The question seemed directed at all of us. I cleared my throat. “My name is Alexander—”

“I know who you are, human.” He spat the word between us. “I knew as soon as you set your filthy feet in this state. You have no business here, and yet here you stand. Why are you here?” His gaze flicked to Frank, then finally to Dee. “Unless you’ve brought me a breeding pair as a peace offering . . . ?”

“Don’t be disgusting,” said Dee. She was lisping slightly. I glanced to the side, unsurprised to see that her fangs had dropped. “These people are our allies.”

“You’re seeking allies among the apes now? You’ve fallen even farther into disgrace than I feared.”

Frank shook his head. “There is no talking to you, is there? There never has been, and there never will be.”

“Yet here you stand, like there’s some purpose in trying,” said Walter. “Which of us is the fool?”

“Sounds to me like you are, but I’m just a monkey, so what do I know?” All of us turned to look at Shelby. She shrugged broadly. “It’s a little silly not to listen to someone who’s come all the way here to see you, don’t you think? Oh, and fought the dragon-worm-thing that was living in your woods, mustn’t forget that. It was big, too. You should be quite impressed and happy to talk to us.”

Walter blinked, the snakes atop his head stirring and beginning to taste the air. “You saw the lindworms and lived?” he asked. “How is that possible?”

“Onions will usually keep lindworms from attacking, but in this case, we saw the lindworm—singular, it was the female—and lived mostly because it had already been blinded,” I said. “It was half petrified. That made it easy to kill, and that’s why we’re here. There’s a cockatrice running around Columbus, and there’s a gorgon helping it turn people into stone. Deanna brought me, and my associate, to talk to you and see if there was anything you might know about this.”

“To accuse us, you mean,” said Walter flatly.

“Easy to kill?” said Shelby.

“Sir, I’m a Price. Do you really think I would risk everything my family has built solely for the chance to accuse you of something we both know you didn’t do?”

Walter blinked again. Then his eyes narrowed. “Come again, son?”

“No, I’m back on ‘easy,’” said Shelby. “You think that was easy to kill?”

I tried to ignore her, focusing on Walter. “You’re too tall to have come into the city without being noticed. Maybe—maybe—you could have driven the cockatrice to the city limits and dropped it off, but you’d have had no way of catching it again, and you wouldn’t have been able to bite the second man we found. We’re here because we need help, and because I heard you’ve been trying to work with gorgon-safe livestock. I wanted to talk to you about that.”

Walter eyed me for a few moments more before he turned to Frank and Dee. “Is he telling the truth?”

“Alexander Price is one of the worst liars I’ve ever met,” said Dee. “Mostly he just tries not to say anything that might get him questioned.”

“I’ve been dating him for months, and I can back up everything she just said,” said Shelby, raising her hand. “I thought he was shy at first. Then I thought he was being controlled by a telepathic murder-bitch. It’s much better now that I know he’s just a terrible liar.”

“Yes, that’s much better,” I mumbled, and turned back to Walter. “Have you ever kept cockatrice here?”

“Yes,” he said, without hesitation. “They can meet our eyes without harm. That’s more than you can do.”

“That’s absolutely true,” I said. “Can you show me where they were kept?”

His chuckle was slow and deep, like rocks shaking beneath the surface of the earth. “I can do more than that,” he said. “I can show you where they are.”

Following a Pliny’s gorgon I barely knew into a cockatrice coop could probably be moved straight to the top of my list of The Dumbest Things I Have Ever Voluntarily Done. It helped that I was armed, but it only helped a little; gorgons and cockatrice are armed by definition. They wouldn’t even need to draw their weapons.

Shelby stuck close to my side as we entered the darkened building. It smelled like a combination of reptile house and pigeon roost, the hot, dry stink of too many reptiles jammed into an enclosed space mingling with feathers, dust, and the unavoidable oceans of bird shit. The ceiling was high enough for both Walter and Frank to stand upright. Light filtered in through cracks between the boards, turned smoky by the dust that hung suspended in the air.

The walls were lined with roosting boxes, and black lumps filled them, occasionally making sleepy clucking noises. I couldn’t get an accurate population count in the darkness. I tried, reached “many” as a final number three times, and gave it up as a bad plan. “Many” was terrifying enough.

“You may want to stay back,” said Walter, and picked up his pace, using his longer legs to get to the middle of the coop while the rest of us were still hanging back by the door. He grabbed the rope that dangled from the ceiling and gave it a solid yank. A trapdoor swung open, hinges creaking, and revealed the chicken wire dome that we had passed through on our way to the building. I had to give the fringe gorgons this much: they were being careful with their cockatrice (although being really careful would have meant not keeping cockatrice at all). The coop, and a decent amount of the area around it, was completely surrounded by chicken wire, reinforced and double thick. Nothing was getting out of here accidentally.

The lumps in the roosting boxes began to stir as the light hit them. They didn’t make the usual broody noises of suddenly-wakened chickens; these sounds were more like the small screeches of angry parrots, combined with an unnerving amount of hissing. Shelby’s hand found mine, grabbing hold and squeezing tightly. I squeezed back, trying to be reassuring.

Then the first cockatrice jumped from its brooding box to the floor of the coop, ruffling its feathers as it bobbed its head in a distinctly avian way. It turned to look at us, first with one eye, then with the other, before opening its mouth and hissing. It was a sound more suited to a dinosaur than anything that should have been walking the earth in this day and age.