Shelby and I followed at a more sedate pace. The goggles would protect us from the petrifying gaze of the gorgons, but they wouldn’t protect us from being bitten by agitated snakes. Humans really are remarkably fragile in the greater scheme of things.
An even taller woman appeared from the back of the crowd. The snakes atop her head were long, dangling like arboreal vipers instead of curling and twisting like rattlesnakes. The other gorgons moved politely out of her way, allowing her to approach us. I stopped walking. Shelby did the same, and the three of us met in the open space in front of the rest of the community.
“Alexander Price,” said Hannah. Her voice was mild, with a Saskatchewan accent that a lifetime in Ohio had yet to ease or erase. It was utterly at odds with her appearance: she sounded more like the nicest waitress at the local diner than a terrifying, nine-foot-tall gorgon matriarch.
“Hannah.” I said her name as respectfully as I could, inclining my head in a solemn bow at the same time. If she had a surname, I didn’t know it. Greater gorgons don’t live among humans as frequently as Pliny’s gorgons do, and some of our habits have yet to catch on in their communities. Hannah took after both her parents.
“I didn’t think to see you here again nearly so soon, and if there were any other choice, I would have taken it,” she said. Her tongue flicked out, human-seeming but supple as a snake’s, and she squinted briefly at Shelby. “Still, our need is great, and you are our best chance of bringing the children home. You understand how precious children are.”
The last part of her statement—“even though you killed my son”—went unspoken. It was still there between us, inevitable and unavoidable.
This is why I hate fieldwork. I’m much happier doing conservation and breeding projects with nonsapient cryptids. We owe them just as much as we do their larger cousins, but they’re so much less likely to hold a grudge. I didn’t say any of that; it wouldn’t have done any good. We were in the situation we were in, and now we just needed to survive it.
“We do,” I said. “Do you have any idea who might have done this?”
“It’s my fault.”
The voice was unfamiliar, high and agonized and heavy with guilt. I turned, as did Hannah and Shelby.
The girl who looked a little bit like Dee had pulled away from what I presumed were her parents and was looking directly at me, chin up, snakes coiled tight in obvious distress. She was wearing jeans and a Lowryland T-shirt, and she looked so young and so afraid.
“My name’s Megan,” she said. “I just got home. This is my fault.”
“It’s not,” Dee said firmly. “You didn’t do this.”
“It is, Mom. Stop trying to defend me.”
“Why do you think that?” I asked. “What do you think you did?”
She took a deep breath. “I’ve been doing my residency at the Lowryland hospital in Florida,” she said. “The semester just ended, so I drove home.”
I nodded slowly. “Okay,” I said. It made sense that she had driven: flying hasn’t been safe for gorgons since the enhanced security measures went into effect. All it would take was one TSA agent trying to pat down a gorgon’s wig for things to get very bad, very quickly.
“Only I couldn’t drive … I couldn’t drive straight through without stopping. It’s fifteen hours if you do it in one straight shot. I couldn’t.” Megan kept her eyes on me—partially, I realized, so she wouldn’t have to look at anyone around her. “I stopped a couple of times. For gas, mostly, and at a motel for the night.”
“What happened, child?” Hannah sounded surprisingly gentle. Megan was still a part of her extended family, even if she’d made some sort of mistake.
“I think someone saw me,” said Megan.
The gorgons around us exploded into shouts and protests. One woman rushed for Megan, hand raised to strike the younger gorgon, and was dragged back by two others. Megan cringed, snakes hissing and writhing in abject misery.
“It was an accident!” she cried. “The curtains were closed, I swear they were, but when the air-conditioning came on, it blew them apart, just a few inches, and I was getting out of the shower, and—” She stopped, holding her hands up helplessly.
“What did they see?” I asked. “Who saw it?”
“I wasn’t wearing my wig,” said Megan. “You can’t really towel-dry snakes. So they saw my … everything.”
“They who?”
“Two men. I closed the curtains, I put my wig on, I opened the door—I figured I could explain, or …” She stopped again, biting her lip.
I shook my head. “I’m human. That doesn’t mean I’m going to judge you.” Gorgons are endangered. Humans aren’t. It’s harsh logic. It still matters. Every death hurts someone, and I’m sure the families of those men would have been heartbroken if Megan had managed to catch them and do what she didn’t want to say she’d been intending to do, but the species wouldn’t have noticed. Megan, on the other hand, was a female Pliny’s gorgon of breeding age. Losing her would be much more of a blow.
“Right. Price.” She took a shaky breath. “I was going to kill them if I’d managed to catch them, but they were gone by the time I got outside. I didn’t see their car.”
“And you think they followed you here,” I said grimly.
She nodded.
“How could you?” Hannah was suddenly looming over Megan, the snakes on her head standing to terrible attention and making her seem even taller. I took an involuntary half-step backward. Humans are only a few millennia removed from monkeys, and part of us will always remember why it’s a good idea to be afraid of really enormous snakes.
Megan stood her ground, but the snakes on her head coiled tight and drooped in clear submission.
“You should have gone the other way as soon as you realized you’d been compromised,” said Hannah, several of her snakes mock-striking toward Megan. “You should have led them as far from us as possible.”
“I thought they were gone,” said Megan. “I had no idea I was being followed.”
“How far away were you when you stopped?” I asked.
Both of them turned to look at me, and I had to fight the urge to step back again.
“Why?” demanded Hannah.
“Because there’s still a cockatrice on the loose out there,” I said. “My basilisks would have a hunting range of up to twenty miles a day in the wild; they’re happy in their habitat at the zoo because I feed them, but if I let them out, they’d keep walking in whatever direction they could find food. I don’t know what a cockatrice’s range is. If it’s been hunting, petrifying small animals or even things like deer, there could be rumors. Hunters talk.”
North America has a big problem with Bigfoot hunters. Never mind that of all the cryptids out there, Bigfoot and Sasquatch are the most closely related to humans, which you’d think might buy them a little respect from their short, fragile, comparatively hairless cousins; there’s always some asshole with a big gun who thinks the way to prove how awesome he is involves shooting and stuffing a sapient being.
The trouble is, Bigfoot are good at going undetected—surprisingly so, given their size. Teen Bigfoot enjoy challenging each other to follow hunters through the woods while pretending to be trees any time there’s a chance they might be seen, and very few of them are ever spotted. Great fun for the Bigfoot, not so much for the hunters, who have a tendency to get frustrated and decide that they should widen their interests. Sadly, this never seems to mean going home and taking up needlepoint. No, it means going all “I want to believe” and striking out to find something new and endangered to shoot at.
The Covenant of St. George has never had a monopoly on so-called “monster hunters.” They just have the best organizational structure and the most dedication to playing weekend extinction event.
“Have you heard those rumors?” asked Hannah.
“No. But my family doesn’t talk much with hunters. They don’t like us because of the way we keep breaking their noses and taking th
eir toys away.” Grandma Alice, especially, hates them with a focused, burning passion. People were a lot more willing to believe in the existence of the unknown when she was young, and the distance between belief and bullets is never as far as we would like.
“Also we were sort of busy going to Australia, fighting werewolves, and trying to keep the Covenant from showing up in your backyard, so maybe go a little easy on him, hey?” said Shelby. Her tone was deceptively mild. She was annoyed. “We didn’t let the cockatrice loose in the first place, and if we haven’t found it, well, you haven’t found it either. Fact is, it being out there means the rumors of a petrifactor could easily be spreading, and now we get to do the cleanup.”
“I’m sorry,” said Megan again.
Dee stepped up next to her daughter, putting her arm around Megan’s shoulders and looking at Hannah with flat defiance. The snakes atop her head drew back, assuming a rearing position.
“What’s done is done,” said Shelby. “We can stand here pointing fingers, or we can get on with finding your kids. Does someone want to show us where they were taken from?”
A low murmur spread through the gorgons. Finally, a woman with white snakes banded in buttery yellow stepped forward.
“I’ll show you,” she said.
“Good,” I said. “Lead the way.”
The crowd parted to let us through, and the three of us walked on, leaving Hannah and her anger, and Megan and her guilt, behind.
* * *
The gorgon community wasn’t large enough for the walk to take long: the woman led us to a small trailer with curtains printed in bright geometric patterns and raised garden beds all around the outside, growing tomatoes and strawberries and various wildflowers.
“That’s their window,” she said, pointing. “Billy and Marigold. They were safe in their beds when I went to sleep. When I woke up …” She stopped and buried her face in her hands.
Shelby patted her on the shoulder, keeping a careful eye on the woman’s snakes as she did. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “It’s not Megan’s, either. We should make sure to tell her that.”
“How can you tell?” I asked.
“The curtains.”
I blinked, giving the trailer a second look. Then I swore softly under my breath.
“They’re the same in all the windows,” I said.
She nodded.
In a surprising number of nonfamilial kidnapping cases, it’s possible to identify the children’s room from outside. They have cartoon curtains, say, or stuffed animals on the windowsill inside, something that tells kidnappers where to enter the house. When my sisters and I were young, our parents had Mickey Mouse curtains on their bedroom window. The one time someone had tried to come into the house to do us harm, they’d gotten a big surprise, and Mom had gotten a broken orbital ridge. Fun times.
If there was no visual way to know which window to pry open, the kidnappers must have had another way to locate the children. That meant they couldn’t possibly have been the men Megan had seen.
Unless we were going about this the wrong way.
“Start looking for tracks,” I said, to Shelby. “I need to go ask Megan a question, and then I need to go home and pick something up.”
“You’ve got that ‘maybe I know what’s going on’ look,” said Shelby. “Do you?”
“I almost hope not,” I said and turned, breaking into a brisk jog as I went back the way we’d come.
The crowd of gorgons had dispersed somewhat, with people going off to take care of things that couldn’t be avoided any longer. Most of the ones I assumed were parents were still there, looking utterly lost. So was Dee, and her family, thankfully. Hannah had moved off to the side, still glowering.
I trotted up to Megan and stopped. “The men who saw you,” I said without preamble. “How far away, and what exactly did you see?”
“Um,” she said. “About six hours’ drive away. I saw … men. Human men, looking through my window.”
“They weren’t just standing in the parking lot and happened to catch a glimpse of you? They were actually looking?”
“Um,” said Megan again. Then she paused, eyes widening. “Yes. Yes! They were looking right at my window. Why would they do that?”
“Because you’re right: they were following you, or at least they were waiting for someone like you. Hannah?” I turned. “I know what happened.”
The gorgon matriarch had a long enough stride that she appeared beside me almost instantly, snakes hissing and tangling around her shoulders in threatening array. “What has the child done?” she demanded.
“Nothing,” I said, forcing myself to meet her eyes. I had never been so grateful for my goggles. “Those men were probably part of a network, staking out all the major approaches to Columbus. There aren’t that many. If you restrict yourself to the highways and the motels that still aren’t part of a major chain, you could do it with twenty.” My family could do it with fourteen. There was no need to go making things worse if I didn’t have to.
“Why?” asked Hannah.
“Because they’ve been casing the community, potentially for months, while they lined up buyers for your kids. We’ve seen this kind of thing before. One of the sylph creches got raided a couple of years ago, and the only way we found the perpetrators was food poisoning at a motel diner.” I half-suspected my dead Aunt Rose of having had a hand in that. Diners are part of her domain, and she doesn’t like people who mess with cryptid kids.
None of us do. Children suffer the sins of their parents, and they shouldn’t have to. They should be allowed at least a little time to be innocent, before they realize they’ve been born into an endless, slow-motion war.
Dee put a hand over her mouth, looking suddenly sick to her stomach. “Buyers?” she asked. “What do you mean, buyers?”
“I mean they weren’t hunters, or there would be a lot more broken glass, and this wasn’t some spur-of-the-moment smash and grab. They knew where the children were, they knew which ones they wanted, and they knew how to spot a gorgon. They probably made Megan as soon as she stepped into the lobby.” I looked from face to face. “Megan may have accelerated their timeline slightly by coming home, but you can’t blame her for that. You were being hunted.”
“Poachers,” said Frank grimly.
I nodded. “Yeah. Poachers.” I turned to fully face Hannah. “I need your permission to do something you aren’t going to like, and I need it right now, because we don’t have a lot of time to waste.”
She frowned. “What do you want to do?”
“My cousin Sarah is a Johrlac. I assume you know what those are?”
Hannah’s frown deepened until it became a scowl. “If you believe yourself family to one of those monsters, I should kill you where you stand.”
“Sarah’s different. She’s not like the rest of her kind. What she is, however, is a telepath.” A fragile one, who was afraid to leave the house. What I was proposing would put her in danger. She could hurt herself again.
And it didn’t matter. With as many moving parts as this plan must have had, we could be looking at dozens of buyers, scattered all over the continent. If we didn’t find these children before they were separated, they were going to disappear forever. There are lots of things an unethical “owner” can do with a gorgon. They could be hunted for sport, or simply shot point-blank to make an “exotic” meal for some unethical fucker. They could have their fangs pulled to turn them into manageable domestics or be beaten into becoming killers and enforcers.
We had to save them. Sarah would understand.
I hoped.
“So?” said Hannah.
“So she’s better than a bloodhound, and these people won’t have bothered to invest in anti-telepathy charms. That sort of work is expensive, and there’s no need for it when you’re only planning to attack the local gorgons. If they’re in these woods with your kids, Sarah will be able to find them. I need your permission to bring her here, and your word that
you won’t attack her.”
“It’s my job to keep these people safe,” said Hannah.
“Keep them safe by letting my cousin in,” I replied.
Hannah stared at me. I looked patiently back. She broke eye contact first.
“Fine,” she said sullenly.
“Great, thanks. Megan?” I looked toward the younger gorgon. “You’re with me. I’m going to need someone to navigate me through the confusion charms, and Sarah’s going to want a look at those men you saw.”
Megan blanched, but she stepped up to join me. I started to move toward the car. Dee grabbed my arm.
“Take care of my little girl,” she said.
“I will,” I said. “Take care of Shelby until I get back.”
Dee nodded and let go.
Together, Megan and I walked away.
* * *
Megan sat rigid and silent in the passenger seat until we were almost to the house. Then, in a small voice, she said, “I thought you’d be taller.”
“I get that a lot.”
“It’s just that your sister’s as tall as you are.”
“Yeah, well, she got the good genes in the fam—” I stopped mid-sentence, slamming my foot automatically down on the brakes. The car came skidding to a stop. Fortunately, no one was behind us: that could have ended very badly for everyone involved.
I twisted in my seat to stare at Megan. She stared back, face framed by the long brown sweep of her wig. She could have passed for a terrified human girl in that moment.
Terrified. Right. She didn’t know me, and it’s not polite to scare your allies. I forced myself to take a deep breath, and said, “I have two sisters. Which one do you mean?” She couldn’t mean Verity, Verity’s short. Verity barely comes up to my chin. But she couldn’t mean Antimony, either, because no one knew where Antimony was.
That Ain't Witchcraft (InCryptid #8) Page 38