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.