Half-Off Ragnarok
Page 37

“The cockatrice!” I’d been so preoccupied with more immediate issues—keeping my eyes from turning into balls of granite, keeping Shelby from shooting Sarah—that I’d forgotten about more potentially long-term threats. I shoved myself away from the kitchen table so fast that my chair went clattering to the floor. Running to the sliding glass door, I hit the switch that would flood the backyard with light. I didn’t look to see whether I had disturbed anything; I just grabbed the hanging curtain and pulled it closed, blocking the yard from view.
I turned to find everyone, even Sarah, staring at me like I had just grown a second head. “Er,” I said, and released my fistful of curtain. “I can explain.”
“I think that might be a good idea,” said Grandpa, finally stepping into the kitchen. Shelby gasped, a small, strangled sound that she clearly tried to swallow. It didn’t do her any good. Grandpa looked down at her, frowning. “This is my home, young lady. Be polite.”
I forced myself to stop looking at Grandpa Martin as my beloved grandfather and to see him as Shelby would: a hulking giant of a man with subtly uneven facial features and heavy cords of scar tissue running along the joins where flesh from his various donors met. He’d removed his sweater before he and Grandma realized there was a problem, and the different skin tones of his hands and forearms were very apparent. Honestly, looked at like that, I couldn’t blame Shelby for gasping. Especially when he was carrying a cudgel too large for most men to safely lift, much less wield.
She recovered fast. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said, remaining seated. Good call: she was less threatening if she wasn’t moving. “I didn’t realize . . . I mean, we’ve never been properly introduced, and I thought . . . I mean . . .”
“She thought you and I were being held captive by Sarah, who she’d somehow managed to get a look at . . .” I glanced at Shelby, curiously.
Looking abashed, she shrugged. “I stole your phone the day the skinks got loose in the reptile house, and went through your pictures. I wasn’t jealous!” she added, seeing the look on my face. “I didn’t think it was another woman or anything, but you kept canceling dates to look after a ‘sick cousin,’ and it was the sort of excuse I’d heard before. I wanted to figure out whether I could break it off with you and still keep the moral high ground.”
“I don’t have any pictures of Sarah in my phone,” I said, confused.
“No, dear, but you have pictures of me,” said Grandma. “Cuckoos have so little facial variation.”
Again, I paused to look at my grandparents, trying to see them as a stranger would. Grandma looked older than Sarah, but not enough older to reflect her true age. I would have placed her in her mid to late thirties if forced to take a guess. When looking for a single cuckoo . . .
“I guess that’s true,” I allowed.
“If I’d known there were two Johrlac present, I would never have brought a gun into your home,” said Shelby fervently.
Grandma turned to Shelby, eyeing her sternly. “Oh, no? What would you have done instead?”
“I would have chained the doors shut while you were sleeping and burned the place to the ground.” Shelby stole an apologetic glance at me. “It would have been the only way to be sure.”
I blinked. Grandma blinked. And then, to my surprise, my grandfather burst out laughing.
“She’s got you there, Angie,” he said, putting his cudgel down on the counter. “Now come on. Put down the crossbow and let’s hear about this cockatrice that’s made such a mess in our kitchen.”
“I’d like more juice, please,” said Sarah.
I knew my cue when I heard it. “Shelby called and said she was uncomfortable being alone after what happened to Andrew . . .” I began, as I stood and walked to the fridge. I continued as I prepared Sarah’s mixture of orange juice and A-1, summarizing the events of the evening. I tried to hit the high points without dwelling too much on things like “letting Shelby into the house.” As I put Sarah’s juice down in front of her, I said, “I didn’t get a good enough look at the cockatrice to tell you subspecies, age, or gender, but as soon as I locked eyes with it, I felt a stabbing pain all the way to the back of my retinas, and . . .” I shrugged helplessly.
“His eyes began turning to stone,” said Shelby.
“I didn’t see it happen, but I sure as hell felt it,” I said. “I walked Sarah and Shelby through preparing the bilberry poultice and combined it with the appropriate antivenin. It worked, because the petrifaction was reversed. If Shelby hadn’t been here, I think I would have lost my eyes.” And possibly my life. The petrifaction hadn’t been able to progress to its natural limits, and it was hard to say how large a dose I might have received.
“She saved his life, Angie,” said Grandpa gently. “Put the crossbow down.”
“I like her,” said Sarah. “Blonde ladies with guns remind me of Verity. I miss Verity. Will she be back from dance camp soon?”
This time the silence that fell over the kitchen was sad, the brief, shared quiet of a family that had, for just a few seconds, managed to forget that it was broken. Grandpa was the one to break it, saying, “Alex, why don’t you take Sarah up to her room? We’ll stay here with your little girlfriend, and make sure she doesn’t run off before we can finish having this talk.”
“Grandpa . . .”
“I promise we won’t kill her and dump her body in the nearest ravine,” said Grandma, sounding annoyed. “Just go, all right?”
“Okay.” I cast Shelby a half-worried, half-apologetic look as I stood and walked back to Sarah’s chair. “Come on, Sarah. Let’s go upstairs.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s where we left your math notebooks, and you have homework for tomorrow.”
“But I never got my sundae.”
“After the homework is finished. I promise.”
Sarah lit up. It was the only way to describe the smile that suffused her face, making her look heartbreakingly like her old self. “Okay!” she said, and stood, clutching her juice glass in one hand. I took the other, and led her out of the kitchen, leaving my grandparents and my girlfriend behind. Hopefully they would all be alive when I got back.