Half-Off Ragnarok Read online

  No, it was the sulking. My sisters, again. Having two of them, both younger than me, meant I’d learned that the only way to survive a sulk is to mock it: a sulking sister, rewarded for her efforts, will proceed to push her sulking to ever-greater heights, until an entire platoon of pigeons could perch on her out-thrust lower lip.

  “I look like a first grade teacher from the pioneer days,” said Shelby.

  “I don’t think they had machine stitching in the pioneer days,” I said, turning onto a narrow residential street lined with attractive brick houses, each on its own privately landscaped stretch of land. Even the air smelled like money. It was something of a relief to see a few fallen leaves clogging the gutters in a distinctly un-artistic manner. If not for that, I would have been afraid we were driving into a completely fabricated community, and started looking for signs that we’d discovered a new form of ambush predator, one that looked like a pleasant suburban neighborhood right up until it slammed its jaws closed on your car.

  “Fine, then, I look like a first grade teacher from the 1970s.”

  “Your sense of history is very brief.” I consulted my GPS before pulling to a stop in front of one of the attractive brick houses. “We’re here.”

  Shelby forgot her sulk long enough to peer past me at the house. “Are you sure?”

  “What did you expect? A hole in the ground? Wadjet are civilized people. Chandi’s mother is a doctor.” And Chandi’s father was an impressively large spectacled cobra, which was why Chandi’s fiancé lived at the zoo. Male wadjet don’t coexist well.

  “Are you sure she’s home?”

  “I called first.” Never surprise any member of a venomous species with a home visit. It’s not only rude, it’s potentially hazardous to your health.

  We walked up the narrow path to the front door, Shelby shamelessly gawking at the landscaping, me watching for signs that we’d been followed. No one drove down the street, but that didn’t mean anything; any tail smart enough to stay with us this far would probably be smart enough to park farther down the block and observe our activities from a distance.

  There are times when I hate being as paranoid as I am. Life with my family makes paranoia a vital survival trait, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy it. It can be a lonely way to live. I glanced at Shelby out of the corner of my eye.

  Then again, maybe it wasn’t so lonely after all.

  I stepped up onto the porch and rang the doorbell, which made a pleasant chiming sound before tapering off. Running footsteps replaced the sound of the bell, and a familiar voice called, “I’ve got it!” just before the door was wrenched open to reveal Chandi. She blinked at us, eyes wide and bewildered. Then they narrowed, and she demanded, “What are you doing here?”

  “I came because I wanted to speak with your parents,” I said. “Ms. Tanner accompanied me because she needs to be formally introduced as a visiting cryptozoologist.”

  Chandi wrinkled her nose. “Ew. Are you running a breeding program for those, too?”

  I gaped at her, not quite sure how I was supposed to respond. I was still gaping when she turned and ran back into the house, leaving the door ajar.

  “Mooooooo-om! Dr. Price from the zoo is here and he brought a girl!”

  Shelby stepped up next to me. “Look at it this way,” she said. “That’s one little girl who’s never going to need the facts of life explained to her.”

  “That’s one little girl whose explanation of the facts of life looks nothing like whatever you’re picturing,” I replied.

  Fortunately, Shelby’s reply was cut off by the appearance of Chandi’s mother. Dr. Sarpa was a tall, slender woman with skin the same deep, rich brown as the scales on a spectacled cobra’s back. She had her long black hair pulled into a ponytail, and was wearing a pencil skirt and a flowing white blouse. Her shoes were three-inch heels that my sister would have coveted, but which made me wince in sympathy. She’d only dressed this fancily for me once, and that was the first time that we met; this was all for Shelby’s benefit.

  “Alex,” she said, with considerably more warmth than her daughter usually managed. She even smiled at me in the human style, showing her teeth without baring them. “This must be Dr. Tanner from the zoo. I’ve heard so much about you. Won’t you both please come in?”

  “Thank you for your hospitality,” I said, stepping over the threshold and bending to remove my shoes. Shelby nodded quickly, indicating that she got the hint, and copied my actions. There was a low bench near the door. We placed our shoes on it.

  “Daksha is waiting for us in the back garden,” said Dr. Sarpa.

  “Thank you,” I said again. “Kumari, may I please properly introduce you to the scholar, Shelby Tanner, who has come here seeking only knowledge?”

  “You may,” said Dr. Sarpa, and turned her human-style smile on Shelby. “You are welcome in my home so long as you travel with Alex, who is known and beloved to us, and do not offer any harm or threat unto my family. Do you agree?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Shelby, looking puzzled but still agreeable. I understood her confusion; I shared it, the first time I had to deal with wadjet in a social setting. Humans are primates, and primates generally wait to see whether something is a threat before inviting it into their homes. Wadjet are something different. For Kumari, bringing us inside put us within striking distance. If we were going to pose a danger to her family, she wanted to control the environment. She wanted us in her den.

  “Good.” Kumari’s smile died, taking the implied threat with it. “This way.” She turned, heading deeper into the house. Her heels clacked sharply against the floor, while our bare feet made no sound.

  Shelby paced herself to walk beside me, looking faintly ill-at-ease. That was a good reaction, all things considered. I followed her gaze and saw that she was looking, not at the artwork on the walls or the general design of the house, but at Kumari’s shoes.

  “We can’t wear shoes indoors because we might step on something we shouldn’t,” I murmured. “People are heavy. You’re more likely to realize what’s happening and pull back before putting your full weight on someone’s tail if you’re barefoot. Kumari gets to keep her shoes on because this is her home. She’s demonstrating dominance over you.”

  “Just me?”

  “She demonstrated dominance over me a long time ago.” I paused, realizing how that sounded, and winced. “That isn’t what I meant.”

  “No, but it’s what you said,” said Shelby, clearly amused. I decided to stop trying to correct her. Amusement was better—much better—than any of the alternatives.

  Kumari was waiting by the sliding glass door to the backyard, which was already standing open. When we reached her, she calmly removed her heels, leaving them on the mat, and stepped through the doorway, onto the cobblestone path that wound its way through their lush rainforest of a yard.

  The back fence of the Sarpa residence was high enough to brush up against the restrictions laid down by the local homeowners association. I knew that well, since I’d helped Kumari deflect three attempts to have her fined for building her fence too tall. It had to be the height it was in order to conceal their private greenhouse from prying eyes. Anyone flying over would realize the Sarpas were essentially maintaining a backyard hothouse, but as it was perfectly legal and all their building permits were in order, none of us were particularly worried.

  I’m a herpetologist, not a botanist; I couldn’t have named any of the trees, climbing vines, or flowers that filled the enclosed glass box of their yard. A fountain chuckled quietly to itself in one corner, feeding into a pond filled with decorative fish. Birds flashed by in the canopy, as captive as any denizens of the zoo. And in the middle of it all, coiled on a large, flat stone intended for that very purpose, was the master of this household, a spectacled cobra fully seventeen feet in length. As we approached him, he lifted the first third of his body into the air, looking down his nose at me as he opened the great flare of his hood. Shelby’s hand closed on my up
per arm, fingers clenching convulsively tight.

  I smiled. “Hello, Daksha. It’s nice to see you again. Your scales look remarkable. Did you shed recently?”

  The massive cobra continued to study me, his tongue flicking in and out three times before he closed his hood, lowered himself back to the basking stone, and slithered down to the garden path. Moving fast enough to be the stuff of nightmares, he zigzagged to Kumari and twisted his way up her body, moving like the stripe on a barber pole. She held perfectly still, helping him along, until his head was resting on her right shoulder and his body gathered in a thick belt around her waist and torso.

  “He greets you, and thanks you for your continued hospitality toward our daughter,” she said, walking over to take his recently abandoned place on the central stone. “As you ask, yes, he did shed recently, and is pleased with his pattern brightness in this current molt.” Daksha arranged himself around Kumari as she sat, moving with her to avoid any unpleasant accidents, like her settling her full weight on his tail. Her lips turned downward in something that was closer to a frown than I liked, and she said, “He wishes to know why you have brought your colleague from the zoo here, as he did not believe she was aware of our nature.”

  “If you didn’t think I knew what I know, why are you telling me what you think I didn’t know but might have come here looking to find out?” Shelby paused. “I’m sorry. I’m not sure even I understand what I just said.”

  “Dr. Tanner is from an organization with goals much like those of my family,” I said, taking a seat on one of the decorative benches. I tugged Shelby along with me, and she settled to my right. “She studies the cryptid world in Australia, and hopes to someday bring the human and cryptid populations of her home continent into a peaceful coexistence. This meant that when people at the zoo began dying of petrifaction, I couldn’t keep her from becoming involved with the investigation of their deaths, and she found out about a great many things. At this point, I feel that it is safer for all of us if she knows as much as possible about the local community. That way, no one can slip and tell her something she’s not meant to know.”

  “I agree with Alex, husband,” said Kumari, speaking in a slightly more casual tone now that she was speaking for herself and not the great snake that she wore around her waist and torso. “He called before he came, and I agreed to this visit.”

  There was a pause while Daksha adjusted his grip. She nodded, and said, once more in the formal tone that meant she spoke for her husband, “He knows what I have told him, but wanted to hear your reasoning for himself. It seems sound; he does not question your motives as much as he did before you came here.”

  “That’s good,” I said sincerely. Wadjet are incredibly venomous. Having Daksha question my motives could end in my untimely demise. “I do trust Shelby with my life at this point: she’s saved it several times.”

  “Bringing her here means you are trusting her with ours, and that you are trusting us with hers,” said Kumari, a faint edge on her voice. “It is not a trust to be cheaply given.”

  “It hasn’t been,” I assured her. “There was, however, a motive for bringing her to meet you now, rather than waiting until things were calmer. I assume Chandi told you about what was happening at the zoo before I did?”

  “She’s very put out,” said Kumari. “She was counting on spending more time with Shami before she had to resume her schooling at the end of the summer. If the deaths continue, her bond could be set back by a matter of years.”

  Shelby sat up a little straighter. I put a hand on her knee, squeezing, and hoped she would read the touch as a request that she not say anything. She shot me a quick look, confusion writ large across her face, but nodded, and kept silent. I smiled gratefully before returning my attention to Kumari.

  (For Shelby, and for most human beings—myself honestly included, when I didn’t make an effort—referring to the deaths at the zoo so casually was almost like erasing the suffering of the victims. For Kumari and her family, while the death of a few humans was sad, it was by no means a tragedy. The human population of Ohio was in no danger. For Chandi and Shami, however, failure to properly bond could mean they would never be able to have children. It could also mean she would fail to develop the appropriate adult physiological responses to his venom, which would make her vulnerable to him later in life. Wadjet biology is not forgiving of things like zoo closures, and they only had one shot at a happy ever after.)

  “The zoo closures are likely to continue, but if necessary, I can help smuggle Shami out of the reptile house,” I said. “The difficulty will be finding a place for him to stay until we’re ready to reopen. I’m terribly sorry, but my grandparents’ house isn’t an option, due to the presence of a colony of Aeslin mice. I know Shami is well-mannered and would do his best to abide by the local rules, but . . .”

  “But there is no sense in testing his resolve in such a direct and potentially damaging way,” said Kumari. “I quite agree, and I appreciate that you have both considered this, and rejected it for good cause. I will ask around about arranging another safe house for him. If only my husband,” she caressed the head of the great snake that encircled her body, “could already tolerate the presence of his son-in-law to be, this would be so much easier.”

  “Yes, it would,” I said, and tactfully didn’t ask any more questions about the situation. I might not like the answers I got. “Do you mind if I go back several steps in the conversation?”

  “Not at all; I was the one who derailed us. You were asking whether I was aware of the deaths. I responded that I am.”

  “Shelby and I went to visit the local Pliny’s gorgon community, to see whether they might be able to tell us where the cockatrice we believe is haunting the zoo came from. We have some good leads to follow. In the meanwhile, we needed to sleep, and we returned to her apartment for the night. I woke to the smell of gasoline . . .”

  It only took a few minutes to tell the full story, including our escape via the second-floor window. Kumari looked appropriately shocked and dismayed. Daksha remained wrapped around her the entire time, his tongue occasionally flicking out to taste the air. Normal snakes don’t hear, exactly; they soak up vibrations with their bodies. I wasn’t sure how male wadjet were able to listen to verbal communication, but knew from my dealings with Shami that they could, probably due to an inner ear structure that was dramatically different from their serpentine cousins. When I finished, the male wadjet turned his head away, letting out a long, low hiss.

  “My husband is shocked and saddened by the trouble you have experienced, but wonders what it has to do with us,” said Kumari. “Surely you don’t think that we had anything to do with the burning of Miss Tanner’s building.”

  “Actually, I came here because I thought the opposite, and because we need your help,” I said. “The local bogeyman community has never been exactly friendly toward me.”

  “They mistrust your grandmother,” said Kumari.

  Shelby snorted. “A Johrlac not being trusted. What are the odds, really?”

  I eyed her but didn’t say anything. Instead, I returned my attention to Kumari, and said, “They have their reasons. That doesn’t change the fact that I need to know who is trying to have me killed—or whether I was the target in the first place. The arsonist could have been attempting to murder Shelby, and been willing to take me out as collateral damage.”

  “I find it more likely that they were hoping to kill both of you,” said Kumari. “I will ask around, however. Perhaps someone has opened a contract, and your life is now valued in a small but viable number of dollars.”

  “What a lovely way of putting it,” Shelby said, wrinkling her nose.

  “Everything has a price.” I stood. “Thank you for your hospitality. Will you call me if you learn anything?”

  “Everything has a price,” agreed Kumari. “Will you help us find a place to house Shami if it proves needful?”

  “I will.”

  “Then, yes. I w
ill call you.” She stood, her husband slithering into a new position around her shoulders. He looped himself there, head bobbing like a wax museum prop. The temptation of Eve, as recreated by cobra and pediatrician. “For both your sakes, I hope the killer was trying for the two of you together.”

  Shelby blinked. “Why’s that?”

  Kumari smiled. “Because it will make you twice as difficult to destroy.”

  Twenty

  “Being smart isn’t good enough. You need to be educated, and you need to be open-minded, and you need to remember that what you don’t know can most definitely hurt you.”

  —Martin Baker

  Driving through downtown, returning to an only moderately creepy suburban home

  “ALL RIGHT,” said Shelby, once we were back on the road and moving away from the Sarpa household. “Do you want to explain to me how a woman can be married to a cobra? Because I’m afraid that’s where I got lost.”

  “Kumari may look like a human woman, but she and Daksha are the same species,” I said. “Wadjet demonstrate extreme sexual dimorphism. Kumari is female, Daksha is male.” That wasn’t necessarily a given. Kumari had more in common biologically with an alligator than she did with either Sarah or Dee. Specifying gender seemed like the safest way to go.