Expression grim, Frank nodded. “Yes. It would be enough to assist the process, if nothing else.”

Shelby cleared her throat. “All right, this is all very fascinating, in that ‘we’re finally solving the murder mystery, aren’t we clever’ sort of way, but we’re standing in the middle of a forest where a giant lizard just tried to eat us. Worse, we had to kill the poor thing to make it stop. So in the interest of not being eaten, and not killing anything else that doesn’t absolutely have to be killed, how about we move on to where we were going in the first place, hmm?”

I stiffened at the reminder of how exposed we really were. The frickens were still silent; they still sensed danger in the trees. They could have been reacting to our presence.

They could have been reacting to something else.

“How much farther?” I asked Frank.

“This way,” he said, and waved for us to follow as he turned and led us out of the woods. The body of the lindworm remained behind, a gruesome reminder that not all the deaths in this conflict were going to be human—and not all the victims were going to go down without a fight.

Sixteen

“Rules only matter if everyone understands them, agrees to them, and can be trusted not to break them. Bearing those irrefutable facts in mind, rules never matter at all.”

—Thomas Price

At a hidden gorgon community in the middle of the Ohio woods, emerging from the tree line, having not been eaten by a lindworm

WE WERE ONLY A short distance from the other side of the trees. If the dead lindworm’s mate was around, he didn’t attack us as we walked. The frickens started singing again after we had passed, their tiny, cheerful cries of “creep, creep, creep” signaling that the danger had passed. To them, we must have been as frightening as the lindworm, at least in the aftermath of our fight. Hopefully, they’d get over their fear of us. I didn’t want to walk through those woods again without an early warning system.

Then we stepped out of the trees, and I stopped thinking about the frickens. I was too busy staring.

When Frank and Dee called this area of the community “the fringe,” I naturally pictured the worst: ramshackle sheds, rusted-out trailers, and a few unkempt farmers with broken shovels in their hands, telling us to get off of their land. It was a terrible stereotype of something that had probably never been invented before—the redneck gorgon—and seeing the reality just made me feel worse about harboring those thoughts.

The main community was mostly mobile homes, designed to move at a moment’s notice. Here on the fringe, everything was built to last. A half dozen small brick houses were spaced around the edges of a wide green space, and more were half-hidden by the trees on the other side of the clearing. There was a grain silo, and three separate buildings that were either barns or stables of some sort. People worked in the field, bowed over their hoes and shovels. Like the gorgons back in the main community, they were bare-headed, allowing their snakes the freedom to taste the air. Unlike those gorgons, they were mostly bare-chested as well, exposing the scaled patches on their backs and shoulders. What clothing they did wear was plainly homemade, the sort of thing that could be stitched by hand.

If not for the snakes growing atop the head of every farmer and field hand we saw, this could have been taken for a human farming community, albeit one that should have existed a hundred years ago, or two hundred years ago, not in modern-day Ohio.

“Welcome to the fringe,” said Frank, not bothering to smother the disdain in his voice. “Come, this way.” He struck out across the field. Lacking any better plan, Shelby and I followed, with Dee bringing up the rear.

Shelby stepped close enough that she could drop her voice and murmur, “This isn’t what I was figuring on.”

“You’re not alone there,” I said, matching her tone. “They don’t look . . .”

“Friendly? No, they don’t, at that.” A few of the nearer farmhands had spotted us and stopped their work in favor of glaring. Shelby offered one of them a jaunty wave. He kept glaring. “But you notice, they’re pointing most of the unhappy at our guide? It’s like we’ve already been vetted to know that they exist, so they’re focusing their nasty on the other gorgons.”

“That makes sense.” A community this size would have to have human allies, even if they didn’t know that they were dealing with gorgons. Local farmers, garden supply stores, even feed stores, if they were serious about keeping livestock. They could pretend to be independent, but they were still connected to the greater world, just like the rest of us. “The fact that we made it this far means they know we’re not Covenant. That’s probably all that matters.”

“Low bar.”

“You work with what you have.”

“Guess that’s true.” Shelby’s tone changed, turning amused, as she asked, “So what was that about proposing marriage back there in the woods? You were talking to me and not the lindworm, right?”

My ears reddened. I pushed my glasses back up and said primly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You probably heard something wrong while we were trying not to be eaten.”

“You mean while you were trying not to be eaten. I was doing pretty okay. And my ears are fine.”

“Yes, about that. How did you know how to fight a lindworm?”

Shelby shrugged. “I didn’t. I just assumed that what would work on a crocodile would work on one of these big fellas, too.”

I stared at her. “You didn’t.”

“What are you complaining about? You’re alive, aren’t you?”

Try as I might, I couldn’t come up with a response to that.

As it turned out, I didn’t need to. A door opened in the nearest brick house and a man emerged. He was wearing a shirt and vest, but his head was bare, and the snakes growing there were long and healthy. Their scales were a pale silver that accentuated his dark tan. He was carrying a hoe. It seemed like a threat, rather than a farming tool. His size helped with that; he was almost a foot taller than Frank, with the solid build of a man who made his living from the land.

Frank stopped walking, motioning for the rest of us to do the same. “Walter,” he said coldly.

“Franklin,” Walter replied. He stopped several yards away, eyeing first me and then Shelby with open disdain. He didn’t look at Dee at all. His gaze lingered on Shelby’s hair, lip curling slightly, the way a human man’s might if he were looking at road kill or something else disgusting. “This is my land. Why are you here?”