Half-Off Ragnarok

  Dee’s eyes widened behind the tinted lenses of her glasses. “Oh, God, he was murdered, wasn’t he?”

  “I don’t know. It’ll depend on what killed him. If it was a sapient being, then yes, he was murdered. If it was a nonsapient, then no. He was just killed.”

  “Wait . . .” Dee paused, cocking her head to the side as she frowned at me. “Are you saying that a cryptid of some sort did this?”

  “Worse, at least from your perspective. I’m saying that a petrifactor did this.”

  This time, the agitated hissing that rose from beneath Dee’s wig needed no translation. I turned and flipped the lock on the door, guaranteeing our privacy at least until the police arrived. “Do you need to let them out?”

  “Yes, I think that would be best. I’m sorry.” Dee reached up and pulled her wig from her head, allowing her serpentine hair to uncurl and hiss fiercely in my direction. A few of the smaller snakes dropped to frame her face, hanging so that they mimicked human curls. It was pretty, in a reptilian sort of a way. “Are . . . are you sure?”

  “His eyes were stone, Dee. Most of him was still flesh, so I can’t be sure what killed him, but his eyes were stone. Only a petrifactor could have done that.”

  “If it started with his eyes, he probably met a gaze-based petrifactor,” said Dee slowly, clearly selecting her words with care.

  I nodded. “I thought of that immediately. I’m not here because I think you did it.”

  “Oh, thank Athena.” Dee groaned, slumping back in her chair and sliding her hands up under her tinted glasses so that she could rub her eyes. “You scared the crap out of me, Alex. I was half-waiting for you to whip out one of those giant knives of yours and kill me on the spot.”

  “Do you really think that little of me?” I asked quietly.

  “No. But I think that little of the Covenant, and sometimes it’s hard to remember that your family isn’t associated with them anymore.” Dee removed her hands from her face, checking to be sure her glasses were still in place before she opened her eyes and offered me a wan smile. It faded quickly. “What are we going to do?”

  “I’m going to go home and tell my grandfather that he needs to get me a copy of Andrew’s autopsy file. Maybe he can get samples at the same time, and we can figure out what did this before it strikes again.”

  Dee nodded. “That poor man. It’s a horrible way to die.”

  “So I’ve been told. Look, Dee, I hate to ask you this, but . . .”

  She put up a hand to cut me off. “No, Alex. I can’t take you home with me. Please don’t ask.”

  Pliny’s gorgons tend to live in isolated communities, close enough to human neighborhoods for them to commute, but far enough away to allow them to relax and let their hair down, so to speak. I knew that Dee lived somewhere outside of the city limits with her husband and daughter, as did the rest of their extended clan, although I didn’t have any idea how large the population of their community might be.

  “If this happens again, you know I’ll need to ask,” I said, as gently as I could. “And I won’t be able to take no for an answer.”

  “I know,” said Dee miserably. “Just please don’t ask me yet if you don’t have to.”

  “All right,” I said. “We’ll table it for now. I’m going to go check on the basilisks before the police get here.”

  “I’ll get ready,” said Dee, reaching for her wig.

  I tried to smile reassuringly. It felt more like a grimace, but I was hoping that the intention would get through even if nothing else did. “We’ll be okay, Dee.”

  “Tell that to Andrew.”

  There was nothing I could say to that. I unlocked the door at the rear of her office, the one that connected to the back halls of the reptile house, and let myself out.

  When I was a kid, I always wondered why buildings at the zoo seemed so much bigger on the outside than they were on the inside. Once I started working in zoos, I realized it was because the part the visitors see—the animal exhibits and the attractively designed public areas—are just the tip of the iceberg. You need feeding pens and bathing areas, storage closets and research labs, places for the animals that aren’t currently on display, the gravid females, eggs or cocoons, and babies too young to handle being stared at all day. The reptile house was unusual because our offices, of which there were three, were connected to both the public and private areas. That was a design choice based on necessity: after all, our offices were where we stored the antivenin.

  I moved down the hall to the research labs, pulling the key to lab number two out of my pocket. The door I wanted was locked twice, once with a deadbolt and once with a combination lock. I shielded it with my body as I turned the dial to the appropriate numbers. Not even Dee knew how to get into this lab without me, and that was exactly as I wanted things to be. Gorgons and basilisks don’t get along, and they’re not immune to each other’s abilities.

  The inside of the lab was lit only by the red glow of the heat lamps. I shut the door, locking it from the inside, and took down the protective eyewear from the hook by the light switch. The smoked glass lenses would block the effects of the basilisks’ eyes if they were awake. Please let them both be here, and don’t let them be awake, I thought. Please don’t let this be my fault.

  Moving the heavy plywood sheet away from the basilisk enclosure was difficult, but I’d done it before, and after a few moments of tugging, I was able to lift it down and lean it up against the wall. I peered through the glass.

  It was a good-sized enclosure, about eight feet on all sides, with a twelve-foot vertical clearance. Basilisks liked to roost in trees when they were courting, which just added to their resemblance to weird, scaly chickens. Ferns and other leafy plants surrounded their artificial stream. The trees were empty. As for the basilisks themselves, they were still asleep, curled up in hard little balls of what looked like granite.

  This was the dangerous part. I picked up one of the feeding sticks and slid open the hatch at the side of the basilisk enclosure. Neither basilisk moved, not then, and not when I threaded the stick through the opening and used it to nudge them gently. They were both as hard as, well, rocks, and entirely unresponsive. I removed the stick and shut the hatch before allowing myself a very small sigh of relief.

  The basilisks hadn’t killed Andrew. Judging solely by their surface hardness, they’d been asleep for months.

  My relief passed as quickly as it had come. Dee didn’t kill Andrew. The basilisks didn’t kill Andrew. And since that accounted for all the known petrifactors on the zoo grounds, that raised one very large, very unpleasant question:

  If they hadn’t killed him, then who had?

  Six

  “Everything is dangerous when looked at from the right angle. Mice fear cats, cats fear dogs, dogs fear bears, and bears fear men with guns. It’s often just a matter of perspective.”

  —Thomas Price

  Ohio’s West Columbus Zoo, attempting to surreptitiously search the zoo grounds for a creature capable of converting living flesh into stone

  I WALKED SLOWLY DOWN the path connecting the tiger garden to the main courtyard, trying to keep my eyes on the ground without being too blatant about it. My glasses weren’t helping. I’d swapped my normal pair for a pair with tinted lenses, and the prescription was slightly off, making it harder to be sure of the details in the bushes around me. I made a mental note to visit the optometrist as soon as possible. I hadn’t been hunting petrifactors in the wild since arriving in Ohio, and I’d allowed my tools to get outdated. That was a good way to get myself killed.

  My current search was running off one major assumption: that Andrew had been killed by something low to the ground, like a cockatrice, rather than something arboreal, like a basilisk, or something human-shaped, like a gorgon. I was basing that assumption on the area where he’d been found, which had had plenty of bushes, but no trees and very little foot traffic.

  We’d be able to narrow down what had killed him after I got a l
ook at the autopsy report. If I was wrong, all I would have lost was a few hours. It was a risk. It was also a necessary short-term decision. If Andrew had been killed by a gorgon, they were probably long gone by now, or else had an agenda I didn’t understand yet. Either way, if our petrifactor was a gorgon, no one else was likely to be in immediate danger.

  But if I was right—if the local gorgons were too smart for this kind of stunt, and there was a wild basilisk or cockatrice loose in the zoo—I couldn’t afford to wait for the results. I needed to find the thing that had killed Andrew before anyone else got converted into garden statuary.

  At least Lloyd had confirmed my guess about when Andrew arrived at the zoo, and hence when he was likely to have been petrified. The old security guard had looked at me oddly for asking. Hopefully, he wouldn’t tell the police that I’d come to him to tighten up my alibi. And if he did . . .

  Well, I’d figure something out. That was part of my job, after all.

  Something rustled in the bushes to my left. I tensed, my hand tightening around the mirror in my coat pocket, and prepared to spring . . . only to see one of the zoo’s endless supply of Canada geese waddle into the open. It looked at me disinterestedly before waddling on, feet slapping against the brick pavement, and vanishing into the bushes on the other side of the path. I let out a breath, feeling some of the tension slip out of my shoulders.

  “Little on edge, aren’t you, sweetheart?” asked Shelby, directly behind me.

  I jumped as I whirled to face her, and only years of training prevented me from pulling one of the knives I had hidden inside my coat. Heart pounding, I forced my hands to unclench as I offered her my best sheepish “oh, it’s nothing” smile. “I was just thinking,” I said. “Are you finished with the police?”

  “A bit ago, yeah,” she said. My obvious distress must have leavened my smile into something she could believe this soon after the death of one of my coworkers, because she put her hand on my elbow, a sympathetic look on her face. “I came looking for you, but Dee said you’d already gone. She was pretty shaken up, the poor dear.”

  “I think we all are at the reptile house.” I didn’t know if that was true—I hadn’t spoken to Kim or Nelson before racing out of there and starting my search of the grounds. I pulled my hand out of my pocket, wishing there was a way I could keep hold of the mirror without being obvious about it. “How are you holding up?”

  “Not thrilled about the situation, obviously, but I didn’t know him as well as you did.” She left her hand on my elbow. I stifled the situationally inappropriate urge to put my arms around her. “I’m assuming you left for your walk before the police got there to chat with Dee?”

  I nodded. “I didn’t think they’d appreciate my presence, given the whole ‘maybe we suspect you’ vibe that they were giving off during my interview.”

  “Aw, pish, that’s just their job,” said Shelby, waving my concern away. “Look, though, that means you didn’t hear that we’re closed.”

  “What?” I blinked at her.

  “The zoo. We’re closed. Everyone’s going home, since there’s just been a death in the family, as it were.” Now it was Shelby’s turn to smile, a trifle wryly. “Don’t tell me you were thinking so hard that you didn’t notice there was no one else about.”

  “Um . . .” I rubbed the back of my neck with one hand. I didn’t have to work to look sheepish. “Like I said, I was thinking. You know how I get.”

  “Yeah, it’s a good thing you’re not Australian. You’d have been eaten by a bunyip by now.”

  “Probably not, since I don’t usually hang out near the edges of billabongs smelling like fish,” I said automatically, and winced when I saw the look on Shelby’s face. “Er, a bunyip is a kind of crocodile, right?”

  “Not quite, but nice try.” She looped her arm through mine and started walking, pulling me along in an odd two-person Wizard of Oz formation. “So our working day has just ended several hours early, with the tragic loss of a peer. There are two ways we can deal with this.”

  “Those being?” I asked cautiously.

  “Option one, we go out to a local pub and get righteously smashed before stumbling to our beds. We wake up tomorrow with hangovers the size of Queensland, and a feeling of satisfaction over a death well-mourned.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “And option two?”

  “We go back to my place, order in a pizza, and have a more private wake for poor Andrew.”

  Given what I knew about ghosts, there was a more than reasonable chance that “poor Andrew” would show up and haunt her apartment looking for a show if we did that. “I can’t,” I said. “I wish I could, but . . .”

  “Whatever plans you have tonight, I’m sure whoever they involve would understand you needing to spend a little time with your girlfriend in the wake of a coworker’s death, Alex,” said Shelby. The way she stressed the word “girlfriend” made it clear she’d heard me talking to the police. “Unless you’re ashamed of me for some reason?”

  “God, Shelby, no. I am . . . believe me, I am anything but ashamed of my hot, brilliant, capable, uh, girlfriend.” I was going to pay for that label later. I could see it in her eyes. “But I’m supposed to look after Sarah tonight. I promised my grandparents I’d stay home with her.” I realized guiltily that I wasn’t lying. This was supposed to be their date night, and I was about to ruin it by coming home and telling them that we had a petrifactor loose at the zoo. “They’ve had these theater tickets for weeks. I can’t back out on them, and Sarah won’t tolerate a sitter she doesn’t know.”

  Shelby sighed. “Your dedication to your family is one of the things I love about you. Maybe if I keep reminding myself of that, my needing to go home and spend the night sitting alone in my apartment, right after I’ve seen a dead man . . . well, maybe it won’t sting as much.”

  It was a statement calculated to make me feel bad. It was sincere enough that I didn’t mind. She had every right to fling that particular arrow at me: if I was supposed to be her boyfriend, I was doing a shitty job of it. “I’m really sorry,” I said. “Look—I’ll call, okay? I’ll get Sarah settled with a video or something, and I’ll call.”

  “If you don’t, I shall hunt you down tomorrow in the parking lot and remove your kidneys with a spoon,” she said blithely.

  “Deal.” I kissed her cheek. Anything else would have required us to stop walking, and I wanted to get to my . . . I stopped in my tracks, hauling Shelby to a stop along with me. “Oh, hell. Shelby, I’m sorry, I forgot something back at the reptile house. I gotta go.” Whatever had rustled in the bushes would be long gone by now, if it had ever been there in the first place. My imagination was playing tricks, and I wasn’t properly equipped to do this on my own.

  She blinked at me. “That’s all right, I’ll walk with you.”

  “No!”

  She blinked again, eyes widening. Then they narrowed into a stubbornly murderous expression that I knew all too well, since I’d been seeing it from most of the women in my life since I was born. “No? What did you forget, Alex, your pet monster?”

  Considering that what I had forgotten was Crow, the guess was closer than I was comfortable with. “No, but you’re not certified for venomous snake handling, and I forgot to milk our tiger snake in all the excitement. We’re supposed to make a delivery to the local hospital tomorrow. We can’t do that if I don’t milk the tiger snake.”

  “I’m Australian, and you’re seriously telling me I’m not safe around snakes.”

  “I’m sorry, zoo rules, I’ll call you tonight.” I kissed her cheek again. Then I turned and ran, putting her behind me as quickly as I could. I didn’t want to see the betrayed expression I knew was on her face.

  Running through the closed zoo right after a man had been found dead might have looked suspicious. I was willing to risk it, since it could also just look like normal human discomfort over hanging out where a corpse had recently been. “Reacting normally around dead things” had been one of
the hardest lessons for my parents to teach to my sisters and me, since frequently, after we’d reacted normally, we were expected to take the dead things home for further study. My being a scientist alleviates that somewhat; I’m expected to react oddly, and a little morbidly, when I encounter bodies. I’ve never been sure how Verity manages. As a ballroom dancer, she’s pretty much expected to flip her shit if she sees so much as a rat.

  I burst back into the reptile house. Kim and Nelson were gone. Dee was still there, turning off lights and peering anxiously into enclosures. She turned at the sound of my footsteps. “Anything?”

  “No,” I said. “The zoo is—”

  “Closed, I know. I’m just double-checking the cages.”

  “I came back for Crow.” I started for my office door. “Do you want me to walk you to your car?” I felt guilty as soon as the offer was made. I’d left Shelby alone, with a monster or a killer potentially loose in the zoo, and here I was offering to escort my assistant.

  “I’m good,” said Dee. She tapped her glasses. “This isn’t my first rodeo. I’ll call you when I get home tonight, just so you know I got there safe.”

  Pushing away the images of a petrifactor rodeo—which would probably be very slow—I said, “Can you also ask around and see if anyone knows anything?”

  Dee nodded. “I can, but people are going to assume you’re accusing them. You’re braced for that, right?”

  “I’d rather they make a few assumptions than we wind up with a bunch of dead bodies on our hands. I mean . . . any death is horrible, but what if it hadn’t been a staff member? What if whatever petrified Andrew had found a bunch of school kids on a field trip?”