“I didn’t think lindworms were native to this part of Ohio,” I said, picking my way through the mud toward Dee. “I’m not sure I’ve got anything on me that can put it under.”
“You know how I always say you need to be more about preserving us, and less about preserving the local wildlife?” demanded Dee, scowling at me through the lenses of her specially polarized glasses. The glass was almost clear, with just the faintest touch of yellow hinting that there might be something strange about it.
“Yes . . .”
“This is one of those times!”
Crow squawked as the lindworm managed to catch one of his tail feathers. He pulled himself free and resumed harrying, but Dee was right; this wasn’t going to work forever. I shrugged off my backpack and put it down on the mud, crouching to begin rummaging through its contents.
“All right, this is what we’re going to do,” I said. “Dee, when I give the word, you’re going to take off your protective gear.”
“Alex—”
“Trust me, get in front of me, and do as I say.”
She gave me a flat look. “You’re going to get yourself killed.”
“Not if you know how to listen.” I straightened up, the vial of ketamine in my hand. “Get in front of me.”
Dee sighed and moved into position, crouching in front of me like we were about to play a game of touch football with the giant reptile. In a way, we were.
Crow was still harrying the lindworm, but he was slowing down; Church Griffins are more like cats than ravens in many ways, including stamina. He was doing his best. He couldn’t have kept that up much longer.
It was a good thing he didn’t have to. I whistled again before shouting, “Crow! Home!”
Crow doesn’t know many commands, and he doesn’t reliably listen to any of them (except for maybe “dinner”), but this was one he both recognized and was glad to obey. He whipped around and flew back toward me, landing heavily on my shoulder. I clamped my free hand down over his eyes, an action that he only protested weakly. There wasn’t time to be gentler. The lindworm was already turning, mouth open, shrieking furiously.
“Now, Dee!”
Cool as a cucumber, my assistant reached up, removing her wig with one hand and her glasses with the other. The snakes growing from her scalp in place of hair rose, hissing, as her eyes locked onto the lindworm’s. It stopped mid-charge, looking dazed. Then, with an unceremonious “thud,” it toppled over to the side.
“Glasses, please, Dee,” I said. The snakes at the back of her head were looking at me, their tongues scenting the air. I offered them a pleasant smile. The snakes that top the heads of Pliny’s gorgons are venomous, and it never hurts to stay on their good side.
If the snakes cared that they were being smiled at, they didn’t show it. “You know, I could have stunned it without you here,” Dee said, putting her glasses back on. She turned to frown at me, her wig still held loosely in one hand. “You’re the one who asked me not to go and paralyze anything we found in the swamp.”
I relaxed as soon as Dee’s eyes were safely covered. Only the human-seeming eyes of a Pliny’s gorgon carry a paralytic. The snakes atop their heads can’t petrify so much as a mouse, although the gorgon’s gaze seems to work better when their snakes are exposed. It’s just one more quirk in the incomprehensible biology of the gorgon.
“No, I asked you not to paralyze anything I hadn’t asked you to paralyze. There’s a difference.” I took my hand off Crow’s head. He launched himself from my shoulder and flew to the nearest tree. Perching on a low branch, he began to preen his feathers, churring sulkily the whole time. I ignored him as I walked over and knelt beside the unconscious lindworm. “Reptiles are delicate. I’d rather not kill anything today that we don’t have to.”
“So why was it okay for me to paralyze the—what did you call this thing?”
“It’s a lindworm, and it was okay for you to paralyze it because very little kills a lindworm. Seriously. The only reliable method of killing them that we have on record is decapitation. Even then, there are some pretty plausible reports of lindworm heads surviving without their bodies for up to a week before they expired, presumably of thirst.” I pried the lindworm’s mouth open. Filling a syringe with ketamine, I injected the sedative into the lining of its mouth. “If a Pliny’s gorgon could kill a lindworm, I’d know.”
“Oh.” Dee walked over to join me, squinting at the lindworm. “It’s big.”
“It’s male. The female would be over twenty feet, and have slightly more developed hind limbs. She uses them to dig the den she and her mate will hibernate in over the winter. Get my bag, will you? I want to take some measurements on this fellow before he wakes up.”
Dee lifted one artfully drawn-on eyebrow. “You mean we’re not leaving right now?”
“Of course not.” I beamed up at her. “This is the fun part of science.”
Between Dee’s paralytic stare and my tranquilizer, the lindworm stayed sedated long enough for me to get length, estimated weight, some scales, and a blood sample. I slipped a radio tag onto one of its hind legs. If it started eating people, we’d be able to find it and make it stop. If it stayed in the swamps, doing what nature intended it to do, we weren’t going to interfere. Lindworms may be unpleasant creatures to share a swamp with, but their presence keeps some even nastier things away. It’s a fair trade.
Dee seemed to have decided that the presence of a giant snakelike cryptid made her hair less outré, because she didn’t put her wig back on while she wrote down the lindworm’s measurements. Crow stayed in the trees, wings drooping as he watched suspiciously. He clearly expected the lindworm to get back up at any moment, and I couldn’t blame him. Heck, I half expected the lindworm to get back up, and I was the one who’d sedated it.
“So if these things aren’t native to Ohio, where did this guy come from?” asked Dee.
“That’s the thing. They might be native to Ohio. I’m not sure this is a species of lindworm that we’ve seen before. The first recorded species were in Europe—Sweden and the United Kingdom, mostly—but we’ve found them all over.” I capped my pen and tucked it, and my notebook, back into my bag. “Maybe we just made cryptozoological history.”
“Be still my heart,” said Dee dryly. Her hair hissed agreement.
“Lindworms are a sign of a healthy ecosystem,” I said, straightening. “Now let’s get out of here before the healthy ecosystem eats us. I think I have enough specimens for today.”
Dee rolled her eyes. “Sure thing, boss.”
Side by side, with Crow flying behind us, we squelched our way through the swamp toward the distant road, leaving the lindworm to peacefully sleep off the rest of the ketamine.
Just another day at the office.
Two
“Yes, that’s a brilliant idea. Choose the career path most likely to lead to an early, painful death, and you’re sure to find job satisfaction.”
—Jonathan Healy
The reptile house of Ohio’s West Columbus Zoo, visiting researcher’s office
EVEN AFTER STOPPING AT home to drop off Crow and change my clothes, I still made it back to the zoo in time for the afternoon shift change. Technically, as a visiting researcher, I didn’t have to come in unless I was giving a talk or shepherding a school group through the wonderful world of venomous snakes. In reality, I did the bulk of my research in my small, borrowed office. It wasn’t completely secure, but the door locked, and all the really sensitive work was done at home. I’d learned to sleep soundly despite the smell of formaldehyde.
Between Dee, Crow, and myself, we had managed to collect specimens representing three of the fricken subspecies known to be native to Ohio: the common swamp fricken, the greater swamp fricken, and the Midwestern spotted fricken. I’d spend all evening after dinner dissecting their bodies. Hopefully, that would give me enough data to let us stop killing the harmless little creatures.
I was typing up a completely fabricated report of our tri
p to the swamp—which had supposedly been focused on looking for copperheads, trying to assess the local population density—when Dee stuck her head in from the main office. Her wig was now firmly back in place, and she looked the very picture of the modern administrative assistant.
“Hey, boss, did you see the time?” she asked. “I ask because you told me to, and not because I’m nagging. Please remember the distinction at my annual review.”
“You’re technically employed by the zoo,” I said. “I don’t think I get to do your annual review.”
“You have a real gift for focusing on the inconsequential part of a sentence, don’t you?” She crossed her arms, leaning against the doorframe. “Time. Look at the.”
I blinked before glancing to the clock on my computer, which showed ten minutes to four. “So?”
“So you promised you’d attend the tiger show today? The one that a certain Miss Shelby Tanner is in charge of?” Dee uncrossed her arms in order to inscribe an hourglass shape in the air. “Unless you no longer care about keeping your hot Australian girlfriend happy . . .”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” I said automatically. I was already standing up. Dee, sensing victory, pushed herself away from the doorframe and plucked my jacket off the coatrack, handing it to me. I shrugged it on and smiled, a little wryly. “What would I do without you, Dee?”
“Date less,” she replied.
I snorted.
Dee—short for Deanna Lynn Taylor de Rodriguez, a mouthful she thankfully doesn’t insist on in casual conversation, or ever—is a Pliny’s gorgon, which puts her in the middle range of “potentially deadly cryptids with snakes in place of hair.” Lesser gorgons are more common, greater gorgons are more dangerous, and Pliny’s gorgons are, as Dee says, just right. She lives with her extended family somewhere outside of Dublin, Ohio. I don’t ask her where, and she doesn’t offer to tell me. Being a Price might make me a cryptid ally, but at the end of the day, I was still a human. Humans have a long history of chopping the heads off of gorgons who are just trying to get by.
Pliny’s gorgons usually have one or two members of their community working in the local human settlements, where they can keep an eye out for any possible mobs with torches, or anything else that might be bad for the family. Always females: most male Pliny’s gorgons are more than seven feet tall, which can be difficult to explain, while the females are more human-normal in height. Dee was right around five-seven, making her about four inches shorter than me. She’d been my assistant since the day I arrived at the Columbus Zoo, and I couldn’t have done it without her.
“Is there anything else you need, boss, or can you take things from here?”
“I think I can manage.” The report to zoo management was essentially finished; all I needed to do was check my grammar and hit “send.” I’d write up the encounter with the lindworm and email it to my parents later this evening. Maybe Dad could find something in the family records about lindworms in Ohio—or maybe I was right, and this really was a new species. Either way, I had plenty to get done tonight.
“Good boy,” said Dee, and left the office, her hair hissing softly beneath her auburn wig.
I chuckled, shrugged my jacket on, and followed her out.
The reptile house was mostly empty when I emerged from my office. The late afternoon was always our slowest time. The more interesting shows—which we were supposed to call “interactive exhibits,” according to the latest flyer from the head office—always took place after lunch, and most people were happier watching koalas or performing tigers while they tried to digest their processed cheese food sandwiches than they were wandering through the dark, snake-infested building where I worked.
Individual heating lamps lit the various enclosures, and hooded lights on the ceiling lit the rest of the room, although not very brightly. Many of the species we had living there were more active at night, and so we tricked them into thinking this was nighttime. They slithered and skittered around their artificial environments, exploring the boundaries they had explored a thousand times before. Crunchy, the aptly-named alligator snapping turtle, hung in the water of his tank like a floating, bad-tempered boulder, his mouth hanging open in silent invitation. It was an invitation I had no intention of accepting any time soon.
An old fellow like Crunchy can weigh in excess of three hundred pounds, and can take off a human leg in one bite. Two boys I judged to be about eleven years old were standing near his tank, watching him with rapt fascination. I paused, raising an eyebrow.
“You boys need something?” I asked.
“He moved last week,” said one of the boys. “He might do it again.”
I smiled to myself. There was a time when I would have been the one standing patiently outside the big turtle’s tank, waiting for that split second when he would close his jaws and the world would be awesome. “Here’s hoping,” I said, and walked on, heading for the front door. If I hurried, I could make it in time for the show.
As much as I loved the reptile house, it was always a sweet relief to step out of it and into the zoo proper. Inside, the air smelled of snake, a hot, musty, dry smell that never quite went away. The air outside smelled like freshly cut grass and a hundred types of blooming flowers, many of which had been imported solely to make the zoo seem wilder and more exotic. Tigers looked more realistic, somehow, when they were framed by flowers that didn’t come from the grocery store florist’s department.
Tourists and school groups milled listlessly on the paths, slowed down by their recent meals, while the diurnal animals did basically the same thing inside the open-air habitats. The African wild dogs were barking again, their strange, yodeling cries splitting the air. I sped up, until I was walking at a pace that was just shy of a run.
The big cats had their own private corner of the zoo, with multiple outdoor enclosures spreading out around the main building like the petals on a flower. A small amphitheater of sorts had been constructed between the lion and tiger enclosures, providing a space for the zookeepers to show off their animals. Cheers and applause were coming from that direction. I abandoned the pretense of walking, and ran the rest of the way.
Shelby’s tiger show was packed, leaving only a few seats at the rear of the amphitheater. I murmured apologies to the people already sitting on the benches as I sidled past them to get as close to the center as possible. People cast glares and irritated looks in my direction, but no one paid attention to me for long. There were better things for them to focus on.
The stadium-style benches of the amphitheater extended down to ground level, where they gave way to an eight-foot median, followed by a four-foot wall topped with a chain link fence. On the other side of the fence was a grassy lawn spotted with super-sized cat toys—and with super-sized cats to boot, in the form of five orange-and-black–striped tigers. They prowled and lounged just like their smaller cousins, and I couldn’t help thinking that Crow would be fascinated.
Three zookeepers in khaki and white moved around the edges of the enclosure, keeping the tigers under close watch, while the woman I’d come to see strutted at the center of the enclosure. Shelby Tanner.
I wasn’t the only one in the audience who was watching her rather than the tigers. The tigers were beautiful, but Shelby . . . Shelby was gorgeous. She was pleasantly tall, with long legs that only looked longer in her khaki shorts, and the kind of figure that comes from manual labor and good genetics. Her wavy blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail, keeping it from becoming tangled in the hands-free microphone that was clipped over her left ear.
“Now this big beauty is Mitya, one of our Siberian tigers,” she said, her Australian accent slathered so broadly across the words that it was almost difficult to understand her. “Isn’t he a looker? Come on, Mitya, give us a kiss.” She tapped her thigh with one hand. The largest of the tigers in the enclosure responded by rearing up onto his hind legs, putting his forepaws on her shoulders, and licking her cheek like a dog. The audience applauded and cheered.
I shook my head, wondering how many of them could tell how nervous the rest of the zookeepers were. This was grandstanding, pure and simple. But grandstanding gets butts into seats, and we needed that. As long as Shelby didn’t actually get eaten during one of her shows, management would let her decide what happened.
Hell, even if she did get eaten, management would probably let the show go on according to her notes. Anything to keep ticket sales up.
Shelby Tanner and I had arrived at the zoo at the same time, me as a visitor from California, no, really, we swear, and her as a visitor from Sydney, Australia. It was only natural for the rest of the staff to shove the two outsiders together. She hadn’t known what to make of me at first, and the confusion was mutual. Shelby was boisterous, enthusiastic to a fault once she had decided on a course of action, and prone to leaping before she looked. I was a man of science, and science was always going to be my first love, no matter how attractive the alternatives might be. And Shelby was a very attractive alternative. She didn’t carry a hunting rifle on a regular basis, but aside from that, she was everything I’d ever wanted in a woman, and I’d been very careful not to pursue her. I don’t make promises that I can’t keep.
Our first date had happened three months before, and it had almost certainly been a dare. She’d marched up to me after a staff meeting, looked me up and down, and informed me I was taking her out for a drink that coming Friday night. I said no. She laughed and said this might be fun after all, and somewhere in the discussion that followed, my no turned into a yes, and one date turned into two, then three, and then four.
All we really had in common was our work with animals, although I was more on the pure research side, while Shelby was a trainer—as she was showing off even now in the green space beneath me, putting a Bengal tiger through his paces by throwing a medicine ball for him to chase. She was a big cat specialist, and had come to Ohio for the opportunity to study them in North America, where there were more specimens available than in her own cat-free homeland. (Big cats turn out to be surprisingly popular in Australian zoos, maybe for the same reason that kangaroos and koalas are so popular in North America: they’re so weird they’re unbelievable, if you didn’t grow up with them.)