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 trip 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.