Half-Off Ragnarok

Four

Ohio’s West Columbus Zoo, home of many exotic species and way too many geese

I PULLED INTO THE zoo parking lot at ten past eight, trying to yawn around the bagel I had clamped in my teeth. It wasn’t working very well, given my desire not to aspirate chunks of breakfast food. Crow wasn’t helping. He was curled in the passenger seat making throaty churring noises that sounded suspiciously like laughter.

As soon as I had a hand free, I removed the bagel from my mouth and waved it at the uncaring Church Griffin. “You are a terrible pet,” I informed him. “My mother was right. I should have gotten a dog.” Any dog that my parents would have approved of me getting would probably have breathed fire or transformed into a dragon on the full moon or something, but at least it wouldn’t have laughed at me.

Crow croaked.

“Uh-huh. Out, before I change my mind about bringing you to work today.” I opened my door. “Office, Crow.”

Crow launched himself from the seat in a flurry of madly beating wings and flew out the open door, smacking me in the face with his tail as he passed. I spat out a small hairball and got out of the car, tucking my keys into my pocket. Time for one more day in the real world, explaining that the existence of House Slytherin in the Harry Potter books doesn’t make snakes evil and keeping small boys from climbing into the snapping turtle enclosure.

The Canada geese that infested the pond outside the zoo thronged the sidewalk as they saw me approach, snaky necks bent into S-curves and orange beaks working overtime as they honked frantically. I threw the rest of my bagel into the water. The geese followed it, fat gray-and-white bodies hustling as each one tried to beat the others to the prize. I walked on undisturbed, smothering another yawn behind my hand.

Sarah hadn’t been in the bed when my alarm rang. Since she didn’t put off as much body heat as a human, I couldn’t tell how long she’d been gone by feeling the blankets, but my fingers were stiff, like something had been gripping them for hours. I hoped the night had been more restful for her than it was for me. My dreams had been strange enough to keep me from sleeping well, probably because they weren’t my dreams. I wasn’t mad at her or anything. I was still going to talk to Grandma after work, to find out whether that sort of thing was actually helpful to Sarah’s recovery.

(That assumed that she would know. Cuckoo mental health is something of an unexplored territory, since most of them are too dangerous to attempt to psychoanalyze. If anything, Sarah’s actions had proven that she wasn’t your ordinary cuckoo. After all, an ordinary cuckoo would probably have slit my throat while I was unconscious. All Sarah had done was try to steal a pillow.)

It was almost an hour to the zoo’s official opening, and the arrival plaza was empty, the ticket booths standing deserted. By nine o’clock they’d be thronged by excited children, harried parents, and even more harried teachers with their school groups. For now, I could walk through the area without worrying that I was going to step on any runaway toddlers. I paused to stroke the nose of the brass lion statue, murmuring a good morning, and turned toward the gate.

“Morning, Dr. Preston,” said the guard on duty. “ID please?”

“Does it ever occur to you that ‘good morning, person I know by name, please provide proof of who you are’ is a little silly, Lloyd?” I asked, digging my zoo ID card out of my pocket and handing it to him.

“Every day of my life, but you know what happens when you don’t do your job.” Lloyd was an older man, tan and thin as a sun-dried lizard, with a battered slouch hat pulled firmly down over his presumably bald pate. I’d never seen him without the hat, or without the thick-lensed glasses that gave his gaze a fishbowl quality that I knew all too well from my time in my high school science club. I put his age as somewhere between sixty and eighty, in that timeless country occupied by men lucky enough to live that long.

“I suppose that’s fair,” I said.

Lloyd snorted. “Fair doesn’t enter into it. Never has, never will.” He gave my ID a cursory glance, handed it back to me, and unlocked the gate. “I don’t check your ID, you tell the administration, and I wind up another sad old man trying to take your over-fancy coffee order at Starbucks. No, thank you, Dr. Preston. You can come on in now.”

“Thank you, Lloyd,” I said, stepping through the open gate.

“You’re welcome, Dr. Preston.” Lloyd offered me a friendly nod before turning back to face the plaza, standing at the sort of military attention that had absolutely no place in a zoo.

At least he took his job seriously. I shrugged, put my ID away, and started down the path that would eventually take me to the reptile house.

About half the zookeepers were out and checking their respective enclosures; a few were in the enclosures, waking or talking to their charges. I waved and kept on walking. We all had work to do before the zoo would be ready to open, and they wouldn’t appreciate the disruption.

A little girl in a vibrant orange sari was sitting on the bench outside the reptile house, kicking her sneaker-clad feet sullenly against the cobblestones. I hesitated before walking over to her. “Good morning, Chandi. How did you get into the zoo this time?”

“I’m not telling,” she said, in a tone as sullen as her posture. “When can I come in the reptile house?”

“Well, that depends.”

She glanced up, eyes narrowed warily. She was a pretty child, and she was going to be a devastatingly attractive woman someday, if we could convince her to stop sneaking into the zoo through whatever cracks and crevices she could find. She’d snuck in via the alligator enclosure a week before, and only the fact that she didn’t smell like a mammal had prevented her from getting eaten. And she always did it while wearing her nicest dresses. I was starting to wonder if she actually repelled mud.

“On what?” she asked.

“If you promise me that you won’t sneak in for another week, I’ll let you in right now, and—” I raised a finger, cutting off the protest I could see forming on her lips, “—I’ll let you get Shami out of his enclosure and take him into my office.”

“For how long?” she asked.

“I can give you three hours.”

There was a pause while Chandi considered my offer. Then, regally, she nodded and slid off the bench. “Okay,” she said, and offered me her hand, as guileless as any eight year old has ever been. I took it. It was better for both of us if she didn’t seem to be running around the zoo unescorted.

Dee met us at the reptile house door. “Alex—” She stopped herself when she saw that I wasn’t alone. “Oh, good morning, Chandi, I didn’t realize today was one of your scheduled visits with Shami.”

“That’s because it’s not,” I said. “We made a deal.” My assistant looked flustered, which wasn’t an easy thing to accomplish, and her wig for the day—a lovely red beehive style studded with polka-dot bows—was pulsing, signaling that whatever had her upset was bad enough to have also upset her hair. “What’s wrong?”

“Wrong? Nothing’s wrong. Why should something be wrong?” Dee laughed, a jagged, unrealistic sound. I blinked at her. So did Chandi.

“I thought gorgons were familiar with normal human emotional response,” said Chandi, looking up at me for a clue as to what was supposed to happen next.

“They are,” said Dee. “I mean, we are. I mean, are you sure you want to let Chandi in early? We have a lot of work to do.”

“I promised her three hours with Shami,” I said. “Unless there’s some sort of ‘let’s panic for no good reason over something that can wait until lunch’ problem, I’m fine with bringing her in early. It’ll make it easier for me to get Shami out of his enclosure without needing to explain to a human why I’m handing a spectacled cobra to a little girl.”

“I could explain,” said Chandi demurely.

“I want to get Shami out of his enclosure before I have to explain to anyone why I allowed a little girl to bite and kill a member of my staff,” I amended.

Chandi pouted.

“That’s the problem!” said Dee. “Andrew was supposed to be here an hour ago to feed the turtles. When I got here, the door was unlocked, but Andrew was nowhere to be seen.”

I blinked. “Oh. That’s a problem.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“I’m bored,” said Chandi. “May I see my fiancé now?”

“Yes, Chandi, you can, but I want to renegotiate our deal first.”

Chandi’s eyes narrowed. “You said I could see him,” she said, her voice taking on a faint lisp as her fangs descended. I kept hold of her hand, despite the fact that every mammalian instinct I had was telling me to let go and move away. Being bitten by a venomous snake is never good for you, and the young, who have little to no control over how much venom they expel in a bite, are the most dangerous of all.

(It wasn’t until my sister discovered that dragons never became extinct, and that the cryptids we’d been classifying as “dragon princesses” were actually the female of the species, that we stopped to take a long hard look at the wadjet. We’d always assumed they pair-bonded with their human servants, somehow extending their lives through an interaction with their venom. Instead, they turned out to be another form of dragon, one where the males resembled immense cobras, while the females looked like humans. And this is just one more entry on a long, long list of reasons that I never dated much: half the girls I met in the course of my daily life were never human in the first place.)

“Without Andrew, Dee and I are going to need to feed all the reptiles before the zoo opens in,” I glanced at the clock above the door, “thirty minutes. If you’ll take the venomous snakes while I handle the turtles and lizards and Dee does the nonvenomous snakes, I’ll let you have six hours with Shami. Three today, as promised, and three tomorrow, with no argument or attempt to backpedal.”

“All I have to do is feed a few snakes?”

I nodded. “You have my word.”

“Very well.” Chandi turned to Dee and smiled brightly, showing her fangs. “Please take me to the rats.”

I let go of her hand. “Dee, we’ll talk about this as soon as we’re open, all right?”

“All right,” she allowed. “I’ll go get the feeding schedule.”

Getting the reptile house ready to open proved to be a remarkably fast process when we had someone who actually spoke snake helping us out. The fact that Chandi wasn’t worried about the prospect of being bitten didn’t hurt. (Wadjet are immune to all known forms of venom, and probably a few that we haven’t gotten around to officially discovering yet, since venom has a nasty tendency to kill the people who first find out that it exists.) I stowed my coat, briefcase, and lunch in my office, and we got to work with surprising efficiency. Soon, all that was left was for me to hang a “this exhibit is temporarily closed” sign on the enclosure that housed Chandi’s fiancé, and we were set to receive visitors.

Just in time, too. The reptile house was one of the most popular early morning destinations for school groups, and no sooner had we opened the door than we were flooded with human children Chandi’s age. I spared a thought for how most of those kids would react if they saw Chandi, now happily curled up with Shami on the beanbag chair in Dee’s office. I just as quickly let it go, and turned to help a little girl win an argument about whether or not boa constrictors swallowed their prey whole. (I, and science, said yes. Her mother, who was tired of dinnertime attempts to swallow broccoli without chewing, said no.)

It was just another day at the office. The loud, snake-scented office full of wide-eyed children, some of whom were seeing their first really dangerous members of the reptile kingdom up close. Having both Dee and Chandi in the building had the snakes all worked up, and they were putting on quite the show as they slithered around their enclosures and even reared up to flick their tongues at the glass. A large bluegill swam too close to Crunchy’s open jaws, and the big snapping turtle did what he did best, slamming his beak closed hard enough that the sound was audible through the side of the tank. The children swarmed in that direction, pressing their faces up against the glass and waiting to see if he was going to do it again. Oblivious to their admiration, Crunchy resumed his normal posture of patient serenity.

Dee caught my eye, nodding toward my office door. “Go,” she said. “The first official tour isn’t for an hour. Get started on what you need to finish today.”

I brightened. “You sure?” I liked watching the kids, but I’d like knowing that my paperwork for the week was finished even more.

“I’m sure.” Dee flashed me a quick smile. “If they get out of control, I’ll just take off my wig and remind them that sometimes, a trip to the zoo means you get the opportunity to feed the animals.”

“Right.” I laughed. “You have fun with that, and if you need me, I’ll be in my office.”

“Sure thing, boss-man.” She saluted mockingly. “I will do my best not to burn the building down while you’re sequestered in your chamber of scholarship.”

Past experience told me “saying good-bye” could last upward of fifteen minutes if we kept going, and by that point, my escape would doubtless be blocked by some group of teenagers who wanted to know whether we ever used Crunchy to dispose of human bodies. (Answer: yes, but it was an emergency, and the guy really, really deserved it.) I answered her salute with one of my own before turning and fleeing the room, heading for the questionable safety of my office.

I had no sooner ducked inside—easing the door carefully shut behind me, since slamming was both immature and likely to draw attention—when I heard a sound that seemed to have been dredged up from the deepest pits of hell. It was a combination of diamond fingernails scraping across a blackboard and the yowling of an angry cat, and it says something about my life choices that I recognized it instantly.

“Shit,” I said, turning toward the window. “Crow.”

My Church Griffin was clinging to the outside of the windowsill, wings flapping wildly as he struggled to maintain his balance, and forelimbs pressed against the glass. When he saw me, he redoubled his yowling, and his flapping, until I was genuinely afraid that he was going to hurt himself.

“Crow! Calm down!” I scrambled across the office, knocking over a stack of paperwork that should have been filed a week ago, and opened the window. Crow slammed through the opening, scolding loudly as he flew a lap around the office. Then he dove into the cat bed atop the desk hutch, becoming a lump of sullen-looking black feathers and banded brown fur.

I sighed and closed the window. “I’m sorry, Crow. It’s been a hectic morning.”

No response from the sulking griffin.

“If you’d let me leave you home once in a while, we wouldn’t have to worry about you getting locked out.”

Still no response from the sulking griffin.

This was the sort of thing that could go on all day, and I didn’t have time for that if I wanted to get anything done before the tour groups began to arrive. I picked up the jar of dried liver cubes I kept as treats for Crow, shook four of them out, and set them carefully next to the cat bed.

“When you’re speaking to me again, let me know,” I said. “Right now, I have work to do. I’m sorry I left you outside.”

Maybe talking to a pet like it was a person was a sign of loneliness, or stress, or my inevitable impending status as the male equivalent of a cat lady. Whatever it was, I felt better after leaving Crow the treats. I sat down at the desk, reaching for my keyboard.

I was typing the last of my emails to the administrative office—this one listing my supply needs for the next month—when someone knocked on my office door. The sound was followed by the door swinging open just wide enough for Dee to stick her head inside. “One of the teachers reported, quote, ‘a horrible racket outside the snake house, I think somebody’s being murdered in there,’ end quote,” she said. “I told security that one of the kids threw a tantrum when we wouldn’t let him hug Crunchy.”

“Quick thinking.”

“You didn’t give me much choice.” She looked to where Crow was still curled tightly in his cat bed. “Is he asleep or giving you the cold shoulder?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you should have gotten an iguana.”

I laughed, glancing at the clock. Then I grimaced. “Is that really the time?”

“Clocks don’t lie,” said Dee, stepping fully into the office. “Your first tour group will be here in a few minutes. Time sure does fly when you’re having fun, huh?”

“Oh, is that what I’ve been doing?” I pushed my keyboard away. “I thought it was paperwork.”

Dee laughed. “It comes for everyone. Chandi is still in my office with her fiancé. They looked so peaceful that it seemed best not to disturb them.”

As long as no one from zoo management showed up wanting to show off the spectacled cobra, that should be fine. I nodded. “Good plan. Have we heard from Andrew yet?”

“No. I tried his cell phone, but there’s no answer.”

I sighed. “Great.”

“Okay. I have made small talk, I have asked after your griffin, and I have told you what’s going on with our resident wadjet.” Dee planted her hands on her hips, painted eyebrows arched high. “Well?”

I looked at her blankly. “Well what?”

“This is where you explain to me what you’ve learned from the frickens we collected yesterday.”

“What? Oh!” I grimaced. “Sorry, Dee. I was distracted.”

“I know. You don’t usually wander around rocking the absentminded professor look for fun.” She leaned against the doorframe, effectively blocking me inside the room. “So come on. What’s up, Doc?”

“I drafted the Aeslin mice into helping me last night. Full examination of the subspecies of fricken encountered during our most recent swamp expedition showed that they were healthy, with no outward signs of illness. They all seem to be eating a varied diet, which is actually odd for two of the subspecies—they’d normally be hunted out of certain food sources by larger frogs.” If not eaten by the frogs. Nature doesn’t play favorites. “Two were females of breeding age and size, only one was carrying eggs, which means the other must have spawned recently.”

“Fungal infection?”

“Yes and no.”

Dee paused. “Okay, science boy. Try that again, using words of more than one syllable.”

I smiled a little. “See, if more girls had made that request in high school, I might not have been forced to take my sister to prom. Just four frickens showed signs of fungal infection . . . on their feathers, and only on their feathers. What’s more, three of the four had molted recently, and showed very little fungal growth.”

Slowly, Dee nodded. “Okay. And one more time, in English?”

“We know that frogs and other amphibians are dying off. There are a lot of reasons, but fungal infection is a big one. The frickens are protected from the worst of the fungus because they’re amphibians with feathers. They’re enjoying a hitherto unknown supply of food, spawning pools, and unoccupied habitat. They’re spreading to fill the spaces the frogs are leaving in the food chain.”

“But isn’t that a good thing?” asked Dee, frowning. “I mean, there are a lot of things out there that rely on frogs as a food source. If they’re willing to eat frickens instead of frogs, problem solved.”

“Except that the frickens will breed. They’ll fill the open ecological niches.”

Dee looked at me blankly.

I swallowed a sigh. “What happens when some enterprising young biologist comes running in with the revolutionary news that frogs with feathers have been spotted in the swamps of Ohio?” Or any other state or province in North America. South America was a whole different ball of wax. I’d need serious funds to know whether the same thing was happening with the frickens down there.

Finally Dee’s eyes widened as she got my point. “Oh, hell . . . the frickens are going to get acknowledged by conventional biology.”

“Which takes them neatly out of the cryptozoological wheelhouse, yes.” That wasn’t the problem: more like convenient shorthand for the problem, which was, quite simply, that the formal discovery of the fricken would lead to a whole new school of scientific study. Technically, moving things from “cryptid” to “acknowledged part of the natural world” was something I wanted very much. The Covenant of St. George couldn’t exactly lead a campaign against cute little feathered froggies. But when people realized that amphibians could have feathers . . .

It would completely change the way the world looked at amphibians, which would, in turn, change the way we looked at reptiles. It was unavoidable, and becoming more so with every year that passed. That was what made my work so important. If this was going to happen, we were going to try to control it.

“If you knew this was happening, what are you planning to do about it?”

“We didn’t know. We suspected.” I raked a hand through my hair, pulling it away from my face. “Now I’ve got proof, which I sent home last night. My father will copy and verify my research and send it off to the rest of the family.”

“And after that?”

“Since I can’t stop the frogs from dying, after that, we brace for impact.” I glanced at the clock. “The school group should be arriving. Let’s go teach some kids about snakes.”

Dee wisely didn’t argue. Crow was still curled in his cat bed when we left the office. I closed the door behind us.

I’ll say this about school groups: they can take your mind off practically anything. My concerns about the growing fricken population were forgotten the minute I had to haul two ten year olds away from the rattlesnake exhibit and lecture them for taunting the snakes. Dee hastened to cover the glass before the two snakes that had been goaded into strike position could work themselves up to actually striking. I didn’t want to deal with an injured rattler if there was any possible way to avoid it.

One of the chaperones came and whisked the boys away as soon as I was done with my lecture, probably to deliver another, far more “I’ll call your parents”-oriented lecture of her own. That was fine with me, and I had other problems, since one of the smaller, cleverer girls—who had equally small, clever fingers—was in the process of removing the lid from a tank of blue-tailed skinks. I raced to stop her. Dee was on the other side of the reptile house, explaining Crunchy’s diet to a rapt audience. As vigorous alligator arm gestures were involved, I wasn’t worried about her losing their attention any time soon.

I made my way to the door to Dee’s office, knocking once before cracking it open and sticking my head inside. Chandi was still seated on the beanbag chair with Shami wrapped around her waist, his head resting on her shoulder and his forked tongue contentedly scenting the air. She didn’t react to my presence.

“Ten minutes,” I said.

Now she reacted. Her head came up, dark eyes widening in surprise, and then narrowing in irritation. “You promised me three—”

“I promised you three hours. It’s been more than three hours. My lunch is in ten minutes, which will give us a chance to get Shami back into his enclosure without anyone seeing. If you’re willing to help with that, I won’t even deduct today’s extra time from tomorrow’s visit.” That was a bluff: I wouldn’t have done that, even if she’d refused to help me. There was trying to keep an enterprising young wadjet from breaking her venomous fiancé out of his tank, and then there was being mean to a little girl. All sapient species go through the period analogous to human childhood. It’s one of the things that unify us all.

“Oh.” Chandi’s lower lip wobbled a little before she pulled herself proudly upright and said, “We will be ready to part in ten minutes. I will see you tomorrow, for my full three hours.”

“Agreed,” I said, and closed the door.

Dee was finishing her alligator pantomime, and the school group teacher and chaperones were gathering their charges, herding them efficiently toward the exit. I sidled over to where Dee was standing.

“Where are they having lunch?” I muttered, sotto voce.

“Main courtyard.”

“Oh, thank God.” I was supposed to be meeting Shelby in the semi-private picnic garden near the tiger cages. It was small, mostly concealed from the casual eye, and didn’t have any vending machines, which you’d think would discourage school groups, but sometimes those were the very attributes that attracted harried teachers looking for a moment’s peace and quiet. And I absolutely did not want to cancel on her, or have yet another attempt at getting together interrupted.

“Did you talk to Chandi?”

“She’ll be ready in ten minutes.”

Dee eyed me suspiciously. “With no argument?”

“Miracles happen.”

Dee looked like she was going to quiz me further, but was interrupted by the arrival of the midday shift—Kim, an overly-earnest, extremely sweet girl with hair the color of butterscotch and a fondness for terrapins of all kinds (but especially Crunchy), and Nelson, who was nice enough, but terrified of anything that weighed more than fifteen pounds or so (again, especially Crunchy). Dee turned to bring them up to speed on the day so far, including Andrew’s ongoing absence. I took advantage of her distraction, waving genially to the pair and ducking into my office before I could be grabbed for any new, exciting emergencies.

Crow was finally out of the cat bed. That was a good thing, except for the part where he was standing on the counter, looking as guilty as it was possible for a cat/bird cross to look, with a dead rat from the refrigerator dangling from his beak. I sighed.

“Did you stop to consider that that might be someone else’s lunch?” I asked.

Crow swallowed the rat before turning his back resolutely on me and beginning to preen his left wing. I sighed again, harder this time.

“That almost certainly means no. You’re a flying vacuum cleaner, you know that?” No response from my misbehaving pet. I smiled fondly. I’d been wondering for a while if he could open the fridge. Now I knew that it was time to invest in a padlock.

I grabbed my coat off the back of the chair and moved to get my bag lunch out of the fridge, where it had been sandwiched between a sack of dead rats (for the pythons) and cubed raw chicken (for Dee’s hair). There was a hole in the sack of rats. “Be good, all right?” I said to Crow. “If you’re going to eat anything else, just try not to puke it back up on the rug.”

Crow continued to groom himself. Chuckling, I opened the office door and stepped back into the reptile house. It had been a long morning, and I was going to need to do something relaxing after I separated Chandi from her boyfriend. What could be more relaxing than having lunch with my own beautiful, blessedly mammalian not-a-girlfriend?

Things Shelby Tanner didn’t specialize in: relaxing. She was sitting atop the picnic table we had claimed as our own, waving a turkey drumstick like a conductor’s baton as she punctuated her own points.

“—so I said, Nicole, it’s lovely that you’re taking an interest, but do you think you could take a step away from the snow leopard enclosure? Possibly before you get your throat ripped out and make a bunch of paperwork for me to handle? There’s a good girl.”

“Nicole’s the new girl, right?” I asked, between bites of my ham-and-cheese sandwich. I was focusing less on her words and more on the way the sunlight glinted off the tiny golden hairs on the back of her knee, where I knew she was sensitive in all the best ways.

“Yeah, the really keen one.” Shelby said keen like it was a bad thing. From her perspective, it probably was. Being keen in the Australian sense—overeager, enthusiastic, and extremely hungry for praise—wasn’t what I’d call a survival trait when you’re working with large predators. “She’s been nothing but one problem after the other since the start of her assignment.”

“So did she get eaten? Because it sounds like that would solve the problem.”

Shelby laughed. “Not quite, but not for lack of trying. Mimi, our big female, was almost on her when I finally got her to move away from the bars. Poor kitty looked awfully betrayed, seeing her midmorning snack step out of range like that.”

I grinned. “I’m sure she’ll find the strength to carry on.”

“Don’t much care if she doesn’t; we’ve only got Nicole for another two weeks. Then she’s off to harass the keepers responsible for the elephants, and good riddance, too.” Shelby’s smile was fast, and showed far too many teeth to be comforting. “If she disappears after that, nobody’s going to be looking for incriminating evidence inside my kitty cats.”

“That’s fast. The transfer, I mean, not the murder plot. If we had someone that careless in the reptile house, I’d probably have fed them to the snapping turtle by now.” That was an exaggeration . . . but not by as much as many people would think.

Shelby shrugged. “What can I say? We’ve got a double crop of interns this year.” The big cats saw a much higher turnover rate than the reptile house, since working with the flashy carnivores was a plum position for trainees and interns. We could hold onto people for as much as a year before someone else wanted their slots. Shelby was lucky if she got to keep someone long enough for them to learn not to feed themselves to the lions. It wasn’t just the big cats, either. Pretty much anything mammalian was more attractive to your average aspiring zookeeper than a bunch of snakes and snapping turtles, even though I’d never personally seen the appeal.

“Earth to Alex, come in, Alex.” I turned to see Shelby leaning forward, elbows on her knees. She looked faintly annoyed. “I’ve been doing all the talking again, and you’ve been letting me. I thought we’d talked about this. I want you here when you’re here, or we shouldn’t even bother.”

“Well, you talked about it, mostly,” I said, trying to elicit a laugh.

It didn’t work. Her annoyance deepened. “If we want this to work out, Alex, we’ve both got to do our share of the heavy lifting. That means sometimes you’ve got to tell me about your day, even if you’d rather not.”

“Ah. Sorry—distracted.” It was hard to talk about my day when I had to constantly revise it to remove the feathered frogs, the supposedly mythological creatures, and the little girls who liked to cuddle cobras. Shelby was a smart girl. That was part of the problem. She could see the holes. “It was hectic at the reptile house this morning. Three back-to-back school groups, and one of the juniors didn’t show up, which meant poor Dee had to do half the feedings for me.”

Shelby blinked. “Your assistant? But she’s not even a zookeeper. Is that safe?”

“She’s been working here for a lot longer than the interns, and you hand them raw meat and put them in front of predators.”

“Yes, but they’re doing it for college credits. We pay her.”

I snorted laughter. Shelby shrugged.

“Just being pragmatic, although I’m sorry you’ve had a lousy morning. Who’s on shift now?”

“Kim and Nelson came on just as I was getting ready to start lunch. Dee’s finally doing her own job, which has got to be a relief for her. I’ll be able to work on my research during the afternoon.”

“Oh? Does that mean you might be done in time to grab a spot of dinner with me?” Shelby tried to make the question sound innocent, but I could see the pointed interest in her eyes. I did a quick mental count of the nights since our last official date, and winced.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really can’t. But we’re still on for tomorrow, right?”

“Tomorrow,” she said. “You can’t blame a girl for trying, can you?” She didn’t sound happy about it. I could hear the inevitable future beginning to unspool in her tone. One more canceled date and she’d start having better things to do with her time when I asked if she wanted to catch a movie or go out for something to eat. Not long after that, I’d get the “This isn’t working” talk, possibly with a side order of “We should be friends, it’s better if we can stay friends.”

That was probably what was best for both of us. She had her work, her research, and eventually, her life back in Australia, where we wouldn’t have been able to meet for dinner if we’d wanted to. It wasn’t like we’d ever officially become a couple. That didn’t make the thought any easier.

“I guess I can’t.” I dropped my sandwich back onto the paper bag it had come off of and stood, trying to make it look like a natural stretching gesture. It didn’t work. I was too stiff, and too obviously unhappy. Shelby sighed.

“I’m not breaking things off with you, Alex, all right?” she said. “I’m not thrilled that we’ve had so little time lately, but you’ve got to stop thinking that every road bump is the beginning of the end. You don’t throw out the car just because you’ve run over an echidna.”

I stopped. “Please tell me that isn’t something you actually say in Australia.”

“What, you don’t like my folksy Australian sayings?” Shelby put her turkey leg down next to my sandwich, shaking her head. “It’s incredible just how many people around here are totally willing to believe that we really walk around talking like that.”

“To be fair, Australia does sound sort of fictional if you’ve never been there.”

“I get told that a lot. Doesn’t feel like a very fictional place to me.” She picked up a napkin, beginning to wipe the grease from her fingers. “I mean it, though. You need to relax. You’re too tense, and you’re taking everything far too seriously. Are you having trouble with your research?”

“Not trouble, it’s just . . . taking some turns I didn’t anticipate, that’s all.” I began to pace, trying to look like I was raptly drinking in the scenery that I’d seen a hundred times before. Anything to keep Shelby from pressing, and me from being forced to lie to her.

The tiger garden was definitely one of the zoo’s better-kept secrets, a picturesque little quirk of the landscaping that no one had yet thought of tearing out in order to install a new enclosure or walkway. It was only a matter of time before somebody looked at an aerial map of the zoo and went, “Hey, that spot is so isolated that it’s only going to get used by zookeepers and horny teenagers looking for a place to make out. Let’s level it.” (Sadly, whatever unnamed bureaucrat was eventually responsible for that decision probably wouldn’t take into account the existence of horny zookeepers who didn’t like making out right next to where they fed the lions. Such are the trials of the working world.)

Thick greenery ringed the circular garden on all sides, surrounding the brick patio flooring and lone picnic table with a concealing veil. Hardy, just-exotic-enough flowers bloomed riotously among the general wash of green, planted by gardeners who enjoyed their privacy as much as Shelby and I did. Even the noises of the zoo were dampened here, muffled by the vegetation, until we could pretend that we were someplace much less artificially designed. A real jungle, maybe, albeit one with an inexplicable amount of landscaping.

“You want to talk about it?” asked Shelby.

“I honestly don’t know where to begin. Do you know much about colony collapse disorder?”

“Isn’t that the thing with the bees?”

“Yeah, it’s . . . the thing . . .” I tapered off mid-sentence, losing the thread of what I’d been trying to say as I stared at the object protruding from one of the decorative hedges.

“Alex?” I heard Shelby sliding off the table. She sounded alarmed. I couldn’t say for sure that it was the wrong emotional response.

The object in question was a shoe. Just a simple white sneaker, the laces still tied. That wasn’t unusual, in and of itself: lots of people manage to lose shoes at the zoo, for reasons that I have never quite understood. No, the problem was what was protruding from the shoe.

The problem was the human ankle.

I stepped closer to the hedge, leaning forward to gently part the branches and look down into the greenery. Shelby stepped up behind me, resting her hands on my shoulders as she craned her neck to get a better view. I didn’t ask her to move back, even though all my years of training were telling me that I should be doing exactly that.

“Well,” I said, after a long moment of silence had passed between us, “I guess I know why Andrew didn’t show up for work this morning.” I released the hedge. It mercifully sprang back into its original formation, blocking the horrified, distorted face of the junior zookeeper from view. I turned, and Shelby put her arms around me, folding me into a strong embrace. I closed my eyes. It didn’t help. Even with my eyes closed, I could still see his expression.

Worse, I could still see his eyes, which had been gray from side to side. Something had turned them to stone. Something that had killed him at the same time. Something not human.

We had a serious problem on our hands.