Half-Off Ragnarok Page 31

  “Thank you.”

  There was a clunk from her end of the phone, followed by the distant sound of her bellowing for her mom to come to the phone. I gritted my teeth as I merged onto the freeway, still driving one-handed. It was easier than I expected, maybe because I was too angry and too afraid to really pay attention to what I was doing. Things are always easy when you refuse to let yourself remember how dangerous they are.

  “Alex?” Kumari sounded worried. That made sense: I didn’t normally call the house several times in the same day. “What is going on?”

  “Have you made any headway with who might be trying to kill us, Kumari? Because Shelby’s missing, and it looks like whoever took her went back to the local gorgon community, or someplace near there. What haven’t you told me? What do I need to know?”

  Kumari gasped. If not for that, I would have thought that she’d hung up on me as the seconds ticked past without her saying anything.

  “Kumari. I’d like to put both hands back on the wheel before I flip the car. Please.”

  “I didn’t . . . it was just a rumor. I gave it no credence.”

  “What was just a rumor?”

  “The mother of the community in the woods, she was a crossbreed. Father of one strain, mother of another.”

  “Yes, I know that,” I said impatiently. “I had dinner with her.”

  “Most crossbreeds are sterile. She was not.”

  That was a surprise. “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning she had a son, but he was born malformed and twisted. Genetics were not kind. He was an outcast among his own people, always seeking a way to earn his place. He disappeared some years ago.”

  “This is fascinating from a biological standpoint, but what does it have to do with Shelby?”

  “When I contacted the local bogeymen and explained what I needed to ask, they told me to look for the gorgon’s son. That while many of them would be quite pleased if you and your family were killed, no one had been asking about it lately, save for the gorgon’s son.”

  “I thought you said he disappeared.”

  “Yes,” said Kumari. “I did.”

  This time, her silence extended until I pulled the phone from my ear and checked the screen. The call had ended. I had five bars of service; we hadn’t been disconnected. She hung up on me.

  “Swell,” I muttered, dropping the phone into the passenger seat. Finally gripping the wheel with both hands, I hit the gas and sped down the highway, heading as fast as I could for what might well be certain doom.

  There are species in the cryptid world that are cross-fertile with each other, just like there are in the scientifically accepted world: as a wise man once said, life finds a way. Life is extremely bloody-minded, and often finds the worst way possible, preferably with a body count somewhere in the triple digits. Hannah’s existence was biologically no stranger than the existence of, say, mules, hinnies, or ligers. It happens. But crossbreeds of that type are almost always sterile, because while nature likes to find a way, biology likes to set limits. Those limits say “no, at some point, we’re pushing things too far, now stop before you get silly.”

  There have been a few recorded cases of mules and the like having offspring, but they’re few and far between, and almost nothing is known about how those babies will mature, or what traits they’ll inherit from their crossbred parents. If Hannah was fertile, that changed everything.

  I hit the gas a little harder.

  Kumari hadn’t named Hannah’s impossible offspring, calling him only “the gorgon’s son,” but based on Shelby’s experience at the zoo, I had a decent idea of who it was.

  Lloyd, who should have been the man at the gate when the second guard was killed, yet was somehow conveniently missing from his post when the cockatrice came to call.

  Lloyd, who always wore his hat, and who knew the zoo inside and out.

  Lloyd, who had looked so surprised to see me after I saw the cockatrice in my backyard.

  He wasn’t a zookeeper, but that would actually make it easier for him to move unobserved. Who watched the guards to see if they were in the right place? Management, presumably, and yet no one else on the property would have reported him for snooping around a restricted area. He could have hidden his cockatrice anywhere in the zoo without needing to worry about being caught.

  Lloyd always wore his glasses, thick, Coke-bottle things that looked too heavy for his face. What if they weren’t intended to improve his vision, but rather to protect the zoo’s staff and patrons from the full effect of his gaze?

  I’d always taken Lloyd for human. It was an assumption, but it was a statistically safe one: even in an area with a large cryptid population, nine out of ten people on the street, if not more, will be human beings. We are the dominant sapient species on this planet, numbers-wise. So assuming that the little old man who checked my badge at the front gate was human wasn’t arrogant; it was reasonable. And it may have gotten Shelby killed.

  I broke the speed limit for the entire drive, and saw no police on the roads; so much for Ohio’s finest. Then again, with a killer in the area who was somehow turning his victims partially into stone, it was possible they just had better things to worry about than speeders—and depending on the strength of Grandma’s whammy, they could have been choosing not to see me out of a vague sense of self-preservation. I barely slowed down in time to avoid missing my turnoff into the forest, where the trees promptly closed in.

  Illusions can’t actually keep you out if you’re determined to keep going; they just mess with the visual aspects of the world, and do nothing to change the physical. I tightened my hands on the wheel, hoping my memory of the road was correct, and kept going into what should have been unbroken forest—

  —only to emerge onto the curving road surrounding the gorgon community. On a hunch, I leaned forward and peered upward. In the sky, high overhead, a black shape that didn’t quite look like a bird was circling. “Good boy, Crow,” I said, and continued on my way down, through the spiral, to the cluster of mobile homes below.

  A crowd was gathering by the time I reached ground level, gorgons appearing in every doorway and around the sides of every building. I slowed enough to give them time to get out of my way but kept driving until I reached the spot where Dee had instructed me to park on my first visit.

  She emerged from a nearby trailer as I turned off the engine, making it clear that she’d been watching my approach. Her snakes were up and hissing, mirroring the distressed look on her face. I adjusted my glasses to make sure they would shield me from accidental petrifaction, unfastened my seat belt, and got out of the car.

  “Alex!” Dee skidded to a stop a few feet away from me. Frank was approaching from the back of the crowd; he must have been in his office, leaving him farther to walk before he could find out what I was doing here. “What in the world—?”

  “Look up.” I pointed, to make my meaning perfectly clear.

  It’s interesting: even when they’re not primates, most things that look like humans will react like humans under normal circumstances. That includes following simple directions that don’t make sense. More than half the crowd, Dee and Frank included, looked up to where Crow was doing his slow circle.

  Of the gorgons who did look up, only Dee gasped, her hand flying to her cheek before she said, sounding unnerved, “Is that Crow? What’s he doing?”

  “Hunting.” I waited until she looked back down before I continued, “Shelby’s missing, Dee. She was hurt while we were searching for the cockatrice at the zoo, and in the time it took me to go and get the car, someone took her. When I asked Crow to find her, he came here. When I called Kumari and asked if anyone might be interested in hurting us, she told me a really interesting story. About Hannah, and the son no one bothered to tell me she had.”

  Dee’s eyes widened further, and her snakes stopped hissing as they coiled close against her head, becoming a tightly-knotted pile of serpentine curls. “I don’t understand what you’re talking
about.”

  “She spoke to the local bogeymen. I asked her, since they won’t talk to me. And according to what they told her, I should be looking for ‘the gorgon’s son’ when I’m trying to find the person who took Shelby. So is there anything you’d been wanting to tell me, Dee? As a friend? Because now would be the time.”

  One of the gorgon men to my left took a step forward, the snakes atop his head hissing menacingly. I had the gun out of my belt and pointed in his direction before he could take a second step. I didn’t turn, but he stopped moving, which told me my aim was true. Not taking my eyes off Dee, I continued, “Also, we’re all friends here, right? I mean, I know I’m outnumbered, so you could technically go ahead and jump me, but I have eight bullets in this gun, and I’m a real fast shot. Right now, we’re having a chat. No hostilities. I’d like to keep it that way. But if you decide we’re going to have problems, I’m not going to be the guy who tells you no.”

  “Paul, stop it,” snapped Dee, dropping her hand to her side. The gorgon to my left took a big step backward. I lowered my gun. Dee focused back on me. “Alex, I swear, I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. I’ve been here all day. We all have.”

  “I believe you,” I said wearily. “That’s the hard part. But someone tried to burn down Shelby’s apartment building last night, and now she’s missing. I want her back, preferably alive and intact. Crow led me here. You didn’t tell me Hannah had a son. Now do you want to help all these things make sense, or are you just going to keep standing there?”

  Frank pushed his way through the crowd to Dee’s side. He put a hand on her shoulder, looking dispassionately at the gun I was holding, before he asked, “What do you want us to do?”

  “I want you to tell me where to find Hannah’s son.”

  “I wish we could.” Frank shook his head. “No one here knows.”

  I looked up to where Crow was still endlessly circling, like a carrion bird above its prey. I wished there were a way I could call him back to land and make him show me where to go next. Sadly, even a smart animal is still an animal. He’d done as much as he was going to do. I looked back down.

  “Fine, then,” I said to Dee and Frank. “If you can’t take me to Hannah’s son, I’ll settle for the next best thing. Take me to your leader. I want to talk to Hannah.”

  Twenty-three

  “Underestimate the power of gravity, if you like; underestimate how many bullets you’ll need to take out a chimera. But never, if you value your life, underestimate what a parent will do for the sake of preserving a child.”

  —Alexander Healy

  At a hidden gorgon community in the middle of the Ohio woods, which is probably a terrible place to be right now

  IT WASN’T A SURPRISE when Dee and Frank led me away from the buildings that made up the bulk of the community, heading toward the woods. We were heading away from the fringe farms, I noted; that was a little more unexpected. The fringe must have come later.

  “I wish you’d called,” said Dee, for the third time.

  “I wish you’d told me Lloyd was a gorgon,” I said, my temper beginning to fray around the edges. “Maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference. Maybe it would have made all the difference. Now people are dead, and Shelby’s missing, and we’re never going to know.”

  “You cannot blame Deanna for protecting her people,” said Frank.

  “Like hell I can’t.” I kept walking, locking my eyes on the tree line. Nothing was moving there. Any deer that lived in this stretch of the Ohio woods would have learned to be cautious, to avoid the smell of both humans and snakes. They would have had to be stupid not to have learned.

  Snakes have a distinctive smell, dry and ancient, like the wrappings of a mummy or the rot that sleeps at the heart of a rainforest. Pliny’s gorgons like Dee and Frank have a bit of that same smell, but it’s only noticeable if you get right up on top of them, moving into their personal space, which is never a safe place to be. The closer we got to the woods, the stronger the smell became, until it was like we were walking into an old, primal version of the reptile house at the zoo. The hair on my arms stood on end as my mammalian sense of self-preservation kicked in, trying to tell me that I was doing something incredibly stupid. Dee and Frank didn’t seem to share my nerves, probably because they didn’t have any mammalian instincts to tell them that walking into the lair of a giant snake was a suboptimal plan.

  I kept walking. No matter how uncomfortable the situation made me, if I wanted to find Shelby, I needed to find Lloyd, and if I wanted to find Lloyd, I was going to need to talk to Hannah. We reached the tree line. Dee and Frank stopped where they were.

  “You don’t have to do this,” said Dee. “We can go ahead and ask her if she’ll see you. We can—”

  “There’s only one way you’re getting me to stay behind, and I don’t think you’re ready to take that step yet,” I said.

  “Don’t be so sure,” said Frank darkly. “You endanger us.”

  “No, I don’t. I am saving you.” I glared at him, fighting the urge to start shouting. We were wasting time. Shelby could be bleeding out, and I was standing here arguing about whether or not I had the right to rescue her. “Do you think this can keep happening and no one’s going to notice? You’re one dead body—one more disappearance—away from the feds sweeping in here like the wrath of God, and one rumor on the Internet away from the Covenant coming to see what that raid really uncovered. Lloyd isn’t a professional. Do you get that? He doesn’t know how to make problems go away. He’s making a mess that’s going to land on your heads. Now you can take me to Hannah and I can continue to pretend that I have any interest in being on your side, or you can force me to find her on my own. And after that happens, we are not playing for the same team, got it?”

  “I take it you think your team will be the winning one?” asked Frank, a dangerous glint in his eye. His snakes rose into a strike position, hissing. Some of them opened their mouths, displaying dangerously sharp fangs.

  “We always have been so far,” I said. “You’re five feet, eight inches away from my current position, Frank. Do you think you can close that distance before I put three bullets in your chest? It’s a math problem. I am very good at math. Unless you’re sure of the answer, I don’t recommend you try to run the numbers.”

  “Frank.” Dee put a hand on his arm, her own snakes hissing and slithering over each other like in an eternally moving knot. “We can trust Alex. We have to trust Alex. He’s right. If this doesn’t stop soon, we’re going to be discovered.”

  “Mammals,” spat Frank. Then he turned and stepped into the woods. Dee glanced back at me, expression somewhere between apologetic and resigned, and went after him.

  I was about to follow two angry gorgons into the woods. I had no cell service, and no one knew where I was. My only potential backup was injured, missing, and presumably being held captive.

  “No turning back now,” I said, and stepped into the trees.

  The smell of snake was stronger once we were past the tree line, like they had somehow been holding it back, preventing it from coming out into the open. Dee and Frank picked a confident trail through the underbrush, following a series of landmarks that I couldn’t distinguish from everything else around us. I tried to stay close behind them, even as my monkey brain shrieked louder and louder, telling me that I needed to turn back at the first possible opportunity.

  As we walked, I started to see glimpses of rock face through the trees. Finally, we moved around a particularly dense clump of elms, and there it was: a cave, cut like a gaping black hole into the side of the Ohio hills. Moss grew thick on the rocks around it, and roots overhung the edge, some of them dangling almost down to the ground. Dee and Frank stopped, allowing me to catch up with them.

  “Hannah lives here,” said Dee needlessly. The smell of snake emanating from the cave was so strong that there was no way Hannah could have lived anywhere else.

  “I got that,” I said. Neither of them
looked inclined to go any further. I eyed them. “Are you staying out here?”

  “You’ve been a great boss, Alex, and that’s rare,” said Dee. “You’re even a pretty good guy, which may be rarer. Most of the time these days, I almost forget that you’re a mammal. And none of that is good enough reason for me to go into that cave with you.”

  Frank didn’t say anything. He simply stood there, stone-faced and silent, save for the soft hissing of the snakes atop his head.

  “Fine,” I said. “Cowards.”

  “Better a live coward than a dead hero,” said Dee.

  “Dead heroes are sort of the family business,” I replied, and started walking toward the cave. The smell of snake got stronger with every step I took, underscored with a thick layer of old blood and older decay. I took my last breath of semi-clean air, put my hand on the pistol at my waist, and stepped through the curtain of roots into the darkness.

  The temperature dropped several degrees as soon as I was inside the cave. The air grew cool and damp at the same time, creating a strange sort of cognitive dissonance. Snakes normally prefer to den in warm places, and the smells of both serpent and decay are hot smells, like chili peppers or sunbaked rock. I slowed my pace, giving my eyes time to adjust to the dimness.

  “Hannah?” I called, hand still on my pistol. “It’s Alexander Price. I need to talk to you.”

  Something slithered in the dark ahead of me. I swallowed hard, fighting back the wave of panic unleashed by my monkey brain. There were a hundred good reasons not to do this. There were a thousand good reasons to turn around and run.

  There was one good reason to be exactly where I was. Her name was Shelby Tanner, and there was a better than good chance that I was in love with her. I kept walking.

  “I’m not here to hurt you, and I don’t want to cause any trouble, but I need to talk to you, and I’m not leaving until that happens,” I said.