There was a door not six feet from me, held half-open by a choking mat of weeds. Gun still in my hand, I crept forward and slipped through the opening, into yet another snake’s lair.

The inside of the barn was brighter than I’d expected, largely due to the aforementioned issues with the roof: there were large holes where the wood had rotted away, allowing the sunlight to slant through them into the room. A makeshift sort of home had been built around those holes, with everything pushed into the spaces where the rain wouldn’t reach. There was a table with two old, rusty lawn chairs; a wardrobe that looked like it had been mended with pieces of cardboard; and a kitchen area that consisted primarily of a fire pit and two racks of chipped old dishes. A faint smell of snake hung over the whole place, overlaid with the twinned scents of mold and ancient, rotten wood.

I took all that in as I scanned the space, waiting for my eyes to adjust and searching frantically for some sign of Shelby. Then, in the darkest corner of the barn, I made out what looked like a bed. It was a big, amorphous shape, lumpy with what could either have been too many pillows piled into a heap . . . or Shelby.

It took all my waning supply of self-control not to run across the room, potentially knocking things over and almost certainly bringing Lloyd back into the barn. Instead, I made my way carefully around the edge of the barn, until I was close enough to that dark corner to whisper, “Shelby? Are you there?”

There was no reply. My heart sank, and I took the last steps into shadow feeling considerably less hopeful.

Despite the broken patches in the roof, there was enough shadow that I couldn’t see any real detail I reached out with my free hand, leaning down until my fingers hit the cool skin of a humanoid shoulder. I closed my eyes and ran my hand along the curve of the shoulder, identifying it as belonging to a female. Reaching a little higher, I touched her hair. Human. I brought my fingers to my nose. Unless Lloyd was fond of kidnapping women who all used the same shampoo, it was Shelby. She wasn’t moving, but when I placed my fingers against the side of her neck and focused, I could find a pulse. It was faint, weak enough that I could just as easily have missed it. It was there, and that was all I had it in me to give a damn about at the moment.

“Shelby.” I knelt, blinking as I tried to force my eyes to adjust faster. I slid my hand along the side of her torso, trying to figure out how best to pick her up without making too much noise or attracting too much unwanted attention. To my surprise, my questing fingers encountered expertly applied bandages circling her stomach, wound tight enough to stop the blood, but not so tight that they would cut off circulation. Lloyd had provided her with basic medical care. Thank God.

The bandages made it more likely that I would be able to move her, although I wasn’t sure how far I’d need to carry her through the woods in order to get her back to the car. It didn’t matter. “It’s going to be okay, baby,” I murmured. “I’m getting you out of here.”

“That’s a pretty sweet thought, Mr. Preston—or should I call you Mr. Price now, since we’re not on the zoo grounds anymore?” Lloyd’s voice was as familiar as always, holding its customary mix of deference and apologetic nosiness. For the first time, however, I could hear the hard edge underneath it. He sounded like someone who’d been given plenty of reasons to be angry with the world, and was planning to make use of every single one.

“Hello, Lloyd,” I said, turning slowly to face him.

Even through the shadows, I could see that he wasn’t wearing his hat. Short, stunted-looking snakes cast malformed shadows on the wall.

“Hello,” he said. “Mighty kind of you to save me the trouble of hunting you down.” That was all the warning he gave before he lunged.

Twenty-four

“Once upon a time there was a little boy who lived with monsters, and the monsters swore that they would never hurt him, because even monsters dream of living happily ever after.”

—Kevin Price

Facing a gorgon hybrid in a supposedly abandoned barn attached to a hidden gorgon community in the middle of the Ohio woods, which is absolutely a terrible place to be right now

SHELBY WAS IMMOBILE AND unconscious; I had to save myself before I’d have any hope of saving her. I dodged aside and allowed Lloyd to slam into the mattress. He whirled, hissing, but I was already halfway across the barn, my pistol in my hand and aimed at him.

“You didn’t have to follow me,” he said.

“I thought you just said I’d saved you a lot of trouble,” I replied.

“You did and you didn’t. I was going to hunt you down, and I don’t have to do that now, but it might have hurt you less if you’d just let my cockatrice take care of business.” He shook his head, his snakes setting up another chorus of hisses. “I liked you well enough, while we both worked at the zoo. You were always nicer to me than you had to be, given our positions. Had to lie to you, of course; couldn’t just go announcing I was a freak of nature, given your family history. I could still have offered you a mostly painless death.”

Spoken like a man who had never been partially petrified. Phantom pains flared in my eyes as I offered the only reply that I could think of: “We left the Covenant generations ago.”

“But you still hold yourselves as judge, jury, and executioner when you feel like it’s appropriate, don’t you? You wouldn’t be here otherwise.” Lloyd remained next to the bed, straightening slowly, until he stood taller than I had ever seen him. It wasn’t just a matter of hunching or not hunching; his torso seemed to have elongated, adding a serpentine cast to his silhouette. “That’s why you had to go before I could have my revenge. Andrew was an accident, you know. I was planning to put my cockatrice in your office, take care of the biggest threat around before things got started. So I put it in your yard, and even that couldn’t get rid of you. Slippery bastard.”

“Sorry I didn’t want to die.”

“I shouldn’t have expected anything different from a Price. Self-appointed saviors of the cryptid world, who know what we need better than we do.”

“You know, I’m used to people being mad at me because of who my ancestors were, but most of the time, they’re pissed off because someone I’m related to killed someone they were related to, not because my great-grandfather helped their parents get married.”