Shelby, please,
I thought.

She jumped.

It was not a graceful fall; she pinwheeled her arms madly all the way down, and she landed hard, hitting her knees on the burning roof. But she bounced back quickly, swinging her towel hard as she fought to beat out the flames.

We were never going to defeat this fire on our own, but we didn’t need to; all we needed to do was get away. I grabbed her wrist, still struggling not to breathe, and pulled her with me as I jumped again, this time off the carport roof.

After a ten-foot fall into a blazing fire, an eight-foot fall into a puddle of rainwater was almost a blessing. My ankles didn’t agree, and they folded beneath me, pitching me to my knees on the pavement. I didn’t care. I was too busy scrambling to my hands and knees, turning to check on Shelby.
Please be all right,
I thought frantically.
Please, please be all right . . .

She was sitting on her butt in the middle of the puddle, her suitcase lying off to one side. The latches had popped, but the lid had fallen back into the closed position after only half a bra had managed to make good its escape. She looked stunned, and the bottom few inches of her hair had been badly singed, probably during the first fall, when she dipped too low to bleed off the force of her impact.

“Shelby? Are you okay?”

“I . . . we just jumped out of a burning building in the middle of the night. That’s a thing which occurred in the actual world.” She tilted her head back, looking toward her apartment window. Flames were finally visible inside, going industriously about the business of consuming everything she hadn’t been able to shove into her emergency bag. “My apartment is on fire.”

“Yes,” I said. I wasn’t sure what else to say. My hands hurt. So did my feet, and my knees. I was going to have some incredible blisters; I was lucky if that was the worst thing I was going to have. I needed to get home and get some medical attention. I needed to help Shelby first.

“The door was jammed.” She looked back down, focusing on me as a new emotion overwrote her confusion: anger. Shelby Tanner looked like she was about to start a second fire through nothing but the power of her rage. “Somebody just tried to kill us.”

“Yeah, they did.” I staggered to my feet, offering her my hand. “Want to go find out who it was, and maybe kick their ass?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

Leaving wasn’t quite that easy, of course: if we were seen driving away from the fire, which was most definitely going to be ruled arson, we’d make ourselves suspects. So Shelby and I gathered her things, patted one another’s hair until we were sure it wasn’t going to spontaneously combust, and went to meet with the emergency responders—after a brief stop at the car to drop off our weapons, of course. I was pleased to see that Shelby had managed to grab two guns and a hand-sized sickle in the process of getting her clothes on. Yes, every second had been important while we were still inside, but sometimes you need to be prepared in order to be safe.