Half-Off Ragnarok
Page 85

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.