Half-Off Ragnarok
Page 22

Considering that what I had forgotten was Crow, the guess was closer than I was comfortable with. “No, but you’re not certified for venomous snake handling, and I forgot to milk our tiger snake in all the excitement. We’re supposed to make a delivery to the local hospital tomorrow. We can’t do that if I don’t milk the tiger snake.”
“I’m Australian, and you’re seriously telling me I’m not safe around snakes.”
“I’m sorry, zoo rules, I’ll call you tonight.” I kissed her cheek again. Then I turned and ran, putting her behind me as quickly as I could. I didn’t want to see the betrayed expression I knew was on her face.
Running through the closed zoo right after a man had been found dead might have looked suspicious. I was willing to risk it, since it could also just look like normal human discomfort over hanging out where a corpse had recently been. “Reacting normally around dead things” had been one of the hardest lessons for my parents to teach to my sisters and me, since frequently, after we’d reacted normally, we were expected to take the dead things home for further study. My being a scientist alleviates that somewhat; I’m expected to react oddly, and a little morbidly, when I encounter bodies. I’ve never been sure how Verity manages. As a ballroom dancer, she’s pretty much expected to flip her shit if she sees so much as a rat.
I burst back into the reptile house. Kim and Nelson were gone. Dee was still there, turning off lights and peering anxiously into enclosures. She turned at the sound of my footsteps. “Anything?”
“No,” I said. “The zoo is—”
“Closed, I know. I’m just double-checking the cages.”
“I came back for Crow.” I started for my office door. “Do you want me to walk you to your car?” I felt guilty as soon as the offer was made. I’d left Shelby alone, with a monster or a killer potentially loose in the zoo, and here I was offering to escort my assistant.
“I’m good,” said Dee. She tapped her glasses. “This isn’t my first rodeo. I’ll call you when I get home tonight, just so you know I got there safe.”
Pushing away the images of a petrifactor rodeo—which would probably be very slow—I said, “Can you also ask around and see if anyone knows anything?”
Dee nodded. “I can, but people are going to assume you’re accusing them. You’re braced for that, right?”
“I’d rather they make a few assumptions than we wind up with a bunch of dead bodies on our hands. I mean . . . any death is horrible, but what if it hadn’t been a staff member? What if whatever petrified Andrew had found a bunch of school kids on a field trip?”
“I’ll never understand the human idea that children are invariably more valuable than adults,” said Dee. “If you have twenty adults and twenty children, and half of them are going to die, you can’t save just the kids. They’d all starve to death.”
Pragmatism is a gorgon trait. That sort of thing is important when you’ve spent centuries being hunted down and slaughtered for being something that humans think of as monsters. “I don’t disagree with you,” I said carefully, all too aware of my own human prejudices, “but remember that we’re in a human-dominant culture. If it had been a dead kid, or worse, dead kids, we’d have news crews crawling all over this place looking for answers, in addition to the police. That would make it a lot harder for us to find the killer and make it stop.”
“Do you really think it’s still here, whatever it was?”
“I think it would be stupid to assume it wasn’t.”
Dee sighed heavily. “This isn’t what I signed up for when I took this job, you know. I thought the worst thing I’d have to deal with was my hair biting someone.”
“Welcome to my world.” I unlocked my office door, stepping inside, and crossed to the window. It was still light outside: that made this trick a little more dangerous, but I couldn’t leave Crow in the office overnight. He’d freak out when he realized I wasn’t coming back, and the amount of damage he could do was limited only by his imagination.
Crow was curled in my desk chair. He lifted his head, watching my progress across the room. The rat bag was on the office floor. It was empty.
“At least that means I don’t need to worry about feeding you,” I said, and opened the window. “Crow, car.”
Crow made an inquisitive croaking noise. He could see as well as I could that it was still daylight outside.
“Crow, car.”
He stood, performing a languid cat stretch before flattening and stretching out his wings like a raven. I stepped hurriedly to the side, and even then, he barely missed me as he took off and launched himself at the open window. I shut it behind him and left the office, moving fast now that I needed to race my griffin to the car. He’d beat me there, of course—he had wings, I had feet and gates I couldn’t just fly over—but I wanted to minimize the amount of time he was likely to spend sitting out in the open, casually preening himself.
Wild miniature griffins move in flocks, and the ones that have survived into the modern day have learned to hide from humans, since natural selection—and men with guns—took all the ones who didn’t hide out of the gene pool years ago. Crow had none of those instinctive reactions. He was more like a house cat, raised from birth to believe that all humans existed solely to be a source of food and entertainment for him. If he tried to make friends with one of the other zookeepers . . .
That was a bad thought. I set it aside and kept walking.
I didn’t see Shelby again as I made my way to the parking lot. I was still feeling guilty about having lied to her, and I could recognize the start of a vicious cycle. My guilt would grow and grow until I saw her next, and then, just as I was getting it under control, I’d need to lie to her again. The conflict between what I could say and what I wanted to say was becoming a serious problem—and worse, it was messing with my focus. I couldn’t prioritize her life over anyone else’s. That didn’t stop me from wanting to.
It wasn’t fair. My father found a woman who’d been raised by cryptids and saw nothing in the least bit unusual about them. My Aunt Jane married an incubus, which neatly sidestepped the issue of “how do you explain that not everything that looks human actually is.” And my sister went and hooked up with a member of the Covenant of St. George. Shelby was the first girl I’d met in a long time—who was I kidding; the first girl I’d met, period—who seemed right for me. She was perfect, except for the part where if she met my family, she’d scream and run away.