“Oh, no, we don’t work for the Covenant.” Sarah’s tone was light, almost dreamy, like she was working on getting in touch with her inner kindergarten teacher. Shelby and I both whipped around to look at her. Judging by the look on Shelby’s face, she’d almost forgotten Sarah was there. I couldn’t blame her; so had I. Sarah looked down from her study of the ceiling, a beatific smile on her face. “The Covenant broke me like a hammer breaks an egg. That’s why the eggshell is cracked, and we’re putting Humpty together again. They wouldn’t have us if we wanted to go back.”
“Back?” echoed Shelby. She swung back around to me. I realized belatedly that I’d just missed my best chance at disarming her. “What does the Johrlac girl mean, ‘back’?”
“Her name is Sarah,” I said. “As far as the rest goes . . .” I paused, studying Shelby.
Either she was an enemy or she was an ally. If she was an enemy, I had nothing to lose by telling her the truth: she might still shoot me and Sarah, but there was no way she’d be getting away with it for long if she did. The mice would tell my grandparents what she’d done, and Grandma would track her down, and Grandpa would make her understand why it wasn’t okay to hurt his family. That assumed she was prepared to shoot me at all. She hadn’t done it when she had the element of surprise, and now? She was on my home turf. I knew where all the weapons were, and I was ready to disarm her if she got distracted again.
Of course, all that assumed that she was an enemy. If she was an ally, she’d only stop lying to me if I stopped lying to her. One of us had to go first.
“The only thing I lied to you about was my last name. It’s not Preston: it’s Price,” I said. “I’m not part of the Covenant of St. George. My family quit several generations ago. If you’re against them, then it looks like we may be on the same side.”
Shelby blinked. “You’re a Price?” she said, disbelieving.
“Yeah.”
“As in Thomas Price, the author of The Price Field Guide to the Cryptids of Australia and New Zealand.”
I vaguely remembered seeing that book in the library at home. “Yes,” I said, with more certainty than I felt.
“You’re lying. He didn’t have children.”
“I think that’s something you should take up with my grandmother, since she’s pretty adamant about us being his, and he married her before my father was born, which means we’re all legitimate in the eyes of the law.”
Shelby blinked again. Then, much to my relief, she lowered her gun. Her shoulders started to shake. I worried for a moment that she was crying, until I realized that the shaking was from the effort of keeping her laughter contained. “All these weeks . . . all those nights of being afraid you’d catch me out, or you’d start asking questions . . . all the times I worried you’d stumble over something on one of your field trips and get yourself eaten . . . I’ve been worrying about a Price. That’s worse than worrying over nothing. That’s like worrying about the well-being of the crocodile in your billabong!”
“Um,” I said. “Sorry about that?” I lowered my own gun. Playing fair is important, especially when there are firearms involved.
“I thought you were completely clueless and just didn’t know how to deal with women!” Shelby shook her head. “I truly believed you were a dead man walking!”
“Getting less flattering by the second, but thanks,” I said. “Now do you want to explain what the hell you’re doing pulling a gun on my cousin? Since we’ve established that we both had a little bit of a smokescreen going on?”
“A little bit of a smokescreen? What would you term a large one? Convincing me you were a Martian?”
“Alex would make a terrible Martian,” said Sarah. “He doesn’t have a giant laser and he’s not planning an Earth-shattering kaboom.” She slid out of her seat and wandered toward the fridge. Apparently, once we’d lowered our weapons, she no longer felt the need to remain seated. That was sort of reassuring, in a way: it meant she recognized the guns for what they were.
Shelby tracked Sarah’s movement, but she didn’t raise her gun. That was also reassuring.
“I’m not a Martian, and the only thing I ever lied about was my last name and my state of origin—we don’t live in California.” I didn’t tell her where we did live. There’s feeling out an ally in the hopes that no one has to get killed, and then there’s being stupid. “I do sort of feel like the information exchange is a little one-sided right now, though, so if you could please explain how you know what a Johrlac is, or why you’ve read my grandfather’s work, that would be awesome.”
“I belong to the Thirty-Six Society,” she said, with an almost prim air. “We’ve got our reasons to be interested in your movement, although it’s been decades since any member of your family set foot in Australia.”
I blinked at her. “You’re a Thirty-Sixer?”
“Just said that, didn’t I?”
“You . . .” The urge to laugh at the sheer improbability of it all was high. “Don’t you think it’s a little, well, bizarre for the first Australian I meet to be a Thirty-Sixer?”
A smile tugged at the edges of Shelby’s mouth. “I don’t know. How bizarre is it for the first American biologist I really get to know to be a Price?”
“It’s zebras all the way down,” said Sarah agreeably, as she walked back to the table. She was holding a can of V8. At least that would keep her occupied for a little while. We both turned to look at her. Then, as one, we turned back to each other and burst out laughing. Shelby sat back down, placing her gun on the table. I did the same.
“All right,” she said. “Story time. We can decide whether anyone’s getting shot later.”
“Deal,” I said. “I came to Ohio to oversee a basilisk breeding project . . .”
Telling Shelby my life story—edited to remove details that could be used to track down my family or otherwise do us harm—took a while. Sarah occupied herself with the V8, and Shelby listened attentively, fingers never twitching toward her firearm. I chose to view that as a good sign, rather than as proof that she considered herself fast enough that she didn’t need to twitch.
“. . . and then you asked if you could come over, and here we are,” I finished. “My grandparents should be home any time now.”
“I want to go over the autopsy reports with you when they come in,” said Shelby. It sounded just like every request she’d ever made for dinner or a movie, except for the suddenly morbid content. I blinked at her. She shrugged. “I was there when you found him. You can’t expect me to sit idly by and let you have all the fun.”
“Since you didn’t tell me until tonight that you had any idea about any of this stuff, I can absolutely expect that.” I wiped a bit of gravel out of the corner of my eye.
“Ah, but by the same token, I expected you to keep your nose out of things that you couldn’t possibly understand. So we’re really in the same position as regards each other.”
I sighed. Growing up with two sisters has given me a highly-advanced ability to know when I’ve been beaten. “I’ll talk to my grandfather.”
“The equation hasn’t balanced,” said Sarah suddenly.
“What do you mean?” I glanced over at her. “Do you need more juice?”
“Yes,” she said. “But no. I mean, yes, I need more juice, the good kind, please and thank you, but I also mean the equation isn’t balanced. You’ve given one half of the numbers. She needs to provide the other, or we’ll never know what it equals.”
“What?” Shelby looked from Sarah back to me. “Are all Johrlac like this?”
“You knew what she was well enough to come hunting for her,” I said, picking up my gun and flipping the safety back on before I stood and stuck it into my belt. I started for the fridge. “Haven’t you ever talked to one before?”
“No. I don’t like getting this close, even with blockers to keep them out of my head.” She fingered her necklace, finally cluing me in as to the location of her anti-telepathy charm. “They’re tricky.”
“That’s true, I suppose. No, most Johrlac aren’t like Sarah. She’s from the rare ‘not a sociopath’ segment of the population, and she really is ill. I wasn’t making that up.” I pulled the orange juice and A-1 sauce out of the fridge as I spoke, combining them in one of the large juice tumblers. Sarah was aware enough of her current limitations that she didn’t mix her own drinks, but I knew what she meant by “the good kind.”
“Then you should let nature take its course.”
I slammed the orange juice down on the counter, making both Sarah and Shelby jump. “She’s ill because she telepathically injured herself saving my sister’s life,” I said, barely restraining the urge to yell. “If she’d been willing to let ‘nature take its course,’ I’d be short a sibling right now. So you’ll excuse me for feeling like I owe her.”
“Okay, I’m sorry,” said Shelby, eyes very wide. “I didn’t know.”
“No, you didn’t. So back off.” I shook my head, picking up Sarah’s drink. “Besides, I think you’d like Sarah under normal circumstances. When she’s feeling herself, she’s a lot more linear and a lot less like trying to have an argument with a prerecorded phone tree. Right now, she’s getting better. It’s just a slow process.”
Shelby looked dubious. “I’m sorry. I just can’t imagine caring for one of them this much.”
“Stop that right now,” I snapped. I stalked to Sarah, put her juice down in front of her, and rounded on Shelby. “You are in my home, which means you are in her home. Yes, you were invited, but I don’t recall saying ‘bring your own bullets’ when I called you. Stop acting like she’s not a person. She’s done nothing to hurt you. If anything, she’s helped you. Now leave her alone.”
Shelby blinked at me. “You really mean all that. She’s not toying with your mind, is she?”
“Didn’t I just spend the last twenty minutes telling you my life story so you’d believe me on this?”
“That was my concern, yes: that you were telling me what you thought I wanted to hear in order to keep me from harming her. Again, Johrlac can be tricky.”
“Right now, Sarah’s about as subtle as a bull moose in the middle of a shopping mall.” I reclaimed my seat. “Now it’s your turn. Explain what you’re doing here, and why you’re so bent on shooting my cousin.”
“Why should I?”
“Because if you don’t, we’re going to have to shoot each other, and that would be a lousy end to an already lousy day.” I shook my head. “Also that would officially be my worst breakup ever, and that’s not a bar I was looking to exceed. So please. What are you doing here?”
Shelby sighed, leaning forward a little to rest her elbows on the kitchen table. “How much do you know about the Thirty-Six Society?”
“Um . . . Australian organization, very territorial, successfully drove the Covenant of St. George out of the country during my grandparents’ time, although according to the family records, the Covenant has been trying to get back in since the door was slammed in their faces.”
“Hence you thinking I might be a member; you thought the Covenant had succeeded and taken us over while your family wasn’t looking.”
“Something like that,” I agreed. “I mean . . . no offense, but you guys are awfully far away, and we’ve always had other things to deal with here at home. I guess you just fell off our radar.”
“That’s always what happens to Australian ecological concerns, if you’re not Australian, isn’t it?” There was a faint bitterness in Shelby’s voice, but it wasn’t aimed at me: more at the whole world. “There have always been cryptozoologists in Australia. They predate the word ‘cryptid’ by quite a lot, but for a long time, we weren’t organized. The Covenant never found us easy targets, but they could still make headway against us. The Thirty-Six Society was founded after the death of the last officially known thylacine—the Tasmanian wolf—in 1936. They were hunted to extinction over a relatively short period of time, and a lot of the incentives that were used to goad people into killing them were provided by the Covenant of St. George. Your Covenant always hated my country. Everything in the ecosystem looked like a monster to them.”
“They’re not my Covenant,” I protested. “We quit generations ago.”
“Some things take a long time to stop mattering, if they ever do.” Shelby shook her head. “We’ll never forget the thylacine. My parents were both members of the Thirty-Six from as far back as I can remember, and so were my grandparents. I grew up understanding that if I didn’t help protect Australia’s more . . . esoteric . . . flora and fauna from humanity, no one would.”
“It’s a big world,” I said, feeling obscurely bad. I shouldn’t have: North America is large enough that my family can’t patrol it all on our own, even as we enlist allies from the human and cryptid communities. Covering Australia as well would have been impossible, and would have stretched our already overtaxed resources to the breaking point. That didn’t stop me feeling like I should have helped.
“It is,” Shelby agreed. “Trouble is, we’re an island ecosystem. Sometimes things get in and turn out to be a great deal more destructive than they ever were in their original habitats. Game animals, mostly, imported by idiots thinking that Australia needs a native population of manticores or tailypo. But sometimes that extends to beings that can get their own passports and trick their way through immigration.” Her gaze slipped back to Sarah, who was peacefully drinking her sewage-colored orange juice and A-1 combination, seeming to ignore everything that was going on around her.
“Johrlac,” I said.
Shelby nodded. “Yes. A hive came over on a cruise ship about ten years ago. I don’t know why, or how they tolerated one another long enough to make it across the ocean without multiple murders, but they made it. We’d never seen a Johrlac in Australia before that. No one realized what they were until it was too late.”
Any story that started with “until it was too late” wasn’t going to end well. But if I wanted it to end without Sarah getting shot in the head, I needed Shelby to keep going. “What happened?”
“What always happens when Johrlac introduce themselves into an unprepared population: nothing remotely good. They spread out, and then one of them found a member of the Society.” Shelby stole another glance at Sarah. “She looked just like your cousin.”
“Cuckoos have minimal visual variance within the species,” I said. “It’s probably because they evolved from insects, not true mammals.” Every female cuckoo we had a record of looked enough like Sarah and Grandma to be their sister. Every male cuckoo we had a record of looked like their brother. Just one more clue that they didn’t handle mammalian biology the same way the rest of us did.
“Doesn’t make her look any less like the woman who killed my brother,” said Shelby calmly. She looked back to me. “She took out six Society members before someone found the anomaly in our records and we realized what was happening. Six! And she wasn’t the only one. There were eight Johrlac in Australia. It took us five years to catch them all.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry doesn’t bring back the dead.” Shelby shook her head. “All of us juniors wound up in field positions years before we expected, and for what? Because some horrible brood parasites wanted a vacation? It wasn’t fair. It was never going to be fair.”
“No, it wasn’t, and I’m sorry. But killing my cousin won’t bring back your dead.” I frowned. “If all your juniors got promoted to seniors, why are you here? Why aren’t you back in Australia, making sure that nothing starts eating people?”
“Manticores,” she said, with a shrug.
“Manticores?” I echoed.
“Some damn fool imported three breeding clusters around the turn of the century, to use as game animals. They ate him and got loose—”
I groaned. “Of course they did.”
“—and now we have manticore issues in Queensland and the Northern Territory. I was hoping that by coming here, I could learn more about how manticore
s behave in the wild, and maybe find a few solutions.”
“There are manticores in Ohio?”
“Oh, yeah.” Shelby frowned. “Hadn’t you noticed?”
“No, I hadn’t. I’ve been studying the local fricken population, and trying to convince my basilisks to breed. Which they are absolutely refusing to do, the lazy stoners.”
“Why would you want to breed basilisks?” asked Shelby.
“They’re big ratters, for one thing, and they tend to avoid humans whenever possible. They’re also the only known predator of stone spiders. So they have their uses, as long as we can keep them out of the cities.”
“You had me at ‘spiders,’” said Shelby. She took a deep breath, letting it out through her nose. “So. Here we are.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Here we are.”
The sound of a crossbow bolt being notched into place drew our attention toward the kitchen doorway. Grandma was standing there, a pistol crossbow in her hands, the point aimed solidly at Shelby. Grandpa was a dark shape in the hall behind her. If I squinted, I could just make out the cudgel in his hands.
“Great,” said Grandma. “Now that we’ve established where we are, let’s move on to the part where no one ever finds your body.”
I put my hand over my face and groaned.
Ten
“Yes, dear, it does seem unwise to stand here and calmly wait to be devoured by the ever-expanding maw of the netherworld. If you have a suggestion as to how better to handle the situation, I’m quite eager to hear it.”
—Thomas Price
Still in the kitchen of an only moderately creepy suburban home in Columbus, Ohio, now dealing with a heavily-armed grandmother
“HI, GRANDMA,” I said, without taking my hand away from my face. “Have you met my colleague, Shelby Tanner? I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned her. I’m sort of dating her. She’s with the Thirty-Six Society. I know I didn’t tell you that part before. I just learned it myself.”
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