“Yes, sir, it is,” I said. It was all fake, of course—Alexander Preston had only existed on paper before I brought him to the Columbus Zoo, and he’d cease to exist as soon as I moved on to my next assignment—but everything about him was designed to pass even the deepest of examinations. He had a good college GPA, glowing letters of recommendation from his professors, and even contact numbers for his next of kin. He was a pretty well-liked guy, and I was going to miss him when it came time for me to move on to being someone else.
I didn’t have a choice, sadly. Verity could maintain a single identity for her ballroom dancing, because the Covenant wasn’t looking for us in that community. Anything related to professional zoology was more likely to catch their attention. No identity was secure enough to risk using twice.
“All right, then,” said the policeman, and turned his back on me, moving toward the cluster of EMTs and police personnel who were examining Andrew’s body. Shelby waved, mouthing the word “later,” and went back to talking to her policeman.
I waved back, a little hesitantly, and left the tiger garden, heading back to the reptile house as fast as I could. I kept my eyes away from the ground as I walked, just in case a cockatrice had been responsible for what had happened to Andrew. Cockatrice like to stay low, and for all that I knew, it was still at the zoo. Under the circumstances, avoiding an accidental staring contest was the safest thing I could have done.
Let’s talk about things that can turn you to stone.
There are a surprisingly large number of them extant in the world, and there used to be even more, before the Covenant of St. George compared notes with some Greek gentlemen and figured out all those spiffy little tricks with smoked glass and reflective surfaces. That cut down on the things-that-turn-you-to-stone population both dramatically and quickly, but “cut down” is not the same thing as “eradicated.” Good thing, too, as many of the things that can turn flesh to stone serve very important roles in the world’s ecology. This probably doesn’t make it any nicer to lock eyes or swap venom with them.
My original purpose in coming to Ohio actually involved things that turn people to stone. When I wasn’t counting frickens, I was supposedly administrating a basilisk breeding program. Technically I still was. It was just that my breeding pair of basilisks were currently hibernating—or had been as of ten o’clock the previous night; I’d been so busy dealing with the reptile house when I got to work that I hadn’t checked on them yet—and basilisks can hibernate for ten years at a stretch. It’s part of what made them so hard for the Covenant to eradicate. It’s hard to kill something that can go off and be a small boulder when it wants to take a long nap.
(Of course, they’re so sensitive to changes in their environment that moving them can cause them to hibernate even longer, which is why the breeding program had to take place in Ohio, where my pair had acclimated enough that they were unlikely to sleep for more than a year at a time—plus, with my middle sister on the East Coast and my parents and youngest sister on the West Coast, it was good for me to be in the Midwest. I could react quickly if there was an emergency, and it helped increase the number of air strikes required to wipe us all out.)
But back to the larger subject. All known petrifactors (IE, “things that can convince the minerals in your body that they really want to change formation and become different types of mineral”) are members of the Ophion family, a group of synapsids which includes everything from gorgons to cockatrice. This is more a matter of convenience than any strong scientific evidence proving their evolutionary relationship. They range in size from the greater gorgons, who are substantially larger than humans, to basilisks, which are the size of irritated chickens. Really, they only have one absolute unifying feature. All of them are capable of turning flesh to stone, to one degree or another.
Lesser gorgons stun with their gaze and petrify with their bite, although you’d have to work to find traces of petrifaction in most of their victims. They prefer their meat to be, well, meaty, not filled with delicious veins of silicate and carbon. Pliny’s gorgons like Dee could stun and petrify with their eyes, although they were better at the stunning part, and needed to have their hair uncovered if they wanted to petrify, or even stun something particularly large. They needed the extra eyes. Greater gorgons . . .
If we had a greater gorgon, I was going to be tempted to grab Shelby, my family, and anyone else that I was fond of and declare that it was time for a month-long vacation somewhere very, very far away. Like Hawaii. Or the moon.
Petrifaction can be stopped if you catch it early, but once it’s gone far enough, there’s no known treatment. If it happens, it’s happened, and there’s no force in this dimension or any other that will undo it. It’s supposed to be a very painful way to die. Personally, I never want to find out.
But Andrew found out. On that somber note, I reached the reptile house, pushed the door open, and stepped inside.
Kim and Nelson were working with the latest school group, a bunch of bored-looking sixth graders who clearly thought of themselves as far too cool for anything as jejune as a bunch of stupid snakes. I waved to the other zookeepers and kept walking, noting in passing that Shami was back in his tank.
Dee’s office door wasn’t locked. Good; that meant she hadn’t let her hair out of its confinement. I opened the door and stepped inside, closing it behind me. “We have a problem,” I announced.
“You just came into my office without knocking,” said Dee, lowering the sandwich she’d been about to bite into. It was dripping red. I was willing to bet it wasn’t because she’d used too much ketchup. “I’ll say we’ve got a problem. We’ve discussed privacy and appropriate boundaries before, Alex, and this is—”
“Andrew’s dead.”
Dee froze. Seconds ticked by while she stared at me, apparently too stunned to move. I waited as long as I could before snapping my fingers. She jumped in her seat, an audible hissing sound coming from beneath her wig.
“Earth to Dee, come in, Dee,” I said, only realizing after the words were out of my mouth that I was unintentionally parroting Shelby’s words to me in the tiger garden. “I need you alert and tracking, so if you could stop being stunned and useless, that would be awesome.”
“Little heavy on the sarcasm there, boss,” she mumbled, still sounding half-present. She shook her head, eliciting more enraged hissing from her hair, and looked at me pleadingly. “Is this some sort of really shitty joke? Because if you say it is, I’ll laugh. I promise to laugh.”
“I wish. The police are in the tiger garden now. They’ll be showing up here soon, to verify that I arrived when I said I did.” Belatedly it occurred to me that my beeline for Dee’s office could be seen as an attempt to solidify my shaky alibi. I sighed, forcing myself not to dwell. If they were going to try and pin Andrew’s murder on me, there wasn’t much I could do about it, aside from being innocent. Since I hadn’t killed him, I figured I had that part in the bag. “Look, Andrew’s death isn’t the problem. It’s the way he died.”
Dee’s eyes widened behind the tinted lenses of her glasses. “Oh, God, he was murdered, wasn’t he?”
“I don’t know. It’ll depend on what killed him. If it was a sapient being, then yes, he was murdered. If it was a nonsapient, then no. He was just killed.”
“Wait . . .” Dee paused, cocking her head to the side as she frowned at me. “Are you saying that a cryptid of some sort did this?”