Shelby was on the other side of the tiger garden with another policeman, sitting atop the picnic table and giving her version of the story. From the occasional words that drifted my way, I was willing to venture that her version matched mine in the broad strokes, but was both more carnal and more profane in its details.

“Now, I don’t know whether I would have said that about your coworker’s heritage,” I said mildly, after Shelby made a particularly salty comment.

My policeman narrowed his eyes. “Please pay attention to your own situation, and not your girlfriend’s, Mr. Preston. Can you account for your whereabouts this morning between eight and eleven?”

“Yes, I can,” I said. “I was at the reptile house for most of the morning, along with my assistant, Deanna Taylor-Rodriguez. She’s still there now. I arrived at work about a quarter after eight. Lloyd was the guard on duty at the front gate.” For the first time, I found myself grateful for Lloyd’s slavish dedication to following the letter of the law. He’d have a triple-checked timestamp verifying exactly when I arrived.

That meant he probably had one for Andrew, too. I made a mental note to check with Lloyd once I was done explaining my innocence to the local police.

“Did this Lloyd gentleman walk you to the, ah, snake house?”

“No, he didn’t,” I admitted. “But if you check with Dee, you’ll find that it took me a maximum of ten minutes to cross the grounds to the reptile house.” I subtly stressed the word “reptile.” I wasn’t trying to mock him or piss him off. I just wanted him to remember that I knew my own business. “I honestly have no idea what happened to Andrew. Whatever it was, it probably took more than ten minutes.”

The first part wasn’t entirely a lie: there were a number of things that could have turned my unfortunate junior zookeeper into stone, and most of them were viable suspects, since he was still meat-based enough that he could have been zapped by anything from the bottom to the top of the power scale. The second part was one hundred percent fiction. Depending on the strength of the creature doing the petrifaction, it takes a few seconds, sometimes less. When something that’s capable of doing that to living flesh makes eye contact with a mammal . . . game over. I could easily have turned Andrew into stone and still made it to the reptile house on time. Except for the part where I’m human.

The policeman frowned at his notes. I seized the opportunity to add, a little more sheepishly, “Also, if I did . . . whatever it is . . . do you honestly think I would have brought my girlfriend here? I mean, I was hoping to have sex again in this lifetime, and most girls get sort of upset when you take them to see a dead body.”

Most girls. Not, apparently, Shelby, who was now laughing with her policeman, both of them appearing to have a grand old time as they reviewed her statement. I didn’t know how she did it, but I loved her for it in that moment, just as I’d loved her for every similar thing I’d ever seen her do.

My policeman followed my gaze to Shelby. Then, to my surprise, he smiled. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “You’re free to go back to work. Please don’t leave town, Mr. Preston, we may need to speak to you further about this incident. I have your contact information, and I assume that your paperwork with the zoo office is up to date?”

“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.)