Half-Off Ragnarok

Three

A nice, if borrowed, bedroom in an only moderately creepy suburban home in Columbus, Ohio

A MADDENED CHORUS OF exultations greeted me when I opened the bedroom door. It increased in volume when the congregation caught sight of the tray I was balancing on my left arm. “HAIL! HAIL! HAIL THE ARRIVAL OF THE DINNER!” Crow, who was curled up in the cat bed on top of the wardrobe, croaked his amusement at the scene. At least, I hoped it was amusement. The last thing I wanted was a war between my resident griffin and my splinter colony of Aeslin mice.

Yes, mice: talking, intelligent mice that worship the Price men as gods—which is a very long story that no one seems to fully understand, not even those of us in the pantheon. There’s a reason Crow is the closest thing to a cat that anyone in my family has ever had.

The rodent rejoicing continued as I stepped into the room and closed the door behind myself, and they reached a fever pitch when I raised my right hand to signal that I was about to speak. There were only thirty mice in my splinter of the family colony, but thirty mice can make a hell of a lot of noise when they feel so inclined, and Aeslin mice anticipating their dinner are always so inclined.

“Quiet, please,” I requested.

The mice quieted down, ever obedient to the dictates of their gods. They sat back on their haunches and wrapped their tails around their hind legs, fixing their glittering black eyes firmly on me as they waited for me to proclaim some pearls of godly wisdom. That, or feed them. To the Aeslin mice, those concepts were basically one and the same.

“I will need three assistants to help me sort feathers tonight, and three more to help articulate fricken skeletons this coming weekend,” I said. “The colony will be paid for the labor in cheese and cake. Is this acceptable?”

Judging by the wild cheering that overtook the Aeslin, it was acceptable. I waited for them to calm down before I said, “This is for science. Science rules will be in effect during the work.”

“Science rules” was dealing-with-the-Aeslin shorthand for “no rejoicing, no dropping what you’re working on to race off and join a spontaneous parade in honor of the Violent Priestess, no asking complex theological questions when you’re supposed to be focusing on your job.” It was sort of amazing sometimes, how many rules we needed to keep ourselves sane.

The announcement of science rules was greeted in a rather more subdued fashion. The mice exchanged looks before turning as one to the colony’s High Priestess. She was distinguished from the others by her slightly more elaborate attire—a cloak of glossy black feathers harvested from Crow during molting season—and her posture, which was straight and proud, even when facing one of her personal gods. She cocked her small gray head to the side, thoughtfully. Then she nodded.

“It Shall Be So,” she intoned, stressing each word so that it sounded like it had been individually capitalized.

That was the cue the mice needed to resume their rejoicing, shouting, “HAIL!” and “ALL GLORY TO THE SCIENCE RULES OF SCIENCE!” I smiled gratefully at the High Priestess as I set the tray on the floor. I barely had time to grab Crow’s dish of meat scraps and liver before the colony swarmed over the food, their exultations reaching a fever pitch. Only the High Priestess remained aloof, sitting calmly on the floor near the bed as she watched her people accost the food. They didn’t eat it. Instead they picked up the plates, working in teams of five, and began toting them toward the closet. The dishes would reappear in the morning, neatly stacked and ready for me to take back down to the kitchen.

I walked over and put Crow’s dish on top of the wardrobe, next to his bed. He stood, stretching languidly, and I gave him a quick scratch behind the ears before he began gulping down his food. At that point, interfering with him might have caused me to lose a finger.

The mice had managed to disappear by the time I finished feeding Crow—all save the High Priestess, who was still sitting patiently, waiting for my attention. I pulled out the desk chair and sat, putting myself closer to her level without doing her the disrespect of kneeling. Aeslin hate to see their gods humble themselves. “Hail,” I said, leaning forward with my elbows on my knees. “What’s going on?”

“Hail to the God of Scales and Silence,” squeaked the High Priestess. “We have done as you bid us do, and have kept Eyes Upon the younger Heartless One.”

“Thank you very much for watching Sarah for me.” Aeslin mice have their own unique approach to the language. I was the God of Scales and Silence—largely, I think, because I liked snakes and didn’t talk as much as my sisters—and Grandma and Sarah were the Heartless Ones. It was a biologically accurate label, if somewhat insensitive-sounding: cuckoos don’t have hearts. They have decentralized circulatory systems, and thick, clear fluid that’s basically biological antifreeze where most bipeds would have blood. The mice weren’t trying to be cruel. Aeslin mice very rarely are.

“It is our pleasure to serve,” said the High Priestess. She wiped her paw across her whiskers in a gesture that I had come to learn meant she was upset. “Holiness, I must speak to you frankly. I apologize if my words offend.”

“It’s okay. Say whatever you need to say.”

“The younger Heartless One . . .” The High Priestess hesitated before saying, in a profoundly troubled tone, “She is Not Well, Holiness. I do not know that she will ever become Well. I fear for your safety, and for the safety of the colony, in her presence. The Heartless Ones . . . when they are Unwell, they can destroy so very much, so very quickly. We should not be here. You should not be here. We have Faith, Holiness, but there is Faith, and then there is Common Sense. Sometimes the one must take precedence over the other.”

I blinked. The Aeslin mice are smart. Sometimes it can be easy to forget that, with the way they carry on, but they’d never have survived long enough to hook up with the family if they weren’t capable of taking care of themselves. Finally, I said, “I understand your concerns. I can’t leave my family. I wouldn’t . . . if I were the kind of man who abandoned his family when they needed him, I wouldn’t be worthy of calling myself a God of the colony.”

“We understand, but we are still afraid,” said the High Priestess.

“I understand the feeling,” I said. “Is everyone wearing the charms we made for them?” Getting anti-telepathy charms for an entire colony of Aeslin mice hadn’t been cheap, and I hadn’t regretted it for a moment. The last thing we needed was for Sarah to accidentally mind-control the colony in her sleep.

The High Priestess nodded. “We have done as you have Commanded.”

“Good. Sarah is unwell. She became unwell helping Verity—the Arboreal Priestess—to protect the family. I can’t refuse to do as much as she did to keep us all safe. Now. What did you see?”

The High Priestess preened her whiskers before saying, “The younger Heartless One engaged in an argument with nothing. We thought at first that she was speaking with her mind, and echoing with her voice, but the elder Heartless One entered and bid her quiet and calm. The elder set the younger a task, to chase the numbers they call ‘prime’ as far as she could.”

“And?”

“And she began to cry and said there were no numbers.” The look the High Priestess gave me was frankly terrified. Disney had never animated such fear in the eyes of a mouse. “We have never heard tell of a Heartless One losing the numbers. It Bodes Ill.”

I winced. I couldn’t help myself. Cuckoos have a racial obsession with math. No one knows why, but every cuckoo we’ve ever encountered has been easily distracted by numbers. Sarah had been in New York with Verity in part because she wanted an excuse to audit some math classes at the colleges there. Sarah lived for her math classes. If she couldn’t do something as simple as reciting primes . . .

She was still family. And family doesn’t leave family behind. “I promise you, if it looks like we’re in any danger because of Sarah, I’ll get us out of here. You have my word. But for right now, we have to stay. I thank you for your report. There will be extra cake tomorrow night to show my gratitude.”

The High Priestess sighed. “You are your father’s son,” she said quietly. “I am glad to know that, even as I fear for your safety, and ours as well. I shall send your assistants to you anon, Holiness.”

“Thank you,” I said again, and offered her a small half-bow. The High Priestess bowed back, with all the formality of a clergywoman addressing her deity, before scurrying away, vanishing into the closet with the others. I looked at the closet door for a moment. Then I turned to the desk and opened my laptop. There was work to be done before morning, and my report wasn’t going to write itself.

The official version of my trip to the swamp had already been written and submitted to zoo management. Now it was time to write the version that would go into the family record. Crow settled back into his cat bed, his head hanging over the edge of the wardrobe so that he could watch my every move. I ignored him. Years of living with Antimony looking over my shoulder has left me essentially immune to suspicious glares. He’d long since forgiven me for leaving him at home alone after our excursion to the swamp—all I had to do was give him his dinner and everything was wonderful again—but now he was angry because I wouldn’t let him have the frickens I was planning to dissect.

The dissection itself took about two hours, and is better left to the imagination. If you’ve ever seen a frog dissected in a high school science class, you know the basics: the details are mostly squishy and unpleasant, even to the scientifically-minded. I had to write up my notes after that, which took longer than expected, largely because I was tired enough to be continually distracted by my research materials. First I had to list the species of fricken we had found still living in Ohio (assuming we hadn’t collected and killed the last individuals; it would be bad form for me to render a cryptid extinct in the process of studying it). That meant digging through the field guide to verify my identifications. Mom used to say, not quite joking, that if I touched a field guide, you’d need to send a search party to get me out again. She wasn’t wrong.

After the fricken count was done, I had to write up the encounter with the lindworm, and that meant another trip through the field guide, with a supplementary jaunt into the local bestiary to be sure there really was no confirmed record of a native lindworm species. The one we’d seen in the swamp didn’t quite match the description of any known lindworm, although it was close enough to be a relative. There was a good chance that we’d just discovered an entirely new species.

“I love science,” I said, and saved the file.

It only took a few minutes to write up a cover letter describing the situation, attach the report, and mail everything off to my parents. I sent a second copy to the printer. I’d give it to the Aeslin, for safety’s sake. There is no better backup system in this world than a colony of Aeslin mice. They may demand to be paid in cheese and cake, but once they know something, they know it forever.

With all that done, I checked on Crow—now soundly asleep—and sprinkled some baby bloodworms into the terrarium with my poison dart frickens, which goggled their brightly colored eyes and flared their brightly colored crests in a threat display that was as adorable as it was serious. The neon-tinted little amphibians were incredibly deadly.

“Yes, you’re terrifying,” I said to the frickens, who ignored me, already engaged in pursuing their dinner. I walked to the closet, where I stopped, cleared my throat, and said, “The Time of Science is upon us.”

Live with Aeslin long enough, you learn how to pronounce capitals. It makes things easier. There was a rustling from inside the closet, and then three sleek-furred young temple novices appeared around the edges of the door, whiskers forward and ears up.

“We Are Ready!” they squeaked in joyous unison.

“Great,” I said. “Let’s sort some feathers.”

Aeslin mice excel at small, repetitive jobs that contain an element of ritual. Sorting fricken feathers by species, type, age of specimen, and whether or not they showed signs of fungal infection was fiddly enough and required enough very precise steps that the Aeslin couldn’t have been happier. I barely had anything to do once the three of them got involved. That was exactly what I’d been hoping for. I picked up the field guide, sat back in my chair, and started reading.

According to the historical records, there were fifteen subspecies of fricken that could potentially appear in this region of Ohio. Five were considered common, six more were uncommon, and four were rare bordering on “may not be native, but we caught one once, and that means we need to make a record of it.” My family has never been what you’d call “restrained” when it comes to maintaining the regional field guides. With good reason. A lot of the smaller, apparently harmless cryptids, like the frickens, can be used as a general barometer of an area’s well-being. If they’re dying by the dozens, you probably have a problem. It’s best to find that out from the little things, rather than learning it from, say, a unicorn attack.

(Unicorns like virgins. That part is true. But being liked by a unicorn is actually not very good for your health, and being disliked by a unicorn is even worse. Unicorns are deadly to things and people that they decide not to like. We’d have a shoot-on-sight order if they weren’t so vital to maintaining a healthy water table. Nature enjoys a good practical joke every now and then.)

That was the historical record. Based on the recorded sightings from my fieldwork, my dissection results, and the slowly growing piles of feathers, there were currently nineteen subspecies of fricken living in the swamps of Columbus, Ohio.

“Well, hell,” I said, staring at the heaps of feathers.

Things exist for a reason. Nature doesn’t mess around with things that don’t have a purpose. Sometimes those things come into competition. Sometimes they edge each other out. Invasive species have been transforming the world in their own image for as long as animals have been capable of moving from one place to another. Humanity has hastened the process, since we’re the first animals to build airplanes and container ships, but we didn’t start it, and it won’t stop when we’re gone.

If the number of frickens in Ohio was going up, they had to be filling a niche that was previously occupied by something else. My money was on the frogs. That was the whole purpose of this study: to prove that the native frogs were being replaced by either an increase in the native frickens, or by an influx of frickens from elsewhere. Not the most exciting stuff in the world, I know, but it was ecologically important, especially if we wanted to continue keeping the frickens from being revealed to the world.

I yawned and reached for my laptop. I needed to make some more notes.

I woke up with my cheek on the keyboard, having already filled several hundred pages with random characters. I sat up, wiping the drool from my cheek. My back ached. I stood, straightening as I turned toward my bed. Then, before I could stop myself, I let out a short, sharp scream, which ended only when I clapped my hand over my mouth. Hopefully, that hadn’t been enough to wake my grandparents.

Sarah was sitting cross-legged on my bed.

She was wearing a white nightgown, and had a red ribbon tied in her hair, making her look like a Tim Burton horror movie reimagining of Snow White. She cocked her head when she saw me looking at her, but there was no trace of actual comprehension in her wide blue eyes. She just kept staring at me.

“Sarah?” I lowered my hand, wishing I could stop my heart from pounding against my ribs. “What are you doing here? This isn’t your room.”

“The moon doesn’t approve of the screaming in the cornfield,” she said. She sounded entirely reasonable, as long as I ignored the fact that she was talking like a book of Mad Libs. “Have you seen the Queen of Hearts today? Does she have the treacle tarts?”

“Sarah, you’re scaring me. Do I need to go get Grandma?”

“No. No no no no . . .” She started shaking her head viciously from side to side, knocking her ribbon askew. I took a step forward. She grabbed handfuls of her hair, pulling as she continued to chant denial.

“Sarah!” I grabbed her wrists before I could think better of it. Telepathy is easier for cuckoos when there’s skin-to-skin contact. Even with my anti-telepathy charm, there was a chance she’d be able to read me while I was touching her. That still seemed better than letting her hurt herself.

Sarah stopped shaking her head. She blinked at me, eyes luminescing with a brief flash of white, and asked, “Alex?”

It was the first time she’d really sounded like herself since she came back from New York. I smiled hesitantly, not letting go of her wrists. “Hi, Sarah.”

“Your head is full of scientific classifications and the natural order of things.” Well, that answered the question of whether or not she could read me. I was still a little surprised when a relieved smile spread across her face, and she said, “I like it. It’s been . . . not so orderly in here for a little while.”

I didn’t know whether she was aware of how long it had actually been, and I didn’t want to think about it too hard. Thinking about it would have been the same as asking her, and that wouldn’t have been fair. “We’ve been worried about you,” I said instead, and moved to let go of her wrists.

“No!” Sarah grabbed my hands, flipping the grip around so that she was holding onto me. She bit her lip, and said, “Please, no. I don’t want everything to come apart again.”

“Sarah . . .”

“I won’t push, I promise I won’t push, but Angela’s filled with worrying about me, and I can’t read Martin at all. Please, let me stay and be organized? Just for a little while? Please?”

She looked so anxious—and so exhausted—that I relented. It wasn’t like I could keep her out, and at least this way, she might follow instructions. “All right, but I need to sleep. Can I do that?”

“Even your dreams are orderly,” said Sarah. She let go of my wrists. “Hurry please. Hurry.” She still sounded more coherent than she had before she grabbed me, but there was an edge of harried desperation to it, like she was clinging to her renewed lucidity by her fingernails.

“I’ll hurry,” I assured her, and grabbed my pajamas from the floor next to the bed before fleeing the room, heading for the bathroom down the hall.

I reviewed my options as I brushed my teeth. I could wake Grandma and ask her to take Sarah back to her own room, possibly with a few strong suggestions about locks. That would prevent things like this from happening again, and also allow me to dismiss the dull but growing concern over how many times Sarah had crept down the stairs to watch me sleep. And yet . . .

And yet Sarah, for all that she wasn’t human, was family. Family comes first. The cryptid community comes second. She represented both those things, and she’d been wounded saving my little sister’s life. If all she wanted was for me to sleep holding her hand, was that really so much for her to ask? I had my anti-telepathy charm, and I had the mice. If she’d done anything to threaten me, I had faith that they would have woken me up.

Sarah was still sitting on the bed when I returned with my teeth brushed, my pajamas on, and my anti-telepathy charm firmly in place. “Hello, hello,” she said, looking down at her crossed ankles. “How’s your father?”

“In Oregon,” I said, reaching out to take her wrist. “Sarah.”

“Yes?” She raised her head, eyes focusing a bit better already.

“A few ground rules for tonight.”

“Yes, yes, it’s good to be grounded; how are you grounding me tonight?”

“You are sleeping on top of the covers; if you try to come under the covers, I’m sending you back to your room.” It wasn’t as harsh as it sounded. Cuckoos get some benefits from the clear hemolymph in place of blood; for one, they don’t feel heat or cold the way most mammals do. Like I said, Nature likes a good practical joke every now and then. As for why I didn’t want her under the blankets . . .

Skin contact made her stronger. If I wanted to keep her from burning my brain out when she had a nightmare, I needed to minimize how much we were touching one another.

Sarah nodded. “That’s fair,” she agreed.

“If you start feeling like you’re going to project at me, rather than just reading, you need to let go and get out.” I folded back the covers with my free hand.

“Okay.”

“Okay,” I said, and got into the bed. It felt strange to trust her like this. It felt even stranger to doubt her. Sarah waited until I was settled before she curled up next to me, resting her head on my shoulder. I dropped our joined hands to my stomach, staring up at the darkened ceiling as I listened to her breathing slowly level out into sleep.

Sometime after that, I joined her in unconsciousness.

My dreams were full of algebraic equations and the sewers of New York, where alligator men danced with ladies made entirely of numbers, and carnival music played on an unseen hurdy-gurdy. Even asleep, I knew that Sarah’s dreams were leaking into mine, but it didn’t really seem to matter. Together, the two of us slept on.