Half-Off Ragnarok

by Seanan McGuire

  “That’s something I think we can all agree on,” I said, relaxing. “Now that we’ve got that out of the way, can we please focus on the problem at hand? Three men are dead, and whoever—or whatever—killed them either is a Pliny’s gorgon, or is trying to implicate the local community in the deaths.”

  “Whoever or whatever?” asked Shelby. “Don’t we already know the answer to that one?”

  “If a Pliny’s gorgon is using a cockatrice to commit the murders, or is committing the murders on their own and somehow pinning it on a cockatrice, we’re looking for a who,” I said. “If it’s a cockatrice that’s somehow being covered up for, it’s a what. That’s going to change our hunting strategies dramatically.”

  “Pliny’s gorgons don’t like cockatrice any more than anyone else does,” said Dee. “They’re spiteful, smelly things, and being immune to their glance doesn’t make us immune to being pecked and scratched.” She shook her head. “Every group has its fringe element. Ours thinks we should be self-sufficient, which means farming. They keep trying to cultivate things that can’t be petrified. That includes cockatrice. No, thank you.”

  “Is there one of those fringe groups around here?”

  Dee hesitated before nodding. “Yes. They live about a mile from the main community, where they won’t interfere with anyone else.”

  “We need to see them.”

  “Alex—”

  “Three people are dead, Dee.” She flinched. I continued: “The police only know about two of them. There’s a chance it won’t make the national news if it stops now. It’ll be a blip on a few of the blogs that specialize in weird news, and it’ll go away. But if it continues, it’s going to get some media play, and the Covenant is going to notice. Do you want to risk that?”

  Dee paled. “No, but . . .”

  “We need to visit the community, Dee. You know that’s how this is going to end.”

  There was a moment of silence before she nodded, slowly. “I suppose I did know that. I’d just been hoping there was, well . . . some other way.” She glanced to Grandma before she said, almost guiltily, “I’m sorry, Angela, but I can’t bring a cuckoo where we live. I know you’re, well . . . you . . . but I can’t.”

  My grandmother, who could be stubborn sometimes, but who had lived her entire life with the reality of what she was, nodded. “I understand, Dee,” she said, with a small, almost regretful smile. “I never expected you to bring me along.” Unspoken was the fact that out of all the cuckoos in the world, my ailing cousin included, Grandma was the least dangerous. She was a projective telepath, like the rest of her kind, but she didn’t receive. It was why she’d grown up with a normal code of ethics, rather than being overwritten by her mother’s sociopathic nature while she was still in the womb.

  “We’ll take two cars,” I said, pushing my coffee away as I stood.

  Dee blinked. “What, now?”

  Andrew, Mr. O’Malley, and the guard—I still needed to learn his name—weren’t getting any less dead while we sat around and talked. I nodded firmly. “Yes, now,” I said. “Before it’s too late for anyone else.”

  “Oh, lovely,” said Shelby. “I’ve always enjoyed field trips.”

  Fourteen

  “Try to let go of the idea that humanity is the pinnacle of evolution. There are creatures in this world that can kill you with a look, people with wings, and mountains that walk. Humanity is amazing, but have a little perspective.”

  —Martin Baker

  Driving through the woods half an hour outside of Columbus, Ohio, struggling to remain positive about the situation

  DEE HAD ALWAYS STRUCK me as a careful driver, someone who obeyed traffic laws and tried not to attract the attention of the police. What I hadn’t considered was that she might be different when stressed out and taking us to meet her family. Once we reached the woods, it was every man for himself: Dee hit the gas, and I was forced to violate several local and state ordinances if I wanted to keep up with her. (She’d been unwilling to give directions to the local gorgon enclave, saying we could follow her home if we insisted on coming for a visit. I was starting to wonder if that wasn’t because she thought she could lose us before we got anywhere near the rest of the colony.)

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I muttered, following Dee as she took a sharp turn across two lanes of freeway and down an exit with a name I couldn’t have pronounced if you paid me.

  “Sorry?” asked Shelby.

  “No, I’m sorry,” I said, keeping my eyes on the road. If I looked away for so much as a second, I was going to wind up slamming into a tree and killing us both. “I swear I thought she could drive.”

  “Alex. Have you ever driven down the Great Ocean Highway?”

  “Uh . . . which would be where, exactly?”

  “It’s in Australia.”

  Dee took another sharp turn, onto a narrow road I hadn’t seen through the trees until she was already heading down it. She hadn’t even used her blinker. I hauled hard on the wheel. The tires squealed as we changed direction and went rocketing after my runaway assistant.

  When I was breathing normally again, I said, “Then, no, I haven’t. I’ve never been to Australia.”

  “Oh, we’ll need to fix that,” said Shelby, with a degree of joy that would have been disturbing if I hadn’t been focusing so intently on keeping Dee in sight. Maybe that was a life lesson in disguise: when there’s any chance your girlfriend is going to exhibit an unnatural amount of glee over something that seems perfectly mundane, take her on a high-speed car chase. It’ll take the edge off. Then she sobered. “Didn’t expect you to call me today.”

  “Shelby, is this really—”

  “You made me have a relationship talk while we were hunting monsters, I think this is fair. Thought we were probably finished after last night.”

  “I needed your help.”

  “Is that all we are now? People who help each other?”

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I’d like to be more, maybe. But I can’t afford to be distracted right now. And then there’s the whole thing where your introduction to my grandparents involved waving a gun at their adopted daughter, so . . . yeah. I recommend not pulling out any more firearms unless there’s a really excellent reason.”

  “I suppose ‘being a Johrlac’ isn’t an excellent reason, right?” Shelby’s tone was unsteadily wry, like she was trying to make a joke but wasn’t quite sure how appropriate it was or how it was going to be received.

  I sighed, still focusing on the road, where Dee was doing her best to set speed records. “No, it’s not. They’re my family, Shelby. If we want this to work out, knowing what we both know now, you’re going to need to learn to be okay with that. They’re not the Johrlac who came to your country and hurt the people that you cared about. They’ve been here this whole time, not hurting anybody.”

  “Are we, then?” asked Shelby.

  “Are we what?”

  “Are we going to try and get this to work out?” Shelby twisted in her seat to face me.

  I was silent for a moment. “Do you want to?” I finally asked. I knew it was unfair of me, but I needed to know.

  “It’s different, now that we don’t have to hide anything. But . . . I don’t know if I would have gotten involved with you if I’d known you were a cryptozoologist.”

  “Ah, but if you had, I wouldn’t have needed to make nearly as many excuses.” I shook my head. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we need a dating service.”

  “How would you keep the Covenant from signing up?”

  “That is why we’re never going to have a dating service.” I laughed. It felt good. So did Shelby. That felt better.

  And then Dee turned again, this time into what looked like a wall of solid green. There was no opening there: nothing but undifferentiated trees and the broken, rocky ground between them.

  Illusions happen. Whispering a quick prayer to anyone who might be listening, I followed her, ten
sing myself against a crash that never came. Instead, the turn ended with us driving onto a smooth, gently curving private road. Dee was just ahead, and she’d slowed down enough that I had to slam on the brakes to keep from rear-ending her. Apparently, we no longer needed to drive like maniacs to avoid being followed.

  “Holy . . .” breathed Shelby. I glanced to the side. She had her hands pressed flat against the passenger side window, and was close to doing the same thing with her nose. I craned my neck, trying to get an idea of what she was looking at.

  The road followed a natural curve in the landscape, winding down into a bowl valley of the type that are common in some forested areas. The trees had been cleared within the valley itself, opening up a wide swath of farmable land. In the middle of the bowl was what looked like a small mobile home park. The individual homes were arranged in a circle that mimicked the bowl itself, and would be a great mechanism for reducing traffic jams if they ever needed to drive out of here. They could start up the lead mobile home and unwind the whole community like a vehicular snake, slithering its way up the road and on to some new safe haven.

  I chuckled. Shelby turned away from the window, raising her eyebrows.

  “Something funny?” she asked.

  “Just that I’m already starting to think in really tortured reptile metaphors,” I said. “Don’t let me try to talk dirty until we’ve been away from here for a few hours.”

  “Don’t be silly, Alex. I never let you talk dirty to me if I can help it. You’re a great kisser, and you’re better in bed, but your idea of romance has always been way too centered around reptiles.” She pressed her nose back against the window. “I see corn, tomato plants, there’s even a small apple orchard. These people must have been living here for years.”

  “At least twenty, I’d say.” The road was well-maintained, but it must have been put in before wide Internet surveillance was possible. If it were more recent, people would have noticed the construction, illusions over the entrance or no. “I wonder if this place appears on Google Earth . . .” I made a mental note to check when I got home.

  “I’ve got cell service in here, if that makes a difference.”

  “That makes sense, actually. A lot of Pliny’s gorgons go into day trading or technical writing or other professions that don’t necessarily bring them into contact with people on a regular basis.” I smiled a little. “There’s at least one romance writer who never goes to conventions, because she’s actually an eight-foot-tall grandfather.”

  “Why do they do that? Dee does fine with humans. I’d never have guessed.” Shelby grimaced. “Although to be fair, I wasn’t looking. I should probably have suspected something.”

  “Dee’s very good at fitting in. And as for why Pliny’s gorgons arrange their lives that way, well, it helps them hide the fact that they—the males at least—are a lot taller than humans. Females top out between five and seven feet, but males can be up to nine feet tall. Not so useful if you want to pass for human, so they get jobs that don’t require them to try.”

  “So what, they’ve got their own cell tower?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. They probably had DSL before most of the rest of the state.” A surprising number of telephone company technicians are cryptids, or know cryptids exist and have simply chosen not to care. Once you’ve determined that the giant ball of fangs and tentacles isn’t going to eat you, there’s no good reason not to fix its phone service.

  “Huh.”

  “Pretty much.” We had reached the bottom of the hill. The road continued around the base of the bowl, avoiding the farmed areas, to wind its way into the mobile homes. I kept following Dee. It seemed like the only safe thing to do.

  People were starting to emerge from the trailers to either side, looking curiously toward my car. A few of them were wearing baseball caps, and most of them were bareheaded. Why shouldn’t they be? This was their home, and Shelby and I were the invasive species. One little girl had red bows tied around the necks of her snakes. Their scales were so pale that they looked almost white. I wondered whether they would darken as she aged. Immediately after, I wondered how rude of me it would be to ask.

  Dee parked in front of a trailer. There was another space next to her, and so I slid into it, killing the engine. Shelby reached for her door. I put a hand on her arm, stopping her.

  “Hang on,” I said, and produced a pair of polarized goggles from my pocket. She looked at me quizzically. “The gaze of a Pliny’s gorgon can stun if they’re not wearing specially tinted glasses. These will keep you from getting hurt.”

  “And you think you weren’t planning to get me involved in all this,” she said, taking the goggles and sliding them on. “What about you?”

  I tapped the arm of my glasses. “I’m already set. These are specially polarized. So is the reflective coating on my car windows. I plan ahead.”

  “You say the sweetest things.”

  “I try,” I said, reaching for the door. “Come on. Let’s go see how much trouble we’re in.”

  The gorgons had started to move as soon as we stopped. By the time Shelby and I were out of the car, we were surrounded. Size didn’t seem to be a factor: even the little girl with beribboned snakes was standing there, clearly confident that she could take us if she had to. Given her natural advantages, she probably could.

  “They’re with me,” Dee announced, stepping between me and the rest of the gorgons. That left Shelby alone between the two cars. I wasn’t sure I was comfortable with that. We should probably have planned this better.

  A thin man with bronze skin and black-scaled snakes pushed his way through the crowd. He was wearing blue hospital scrubs that left the bottom foot or so of his legs exposed. He must have been seven feet tall. My animal hindbrain began a vigorous argument with the rest of my mind over the virtues of running vs. asking if I could perform a physical examination.

  “And who, exactly, are ‘they,’ Deanna?” he demanded.

  “They’re my guests, Frank,” said Dee, sounding unruffled. She reached up and removed her wig, causing her own brown-and-red snakes to uncoil and stretch to their full length. Several of Frank’s snakes stopped writhing in order to watch hers intently. “If that’s not enough for you—”

  “It’s not,” said Frank dangerously.

  “—allow me to present Alexander Price, and Shelby Tanner. Shelby belongs to the Thirty-Six Society.”

  “Cheers,” said Shelby, solving the “separated from the group” issue by sliding across the hood of my car and landing on her feet beside me. “Nice . . . village? Village works as well as anything, I suppose. Nice village you’ve got here. How often are you doing crop rotation?”

  “Every season,” said Frank automatically. Then he scowled. “Hang on. I’m not going to answer any questions about how we’re living. You’re the ones who should be answering questions.”

  “Frank.” I could practically hear Dee roll her eyes. “They’re my guests. Behave.”

  “They’re humans,” said one of the children—a little boy in a Pokémon T-shirt. Some things are apparently universal. He looked curious. The reason was revealed as he continued, “I’ve never seen humans before. Can we keep them?”

  “No,” said Frank. “They won’t be staying. Or at least, they won’t be staying alive.”

  “Do you lot always threaten company?” asked Shelby. “Like, is this a normal social thing, and I should start threatening you back if I want to be civil?”

  “Please don’t,” said Dee.

  “Go right ahead,” said Frank.

  “When in doubt, we uninvited humans like to listen to the people who have a known track record of not trying to kill us,” I said hastily, before things could get any worse. “Look: we’re here because I asked Dee to bring us. She’s been a good friend, and I’m really glad to have been able to assist your community by supplying antivenin and other needed medical supplies. I take it you’re the community doctor, Mr. . . . ?”

  “Franklin
Javier Lusczando de Rodriguez,” said Frank, drawing himself up to his full height and looking haughtily down his nose. He had a lot of height, which made the gesture more impressive than pretentious, although it was a narrow margin.

  “Ah, so you’re Dee’s husband.” I stole a glance at Dee, who wasn’t looking at me at all. This was probably not the top of her list of “ways I want my boss to meet my husband.” I looked back to Frank. “Anyway. Dee has been a huge help since I came to Ohio, and I want to help her in return. I know it would be devastating for you if a Covenant purge were to get started over all this silly cockatrice business.”

  As I had expected, saying the word “Covenant” in the middle of a gathering of gorgons was like dropping a lit match into a barrel full of salamanders. Hissing filled the air as people turned to their neighbors, talking in quick, panicked voices. I held my ground, watching Frank. His snakes were still mostly calm, although they were twisting together in a way that could have indicated anything from confusion to guilt.

  Finally, he frowned. “Silly cockatrice business?”

  I blinked, glancing toward Dee again. She still wasn’t looking at me. “Well, this is going to be fun,” I muttered, and turned back to Frank. “I can see we have a great deal to discuss. Is there someplace we can go to talk about this, preferably where we won’t start a panic?”

  Frank kept frowning as he studied me. At long last, he nodded and said, “I have a place. Come with me.”

  Frank’s “place” turned out to be one of the larger mobile homes, set off from the rest by almost fifteen yards—unheard of privacy in a community where everyone shared the same open space as both a common area and a means of getting from one place to another. The reason for the privacy was apparent as soon as he opened the door to reveal the gleaming operating table and state-of-the-art dentist’s chair. There was even a maternity area, with several large incubators and a comfortable bed for mothers recuperating from their labor.