Half-Off Ragnarok

Twenty-two

Outside the wall of Ohio’s West Columbus Zoo, somehow missing a girlfriend

“SHELBY?”

The question hung in the air unanswered, making me feel foolish for asking it. Shelby wasn’t there, and with her injuries, there was no way she’d recovered enough to move on her own while I was getting the car. I still took a few precious seconds to scan the nearby brush, looking for the blood trail she would have left if she’d tried to move on her own. It wasn’t there. Someone had taken her.

I took a deep breath, trying to force down the wave of panic clawing at my chest. She was gone. That was a fact; that was something I was going to have to deal with. All it really meant was that I was going to need to get her back.

I stepped deeper into the brush, watching the ground for signs of disturbance. Lindworms don’t normally have territories that span more than a few miles, but she’d killed the local male’s mate. If it had somehow tracked her, it might have—

No. I rejected the thought as quickly as it came. Shelby had not been dragged away by a hungry lindworm. This wasn’t Jaws: an animal that consisted of nothing but hunger and survival instinct wasn’t going to come looking for revenge. Even if it was, it wouldn’t come near the zoo—too many people, too many large scavengers. And besides, there would be traces if something that large had been through here. The brush was almost undisturbed. Nothing larger than a human had passed recently.

The trunk of the tree where Shelby had been leaning was damp and sticky with her blood. I touched the bark, unsure whether or not I should be reassured when my fingers came away red. Then I looked down, and began trying to sort through the broken branches as I looked for a direction. This trail was where I’d carried Shelby from the road, and this trail was where I had forged my way back in . . .

When I was done, there was only one trail unaccounted for, wider and slightly more uneven than the others, like whoever had walked there had been dealing with an unexpected weight. I followed it to a spot on the road a few yards from where Shelby and I had originally entered the trees. Crouching down, I studied the pavement, looking for tracks. There were some muddy scuffs, like someone had walked here recently. And there was a single drop of blood.

Someone had taken Shelby. Someone had followed us out of the zoo and taken her.

I wanted to be sick. Instead, I pulled out my phone and walked back to the car, scrolling through my contacts until I came to the number labeled “dry cleaning.” I pressed it and raised the phone to my ear.

“Yes?”

“Grandma.” I closed my eyes. “I need you. Please come.”

I was still standing next to my car when my grandmother pulled up, parking her own car so that it blocked the entire road. She launched herself from the driver’s seat at me, and Crow was close behind her, his wings spread wide as he arrowed for my chest. He hit me like a small feathery missile, and I wrapped my arms around him, automatically supporting his hindquarters in order to keep him from shredding my shoulders.

“You’re projecting panic, Grandma,” I said, fighting to keep my voice level. Maybe it was my anti-telepathy charm taking the edge off, and maybe it was the fact that I was panicking quite well without any outside help, but I didn’t want to run for the woods. I just wanted the extra waves of fear to stop. “Please pull it back. I don’t know how much I can take.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, stricken. Her eyes flashed white, and the foreboding in the air decreased. I only wished she could take my panic away as easily as she’d stopped projecting her own. “What can I do?”

“You’ve already done it. You brought Crow.” I walked back to the place on the road where that last drop of blood glittered dark and foreboding against the pavement and knelt, putting Crow carefully down. He looked up at me and cawed, tail lashing. “Shelby, Crow. Where’s Shelby?”

He sat down and croaked at me.

“Shelby. You liked Shelby. I know you can track by smell. You’ve tracked me through five miles of dense forest because you thought it was time for dinner. Now where is Shelby?”

Crow looked at me for a moment, head cocked to the side. Then he leaned forward and sniffed the ground, wings half-mantling, before he launched himself into the air. In seconds, he was gone, flying up over the zoo and disappearing.

I gaped. When I asked my grandmother to bring the Church Griffin, I hadn’t been counting on the fact that he had wings and I didn’t. “Oh, shit,” I said, and ran back to my car. “Southeast, he’s going southeast. What’s southeast of here?”

“Lots of things, Alex, that’s not exactly a small question!” said Grandma, following me. “Woods. Some cave systems. Dayton . . .”

“The gorgons.” I raised my head and looked at her. “That’s where the cockatrice came from. That’s where this all started. And they’re to the southeast, too. Someone from the gorgon community has Shelby.”

Grandma stared at me. Then, in a dangerous tone, she said, “I don’t have to move my car. I can keep you here.”

“No, you can’t.” I got into the driver’s seat, fastening my seat belt on autopilot. “I’m going after her, Grandma. I have to go after her. I’m the reason she got involved in all of this to begin with.” She was the reason I was distracted. I’d spent years keeping myself from forming any attachments that could interfere with my work, and then Shelby goddamn Tanner had come along and fucked everything up. And all I wanted now was to see her safely home.

“Then I’m coming with you,” said Grandma. “I can’t let you run into a nest of snakes alone.”

“That’s racist,” I said automatically. Then I shook my head. “No. Grandpa’s at work, the cockatrice is still somewhere in the city, and you can’t leave Sarah alone for as long as this is going to take. I’m trained for this. Now please. I’m not going to argue with you while Shelby’s out there bleeding to death.” Assuming Shelby still had blood; assuming she wasn’t a statue by now.

That kind of thinking wouldn’t get me any closer to saving my girlfriend. I shut the car door, rolling down the window so that I could say, “I’ll call as soon as I know anything. Trust me and my ability not to get myself killed over something stupid, all right? Now please. Move your car.”

She looked at me sadly for what felt like hours but was probably just a few seconds before nodding and walking back to her own vehicle. I rolled up my window and clutched the steering wheel, waiting for her to get out of my way so that I could follow Crow’s flight path across the city.

The second her car had rolled far enough to leave me room to maneuver, I hit the gas, blasting past my grandmother and heading for the main road at an unsafe speed. I made matters worse by pulling out my phone again, driving one-handed as I pulled up the number for the Sarpas.

Chandi answered the phone, sounding surprisingly polite as she said, “You have reached the Sarpa residence. Who may I say is calling?”

“It’s Alex Price,” I said, and swore under my breath as I swerved to avoid a VW bug that seemed to think the appropriate place to slow down and smell the roses was in the middle of a major thoroughfare. “I need to speak to your mother. Can you put her on the phone?”

“What? Why are you on my phone?” Her tone turned irritated and slightly scornful, which was much more normal for her. “You were just in my house. Why are you on my phone?”

“I need to speak to your mother,” I repeated. “If you want me to open the reptile house tomorrow, you’ll put her on the phone.”

“What? You can’t threaten—”

“I’m not threatening anything. I won’t be able to open the reptile house if I’m dead. Now put your mother on the phone.”

There was a pause as Chandi considered my words, weighing their meaning. Then she said, “I’ll get my mother.”

“Thank you.”

There was a clunk from her end of the phone, followed by the distant sound of her bellowing for her mom to come to the phone. I gritted my teeth as I merged onto the freeway, still driving one-handed. It was easier than I expected, maybe because I was too angry and too afraid to really pay attention to what I was doing. Things are always easy when you refuse to let yourself remember how dangerous they are.

“Alex?” Kumari sounded worried. That made sense: I didn’t normally call the house several times in the same day. “What is going on?”

“Have you made any headway with who might be trying to kill us, Kumari? Because Shelby’s missing, and it looks like whoever took her went back to the local gorgon community, or someplace near there. What haven’t you told me? What do I need to know?”

Kumari gasped. If not for that, I would have thought that she’d hung up on me as the seconds ticked past without her saying anything.

“Kumari. I’d like to put both hands back on the wheel before I flip the car. Please.”

“I didn’t . . . it was just a rumor. I gave it no credence.”

“What was just a rumor?”

“The mother of the community in the woods, she was a crossbreed. Father of one strain, mother of another.”

“Yes, I know that,” I said impatiently. “I had dinner with her.”

“Most crossbreeds are sterile. She was not.”

That was a surprise. “Meaning what?”

“Meaning she had a son, but he was born malformed and twisted. Genetics were not kind. He was an outcast among his own people, always seeking a way to earn his place. He disappeared some years ago.”

“This is fascinating from a biological standpoint, but what does it have to do with Shelby?”

“When I contacted the local bogeymen and explained what I needed to ask, they told me to look for the gorgon’s son. That while many of them would be quite pleased if you and your family were killed, no one had been asking about it lately, save for the gorgon’s son.”

“I thought you said he disappeared.”

“Yes,” said Kumari. “I did.”

This time, her silence extended until I pulled the phone from my ear and checked the screen. The call had ended. I had five bars of service; we hadn’t been disconnected. She hung up on me.

“Swell,” I muttered, dropping the phone into the passenger seat. Finally gripping the wheel with both hands, I hit the gas and sped down the highway, heading as fast as I could for what might well be certain doom.

There are species in the cryptid world that are cross-fertile with each other, just like there are in the scientifically accepted world: as a wise man once said, life finds a way. Life is extremely bloody-minded, and often finds the worst way possible, preferably with a body count somewhere in the triple digits. Hannah’s existence was biologically no stranger than the existence of, say, mules, hinnies, or ligers. It happens. But crossbreeds of that type are almost always sterile, because while nature likes to find a way, biology likes to set limits. Those limits say “no, at some point, we’re pushing things too far, now stop before you get silly.”

There have been a few recorded cases of mules and the like having offspring, but they’re few and far between, and almost nothing is known about how those babies will mature, or what traits they’ll inherit from their crossbred parents. If Hannah was fertile, that changed everything.

I hit the gas a little harder.

Kumari hadn’t named Hannah’s impossible offspring, calling him only “the gorgon’s son,” but based on Shelby’s experience at the zoo, I had a decent idea of who it was.

Lloyd, who should have been the man at the gate when the second guard was killed, yet was somehow conveniently missing from his post when the cockatrice came to call.

Lloyd, who always wore his hat, and who knew the zoo inside and out.

Lloyd, who had looked so surprised to see me after I saw the cockatrice in my backyard.

He wasn’t a zookeeper, but that would actually make it easier for him to move unobserved. Who watched the guards to see if they were in the right place? Management, presumably, and yet no one else on the property would have reported him for snooping around a restricted area. He could have hidden his cockatrice anywhere in the zoo without needing to worry about being caught.

Lloyd always wore his glasses, thick, Coke-bottle things that looked too heavy for his face. What if they weren’t intended to improve his vision, but rather to protect the zoo’s staff and patrons from the full effect of his gaze?

I’d always taken Lloyd for human. It was an assumption, but it was a statistically safe one: even in an area with a large cryptid population, nine out of ten people on the street, if not more, will be human beings. We are the dominant sapient species on this planet, numbers-wise. So assuming that the little old man who checked my badge at the front gate was human wasn’t arrogant; it was reasonable. And it may have gotten Shelby killed.

I broke the speed limit for the entire drive, and saw no police on the roads; so much for Ohio’s finest. Then again, with a killer in the area who was somehow turning his victims partially into stone, it was possible they just had better things to worry about than speeders—and depending on the strength of Grandma’s whammy, they could have been choosing not to see me out of a vague sense of self-preservation. I barely slowed down in time to avoid missing my turnoff into the forest, where the trees promptly closed in.

Illusions can’t actually keep you out if you’re determined to keep going; they just mess with the visual aspects of the world, and do nothing to change the physical. I tightened my hands on the wheel, hoping my memory of the road was correct, and kept going into what should have been unbroken forest—

—only to emerge onto the curving road surrounding the gorgon community. On a hunch, I leaned forward and peered upward. In the sky, high overhead, a black shape that didn’t quite look like a bird was circling. “Good boy, Crow,” I said, and continued on my way down, through the spiral, to the cluster of mobile homes below.

A crowd was gathering by the time I reached ground level, gorgons appearing in every doorway and around the sides of every building. I slowed enough to give them time to get out of my way but kept driving until I reached the spot where Dee had instructed me to park on my first visit.

She emerged from a nearby trailer as I turned off the engine, making it clear that she’d been watching my approach. Her snakes were up and hissing, mirroring the distressed look on her face. I adjusted my glasses to make sure they would shield me from accidental petrifaction, unfastened my seat belt, and got out of the car.

“Alex!” Dee skidded to a stop a few feet away from me. Frank was approaching from the back of the crowd; he must have been in his office, leaving him farther to walk before he could find out what I was doing here. “What in the world—?”

“Look up.” I pointed, to make my meaning perfectly clear.

It’s interesting: even when they’re not primates, most things that look like humans will react like humans under normal circumstances. That includes following simple directions that don’t make sense. More than half the crowd, Dee and Frank included, looked up to where Crow was doing his slow circle.

Of the gorgons who did look up, only Dee gasped, her hand flying to her cheek before she said, sounding unnerved, “Is that Crow? What’s he doing?”

“Hunting.” I waited until she looked back down before I continued, “Shelby’s missing, Dee. She was hurt while we were searching for the cockatrice at the zoo, and in the time it took me to go and get the car, someone took her. When I asked Crow to find her, he came here. When I called Kumari and asked if anyone might be interested in hurting us, she told me a really interesting story. About Hannah, and the son no one bothered to tell me she had.”

Dee’s eyes widened further, and her snakes stopped hissing as they coiled close against her head, becoming a tightly-knotted pile of serpentine curls. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“She spoke to the local bogeymen. I asked her, since they won’t talk to me. And according to what they told her, I should be looking for ‘the gorgon’s son’ when I’m trying to find the person who took Shelby. So is there anything you’d been wanting to tell me, Dee? As a friend? Because now would be the time.”

One of the gorgon men to my left took a step forward, the snakes atop his head hissing menacingly. I had the gun out of my belt and pointed in his direction before he could take a second step. I didn’t turn, but he stopped moving, which told me my aim was true. Not taking my eyes off Dee, I continued, “Also, we’re all friends here, right? I mean, I know I’m outnumbered, so you could technically go ahead and jump me, but I have eight bullets in this gun, and I’m a real fast shot. Right now, we’re having a chat. No hostilities. I’d like to keep it that way. But if you decide we’re going to have problems, I’m not going to be the guy who tells you no.”

“Paul, stop it,” snapped Dee, dropping her hand to her side. The gorgon to my left took a big step backward. I lowered my gun. Dee focused back on me. “Alex, I swear, I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. I’ve been here all day. We all have.”

“I believe you,” I said wearily. “That’s the hard part. But someone tried to burn down Shelby’s apartment building last night, and now she’s missing. I want her back, preferably alive and intact. Crow led me here. You didn’t tell me Hannah had a son. Now do you want to help all these things make sense, or are you just going to keep standing there?”

Frank pushed his way through the crowd to Dee’s side. He put a hand on her shoulder, looking dispassionately at the gun I was holding, before he asked, “What do you want us to do?”

“I want you to tell me where to find Hannah’s son.”

“I wish we could.” Frank shook his head. “No one here knows.”

I looked up to where Crow was still endlessly circling, like a carrion bird above its prey. I wished there were a way I could call him back to land and make him show me where to go next. Sadly, even a smart animal is still an animal. He’d done as much as he was going to do. I looked back down.

“Fine, then,” I said to Dee and Frank. “If you can’t take me to Hannah’s son, I’ll settle for the next best thing. Take me to your leader. I want to talk to Hannah.”