“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 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.