Half-Off Ragnarok Read online

  The Siberian tiger reared up behind Shelby, putting its paws on her shoulders. The audience gasped. Shelby reached back and calmly scratched the tiger under the jaw, saying, “These big fellas aren’t domesticated, but as you can see, they’ve got a lot in common with the cats you may have at home, or the ones you love to watch on the Internet.” Nervous laughter answered her. “They deserve our respect, and they deserve to be protected, because our world would be a lot poorer without them. Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time we got back to work. These beauties will be back in their enclosures and ready for their adoring public in about fifteen minutes! Thank you all!”

  Thunderous applause greeted her announcement. I stood and hopped over the bench I’d been sitting on, heading for the nearest exit before I could get swept up in the crowd. They’d be thronging to the tiger enclosures, trying to get a good spot to gawk at the performers up close. I was doing something similar. I just had a different performer in mind.

  The amphitheater was a stand-alone structure, but the green space where the tigers were displayed backed up on the main cat house, allowing the staff to discreetly move the animals back into their individual runs, and then on to their proper places. While the crowds formed around the outdoor enclosures, I slipped into the main building and made my way to the door marked “Staff Only.”

  The hall on the other side combined industrial tile floors with glossy white walls. It shared certain traits with hospital halls, like the fact that it had obviously been designed to be cleaned with a power hose. There were even drains in the floor. A few interns passed me as I walked toward Shelby’s office. They waved. I nodded. We all went about our business.

  The door to Shelby’s office was standing slightly ajar. I stopped outside, rapping my knuckles against the wood under her nameplate. “Can I come in?”

  “That depends,” replied Shelby, yanking the door open and glaring at me. Her hair was out of its ponytail, falling to frame her face in disheveled waves. “Are you going to demand I talk like Crocodile Dundee to amuse the tourists?” Now that she was no longer on stage, her accent had faded, becoming more common and less cliché.

  “I wasn’t planning to,” I said. “I just wanted to let you know I actually made it to the show today.”

  “Really?” Shelby stepped back, making room for me to come into her office. It was the same size as mine, but contained what seemed like ten times as much stuff. I was constantly afraid of an avalanche when I came to visit. “Do you want a medal?”

  “Not particularly.” I moved into the office. “I was doing the copperhead survey this morning in the swamp.”

  “Mud and venomous snakes. Sounds like the ideal date.” There was a sharp edge to her words, and she still wasn’t smiling. I managed not to wince. Shelby was one of those people who looked miserable, almost funereal, when she wasn’t smiling. When she did, it seemed like she could outshine the sun.

  She hadn’t been smiling much at me recently.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t invite you,” I said. “I knew you had a show this afternoon.”

  “I suppose that’s fair,” she said, after a pause that left me squirming. Finally, the corners of her mouth tipped upward, and she asked, “How’d you like it?”

  I grinned. “I thought it was fantastic.”

  “Good, because I thought we had some pacing issues during the conservation section,” she said, and began chattering rapidly about the structure of the tiger show, leaving me free to listen and enjoy being back in her good graces.

  Shelby was possibly the most dangerous opponent I’d ever faced: brilliant, beautiful, and a biologist who knew how to wrestle a mountain lion without hurting either herself or the animal. She hit all my buttons at once. And she didn’t even know my real name, or anything else about my real life. That was part of why she was annoyed at me—I kept pulling away every time she got too close, and I was pretty sure she was getting tired of my crap.

  Her talk about the tiger show was winding down. I watched her carefully, trying to decide what the appropriate next move would be. Shelby answered the question for me by crossing the room, leaning forward, and kissing me. I reacted without thinking, sliding my arms around her waist and kissing her back, pulling her against me until I could smell the faint wild traces of tiger on her skin.

  When she pulled away, her smile had become something sweeter and darker, like cherry cola syrup. “Come on, Alex, what do you say? Take a girl to dinner after work?”

  “I’d love to,” I said, allowing my honest regret to come through in my voice, “but I can’t. I have two school groups coming tomorrow, and I have a lot of work to do on the samples that I collected today. I’m really sorry.”

  Shelby’s smile faded, replaced by a look of profound sorrow. The first few times I disappointed her, I thought I’d broken her heart. It took weeks before I realized that she was just one of those people who looked like the world was ending every time she was a little unhappy. “You and science have the best relationship. I’m not sure there’s really room in it for me.”

  “Shelby—”

  “You’ve canceled six dates on me, Alex, and that’s in the last month. I know we’re not official or anything, but a girl likes to know that the man she’s seeing actually wants to see her once in a while.”

  “He does! I mean, I do! I’ve just been busy lately, that’s all.” My words sounded hollow even to my own ears. Maybe Shelby had a point. Maybe it wasn’t fair to either one of us for me to keep stringing her along like this. If I was just willing to admit that it was never going to work, I could save us both a lot of pain in the long run. (In the short run, however, I would be dealing with an angry Australian woman who had access to a large number of predatory cats for the rest of my tenure in Ohio.)

  And I couldn’t do it. I liked Shelby. I liked feeling like there was someone in the world who didn’t give a damn about my family or our mission, and who just liked me for me. It would all fall apart eventually, but for now . . .

  For now, I just wanted to enjoy it.

  Shelby frowned. “You’re really sure you can’t come out with me tonight? There might be ice cream in it for you . . .”

  “You have no idea how much I wish I could,” I said, shaking my head. “Can I maybe get a rain check?”

  There was a brittle edge to her laughter as she said, “At this rate, we’d need a monsoon for you to pay back all the rain checks that you owe. Come on, Alex. Give me a date. I’m begging you here. Have mercy, and tell me when I’ll need my rain gear.”

  I grimaced. It would take most of the night to dissect the frickens. The next night, I was supposed to be watching my cousin so that my grandparents could have their date night. But the night after that . . . “How’s the day after tomorrow?” I asked. “If you say it’s good, I promise you nothing will interfere. I’ll be all yours for the whole evening.”

  “You know, I’m fairly sure I’ve heard that one before,” she said. “What can you offer to sweeten the deal?” Shelby stepped close enough to poke me in the chest. “Well?”

  “Um . . . no biology homework?”

  “Aw, and see, I was hoping for a bit of biology homework. The practical sort.” Shelby leaned up and kissed me, long and slow and with the kind of promise that made me truly regret the fact that I couldn’t go home with her immediately. She smiled again as she pulled away, a languid expression that she could almost have borrowed from the cats she cared for. “I’ll see you then. Don’t you dare be late. And now, you’ll be going. I need to change.”

  She pushed me out of the office and into the hall, where I stood, gaping like an idiot, as she closed and locked the door behind me.

  The rest of the afternoon passed in a flurry of school groups and the usual questions about the denizens of the reptile house, many of which were some variation on “can’t you make it be less boring?” Reptiles are fascinating things, but you have to be willing to spend a lot of time waiting for them to move.

  The kids who passed t
hrough the reptile house would probably have been a lot more interested in my private research projects—frogs with feathers and winged lizards that could turn a man to stone. Hopefully, with a little luck and a little more time, we’d be able to bring things like the frickens and the basilisks into the protected valley of mainstream science before they went totally extinct in the hinterlands of cryptozoology.

  I was in a rotten mood by the time we closed. I didn’t like abandoning Shelby and her interesting notions of biology homework just to spend another night alone with my microscope. I know I’ve already said that I sometimes envy my sisters, but nights like these are the ones where it gets hard to deal with. Verity chose a field of specialization that regularly brings her into contact with sapient cryptid species who could explain what they were and where they came from. I chose something that looks a lot like traditional biology. Just a little more likely to turn you to stone or melt you or mutate you if you’re not careful about what you’re doing.

  Basically, I chose the specialization that means spending an awful lot of time alone. I drove along the tree-lined streets of Columbus and cursed myself for poor career choices, poor wardrobe choices, poor choices of pet . . . basically, if I could curse myself for it, I did. It made me feel a little bit better, paradoxically; after all, if I was doing absolutely everything wrong, I was at least consistent. That was something, right?

  My grandparents live in one of Columbus’ older housing developments, a place the locals call “Bexley,” which was designed back when they still allowed multiple types of homes in every neighborhood. You have to pay close attention to realize that the same six frames repeat over and over again as you drive through the area. If you don’t, you could easily mistake their neighborhood for something that occurred organically, rather than being planned by some canny developers out to make a buck. Even if you weren’t paying close attention, though, you’d probably realize that there’s something a little bit . . . off . . . about my grandparents’ place. It’s the only three-story house on the block, for one, and the only house with a widow’s walk. But most of all, it’s the only house surrounded by an eight-foot fence with spikes on top.

  My grandparents have been practicing “blending in with the neighbors” for a long time. Maybe someday, they’ll actually be good at it.

  The gate was already open, in anticipation of my arrival. Grandma’s car was in its customary place by the door, and Grandpa’s car was parked behind it. I pulled up behind him.

  “Home sweet home,” I said, turning off the engine. The porch light was already on as I walked up the pathway to the door. I smiled at that small gesture of hospitality, pulling my house keys out of my pocket.

  I didn’t start my stay in Columbus by moving in with my grandparents. I originally had an apartment downtown, right in the heart of the city, where I’d be able to experience the nightlife and see the sights. Only after six months, I figured out that all the nightlife did was make it hard for me to sleep, and the only sights I was seeing were either through a microscope or out in the swamp, which was nowhere near where I was living. And then my cousin Sarah got seriously hurt saving Verity’s life, and it suddenly seemed like a really good idea for me to take my grandparents up on their offer of a place to stay. We’re family. We stick together.

  “Grandma, Grandpa, I’m home!” I called, dropping my briefcase next to the coatrack and peeling off my light jacket. Not that I needed one for Ohio in the spring, but I grew up in Oregon; I feel naked without a coat. Crow appeared at the head of the stairs, croaking once in greeting before disappearing again, off on some obscure griffin business that didn’t involve coming down for scritches.

  “Alex!” My grandfather emerged from the kitchen. He was grinning widely, and had a frilly apron that read “Kiss the Cook” struggling to remain tied around his waist. “You made it in time for dinner!”

  I smiled. “That was the goal. I have a lot of work to do tonight, so I figured I should spend some quality time with my family.”

  “Good,” said Grandpa. “I look forward to hearing about your day. Now come give your grandmother a kiss.” He motioned for me to follow him. Being an obedient grandson, I did as I was bid, and stepped into the warm, homey-smelling air of the kitchen. Sometimes it’s good to go where everybody knows your name . . . and your species.

  My grandparents have what could charitably be referred to as “a mixed marriage.” Not in the sense that they’re of different religions or races, but in the sense that they’re actually different species, and neither of them is a member of the species commonly known as Homo sapiens. (Their daughter, my mother, is human. She was adopted.)

  Grandma Angela is a cuckoo, a form of hyper-evolved parasitic wasp with annoyingly strong telepathic abilities. They look like pale, black-haired humans, for reasons that only nature can explain. Nature’s not talking, possibly because even nature realizes that giving perfect camouflage to apex predators is sort of a dick move. Grandpa Martin is a little closer to human—or at least, he started out that way. He’s what we call a Revenant, a construct of formerly dead body parts that has been successfully reanimated through one highly unpleasant mechanism or another. In his case, it was your standard mad scientist bent on denying the laws of God and man in favor of obeying his own twisted muse. The result of that long-dead scientist’s tinkering was my grandfather, a six-and-a-half-foot–tall man who looks, charitably speaking, like he’s wrestled one too many bears in his day. He’s one of the nicest men I’ve ever met, maybe because he doesn’t feel like anything is worth getting too worked up over.

  Grandma married him because he was the first man she’d ever met who wasn’t affected by her telepathy. This is the sort of thing that Internet dating sites never have a field for. Anyway, they’d settled in Ohio and adopted three children: my mother Evelyn, my uncle Drew, whose room I was currently occupying, and my cousin Sarah, who was my age. (Technically, this makes Sarah my aunt, but “cousin” is a better match for our respective ages and actual relationship.)

  Speaking of Grandma, she was taking dinner out of the oven when Grandpa and I walked into the kitchen. She raised her head and smiled. “Alex! You’re home early.”

  I glanced at the clock. “It’s almost six. I need to work on my definition of ‘early.’”

  “But you can’t argue with me, now, can you?” She handed the covered casserole dish to my grandfather, who didn’t need oven mitts to transport it safely to the table. “Give me a hug and wash your hands before you put your nametag on. We’re having shepherd’s pie for dinner.”

  “I love your shepherd’s pie.” I obligingly hugged her before moving to the sink. I couldn’t stop myself from glancing toward the dining room door as I turned the water on. “How is she?”

  Grandma sighed. “It’s not her best day,” she admitted. “She’s still having trouble remembering who I am. But she’s up and moving around under her own power, and she picked her own clothes out this morning. So that’s a good sign.”

  “Grandma . . .”

  “I know, I know. But it’s not like there’s a manual for this, all right, Alex? There’s no one I can ask. Sarah will get better at her own pace.”

  “Or she won’t.” I tried to keep my words gentle. I didn’t quite succeed.

  My cousin Sarah is a cuckoo, like Grandma, even though they’re probably not biologically related. Like all cuckoos, she manipulates the memories of the people around her as a sort of natural defense, making them feel like she belongs. Well, a few months ago, the Covenant of St. George managed to corner my sister, Verity. If they’d been able to take her back to Europe with them, they could have learned everything there is to know about our family, starting with the part where we still exist, despite being officially wiped out after the Covenant branded us as traitors to humanity. (The Covenant of St. George: assholes with a cause. They want to wipe out all the “monsters” in the world, and the definition they use encompasses most of my family. Oh, and that thing about us being traitors to
humanity? That’s because we used to be members of the Covenant. Hell hath no fury like a centuries-old organization of zealots scorned.)

  Verity couldn’t let that happen. Sarah couldn’t let that happen, and so she stepped in and used what’s supposed to be a passive defense in an active fashion, revising the Covenant’s memories of what they’d seen in New York. The result was a bunch of brain-blasted operatives . . . and one brain-burnt cousin.

  Grandma went to New York to bring Sarah home. I moved in with them three days later.

  My grandmother looked at me silently for a moment, processing my contradiction. Then she nodded, very slightly, and commanded, “Dry your hands, put on your nametag, and bring the biscuits.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I’ve always found it best to do as I was told when dealing with my grandmother. Both my grandmothers, really. Dad’s mom isn’t any less terrifying when crossed.

  The nametag was preprinted, large block letters on a white background. ALEX. Without her telepathy, Sarah—whose species didn’t evolve with the need to recognize faces, thanks to their habit of reading minds—couldn’t tell one person from another. That included her family. She could normally have told us apart by voice, but as bad as she’d been lately, that was by no means a guarantee. Nametags made things a little easier on her, and hence a lot easier on the rest of us.

  Grandpa had already dished out the shepherd’s pie when we got to the dining room. I put down the biscuits at the center of the table and took my seat across from Sarah, pulling my plate closer to me. Her plate was conspicuously empty. That meant this wasn’t one of the days when she could be trusted with a fork. This was going to be a fun dinner.