Half-Off Ragnarok: Book Three of InCryptid by Seanan McGuire Page B

zoo.
    At least he took his job seriously. I shrugged, put my ID away, and started down the path that would eventually take me to the reptile house.
    About half the zookeepers were out and checking their respective enclosures; a few were in the enclosures, waking or talking to their charges. I waved and kept on walking. We all had work to do before the zoo would be ready to open, and they wouldn’t appreciate the disruption.
    A little girl in a vibrant orange sari was sitting on the bench outside the reptile house, kicking her sneaker-clad feet sullenly against the cobblestones. I hesitated before walking over to her. “Good morning, Chandi. How did you get into the zoo this time?”
    “I’m not telling,” she said, in a tone as sullen as her posture. “When can I come in the reptile house?”
    “Well, that depends.”
    She glanced up, eyes narrowed warily. She was a pretty child, and she was going to be a devastatingly attractive woman someday, if we could convince her to stop sneaking into the zoo through whatever cracks and crevices she could find. She’d snuck in via the alligator enclosure a week before, and only the fact that she didn’t smell like a mammal had prevented her from getting eaten. And she always did it while wearing her nicest dresses. I was starting to wonder if she actually repelled mud.
    “On what?” she asked.
    “If you promise me that you won’t sneak in for another week, I’ll let you in right now, and—” I raised a finger, cutting off the protest I could see forming on her lips, “—I’ll let you get Shami out of his enclosure and take him into my office.”
    “For how long?” she asked.
    “I can give you three hours.”
    There was a pause while Chandi considered my offer. Then, regally, she nodded and slid off the bench. “Okay,” she said, and offered me her hand, as guileless as any eight year old has ever been. I took it. It was better for both of us if she didn’t seem to be running around the zoo unescorted.
    Dee met us at the reptile house door. “Alex—” She stopped herself when she saw that I wasn’t alone. “Oh, good morning, Chandi, I didn’t realize today was one of your scheduled visits with Shami.”
    “That’s because it’s not,” I said. “We made a deal.” My assistant looked flustered, which wasn’t an easy thing to accomplish, and her wig for the day—a lovely red beehive style studded with polka-dot bows—was pulsing, signaling that whatever had her upset was bad enough to have also upset her hair. “What’s wrong?”
    “Wrong? Nothing’s wrong. Why should something be wrong?” Dee laughed, a jagged, unrealistic sound. I blinked at her. So did Chandi.
    “I thought gorgons were familiar with normal human emotional response,” said Chandi, looking up at me for a clue as to what was supposed to happen next.
    “They are,” said Dee. “I mean, we are. I mean, are you sure you want to let Chandi in early? We have a
lot
of work to do.”
    “I promised her three hours with Shami,” I said. “Unless there’s some sort of ‘let’s panic for no good reason over something that can wait until lunch’ problem, I’m fine with bringing her in early. It’ll make it easier for me to get Shami out of his enclosure without needing to explain to a human why I’m handing a spectacled cobra to a little girl.”
    “I could explain,” said Chandi demurely.
    “I want to get Shami out of his enclosure before I have to explain to
anyone
why I allowed a little girl to bite and kill a member of my staff,” I amended.
    Chandi pouted.
    “That’s the problem!” said Dee. “Andrew was supposed to be here an hour ago to feed the turtles. When I got here, the door was unlocked, but Andrew was nowhere to be seen.”
    I blinked. “Oh. That’s a problem.”
    “Yeah, it is.”
    “I’m bored,” said Chandi. “May I see my fiancé now?”
    “Yes, Chandi, you can, but I want to renegotiate our deal first.”
    Chandi’s eyes narrowed. “You said