“There’s a skeleton crew on the grounds taking care of feeding and vital maintenance and security’s been stepped up, although that’s just going to take it from ‘joke’ to ‘slightly better joke,’” said Shelby, reading from her phone. Management had sent us all an email with the updated schedules and information on the closure. “I’m supposed to be on duty tomorrow to clean out the lion enclosure. Seriously? The zoo’s closed, I’m not even the one doing the feedings, and I still have to change the kitty litter?”

“Do you actually use kitty litter?” I asked, pulling off the road and parking behind a particularly thick copse of oak trees. They would almost completely hide my car from anyone who wasn’t really looking for it. As long as we didn’t somehow trigger a full police sweep, it should be fine here.

Shelby gave me a withering look. “Of course not. It’s a figure of speech.”

“Hey, I don’t look at you like that when you ask dumb questions about snakes,” I said. I got out of the car, easing the door carefully closed behind me. The forest was quiet; out here, a slammed door could echo like a gunshot.

“I don’t ask dumb questions about snakes,” she protested. “I’m Australian. We’re born knowing more about snakes than you will ever learn.”

“Uh-huh.” I crouched down, studying the loam around the car. “I don’t see any cockatrice tracks here. We should be safe, for the moment. Put on your glasses, okay? I really don’t want to explain to your parents that I have no idea where you went.” Explaining her disappearance to the police would be even less fun. Getting involved in a murder investigation after my girlfriend went missing would be a guaranteed way to blow this identity.

“Are you sure these are necessary?” asked Shelby, producing a pair of wire-framed glasses from her pocket and slipping them on. The non-prescription lenses were polarized, and would give her a measure of resistance to petrifaction.

Besides which, maybe I’m shallow, but I’m also a science geek. Shelby in glasses was hot.

“Yes, they’re necessary,” I said, straightening. “You should try not to lock eyes with a cockatrice if you can avoid it, since there’s always the chance that your glasses could be knocked askew or something, but they’ll buy you time. Even if it’s only a few seconds, a few seconds can save your life.”

“All right,” said Shelby.

“Follow me.”

We slunk through the woods parallel to the fence, watching our feet as we tried to minimize the amount of noise that we were making. I grew up in the woods outside of Portland, Oregon, and while I didn’t have Verity’s knack for moving through the landscape like it was just another dance floor, I did all right for myself. Shelby, on the other hand, had a nasty tendency to step on branches and slip on patches of dried leaves, making it very apparent that something was moving through the trees, even if it wasn’t quite clear what. I tried to focus on forging the quietest trail possible, rather than getting angry with her for not knowing the terrain. This wasn’t the kind of forest she’d trained in. Of course she wouldn’t know how to use it to her advantage.

A gnarled old oak pressed up against the fence about two hundred yards from our parking spot. The bricks were warped and bowed around the trunk of the ancient tree, and I estimated that we were less than ten years away from the zoo management needing to make a decision about either removing the tree or rebuilding the fence around it. I hoped they’d decide to keep the tree. It had been there a long time before the zoo showed up.

“This overhangs the alligator enclosure,” I murmured. “This time of day, they’ll either be inside, or they’ll be sunning themselves near the interior fences. We should have a clear shot to the access door.” Better, zoo security was unlikely to come anywhere near the place, since only a suicidal idiot would use this method of breaking in.

Shelby looked at me like I’d just proposed we grow wings and fly into the zoo. “Alligators? That’s your brilliant plan? We climb a tree into a pen filled with alligators?”

“It’s perfectly safe, as long as we’re careful, and don’t drop directly onto a gator’s head or anything.” I reached up and grabbed a low-hanging branch. “You can wait here, if you’d prefer.”

Shelby muttered something under her breath that sounded suspiciously like “madman” and climbed after me. I somehow managed not to laugh.

The old oak was broad enough and bent enough that climbing wasn’t difficult; in no time at all, we were inching our way along a branch that extended over the alligator enclosure. It was suddenly very obvious how Chandi had been able to use this method to break into the zoo. I made a mental note to talk to the groundskeepers about cutting this particular branch off the tree, and then dropped down to the soft grass below—

—only to find myself crouching almost nose to nose with Big Ted, the largest of the zoo’s three American alligators. I blinked. He blinked, looking as surprised as I was, in his slow reptilian way. I heard a soft thump as Shelby landed behind me, followed by the sound of her whispering, “Aw, fuck me.”

Evolution has been kind to the alligator. It discovered a form that suited the alligator’s function millennia ago, and rather than forcing the alligator to change, it backed off, leaving a living fossil to prowl the swamps and wetlands of the world. The alligator is the cardboard box of nature: perfect just as it is, and needing no further refinement.

Fortunately for us, that means the alligator is not the sharpest tool in the shed, since it’s never needed to be. I straightened and began backing away, hands raised, less because I thought Big Ted would understand what I was trying to tell him, and more because he’d learned to associate humans with raised hands with a coming mealtime. Sure, promising food I didn’t have to the giant reptilian killing machine was a potentially bad idea, but if he was waiting for me to drop a chicken, he might hesitate before taking a chunk out of my thigh.

Footsteps behind me told me that Shelby was following my lead. Good.

Big Ted appeared to finally finish processing the shock of our presence. He opened his mouth and hissed. It was a horrible, primeval sound, and I was probably going to be dreaming about it for the next few nights.

“Shelby,” I said quietly, as I continued to back up, “look behind you. Do you see any other alligators?”