“It’s not,” said Frank dangerously.
“—allow me to present Alexander Price, and Shelby Tanner. Shelby belongs to the Thirty-Six Society.”
“Cheers,” said Shelby, solving the “separated from the group” issue by sliding across the hood of my car and landing on her feet beside me. “Nice . . . village? Village works as well as anything, I suppose. Nice village you’ve got here. How often are you doing crop rotation?”
“Every season,” said Frank automatically. Then he scowled. “Hang on. I’m not going to answer any questions about how we’re living. You’re the ones who should be answering questions.”
“Frank.” I could practically hear Dee roll her eyes. “They’re my guests. Behave.”
“They’re humans,” said one of the children—a little boy in a Pokémon T-shirt. Some things are apparently universal. He looked curious. The reason was revealed as he continued, “I’ve never seen humans before. Can we keep them?”
“No,” said Frank. “They won’t be staying. Or at least, they won’t be staying alive.”
“Do you lot always threaten company?” asked Shelby. “Like, is this a normal social thing, and I should start threatening you back if I want to be civil?”
“Please don’t,” said Dee.
“Go right ahead,” said Frank.
“When in doubt, we uninvited humans like to listen to the people who have a known track record of not trying to kill us,” I said hastily, before things could get any worse. “Look: we’re here because I asked Dee to bring us. She’s been a good friend, and I’m really glad to have been able to assist your community by supplying antivenin and other needed medical supplies. I take it you’re the community doctor, Mr. . . . ?”
“Franklin Javier Lusczando de Rodriguez,” said Frank, drawing himself up to his full height and looking haughtily down his nose. He had a lot of height, which made the gesture more impressive than pretentious, although it was a narrow margin.
“Ah, so you’re Dee’s husband.” I stole a glance at Dee, who wasn’t looking at me at all. This was probably not the top of her list of “ways I want my boss to meet my husband.” I looked back to Frank. “Anyway. Dee has been a huge help since I came to Ohio, and I want to help her in return. I know it would be devastating for you if a Covenant purge were to get started over all this silly cockatrice business.”
As I had expected, saying the word “Covenant” in the middle of a gathering of gorgons was like dropping a lit match into a barrel full of salamanders. Hissing filled the air as people turned to their neighbors, talking in quick, panicked voices. I held my ground, watching Frank. His snakes were still mostly calm, although they were twisting together in a way that could have indicated anything from confusion to guilt.
Finally, he frowned. “Silly cockatrice business?”
I blinked, glancing toward Dee again. She still wasn’t looking at me. “Well, this is going to be fun,” I muttered, and turned back to Frank. “I can see we have a great deal to discuss. Is there someplace we can go to talk about this, preferably where we won’t start a panic?”
Frank kept frowning as he studied me. At long last, he nodded and said, “I have a place. Come with me.”
Frank’s “place” turned out to be one of the larger mobile homes, set off from the rest by almost fifteen yards—unheard of privacy in a community where everyone shared the same open space as both a common area and a means of getting from one place to another. The reason for the privacy was apparent as soon as he opened the door to reveal the gleaming operating table and state-of-the-art dentist’s chair. There was even a maternity area, with several large incubators and a comfortable bed for mothers recuperating from their labor.
“This is your hospital,” I said, looking around with a practiced eye. Everything was clean and well-maintained. If more than one person was sick or injured at a time they would need to share the same room, but apart from that . . . “This is fantastic. You could give my parents tips on how to maintain a private emergency room.”
As I had expected, Frank preened a bit, walking past me to stand in front of the operating table. It came up to his waist. “It can be hard, getting equipment that’s large enough for us to use here,” he said. “It doesn’t help that we need two sets of everything. My apprentice and both our nurses are under six feet tall.”
“Did you go to medical school, then?” asked Shelby.
Frank nodded. “I was young. I still fit in the desks.” The snakes atop his head made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a snicker.
“Good for you,” said Shelby.
“Apprentice?” I asked.
“Yes. Our physiology isn’t exactly like yours, and as you need a license to practice human medicine if you want to get access to most of the stronger painkillers and antibiotics in this country, he and I both went to human schools. Now he’s studying with me to become a proper doctor. When his training is done, he’ll be able to move to another community, and be a great asset to them.”
Given the way Pliny’s gorgon communities handled their families, “great asset” probably meant “attract a better wife.” I nodded. “It’s a good arrangement.”
“We think so. Now.” Frank’s expression turned grave. “What do you mean by ‘silly cockatrice business’?”
“Two men have died at the zoo where Dee and I work, and another died near my home,” I said. “All have shown outward signs of petrifaction. I was able to gain access to the man who died outside the zoo. There was internal petrifaction as well, although it didn’t continue much past the point where it would have been fatal.”
“Then it could have been any number of things. Stone spiders—”
“There was a cockatrice in my backyard last night.” That stopped him. I shrugged as I continued, “We locked eyes; petrifaction began. If I hadn’t had someone with me, I wouldn’t have survived long enough for the solution to be assembled. I’m not going to be able to pull off a trick like that again. Keeping me from losing my eyesight—or my life—meant using most of the cockatrice antivenin we had in stock.”
Frank blinked. “You saw the cockatrice.”
“Yes.”
“Forgive me if this seems a bit . . . blunt . . . but are you lying to me right now? You’re human. You can’t have locked eyes with a serpent and lived.”
“He didn’t,” said Shelby. “He locked eyes with a cockatrice. I know. I was there. It would have been me, but he pushed me out of the way before the bugger could get close enough to do any damage.” She hesitated before she added, “I could have been killed.”
“Serpent is slang for both cockatrice and basilisks,” I explained. To Frank I said, “If Shelby hadn’t been there and able to follow my instructions, I would have died. Believe me, I have no reason to lie to you about this.”
Frank nodded slowly. “You’ll excuse my dubiousness.”
“Absolutely. I’d think you were full of it if you were the one telling this story. But there’s more.”
“More?”
“In examining the body we were able to obtain, we found fang marks.” I pulled out my phone, opened the gallery, and scrolled to the picture of the back of Mr. O’Malley’s leg. I held it out for Frank to see. “In your professional opinion, what bit this man?”
Frank frowned. “May I?” he asked, half-reaching for my phone.
“You may.” I let him take the phone, and waited as he studied the picture, his eyes darting from side to side as he took in the small cues to scale and perspective. His snakes even got in on the act, darting forward until their noses nearly brushed the screen, tongues flicking in and out the whole time.
“I want to tell you that you have no business here,” he said finally, and handed the phone back to me. “I want to tell you that you are not only wrong and misguided, but you are trespassing and possibly in danger of your lives.”
; “But you’re not going to tell me any of those things,” I said.
“No.” Frank shook his head. The snakes curled back against his scalp with the motion, hissing and slithering against each other. “I can’t. These marks . . . they could have been made by my own fangs.” He paused, eyes widening as he realized what he’d said—and who he’d said it to. “I didn’t mean—”
“I know,” I said. “It can’t have been you. It’s literally not possible. Not only would your bite radius be substantially bigger, but there’s no way a man of your stature could have come into my neighborhood, bitten my next-door neighbor, and gotten away without being seen. Someone would have called the police about ‘that really tall guy,’ and we’d have more to talk about right now.”
“See, honey,” said Dee, sounding relieved. “I would never have brought them here if I thought there was a chance you were involved.”
I would have been annoyed by that announcement if I hadn’t understood it so very well. Family has to come first in this world. Sometimes that means making decisions that you really don’t want to make. “So the problem becomes clear,” I said. “There’s a cockatrice somewhere in Columbus, and we don’t know where it’s going during the day, or how it got there. I think someone brought it there, and is recapturing it somehow. There’s no other reason it would have been at both my place of work and where I live.”
“So you think someone is trying to kill you?” asked Frank, frowning.
“That’s the problem: I’ve got no idea.” I shook my head. “It’s hard to see the cockatrice showing up at my house as anything other than an attack, but who was it an attack on? I don’t live alone, and Shelby was there. If we’re talking about someone who keeps a cockatrice crammed into a cat carrier, they would have had plenty of time to tail her, dump it in the backyard, and get out of sight.”
“Gosh, I’m going to sleep great tonight,” said Shelby.
“Sorry.” I shrugged. “So maybe they’re trying to kill me, or Shelby, or they’re attacking the zoo and having two employees in the same building was too much to resist. Or maybe it was a coincidence. I guess we’ll find out when the cockatrice shows up at my house again. Until then, I’m more worried about who’s using a poor dumb animal like a weapon.”
“You’re not here to kill it?” asked Frank, frowning.
“If you’re Dee’s husband, you know I’m running a basilisk breeding program at the zoo,” I said. “I’m not in the business of killing innocent creatures because they were temporarily inconvenient.” The three dead men probably wouldn’t have liked me calling their deaths “inconvenient,” but it was true as far as it went: the cockatrice hadn’t meant them any harm. It was whoever put the cockatrice into their paths that I wanted to get my hands on.
“What will happen if you capture it?”
“If it’s been partially tamed, enough that it’s going to keep wandering into human habitations, I’ll see if there’s anyone with a breeding program or private facility who we can trust and who’s currently looking for a cockatrice,” I said. “There are a few carnivals still running traditional sideshows, and most of those have both the enclosures and the equipment needed to safely display a cockatrice. It’s not the best solution. The poor thing will never be free again. But it won’t have to die, and it won’t kill anyone else. If it’s still wild, all of this is moot; we’ll relocate it to one of the cockatrice ranges in the Appalachians, and forget that it was ever here.”
“And what of the one who made those bite marks you showed me?”
This was going to be the tricky one. “Whoever bit my neighbor was a ‘who,’ not a ‘what.’ The thing about ‘whats,’ like the cockatrice, is that they don’t do what they do out of malice, or out of anything other than instinct. ‘Whos’ are different. They’re people. And people should know what’s right from what’s wrong.”
Frank narrowed his eyes. “So you get to make that determination all by yourself? That sounds suspiciously like Covenant thinking.”
“Not unless there’s an immediate threat to the lives of those around me. I’m not Covenant. I don’t think like that. But I’m not going to let the sins of my fathers keep me from reaching for a gun when someone is trying to kill me.” Belatedly, I realized that the gorgons hadn’t taken our weapons away. They were that confident about their ability to overpower us. “At the same time, if I find out that it’s someone from this community doing the killing, I will expect you to stop them, through whatever means are necessary. I don’t care if you exile them, imprison them, or what, but you can’t let this go on. It’s going to attract the attention of the Covenant. That wasn’t an idle threat.”
“I never thought it was,” said Frank. He turned to face the back of the trailer, where a blue curtain walled off whatever was on the other side. “Have you heard enough?”
“I have,” said a mild female voice with a thick Saskatchewan accent. The curtain was pushed aside, and a female gorgon with skin the color of rattlesnake scales in the moonlight stepped into the main trailer. I couldn’t tell her subspecies on sight. Her snakes were long, falling all the way down to the middle of her back, and Frank’s head only came up to her collarbone, making her at least nine feet tall. She didn’t look old, but she felt it. I swallowed the urge to bow.
The older gorgon studied us through narrowed, sand-colored eyes. Finally, she offered me her hand, and smiled, showing teeth that were more like an alligator’s than a human’s. “Hello,” she said. “My name is Hannah. You are Jonathan’s boy, are you not?”
I took her hand. Her skin was cool. “Jonathan was my great-grandfather,” I said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Great-grandfather? How time flies.” She shook my hand gently, only squeezing a little before she let me go. “He was a good man. He helped my parents to wed. I am grateful for that.” She turned searching eyes on Dee and Shelby. “You are the newest Healy girl?”
“Sorry?” said Shelby.
“She’s my partner, yes,” I said. If Hannah had known my great-grandfather, then she must have also known my great-grandmother, Fran. Until that moment, I hadn’t considered quite how much Shelby looked like her, and like every other woman in the last three generations of my family, with the possible exception of Antimony, who looked more like my grandfather than anyone else. One more thing to talk about with the therapist I didn’t have.
“Hmm.” Hannah nodded. “She will do. Now, Deanna. Did you really think that bringing humans to our home was the best choice you could have made?”
“Under the circumstances, yes,” said Dee.
“So long as we are not lying to each other.” Hannah turned back to me. “Because you are Jonathan’s boy, I will trust you enough to listen. You will be my guests for dinner this night. Once we have eaten, then we will discuss what will happen next.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” I said.
She smiled, displaying the sharp tips of her lower canines. “Thank me after we have eaten,” she said. “Anything less would be folly.” She turned and walked out of the trailer, leaving us all staring after her.
Frank’s wide hand fell heavily on my shoulder. I looked up at him.
“Well, I hope you were planning on sticking around,” he said. “You’re about to have an interesting evening.”
I managed not to gulp.
Fifteen
“Gorgon society is fascinating in its complexity, especially since, until you know what kind of gorgon you’re dealing with, there’s no way of knowing whether the society is polite or not.”
—Jonathan Healy
At a hidden gorgon community in the middle of the Ohio woods, where no one is going to hear the cries for help
“THIS IS BAD,” said Dee.
“It’s certainly not good,” agreed Frank. “Does anyone know you brought them here?”
“My grandparents,” I said. “Which means tha
t the rest of my family will know in short order if I don’t come home.”
“Nobody knows I’m here but Alex and his folks,” said Shelby cheerfully. I blinked at her. She shrugged. “No point in lying about it. I figure if I’m going to be eaten, I’ll get avenged when your people come riding in with their guns blazing. Although speaking of guns, this feels like a good time to point out that anybody trying to eat me had better be prepared for a face full of bullets. It’s not a very friendly thing to do, but neither is eating your company.”
“No one’s eating anyone,” said Dee firmly. “We don’t eat humans. Pliny’s gorgons are . . . well, we’re not vegetarians, but we’re not people-eaters either.”
“But Hannah’s not a Pliny’s gorgon, is she?” I asked slowly. Dee and Frank both turned to look at me. I shook my head. “Not entirely, I mean. She’s too tall. Female Pliny’s gorgons don’t get that tall. And her snakes . . . something about the shape of their heads is wrong.”
“Her mother was a Pliny’s gorgon,” said Frank. “Her father was of Medusa’s breed.”
I gaped at him. “Pliny’s gorgons are cross-fertile with greater gorgons?” I realized how insensitive the question was as soon as it was out. I winced. “Sorry. That was rude of me. I just didn’t realize . . . anyway. There’s nothing in the books to indicate that’s possible.”
“Then you haven’t read your great-grandfather Jonathan’s notes very carefully. Hannah speaks very highly of him. He spoke in favor of the marriage of her parents, when it became clear that they were going through with their union.”
“I may have missed a few things,” I said. It was a little white lie: whatever I’d missed wasn’t in the house to be read. There are big holes in the information we got from Great-Grandpa Healy’s notes, and they can almost certainly be blamed on his daughter—my maternal grandmother—who burned a lot of his things after he died. In her defense, she had good reason. That doesn’t justify losing whatever knowledge she’d destroyed.
Half-Off Ragnarok: Book Three of InCryptid Page 20