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

alligator pantomime, and the school group teacher and chaperones were gathering their charges, herding them efficiently toward the exit. I sidled over to where Dee was standing.
    “Where are they having lunch?” I muttered, sotto voce.
    “Main courtyard.”
    “Oh, thank God.” I was supposed to be meeting Shelby in the semi-private picnic garden near the tiger cages. It was small, mostly concealed from the casual eye, and didn’t have any vending machines, which you’d think would discourage school groups, but sometimes those were the very attributes that attracted harried teachers looking for a moment’s peace and quiet. And I absolutely did
not
want to cancel on her, or have yet another attempt at getting together interrupted.
    “Did you talk to Chandi?”
    “She’ll be ready in ten minutes.”
    Dee eyed me suspiciously. “With no argument?”
    “Miracles happen.”
    Dee looked like she was going to quiz me further, but was interrupted by the arrival of the midday shift—Kim, an overly-earnest, extremely sweet girl with hair the color of butterscotch and a fondness for terrapins of all kinds (but especially Crunchy), and Nelson, who was nice enough, but terrified of anything that weighed more than fifteen pounds or so (again, especially Crunchy). Dee turned to bring them up to speed on the day so far, including Andrew’s ongoing absence. I took advantage of her distraction, waving genially to the pair and ducking into my office before I could be grabbed for any new, exciting emergencies.
    Crow was finally out of the cat bed. That was a good thing, except for the part where he was standing on the counter, looking as guilty as it was possible for a cat/bird cross to look, with a dead rat from the refrigerator dangling from his beak. I sighed.
    “Did you stop to consider that that might be someone else’s lunch?” I asked.
    Crow swallowed the rat before turning his back resolutely on me and beginning to preen his left wing. I sighed again, harder this time.
    “That almost certainly means no. You’re a flying vacuum cleaner, you know that?” No response from my misbehaving pet. I smiled fondly. I’d been wondering for a while if he could open the fridge. Now I knew that it was time to invest in a padlock.
    I grabbed my coat off the back of the chair and moved to get my bag lunch out of the fridge, where it had been sandwiched between a sack of dead rats (for the pythons) and cubed raw chicken (for Dee’s hair). There was a hole in the sack of rats. “Be good, all right?” I said to Crow. “If you’re going to eat anything else, just try not to puke it back up on the rug.”
    Crow continued to groom himself. Chuckling, I opened the office door and stepped back into the reptile house. It had been a long morning, and I was going to need to do something relaxing after I separated Chandi from her boyfriend. What could be more relaxing than having lunch with my own beautiful, blessedly mammalian not-a-girlfriend?

    Things Shelby Tanner didn’t specialize in: relaxing. She was sitting atop the picnic table we had claimed as our own, waving a turkey drumstick like a conductor’s baton as she punctuated her own points.
    “—so I said, Nicole, it’s lovely that you’re taking an interest, but do you think you could take a step away from the snow leopard enclosure? Possibly before you get your throat ripped out and make a bunch of paperwork for me to handle? There’s a good girl.”
    “Nicole’s the new girl, right?” I asked, between bites of my ham-and-cheese sandwich. I was focusing less on her words and more on the way the sunlight glinted off the tiny golden hairs on the back of her knee, where I knew she was sensitive in all the best ways.
    “Yeah, the really
keen
one.” Shelby said keen like it was a bad thing. From her perspective, it probably was. Being keen in the Australian sense—overeager, enthusiastic, and extremely hungry for praise—wasn’t what I’d call a survival trait when