“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.