Half-Off Ragnarok

Seven

An only moderately creepy suburban home in Columbus, Ohio, waking up after an impromptu nap

CROW WAS CURLED UP on my stomach when I woke up. I blinked at the ceiling, only gradually coming to realize that I’d been woken up by the sound of someone knocking on my bedroom door. I sat up, sending Crow tumbling, and rubbed my face with one hand while he squawked in irritation.

The knocking continued, now accompanied by my grandmother’s voice calling, “Alex? Are you awake?”

“I’m up, Grandma,” I called back, giving my face one more good rub before I swung my feet around to the floor and stood. I grabbed my usual glasses off the table as an afterthought. It wasn’t like I needed to worry about being turned to stone in my own home. “Crap. I didn’t mean to go to sleep. What time is it?”

“Seven.”

“Crap.” I pulled my phone out of my pocket as I walked across the room, and found a text from Dee telling me that she had made it home. That was a relief, at least. I opened the door to find my grandmother standing in the hall, still wearing her work clothes, a concerned look on her face. I forced a wan smile. “Did Grandpa tell you what’s going on?”

“He did,” she said, with a nod. “Are you all right?”

“I am. Andrew’s not.”

“Now, you don’t know that. He could be getting his afterlife orientation right now.”

My Aunt Mary used to babysit my grandmother, and she died decades before I was born. That doesn’t stop her from showing up at every family reunion and Christmas party she can get to. I shook my head. “Breathing people like to keep breathing. When you stop, you’re not all right anymore, even if you get to have a new existence as a semi-corporeal houseguest. Has Grandpa heard back from the morgue?”

“He has,” she said. “The autopsy is being performed locally, which is good news—”

My stomach sank. “But it’s not being performed until the morning, is it?”

Grandma shook her head. “They’ve already ruled out contagion—there’s nothing to indicate that turning into stone is something you can catch. So while it’s being treated as a chemical attack for the moment, it’s not urgent.”

“Then we have to break into the morgue. I need to see the remains.” I shook my head, wishing I was the telepathic one, so that I could make her understand why this mattered so much. “Petrifaction isn’t a thing that just happens in the human body. We need to know how it happened so that we can determine what did it, so we can stop—”

“Alex, you need to stop.” Grandma folded her arms, looking at me gravely. “I love you, but you have the same problem your father does. You assume we haven’t been fighting this battle without you for centuries. You’re not the only answer to every problem.”

Her words stung, but she was right. I frowned before allowing my shoulders to sag. “I’m sorry, Grandma. I just want to help. This could be my fault.”

“Because of your basilisks, or because it happened at the zoo where you happen to be working? Sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence, you know.”

“And sometimes it’s the start of something very large, and very unpleasant. I can’t bank on one and ignore the other.”

“I know.” She smiled slightly. “You’re my grandson, after all. Come on down to the kitchen. We have a proposition for you.”

Grandpa was waiting in the kitchen. Grandma led me to the table and pushed me into a chair, and Grandpa set a tuna fish sandwich in front of me. “Eat,” he commanded.

“Yes, sir,” I said, and picked the sandwich up.

They waited until my mouth was full and I couldn’t protest before Grandma said, “You’re staying home with Sarah tonight while we go on our date. You’ll get your autopsy results in the morning.”

“And no, we’re not breaking into the city morgue,” added Grandpa.

I swallowed my half-chewed mouthful of sandwich, managing not to choke, and said, “But I need to see—”

“You need to learn patience,” said Grandpa. “There’s no good reason for us to see this as anything other than an isolated incident right now, and there are quite a few good reasons for you to stay home.”

“For instance, we only have two tickets to the theater, and I’m not going to buy another one from a scalper just because you don’t feel like waiting here,” said Grandma. “And there’s Sarah to be considered. Someone has to stay with her. That’s why we arranged this date night in the first place. I know you want to serve the cryptid community, sweetheart. Well, tonight, you serve the cryptid community by babysitting.”

“I don’t believe this,” I said.

“The autopsy isn’t going to happen any faster if we cancel our date,” said Grandpa. “He’s scheduled for the morning. Learn patience.”

“Can you at least promise I’ll get the file as soon as the autopsy is complete?” I asked. My head was spinning. Of all the possible solutions I’d considered, “you stay home and babysit because patience is a virtue” wasn’t on the list.

“Yes,” said Grandpa firmly. “As soon as he’s released to the city morgue, I’ll call you, and we’ll examine him a second time together. But tonight, we need you to stay home. Please, Alex, can you do that for us?”

“I really don’t believe this,” I said, pinching the bridge of my nose. Finally, against my better judgment, I nodded. “Yes, I’ll stay at home with Sarah so you can have your date night. But you have to promise I’m getting those autopsy reports.”

“I swear,” said Grandma.

I sighed and dropped my hand. “I guess I’m staying at home, then.”

“Yes, I suppose you are,” said Grandpa, and smiled.

An hour later, they were heading out the door, having delivered the usual list of instructions for the care and feeding of my cousin, most of which involved the word “don’t.” Don’t let her go outside, don’t let her answer the phone, don’t let her answer the door, don’t let her get into philosophical debates with the pizza delivery man, don’t let her eat chocolate chips. (To be fair, that last one was for medical reasons: chocolate is mildly poisonous to cuckoos, and she’d make herself sick before she remembered she wasn’t supposed to have it.) Sarah stood halfway down the stairs, clutching the banister and swaying slightly as she watched them go.

“Be good!” called Grandma, and closed the door behind her, leaving us alone. I turned to Sarah.

“What do you want to do?”

“Ignite the heart of a dormant sun and resolve the impossible fractions,” she replied.

“Well, since that’s not going to happen tonight, how about some television?” With her telepathy mostly blocked, TV was actually more soothing for her than live interaction. She knew she couldn’t read the minds of the people on the screen, and most of the time, the characters were easily distinguishable by hair color and wardrobe—two of the things she could pick up on.

“Television is good,” she agreed, descending two more steps. “What’s the menu?”

“I have season one of Numb3rs, or some downloads of Square One that Artie sent for you. Whichever you like.”

“PBS is better,” she said serenely, and finally walked to the bottom of the stairs, proceeding into the living room. I shrugged and followed her.

“Square One it is,” I said.

It didn’t take long to get her settled on the living room floor with a bowl of ketchup-covered popcorn in her lap and math-based edutainment programming playing on the television. Sarah stared raptly, swaying to the beat as two would-be rappers began singing about prime numbers.

“I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me,” I said.

She flapped a hand, dismissing me from her presence. I smiled.

“Yes, Your Majesty,” I said, and left, pulling my phone out of my pocket as I walked. I’d promised Shelby I would call her. Sure, it was originally going to be a little later, since I was hoping we might be breaking into the morgue, but I hadn’t specified an exact time.

Shelby picked up so fast that I wasn’t sure the phone had actually completed its first ring. “Alex? Is that you?”

“Caller ID probably says it is,” I said. Then I paused, and laughed.

“What?” she asked, tone turning suspicious. “What’s so funny?”

“I just talked to my father a little while ago, and I was making caller ID jokes with him, that’s all. What’s going on? I’m calling like I said I would.”

“What do you want, a cookie?” Shelby paused and sighed. “I’m sorry, that was nasty of me. I just don’t want to be alone right now. I keep waiting for something to jump out of the shadows at me, and it’s making me incredibly uncomfortable.”

I grew up waiting for something to jump out of the shadows at me. I sighed as I sat down at the kitchen table. “I’m sorry.”

“So I was wondering . . .”

“What?” I should have heard the danger in her tone, which had sweetened and taken on a faint wheedling quality. But I was worried about her, and anxious about the possibility of a cockatrice rampaging through Columbus, and I suppose I just wasn’t listening clearly.

“Could I come over? Tonight, I mean? I know I’ve never been to your place, but you can’t leave your poor sick cousin, and I won’t be any bother, I swear. I just . . . I really don’t want to be alone right now. Please?”

“Shelby . . .”

Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I keep thinking about Andrew.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose, fighting the urge to groan. “Give me a second.”

“Of course.”

It wasn’t technically against the rules for me to have company—Grandma would have encouraged it if it hadn’t been for Sarah, since she really wanted me to have more of a social life. As long as I put away anything incriminating before Shelby arrived, and could convince Crow and the mice to stay upstairs for the duration of her visit, I wouldn’t have to worry about anything except for my cousin.

About that . . . Sarah was happy in front of the television, and lots of people eat strange things on their popcorn. One of my college roommates used to put baker’s yeast on his. Ketchup was nothing. I could give Shelby a telepathy blocker, say it was a piece of jewelry that made me think of her. The charms were pretty things, copper disks suspended in little glass balls filled with water. She’d probably believe me.

Shelby sounded honestly distressed, and I wanted to be a good boyfriend, no matter how bad at it I was. Certain that I was making a mistake—and less certain of exactly what it was—I said, “Come on over. I’ll text you the address. Just . . . give me twenty minutes to clean up?”

“What, disposing of the bodies, are you?” she asked, a bit of her normal playfulness seeping back into her tone.

“Something like that.” If she thought body disposal would take me twenty minutes, she’d clearly never watched me clean a snake cage. I could get rid of an average human body in ten minutes, tops.

...and maybe that would be a bad thing to brag about to the nice girl that I was dating. Clearly, “normal” was still a bit beyond my capabilities. I shook my head and quickly added, “Only a bit less gruesome. Mostly it’s just dishes and making sure Sarah understands we’ll be having company.”

There was a pause. “She’s really quite ill, then?” said Shelby, sounding unsure.

“Nothing contagious, I swear.” It occurred to me that Shelby might have taken my constant excuses about needing to care for a sick cousin as exactly that: excuses. I glanced at the kitchen door. “She’s watching television right now. I’ll talk to her before you get here.”

“All right,” said Shelby. The uncertainty was gone, replaced by her normal good cheer. “See you soon, then.” She hung up.

I smiled to myself as I texted the address to her number, put my phone away, and began the process of removing any obvious “nonhumans live here” markers from easy view. The kitchen was easy: tuck a few of Grandma’s cookbooks into a drawer, hide Grandpa’s bottles of formalin behind the wilted lettuce in the vegetable crisper and presto, a normal kitchen for a normal human family. The front hall was harder—I had to take down several pictures—but it was still nothing compared to what it would have taken to do the same thing at home.

I stuck my head into the living room, where Sarah was still staring raptly at the television. Nothing in there really screamed “hide me,” except for maybe Sarah herself, and that wasn’t an option. “Sarah?” I asked, stepping fully inside.

She didn’t react. It was possible she couldn’t tell me from the voices on the TV. I walked toward her, careful to stay at a nonthreatening distance. Trying to approach her when she was focusing on something else was a lot like dealing with the venomous snakes at the zoo, and about as dangerous. “Sarah, it’s Alex. Can you look at me for a second?”

“Math is happening,” she scolded, not turning her head.

“Math has a pause button. Please, can we talk for a second? I’ll make you an ice cream sundae.”

That got her attention. She turned her head toward me, and asked, “Vanilla? With ketchup and curry powder?”

I managed to repress my shudder. She probably wouldn’t have recognized it anyway. “Yes, vanilla ice cream with ketchup and curry powder.”

“All right.” Sarah twisted to fully face me instead of the television. “Talk.”

“I have a . . . friend. Her name is Shelby. She works with me at the zoo. We had a bad day today, and she doesn’t want to be alone. So I told her that she could come over here. Is that all right with you?”

A line formed between Sarah’s eyebrows as she frowned. “Oh,” she said. “No. No, I don’t think that’s okay at all. Won’t I be here? Won’t she see me?”

“Yes. She’ll see a pretty girl who’s having some medical trouble, and that’s all.” I touched the chain around my neck that held my anti-telepathy charm. “I’m going to give her a charm so that you can’t accidentally hurt her, because I know you’d be sad if you did. And it’ll be good for you to see someone who isn’t a relative.”

Sarah shook her head. “I don’t want to.”

“Sarah . . .”

“What if it doesn’t work? The charm? The math doesn’t always add up, you know. What if I get confused and I hurt her? You’ll hate me, and Angela will finally say ‘that’s it, oh well, we tried, but cuckoo is cuckoo is cuckoo,’ and then the knives in the night, and nothing ever after.”

“Sarah . . .” I moved closer before crouching down. “That’s not going to happen, I promise. Now, I can call Shelby and tell her not to come if you need me to, but I want you to be sure you need that. Please, Sarah.”

She bit her lip. Then, finally, she said, “I want two ice cream sundaes, and I want to sleep in your room tonight.”

If my little sister had tried bargaining like that, I would have been annoyed. From Sarah, it was a sign of recovery, and so welcome that I almost hugged her. I restrained myself and smiled instead, straightening back up as I said, “It’s a deal. Shelby will be here soon; I’m going to go and tell the mice they need to keep quiet.”

Sarah snorted, and for just a moment, she looked like her old self again: focused, smarter than me, and laughing at my pain. “Good luck with that, Alex.”

“Thanks.” I walked out of the room as she turned back to the TV. I didn’t want to see the moment when the presence slipped out of her face, as I knew it inevitably would.

She was getting better. She had to be.

Bribing the mice required an entire package of Oreos and half a pound of cheddar cheese, with the promise of more to come after they’d kept their word and stayed in the bedroom until Shelby was gone. Bribing Crow was easier: a package of raw chicken livers and he was happy to stay right in the middle of my bed, getting bloodstains on the duvet. It wouldn’t be the first time.

I was walking down the stairs and buttoning a clean shirt when the doorbell rang. “Coming!” I shouted, almost tripping over my own feet in my hurry to answer. “Coming,” I repeated, and opened the door.

Shelby blinked. Then she grinned. “You’re lopsided,” she said.

“What?”

“Lopsided.” She gestured toward my shirt. I looked down and reddened. I had managed to miss a button in the middle, leaving me off-kilter.

“Oh,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it.” Her hand brushed my chin, pushing it gently upward until we were eye-to-eye. She was still grinning. “I think it’s cute. Are you going to invite me inside?”

“Oh,” I said again, and stepped to the side, indicating the front hall with a wave of my hand. “Please, come in.”

“Don’t mind if I do,” said Shelby, and stepped over the threshold.

She was wearing a knee-length blue dress with an almost 1950s-style skirt, the kind that would flare out if she spun around. The six inches around the neckline and bottom foot or so of the fabric was white, meeting the blue in a series of scalloped curves that looked almost like clouds. It was the sort of dress most women would have paired with heels, but she was wearing blue ballet flats. I silently approved. Shoes like that wouldn’t get her killed in a firefight. Her only jewelry was a pair of opal stud earrings and some sort of pendant on a silver chain, currently hidden by the neckline of her dress.

Shelby was looking at me, smirking slightly. “You done staring, there, or shall I stand here a bit longer before you show me around?”

“Sorry.” I grimaced and closed the door, turning the deadbolt. “Um, kitchen’s to your left, bathroom’s down the hall, living room’s to your right. The upstairs isn’t currently fit for human habitation. Sarah is in the living room watching PBS. Did you want some coffee, tea, cocoa, something stronger . . . ? Like maybe a boyfriend who doesn’t babble incessantly?”

“I like the babbling all right, and cocoa’d be nice,” Shelby said. “Thank you. For everything, really. I truly didn’t want to be at home alone tonight.”

“It’s my pleasure. Come this way.” I started for the kitchen, casting one last nervous glance over my shoulder at the closed living room door. Sarah had promised to be good. I needed to take her at her word.

Shelby followed me, and sat down at the kitchen table while I busied myself with preparing two cups of hot chocolate and a plate of Grandpa’s snickerdoodles. Touching the cookies would normally have triggered an avalanche of mice, but like Sarah, they had promised to be good. I had to take them at their word, too.

I handed Shelby a mug, and was rewarded with another smile. “Thank you,” she said. “You really do have a lovely home. What I’ve seen of it, anyway.”

“My grandparents believe that a healthy mind begins with a healthy environment.”

Shelby paused with her mug half-lifted to her mouth, expression turning skeptical. “This isn’t hot carob with a soy-based ‘whipped cream’ on top, is it? Because I’m afraid I’ll have to pour it on you if you say it is.”

“Not that kind of healthy, I promise.” Grandma had no arteries to clog, and Grandpa regularly flushed his circulatory system with acids. “Health food” wasn’t a risk in their kitchen. “I meant more that they really think a home should be a home, and not a house where you’re temporarily living.”

“They sound like clever folks,” said Shelby, and finally sipped her cocoa before asking, “Is that why you agreed to move back home? I remember you used to have an apartment, even though I never saw it.”

“That was part of it, yeah,” I agreed. Back in Portland, the house was always full of people—my parents, my sisters, my paternal grandmother, and whoever among our allies and extended family had followed us home that week. In Columbus I’d lived alone, in a one-bedroom apartment that didn’t allow pets. Its layout made it essentially indefensible. I hadn’t slept well once while I was living there. “And then there was Sarah. My grandparents couldn’t take care of her on their own, so they asked if I’d come and help them out.”

“Family first,” said Shelby.

“Yes, exactly,” I agreed. “Family first.”

Shelby took another sip of her cocoa. For a moment, it felt like she was watching me over the top of the cup. The hairs on the back of my neck rose. Then she raised her head and smiled, and I knew that I was just being silly. “I’m glad you’re all right.”

“Me, too.” I reached across the table and took her free hand. “I was really worried when the cops shooed me off and kept on talking to you.”

“They mostly just wanted to know if I thought you might be a serial murderer.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I hope you told them that I was your beloved boyfriend who would never murder anyone.” Without good cause.

“I told them you were a bastard who canceled dates and refused to let me see his home and probably had a wife hidden in the attic, but that you weren’t the type to commit murder in cold blood,” said Shelby sweetly, before taking another sip of cocoa.

“Hey,” I protested. “I haven’t canceled that many dates.”

“Any woman in the world will tell you that one date canceled is one too many,” Shelby said, and took a cookie. “I told them you almost certainly were not a serial killer, and that they were being horribly sexist by assuming that of the two of us, only you were capable of committing murder. That may have been a tactical error—it got me rather a lot more questioning that I hadn’t exactly been planning on.”

“Well, yes. It’s usually unwise to tell the police you could be a serial killer if you really, really wanted to.” I took a cookie of my own, dunking it in my cocoa. “But everything is okay otherwise?”

“You mean beyond the dead man in the bushes and our ruined lunch? Yes. Everything is fine. How was your staff?”

“They’re not technically my staff. I don’t run the reptile house.”

Shelby snorted. “Come off that, Alex. You run Dee, and Dee is the force that holds that place together. Before they hired her on to keep records, it was like a bunch of children playing at being a serious research institute.”

I raised an eyebrow. “And you would know this how? We arrived at the zoo at the same time.”

“Yes, and you brought Dee with you, and while your staff may have been too grateful to go telling tales, the rest of the zoo wasn’t so restrained. If you stuck your head outside the snake box every once in a while, you might have heard a thing or two.”

My cheeks reddened. “I was busy getting settled into my new position.” Rearranging the labs so that no one would notice my basilisk enclosure had taken months, shifting things one piece at a time while Dee adjusted the paperwork and kept the rest of the staff distracted with her streamlined schedules and improved feeding processes. She wasn’t a zookeeper, but she knew her reptiles.

“I know; the gossip had died down before you stuck your head aboveground, and by that point, it seemed a little silly to tell you everyone basically assumed you were in charge. Where’s the harm? Means no one’s monitoring your lunch hours, unlike me.” She grimaced. “I’m thirty seconds late and it’s another lecture from the head keeper on punctuality and pride and lots of other words that start with the letter ‘P.’”

“Still. I didn’t know.” And I didn’t like it. I was supposed to be keeping a low profile, not setting myself up as the new god-king of the Columbus Zoo reptile house.

“I know. That’s part of what made you so interesting.” Shelby grinned.

After a pause, I grinned back. She started to lean across the table toward me. I did the same—and froze, pulling away just before our lips could meet. Shelby blinked at me, smile fading into a puzzled frown.

“What is it?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”

“I’m sorry—I was going to give you something. Hang on just a second.” I bolted from the table before she could argue with me, running back into the front hall. The kitchen door swung shut behind me. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” I chanted, wrenching open the drawer on the hallway table and digging through the mass of protection charms, rope, and old batteries that had built up over the years. (Why the old batteries, I don’t know. Maybe there’s some sort of natural law that says every drawer without an exact defined purpose has to contain a certain number of batteries.)

I knew Shelby needed an anti-telepathy charm if she was going to be in the house. I’d planned for it. So how was it that the second I saw her standing there in her pretty blue dress, I forgot about everything important?

The TV in the living room was still on, and Sarah was unlikely to have moved as long as her show was playing. That was something, anyway.

The anti-telepathy charm was wedged into the bottom of the drawer, next to an anti-hex charm and a basilisk’s claw. I grabbed the thin cotton cord of the charm I’d been looking for and slammed the drawer, running back to the kitchen. I slapped a smile across my face and pushed the door open.

“Sorry about that, Shelby; I just didn’t want to risk forgetting—” I stopped mid-sentence.

Shelby was no longer at the kitchen table. She was standing near the sliding glass door to the backyard, frowning out into the darkness. “I think I saw something moving out there,” she said, stepping closer, so that her face was practically pressed up against the glass. “It didn’t look like a raccoon . . .”

I didn’t think: I just moved, racing across the room and shoving her out of the way just before the creature she’d seen lunged toward the door. I caught a glimpse of madly flapping wings and a tail like a whip before a searing pain lanced through my eyes.

The world went gray.