Half-Off Ragnarok

by Seanan McGuire

  “No. No no no no . . .” She started shaking her head viciously from side to side, knocking her ribbon askew. I took a step forward. She grabbed handfuls of her hair, pulling as she continued to chant denial.

  “Sarah!” I grabbed her wrists before I could think better of it. Telepathy is easier for cuckoos when there’s skin-to-skin contact. Even with my anti-telepathy charm, there was a chance she’d be able to read me while I was touching her. That still seemed better than letting her hurt herself.

  Sarah stopped shaking her head. She blinked at me, eyes luminescing with a brief flash of white, and asked, “Alex?”

  It was the first time she’d really sounded like herself since she came back from New York. I smiled hesitantly, not letting go of her wrists. “Hi, Sarah.”

  “Your head is full of scientific classifications and the natural order of things.” Well, that answered the question of whether or not she could read me. I was still a little surprised when a relieved smile spread across her face, and she said, “I like it. It’s been . . . not so orderly in here for a little while.”

  I didn’t know whether she was aware of how long it had actually been, and I didn’t want to think about it too hard. Thinking about it would have been the same as asking her, and that wouldn’t have been fair. “We’ve been worried about you,” I said instead, and moved to let go of her wrists.

  “No!” Sarah grabbed my hands, flipping the grip around so that she was holding onto me. She bit her lip, and said, “Please, no. I don’t want everything to come apart again.”

  “Sarah . . .”

  “I won’t push, I promise I won’t push, but Angela’s filled with worrying about me, and I can’t read Martin at all. Please, let me stay and be organized? Just for a little while? Please?”

  She looked so anxious—and so exhausted—that I relented. It wasn’t like I could keep her out, and at least this way, she might follow instructions. “All right, but I need to sleep. Can I do that?”

  “Even your dreams are orderly,” said Sarah. She let go of my wrists. “Hurry please. Hurry.” She still sounded more coherent than she had before she grabbed me, but there was an edge of harried desperation to it, like she was clinging to her renewed lucidity by her fingernails.

  “I’ll hurry,” I assured her, and grabbed my pajamas from the floor next to the bed before fleeing the room, heading for the bathroom down the hall.

  I reviewed my options as I brushed my teeth. I could wake Grandma and ask her to take Sarah back to her own room, possibly with a few strong suggestions about locks. That would prevent things like this from happening again, and also allow me to dismiss the dull but growing concern over how many times Sarah had crept down the stairs to watch me sleep. And yet . . .

  And yet Sarah, for all that she wasn’t human, was family. Family comes first. The cryptid community comes second. She represented both those things, and she’d been wounded saving my little sister’s life. If all she wanted was for me to sleep holding her hand, was that really so much for her to ask? I had my anti-telepathy charm, and I had the mice. If she’d done anything to threaten me, I had faith that they would have woken me up.

  Sarah was still sitting on the bed when I returned with my teeth brushed, my pajamas on, and my anti-telepathy charm firmly in place. “Hello, hello,” she said, looking down at her crossed ankles. “How’s your father?”

  “In Oregon,” I said, reaching out to take her wrist. “Sarah.”

  “Yes?” She raised her head, eyes focusing a bit better already.

  “A few ground rules for tonight.”

  “Yes, yes, it’s good to be grounded; how are you grounding me tonight?”

  “You are sleeping on top of the covers; if you try to come under the covers, I’m sending you back to your room.” It wasn’t as harsh as it sounded. Cuckoos get some benefits from the clear hemolymph in place of blood; for one, they don’t feel heat or cold the way most mammals do. Like I said, Nature likes a good practical joke every now and then. As for why I didn’t want her under the blankets . . .

  Skin contact made her stronger. If I wanted to keep her from burning my brain out when she had a nightmare, I needed to minimize how much we were touching one another.

  Sarah nodded. “That’s fair,” she agreed.

  “If you start feeling like you’re going to project at me, rather than just reading, you need to let go and get out.” I folded back the covers with my free hand.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay,” I said, and got into the bed. It felt strange to trust her like this. It felt even stranger to doubt her. Sarah waited until I was settled before she curled up next to me, resting her head on my shoulder. I dropped our joined hands to my stomach, staring up at the darkened ceiling as I listened to her breathing slowly level out into sleep.

  Sometime after that, I joined her in unconsciousness.

  My dreams were full of algebraic equations and the sewers of New York, where alligator men danced with ladies made entirely of numbers, and carnival music played on an unseen hurdy-gurdy. Even asleep, I knew that Sarah’s dreams were leaking into mine, but it didn’t really seem to matter. Together, the two of us slept on.

  Four

  “The trouble with the word ‘monster’ is that it’s very much in the eye of the beholder. Show me a monster, and I’ll show you a man who just didn’t know how to explain himself to you.”

  —Martin Baker

  Ohio’s West Columbus Zoo, home of many exotic species and way too many geese

  I PULLED INTO THE zoo parking lot at ten past eight, trying to yawn around the bagel I had clamped in my teeth. It wasn’t working very well, given my desire not to aspirate chunks of breakfast food. Crow wasn’t helping. He was curled in the passenger seat making throaty churring noises that sounded suspiciously like laughter.

  As soon as I had a hand free, I removed the bagel from my mouth and waved it at the uncaring Church Griffin. “You are a terrible pet,” I informed him. “My mother was right. I should have gotten a dog.” Any dog that my parents would have approved of me getting would probably have breathed fire or transformed into a dragon on the full moon or something, but at least it wouldn’t have laughed at me.

  Crow croaked.

  “Uh-huh. Out, before I change my mind about bringing you to work today.” I opened my door. “Office, Crow.”

  Crow launched himself from the seat in a flurry of madly beating wings and flew out the open door, smacking me in the face with his tail as he passed. I spat out a small hairball and got out of the car, tucking my keys into my pocket. Time for one more day in the real world, explaining that the existence of House Slytherin in the Harry Potter books doesn’t make snakes evil and keeping small boys from climbing into the snapping turtle enclosure.

  The Canada geese that infested the pond outside the zoo thronged the sidewalk as they saw me approach, snaky necks bent into S-curves and orange beaks working overtime as they honked frantically. I threw the rest of my bagel into the water. The geese followed it, fat gray-and-white bodies hustling as each one tried to beat the others to the prize. I walked on undisturbed, smothering another yawn behind my hand.

  Sarah hadn’t been in the bed when my alarm rang. Since she didn’t put off as much body heat as a human, I couldn’t tell how long she’d been gone by feeling the blankets, but my fingers were stiff, like something had been gripping them for hours. I hoped the night had been more restful for her than it was for me. My dreams had been strange enough to keep me from sleeping well, probably because they weren’t my dreams. I wasn’t mad at her or anything. I was still going to talk to Grandma after work, to find out whether that sort of thing was actually helpful to Sarah’s recovery.

  (That assumed that she would know. Cuckoo mental health is something of an unexplored territory, since most of them are too dangerous to attempt to psychoanalyze. If anything, Sarah’s actions had proven that she wasn’t your ordinary cuckoo. After all, an ordinary cuckoo would probably have slit my throat while I was
unconscious. All Sarah had done was try to steal a pillow.)

  It was almost an hour to the zoo’s official opening, and the arrival plaza was empty, the ticket booths standing deserted. By nine o’clock they’d be thronged by excited children, harried parents, and even more harried teachers with their school groups. For now, I could walk through the area without worrying that I was going to step on any runaway toddlers. I paused to stroke the nose of the brass lion statue, murmuring a good morning, and turned toward the gate.

  “Morning, Dr. Preston,” said the guard on duty. “ID please?”

  “Does it ever occur to you that ‘good morning, person I know by name, please provide proof of who you are’ is a little silly, Lloyd?” I asked, digging my zoo ID card out of my pocket and handing it to him.

  “Every day of my life, but you know what happens when you don’t do your job.” Lloyd was an older man, tan and thin as a sun-dried lizard, with a battered slouch hat pulled firmly down over his presumably bald pate. I’d never seen him without the hat, or without the thick-lensed glasses that gave his gaze a fishbowl quality that I knew all too well from my time in my high school science club. I put his age as somewhere between sixty and eighty, in that timeless country occupied by men lucky enough to live that long.

  “I suppose that’s fair,” I said.

  Lloyd snorted. “Fair doesn’t enter into it. Never has, never will.” He gave my ID a cursory glance, handed it back to me, and unlocked the gate. “I don’t check your ID, you tell the administration, and I wind up another sad old man trying to take your over-fancy coffee order at Starbucks. No, thank you, Dr. Preston. You can come on in now.”

  “Thank you, Lloyd,” I said, stepping through the open gate.

  “You’re welcome, Dr. Preston.” Lloyd offered me a friendly nod before turning back to face the plaza, standing at the sort of military attention that had absolutely no place in a zoo.

  At least he took his job seriously. I shrugged, put my ID away, and started down the path that would eventually take me to the reptile house.

  About half the zookeepers were out and checking their respective enclosures; a few were in the enclosures, waking or talking to their charges. I waved and kept on walking. We all had work to do before the zoo would be ready to open, and they wouldn’t appreciate the disruption.

  A little girl in a vibrant orange sari was sitting on the bench outside the reptile house, kicking her sneaker-clad feet sullenly against the cobblestones. I hesitated before walking over to her. “Good morning, Chandi. How did you get into the zoo this time?”

  “I’m not telling,” she said, in a tone as sullen as her posture. “When can I come in the reptile house?”

  “Well, that depends.”

  She glanced up, eyes narrowed warily. She was a pretty child, and she was going to be a devastatingly attractive woman someday, if we could convince her to stop sneaking into the zoo through whatever cracks and crevices she could find. She’d snuck in via the alligator enclosure a week before, and only the fact that she didn’t smell like a mammal had prevented her from getting eaten. And she always did it while wearing her nicest dresses. I was starting to wonder if she actually repelled mud.

  “On what?” she asked.

  “If you promise me that you won’t sneak in for another week, I’ll let you in right now, and—” I raised a finger, cutting off the protest I could see forming on her lips, “—I’ll let you get Shami out of his enclosure and take him into my office.”

  “For how long?” she asked.

  “I can give you three hours.”

  There was a pause while Chandi considered my offer. Then, regally, she nodded and slid off the bench. “Okay,” she said, and offered me her hand, as guileless as any eight year old has ever been. I took it. It was better for both of us if she didn’t seem to be running around the zoo unescorted.

  Dee met us at the reptile house door. “Alex—” She stopped herself when she saw that I wasn’t alone. “Oh, good morning, Chandi, I didn’t realize today was one of your scheduled visits with Shami.”

  “That’s because it’s not,” I said. “We made a deal.” My assistant looked flustered, which wasn’t an easy thing to accomplish, and her wig for the day—a lovely red beehive style studded with polka-dot bows—was pulsing, signaling that whatever had her upset was bad enough to have also upset her hair. “What’s wrong?”

  “Wrong? Nothing’s wrong. Why should something be wrong?” Dee laughed, a jagged, unrealistic sound. I blinked at her. So did Chandi.

  “I thought gorgons were familiar with normal human emotional response,” said Chandi, looking up at me for a clue as to what was supposed to happen next.

  “They are,” said Dee. “I mean, we are. I mean, are you sure you want to let Chandi in early? We have a lot of work to do.”

  “I promised her three hours with Shami,” I said. “Unless there’s some sort of ‘let’s panic for no good reason over something that can wait until lunch’ problem, I’m fine with bringing her in early. It’ll make it easier for me to get Shami out of his enclosure without needing to explain to a human why I’m handing a spectacled cobra to a little girl.”

  “I could explain,” said Chandi demurely.

  “I want to get Shami out of his enclosure before I have to explain to anyone why I allowed a little girl to bite and kill a member of my staff,” I amended.

  Chandi pouted.

  “That’s the problem!” said Dee. “Andrew was supposed to be here an hour ago to feed the turtles. When I got here, the door was unlocked, but Andrew was nowhere to be seen.”

  I blinked. “Oh. That’s a problem.”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “I’m bored,” said Chandi. “May I see my fiancé now?”

  “Yes, Chandi, you can, but I want to renegotiate our deal first.”

  Chandi’s eyes narrowed. “You said I could see him,” she said, her voice taking on a faint lisp as her fangs descended. I kept hold of her hand, despite the fact that every mammalian instinct I had was telling me to let go and move away. Being bitten by a venomous snake is never good for you, and the young, who have little to no control over how much venom they expel in a bite, are the most dangerous of all.

  (It wasn’t until my sister discovered that dragons never became extinct, and that the cryptids we’d been classifying as “dragon princesses” were actually the female of the species, that we stopped to take a long hard look at the wadjet. We’d always assumed they pair-bonded with their human servants, somehow extending their lives through an interaction with their venom. Instead, they turned out to be another form of dragon, one where the males resembled immense cobras, while the females looked like humans. And this is just one more entry on a long, long list of reasons that I never dated much: half the girls I met in the course of my daily life were never human in the first place.)

  “Without Andrew, Dee and I are going to need to feed all the reptiles before the zoo opens in,” I glanced at the clock above the door, “thirty minutes. If you’ll take the venomous snakes while I handle the turtles and lizards and Dee does the nonvenomous snakes, I’ll let you have six hours with Shami. Three today, as promised, and three tomorrow, with no argument or attempt to backpedal.”

  “All I have to do is feed a few snakes?”

  I nodded. “You have my word.”

  “Very well.” Chandi turned to Dee and smiled brightly, showing her fangs. “Please take me to the rats.”

  I let go of her hand. “Dee, we’ll talk about this as soon as we’re open, all right?”

  “All right,” she allowed. “I’ll go get the feeding schedule.”

  Getting the reptile house ready to open proved to be a remarkably fast process when we had someone who actually spoke snake helping us out. The fact that Chandi wasn’t worried about the prospect of being bitten didn’t hurt. (Wadjet are immune to all known forms of venom, and probably a few that we haven’t gotten around to officially discovering yet, since venom has a nasty tendency to kill th
e people who first find out that it exists.) I stowed my coat, briefcase, and lunch in my office, and we got to work with surprising efficiency. Soon, all that was left was for me to hang a “this exhibit is temporarily closed” sign on the enclosure that housed Chandi’s fiancé, and we were set to receive visitors.

  Just in time, too. The reptile house was one of the most popular early morning destinations for school groups, and no sooner had we opened the door than we were flooded with human children Chandi’s age. I spared a thought for how most of those kids would react if they saw Chandi, now happily curled up with Shami on the beanbag chair in Dee’s office. I just as quickly let it go, and turned to help a little girl win an argument about whether or not boa constrictors swallowed their prey whole. (I, and science, said yes. Her mother, who was tired of dinnertime attempts to swallow broccoli without chewing, said no.)

  It was just another day at the office. The loud, snake-scented office full of wide-eyed children, some of whom were seeing their first really dangerous members of the reptile kingdom up close. Having both Dee and Chandi in the building had the snakes all worked up, and they were putting on quite the show as they slithered around their enclosures and even reared up to flick their tongues at the glass. A large bluegill swam too close to Crunchy’s open jaws, and the big snapping turtle did what he did best, slamming his beak closed hard enough that the sound was audible through the side of the tank. The children swarmed in that direction, pressing their faces up against the glass and waiting to see if he was going to do it again. Oblivious to their admiration, Crunchy resumed his normal posture of patient serenity.

  Dee caught my eye, nodding toward my office door. “Go,” she said. “The first official tour isn’t for an hour. Get started on what you need to finish today.”

  I brightened. “You sure?” I liked watching the kids, but I’d like knowing that my paperwork for the week was finished even more.

  “I’m sure.” Dee flashed me a quick smile. “If they get out of control, I’ll just take off my wig and remind them that sometimes, a trip to the zoo means you get the opportunity to feed the animals.”