“Lions and tigers usually bring down prey and then drag it a ways before they eat it, right? There’s always a trail when that happens, and there was a trail today. Andrew was dragged into those bushes. Trust me, I know what a dragged kill looks like.”

“Cockatrice aren’t big enough to drag a dead human, and they don’t work together well.” I glanced to my grandparents. “There’s a cockatrice loose in the neighborhood, and it may have a handler. We need to get out there and stop it before anyone else gets hurt.”

“I was wrong about you, Alex,” said Shelby, with a small smile. “You really do know how to show a girl a good time.”

Eleven

“Shoot first, but aim for the foot, hand, or other non-life-threatening extremity. That way you’ll still be able to ask questions later.”

—Alexander Healy

In the basement of an only moderately creepy suburban home in Columbus, Ohio, getting ready to go on a cockatrice hunt

I MIGHT BE WILLING to go out at night hunting for a creature capable of turning me into solid stone. I wasn’t willing to do it without proper preparation. On a normal day, I have the gun on my calf, three or four knives, and a garrote. This called for something a little less, well . . . basic.

Shelby looked around the basement with the saucer-wide eyes of someone who has just been allowed to glimpse the hills of Heaven, and has found them to be very pleasant indeed. “This is an armory,” she said.

“Not compared to the weapons room at home, but it does well enough,” I said, picking up a brace of throwing knives and making them disappear, one by one, into my coat. “Check the drawer underneath the pole arms. There should be some polarized glasses in there. You’ll need a pair if you don’t want to become a really confusing new lawn ornament.”

“This is all horrible,” said Shelby, even as she obediently opened the drawer and started rooting through the assorted forms of protective eyewear. “I don’t understand how you can be so calm about people being turned to stone.”

“Grandpa?” I picked up a second pistol and started loading it.

My grandfather, recognizing a request for information when he heard one, sighed and said, “Petrifaction is the process of flesh or plant matter being converted into stone.” Shelby looked at him blankly. “Basilisks, cockatrice, and stone spiders are all petrifactors. They can, one way or another, turn flesh to stone.” Shelby continued looking at him blankly. “Don’t you have any of these things in Australia?”

“I think the crocodiles ate them,” she said flatly. “Can we go back to the core question here? How can a person be turned into stone when nothing’s been injected or dumped on them?”

“You saw my eyes,” I said, tucking my new pistol into the waistband of my pants. I rubbed the corner of my right eye with a finger, dislodging another bit of gravel. I was going to be putting in eye drops for the next few weeks, while I waited for the moisture levels to get back to normal.

“You explained that, though,” she said. “Visual allergies.”

“Calling petrifaction a ‘visual allergy’ is pretty accurate, but it doesn’t describe the whole process,” said Grandpa.

“You’d be better off calling it poison that you see,” said Grandma, stepping into the room with a jar of bilberry jam in her hand. “In the case of visual petrifactors, like the cockatrice, it enters via the eye—making it most dangerous to actually lock eyes with one of them—and travels down the optic nerve to the rest of the body. From there, it will begin petrifying whatever it encounters.”

“Cockatrice petrify from the inside out, starting with the eyes and internal organs, while basilisks petrify from the outside in, starting with the eyes and skin,” added Grandpa. “A basilisk will actually leave most of its prey unchanged, counting on suffocation to provide the killing blow.”

“Why?” asked Shelby.

“Crunchy outside, chewy inside,” I said, taking the jar of jam from my grandmother and shoving it into my pocket. “They peck their way through the hard stone shell and have a nice meal all pre-packed and waiting for them. The two species do have one thing in common, though.”

“They’re horrible?” ventured Shelby.

I laughed. “No. They both start with the eyes.”

“So do some gorgons,” said Grandpa pointedly.

“I know.” I shook my head. “I think the presence of a cockatrice in our backyard is a pretty strong indicator that a gorgon didn’t kill Andrew. Yes, a Pliny’s gorgon could have turned him partially to stone. It can’t have been a greater gorgon. There would have been no flesh left.” I didn’t want to think of a Pliny’s gorgon being responsible for this. Dee had been as shocked as the rest of us.

Dee had spent her entire adult life pretending to be human, and doing it well enough to fool almost everyone she’d ever met. Dee disguised her history, her culture, and her species on a daily basis. If she was a good enough liar to manage all that, why wouldn’t she be good enough to fool me by looking surprised when a dead man was found on zoo property?

“You know you have to consider it,” said Grandma.

“I know,” I said miserably.

“Hang on a second,” said Shelby. “There’s different kinds of gorgon?”

I turned to eye her. “What do they teach you in the Thirty-Six Society?”

“Not that,” she replied. “You may have a Eurocentric view of the cryptid world—which doesn’t make much sense to me, mind you, since you lot are living in North America—but it’s not the only view there is, and we’re an island ecology. Mostly, we try to keep the native species from eating each other, and we only worry about the non-native ones when they turn invasive.”

Given the climate and geographical isolation of Australia, I’d be stunned if there weren’t at least a few families of gorgons living there. That doesn’t necessarily say anything about the skill of the members of the Thirty-Six Society. The chupacabra predates European colonization of the Americas, and we didn’t know they existed until about fifty years ago (as far as I know, the Covenant still thinks they’re just werewolves with a skin condition). When something has good reason to stay hidden, it finds a way.

“Since we’re about to go looking for a cockatrice that we know was responsible for partially petrifying at least me, is it okay if we save that particular natural history lesson for later?” I asked.