Pocket Apocalypse: InCryptid, Book Four (3 page)

Dee laughed. “See you at the reptile house,” she said. After a quick glance in the mirror to confirm that her wig was firmly seated, she was out of the car and heading for the zoo gates with the quick, efficient steps of a woman who had no time for whatever bullshit the guard at the gate might decide to throw her way. She didn’t look back. That was for the best. Our midday “field trips” were tolerated by the administration as long as they were connected to my research, but that tolerance would probably drop off dramatically if either one of us started giving off signs that we were secretly having an affair.

Not that we
were
secretly having an affair. Dee was happily married to the doctor of the local gorgon community, an imposing fellow named Frank, and I was equally happy in my relationship with the other visiting researcher attached to the West Columbus Zoo: Dr. Shelby Tanner, big cat specialist and potentially the most dangerous thing ever produced by the great continent of Australia.

I twisted in my seat, looking at Crow. “We’re here,” I said. “Office, Crow. Office. Can you do that?”

Crow continued preening his left wing, ignoring me.

I sighed. Chasing my griffin around the zoo grounds while I tried to keep him from being seen by anyone wasn’t my idea of a good time. At the same time, I couldn’t leave him in the car. Cryptid or not, he’d be killed if the car got too hot, just like a normal dog or cat—and even if that didn’t happen, I didn’t feel like spending the evening cleaning griffin crap out of the upholstery.

“Office,” I said. “Treats.”

Crow lifted his head.

“Yeah, I thought that would get your attention. Go straight there, and you can have two liver cubes.” I got out of the car and opened the rear driver’s-side door. Crow took off like a shot, his vast black wings straining at first to gain altitude, and then leveling off into a glide. Anyone who happened to see him pass overhead would probably take him for a raven, their minds automatically editing out the long plume of his tail and mammalian shape of his lower body in the interests of not seeing something that they knew couldn’t possibly exist.

Sometimes it’s convenient to have a pet that no one believes in. I’d never be allowed to bring a cat to work every day, but since Crow “isn’t real,” no one’s ever reported him to the zoo management. Other times, I think it would be nice to stop hiding him from the world. Miniature griffins could be the next big trend in exotic pets.

Or maybe not. They did require a lot of special care.

The guard at the gate was new, and I didn’t remember his name. He checked my credentials, said, “Welcome back, Dr. Preston,” and waved me through. I smiled amiably and stepped inside, closing my eyes for a moment in regret. The old guard, Lloyd, had been a friendly man who’d always seemed happy to see me. Unfortunately, he’d also been a homicidal gorgon hybrid who’d resented humanity for shutting him out; he’d stabbed Shelby and tried to kill us both before I shot him dead in the forest near the gorgon community.

Still, he’d been a nice old man for a long time before that happened, and I missed him. Logic and loss aren’t always great friends. Sometimes we mourn for the things that hurt us. Sometimes, that’s okay.

School groups and small clusters of excited zoo goers clogged the paths between the entrance and the reptile house, all of them trying to get in one last sighting of our shy snow leopard or our playful young male orangutan before the weather turned bad and the zoo became a much less appealing destination. Ohio winters weren’t exactly conducive to open-air pathways and natural enclosures. Some of the animals enjoyed the snow. Others would spend the whole winter inside, glaring at anyone who dared to open a door and let the wind in. I wove my way around the people, smiling politely when they cast curious glances at my muddy boots and zoo ID, until my destination came into view: the low round shape of the reptile house. I sped up. Almost home.

Stepping into the reptile house was like stepping back in time, into a world where the rich, dark smell of snakes and lizards dominated the atmosphere. The overhead lights were low, allowing the individual enclosures to shine just a little brighter. Crunchy, our big alligator snapping turtle, floated in his tank directly in front of the door, like a promise of better things to come or a warning about not pissing off the residents.

There were a few people inside as well as outside, but most of the zoo’s visitors were eschewing the warm confines of the reptile house until later in the day, when the chill would drive them into any enclosed exhibits they could find, and getting a good position in front of our cobra enclosure would prove virtually impossible. I waved to Dee, who was wiping smears off the front of the rattlesnake enclosure, as I passed.

“You have company,” she said.

I paused. “Good company?”

“You could say that.” She grinned. I walked a little faster.

My office would normally have been used for the director of the reptile house. The zoo didn’t have one of those right now: instead, it had me, and since I was serving the same basic function, I got to use the space. The door was unlocked. I opened it cautiously, hoping that Dee’s definition of “good company” matched up with mine.

A blonde woman in zoo-issue khakis was sitting on the edge of my desk, her slouch hat pushed back on her head and her long, tanned legs crossed at the knee, so that one hiking boot-clad foot thumped against the desk’s edge. She was leaning back on one hand and scritching Crow on the back of the neck with the other. My temperamental pet’s eyes were half closed, and he was making small chirping noises in his contentment. As for the woman, she was smiling indulgently, like she’d known all along that all she had to do was show up and I would appear.

I stepped into the office and shut the door.

“Hello, Price boy,” said Shelby Tanner, her Australian accent pronounced in the way that meant she was about to ask me for something. I didn’t mind. Most of the things Shelby asked me for were okay by me. “You know much about werewolves?”

Well. That wasn’t what I’d been expecting.

“We try to avoid words like ‘monster’ when we can. They tend to prejudice people. And yet, sometimes, ‘monster’ is the only word that fits.”

—Jonathan Healy

The reptile house of
Ohio’s West Columbus Zoo, visiting researcher’s office

“H
ELLO,
S
HELBY.”
I walked past her, using the need to close the window as a distraction while I swallowed my atavistic desire to turn and run away. It only took a few seconds, but that was long enough for me to mostly recover from the shock of her question. I flipped the latch and turned back to her. “So what do you want to know about werewolves?” I asked. I was proud of myself: my voice didn’t even break.

“Everything.” Shelby sobered, all traces of levity slipping away. “Sit down, will you? I need to talk to you.”

Those words just made the fear that already gripped my heart grow even stronger. “All right,” I said, still fighting to retain my composure. I snagged my desk chair, rolling it to where it would give me a clear view of her face before I sat down. She didn’t say anything. She just watched me. “What’s wrong?”

“That’s sort of encapsulated in the question, isn’t it?” She frowned. “Are you all right? You look shaken.”

“When my girlfriend comes to my office asking about werewolves, I get a little anxious.” I folded my hands on my knees to keep myself from fidgeting. “What’s going on?”

“I need you to tell me everything you know about werewolves,” said Shelby gravely.

I wanted to ask if there had been a local sighting, but I put the question out of my mind: there was no way she would be this calm if the danger were that close. Instead, I took a deep breath and said, “All right. First off, werewolves don’t exist as a species. They’re individuals infected with the lycanthropy-w virus, which we believe started as a therianthrope-specific form of rabies before jumping back into a nonshapeshifting population. Anything mammalian can be infected with lycanthropy-w, although it’s extremely rare for anything or anyone weighing less than ninety pounds to survive the first transformation, which tends to limit its living victims to humans, humanoids, and large mammals like horses or bears. Nonmammalian cryptids, like wadjet or cuckoos, can’t be infected; their biology isn’t compatible with the virus.”

Thank God for that. The idea of telepathic werewolves was terrifying enough to make me never want to sleep again.

Shelby’s frown deepened. “What do you mean, ‘anything mammalian’?”

“I mean it doesn’t just infect humans. Any mammal can catch it.”

“That’s—seriously? Oh, that’s just great. How deadly is it?”

“Lycanthropy-w is pretty hard to catch. It’s spread through direct fluid transfer only, so bites, blood, or saliva. And that’s a damn good thing, because every confirmed infection has eventually led to death—either through natural causes, when the strain of the transformations cause organ failure in the victim, or within a month of first change, when someone follows the trail back to the werewolf’s den and puts them out of their misery.”

“That’s what I was afraid you were going to say.” Shelby slouched, rubbing her forehead with one hand. “You got a valid passport?”

I frowned as the sense of dread grew. “I’ve got a few. Why?” Having multiple ways out of the country at all times was just common sense. It was unlikely that the Covenant of St. George would show up and chase me to Canada, but I needed to keep the option to run as open as I could.

“Good. We need to leave for Australia as soon as we can. My folks have said that cost isn’t an issue, which means they’re fronting the tickets for the both of us. They need me, and I need someone who’s got some idea of what we’re dealing with.” Shelby paused. “I didn’t ask if you’d come. Will you come?”

The words “what we’re dealing with” seemed to freeze the air around them, making the situation perfectly clear. I still raised a hand, gesturing for her to slow down, and said, “Hang on. Why, exactly, are we going to Australia?”

I knew what she was going to say. I still needed to hear the words. If there was any chance that I was wrong . . .

Shelby grimaced before she said weakly, “I suppose I didn’t say that either. We’re going to Australia because there’s an outbreak near Brisbane. Werewolves, Alex. Werewolves in Australia, which is not a place werewolves are meant to be. We’re an island ecosystem, we can’t handle that sort of thing as easily as a place that has more resiliency to its biosphere.”

I wasn’t wrong. “The biosphere of Australia can kick most other biospheres right out of the party,” I said. “Still, you’re right. The lycanthropy virus isn’t supposed to be there.” The thought was enough to make my stomach sour and my head spin. Rabies and lycanthropy had been kept out of Australia for centuries, thanks to careful border maintenance. If those borders were starting to fail, the whole continent could be at risk.

But that didn’t mean I had to be the one who took care of it. Werewolves terrified me, had terrified me since the one time I’d been forced to deal with a pack of them. They were worse than anything else I could think of in the cryptid world—worse even than petrifactors, like my basilisks, or telepathic predators, like my cousin and grandmother. All a cuckoo could do was twist you to their will and then kill you. All a basilisk or gorgon could do was turn you into lawn statuary.

Werewolves would unmake you, and make you over again in their own image. It was the ultimate loss of self, and the thought made my blood go cold.

Shelby looked at me anxiously. “So you’ll come? You’ll come to Australia?”

“Shelby, I don’t think—”

“Because it’s my family, you see, and they’re in danger. It’s not like we can evacuate the continent, and I’m not going to say ‘sorry, you’re on your own’ when they’re calling me for help. But I don’t want to go alone, Alex. Please don’t make me go alone.”

She looked at me pleadingly. I looked back, every inch of me screaming that this was a terrible idea. Then I took a deep breath, and I forced myself to nod.

“We’ll need to set it up with zoo management. After that, I’ll have to make some calls. We’re going to want people in customs who can look the other way about our bags, and we’re going to want them on both ends.” Neither of us liked to travel unarmed. More importantly, there’s no vaccine for lycanthropy-w, and I wasn’t going into a known outbreak without the herbal and chemical remedies that we knew could make a difference in preventing infection. Australia had good reasons for their strict bans on carrying fruit and dairy products into the country. We were going to have to find a way around them, at least where powdered aconite and dried mistletoe berries were concerned. Better safe than sorry, especially in a situation like this.

“I can handle the Australian end if you can manage the US end,” Shelby said.

“As long as we fly out of New York, I can manage things here,” I said. “Verity made a lot of contacts in the area who will help us out.”

“You still haven’t said. Does this mean you’ll come?”

Maybe she was like me: maybe she needed to hear the words. I nodded again, this time slowly, as if my head had become too heavy to hold upright. “It means I think I have to.”

Werewolves both do and don’t exist. They’re one of the great conundrums of the cryptid world, and one of the greatest failures of the Covenant of St. George, which may have—accidentally—created them.

There was a time when the world’s therianthrope populations had their own ways of handling sickness. Infected individuals would retreat to caves or deep forests, where the majority of them would die without passing their infection along. The viruses that make up the lycanthropy family may be closely related to rabies, but they had to sacrifice some flexibility in exchange for the traits that enabled them to infect shapeshifters: they’re even harder to catch than rabies itself. Most often, the outbreak would claim one or two victims and then burn out, a victim of its own deadly nature.

The Covenant changed all that when they showed up and started hunting cryptids, like the therianthropes, into extinction. A sick therianthrope looked like an easy target; more and more, they found themselves followed into the places where they tried to hide. Maybe that would have been all right, if we’d been talking about a pox or a flu—the sick therianthrope could have used the Covenant teams as a means of suicide, convincing them that there were no other therianthropes in the area. And maybe the ones who weren’t already sick enough to have become irrational chose that method of death. Sadly, more had reached the stage where they bit and scratched at everything that moved. Some members of the Covenant were exposed to the virus. Most of the time that came to nothing. Jumping between species isn’t easy.

But it only had to happen once.

No one knows the name of the first werewolf, or how they reacted when they felt themselves getting sick. Maybe they prayed. Maybe they raged. Maybe they hid their infection out of fear that the Covenant that had sheltered them would now turn against them and put them to death for having become one of the monsters they were intended to fight. Whatever they did, they did it long enough for lycanthropy-w to finish rewiring their bodies and rewriting their minds, until the day came that they changed forms for the first time, and all hell broke loose.

There’s no such thing as a “good” werewolf. A werewolf in their original form is completely hidden, undetectable among a normal population; they can go anywhere, move freely without being detected. A werewolf in the grip of the change is a killing machine, designed for nothing more than feeding itself and spreading the virus that controls it. They feel very little pain, and absolutely no remorse. Stories of people successfully begging werewolves not to kill their own spouses or children are generally regarded as just that—stories, with no facts behind them. Werewolves kill. That’s all.

Even Australia, with its own share of dangerous beasts and dangerous people, wasn’t equipped to handle an outbreak of lycanthropy. No one ever was.

Shelby had been living with me since her apartment burned down, which made it easy to coordinate trip planning. We’d driven separate cars to the zoo—we didn’t keep identical hours, thanks to the largely public-facing nature of her work, and the largely private nature of mine—but we could meet back up at the house after work to plan further for the trip. She gave me a distracted kiss before she left to do the afternoon big cat show, leaving me alone with my thoughts—and with Crow, who cawed after her in a way that was practically guaranteed to attract attention.

“What am I going to do with you, huh?” I asked, leaning back in my chair and looking at him. “I can’t take you to Australia. There’s lying to customs to save my own skin and then there’s importing non-native wildlife because I want to. One of them is practical. The other is sort of a dick move.” Crow probably wouldn’t enjoy riding in the hold of the plane, either. We’d reach Brisbane and find that every suitcase on the plane had been mysteriously broken into and ransacked for treats.

Crow churred and began preening one wing.

“I guess I can ask Sarah to keep an eye on you. You like Sarah, don’t you?”