Pocket Apocalypse

Book 4: InCryptid

by Seanan McGuire

Genres: Contemporary Fantasy; Paranormal; Action & Adventure

Synopsis

The fourth book in New York Times-bestselling Seanan McGuire's witty urban fantasy InCryptid series about a family of cryptozoologists who act as a buffer between humans and the magical creatures living in secret around us.

"The only thing more fun than an October Daye book is an InCryptid book." —Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Sookie Stackhouse series

Endangered, adjective: Threatended with extinction or immidiate harm.

Australia, noun: A good place to become endangered.

Alexander Price has survived gorgons, basilisks, and his own family—no small feat, considering that his family includes two telepaths, a reanimated corpse, and a colony of talking, pantheistic mice. 

Still, he’s starting to feel like he’s got the hang of things…at least until his girlfriend, Shelby Tanner, shows up, asking pointed questions about werewolves and the state of his passport.  From there, it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to Australia, a continent filled with new challenges, new dangers, and yes, rival cryptozoologists who don’t like their “visiting expert” very much.

Australia is a cryptozoologist’s dream, filled with unique species and unique challenges.  Unfortunately, it’s also filled with Shelby’s family, who aren’t delighted by the length of her stay in America.  And then there are the werewolves to consider: infected killing machines who would like nothing more than to claim the continent as their own. The continent which currently includes Alex.

Survival is hard enough when you’re on familiar ground.  Alex Price is very far from home, but there’s one thing he knows for sure: he’s not going down without a fight.

Release date: March 3, 2015

Publisher: DAW

Print pages: 368

Sample

1. Threatened with extinction or immediate harm.

1. The world’s smallest continent.

2. Home of some of the most unique and varied animal life known to mainstream science.

3. A good place to become endangered.

Prologue

“Adversity doesn’t exist to make us stronger. Adversity exists because this world is a damn hard place to live. Prove that you’re better than the things it throws at you. Live.”

—Thomas Price

A privately owned family farm near Vancouver, Canada

Seven years ago

ALEX EASED HIMSELF AROUND the open stable door, his heart beating so hard that it felt like it was going to break in two. The sweat dripping from his palms was making it hard to keep his hand positioned correctly on the grip of his pistol. Everything was silent. His parents and Aunt Jane were inside the house, looking for signs that could possibly lead them to the werewolf’s hiding place. Elsie was outside, watching the road to see if anyone else was inclined to come looking. The farm was isolated enough that the screams wouldn’t have carried very far—but they had carried far enough for one of the local Sasquatches to notice.

This was the area’s second werewolf outbreak in a little under a month. The first had been handled by amateur monster hunters who didn’t finish the job. When the werewolves came back, the locals got frightened for their own safety, and called in the closest thing they could find to professionals: the Prices.

Alex and Elsie wouldn’t even have been there if Uncle Mike had been available. Alex had turned nineteen two months before, making him officially old enough for dangerous field assignments. Elsie was still eighteen. The fact that she had been allowed to come along had been the cause of much shouting at home when Alex’s sixteen-year-old little sister, Verity, had learned that the rules weren’t going to bend far enough to let her join the party. As loud as she could yell, she should have been a singer, not a dancer.

As he inched farther into the dark barn, Alex found himself wishing their ages had been reversed. Verity wouldn’t have enjoyed the current situation any more than he did, he was sure, but at least she’d wanted to be there. He’d wanted to stay home with his books and his terrariums and keep studying for next week’s midterms. Even if most of his research was going to be done under false identities, he needed to have a real degree to have any credibility within the cryptozoological community.

And none of that was going to matter if he wound up as werewolf chow. He took a deep, shaky breath, forcing his hands to stop shaking, and swung around the corner into the main part of the stable.

There were still bloodstains on the walls from the first outbreak. Alex looked at them and swallowed hard. Lycanthropy-w was a relative of rabies. It was primarily blood borne, but it couldn’t spread through dry contact. He’d need to lick the walls to be in danger, and even then, the odds of infection were so low as to be nonexistent. He knew that, just like he knew that he’d been sent to search the stables because there was less of a chance he’d run into danger out here. He still gave the first of the stains a wide berth, and made a mental note to tell his father that they needed to put a call out for Aunt Mary. She could come and scan the ghost side of things to make sure the dead horses weren’t haunting the place.

Everyone had their own set of skills and talents to bring to the table. Alex just wasn’t sure that his included this particular kind of fieldwork.

Something rustled at the back of an open stall. Alex held his breath, counting to five as he listened. The sound didn’t repeat, and he inched forward, scanning all the while for movement. It was probably a raccoon, or a barn cat, or something else native to the farm. Why would a werewolf have come out to the stables when there was so much untouched meat strewn around the house? The family that had owned this farm was dead, all of them, their throats ripped out and their blood left to pool on the floor. Werewolves were territorial, and they didn’t like to be exposed. The creature had most likely made its den somewhere inside the house—an attic, a basement, an overlooked room.

Unless it considered the stable its territory. As Alex moved toward the open stall the creature, which had been huddled down in the straw, rose on strong, twisted legs that were somewhere between equine and lupine, yet still somehow managed to grant it a bipedal stance. Alex froze, feeling like his feet were suddenly locked to the floor. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t move.

The werewolf had no such restrictions. It stalked toward him, snapping and snarling at the air. Its mouth was a crowded jumble of herbivore and carnivore teeth, and its half-hoven claws were splayed as wide as its warping bone structure would allow.

The claws were what finally did it. Alex’s paralysis broke, and he turned and ran, heading for the rear of the stable as fast as his legs could carry him. He could hear the werewolf crashing along behind him, but as he had hoped, the creature’s twisted skeletal structure was slowing it down, preventing it from matching his speed. No human could outrun a horse over a short distance, or a wolf for that matter. This thing was a combination of the two, along with the unique bone structure granted to its interstitial form by the lycanthropy-w virus. It had to be a newish werewolf. If it had been more accustomed to its new reality, it would have changed forms and gone for him as either a wolf or a horse by now, not this horrifying combination of the two.

He was almost to cover. He dared a glance over his shoulder and saw the werewolf less than eight feet behind, froth dripping from its jaws, eyes red with burst capillaries. Adrenaline lanced through his veins, propelling him the rest of the way to the back wall, where he spun around, whipping himself behind a pile of hay bales, and opened fire.

His pistol was small: it held only six bullets, but all of them were silver-coated and treated with aconite. The werewolf screamed when the first one hit it. It wasn’t a sound Alex had ever heard before, and it wasn’t a sound he ever wanted to hear again. Like everything else about the creature, that scream was a hybridized horror, neither wolf nor horse, and somehow wrong in a way he couldn’t put into words. It made his blood run cold and his teeth ache, and so he kept firing, again and again, until the hammer clicked on an empty chamber and the werewolf was sprawled on the stable floor, no longer moving.

Its anatomy was so twisted that it was impossible to tell whether or not the thing was dead, and Alex had seen too many horror movies to risk walking over to check. That was the sort of decision that got people gutted or, worse, infected. He sank slowly to the floor, his useless weapon dangling from his fingers, and stared at the unmoving bulk of the creature. He knew that he should run, but he couldn’t get his legs to work. So he just sat there.

He was still sitting there, crying silently, when his family came running to investigate the gunshots. He didn’t know what else to do.

One

“Adventure is a tricky beast that will sneak up on you when you least expect it, laying ambushes and forcing you down avenues that you would never have chosen to walk on your own. After a certain point, it’s better just to go along with it. You do see the most interesting things that way.”

—Alexander Healy

An unnamed stretch of marshland near Columbus, Ohio

Now

EARLY FALL HAD TURNED the leaves on the trees around us into a flaming corona of red, gold, and pale brown. The few remaining patches of green looked almost out of place: their season was over, and they no longer belonged here. Crow seemed to share my feelings. The black-feathered Church Griffin was flying from tree to tree, crashing through the green patches like a self-aiming arrow and sending explosions of foliage to the ground. He cawed with delight every time he slammed into a branch. I had long since given up on worrying about him injuring himself; his head was incredibly hard, and he rarely collided with anything he wasn’t aiming to hit. Of the two of us, he was much less likely to be injured than I was.

“You know, I can stay home if I want to see scrubland and dead leaves,” said Dee. She was struggling to match my trail through the patchy marsh, hampered by her sensible pumps, which weren’t so sensible in her current environment. I was aiming my steps expertly for the patches of solid ground between the puddles and the mud flats. Despite having grown up in the forest not far from here, Dee wasn’t very practiced at walking in swamps. That either showed a great failing or a great advantage in her upbringing.

“Yes, but can you see the screaming yams as they prepare to migrate to land that’s less likely to freeze solid enough to damage their roots?” I kept walking. Dee, on the other hand, stopped dead.

I turned around after a few feet, beaming a sunny smile in her direction. Dee, her eyes narrowed with suspicion behind the smoked yellow lenses of her glasses, did not match the expression.

“What,” she said.

“I told you we were coming out here to witness a migration,” I said.

“Yes, Alex. You said ‘a migration.’ You know what migrates? Things with the capacity for independent movement. You know what doesn’t migrate? Yams.” Dee shook her head hard enough that her wig—a sleek blonde beehive—slipped a little. “Yams are plants. I realize there’s some hazing involved in doing this job. I’ve managed to resign myself to the fact that you’re a mammal and hence by definition, insane. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to convince me that we’re out here looking for yams that scream.”

“And see, that right there is how your colony has been able to exist for decades without discovering the screaming yam for yourselves.” I turned back around and resumed my forward trek. Dee was annoyed enough that she would follow, if only so she didn’t have to stop sniping at me about the yams she was so sure didn’t actually exist. “Anyone who saw them would have kept it to themselves for fear of getting exactly this reaction.”

“Yes, because screaming yams don’t exist,” said Dee, catching up to me. “I don’t know what human parents teach their children, but gorgon parents like to stick to things that are real.”

“Like Medusa?”

“Medusa was real,” said Dee. There was a dangerous note in her voice, accompanied by a low hiss from inside her wig.

“Okay, bad example.” It’s never a good idea to drag people’s gods into casual conversation. Medusa was the ur-Gorgon, the one without whom her two equally divine sisters would never—in gorgon cosmology—have been uplifted and allowed to shape their own children from snakes and clay. So maybe she wasn’t a good thing to call fictional. “Look, will you just stick with me and try to keep an open mind?”

Dee rolled her eyes. “You’re paying me double-time for this. Don’t forget to file the paperwork with zoo HR.”

“I wouldn’t,” I said, doing my best to look faintly hurt. “I keep my promises.”

Technically, Dee was my administrative assistant at the West Columbus Zoo, where I was stationed as a visiting researcher from California. I’m not from California, and the zoo had no idea what I was really researching, but I provided enough value that I didn’t feel bad about deceiving them. The denizens of their reptile house had never been healthier, and we hadn’t fed anyone to the alligator snapping turtle in almost a year. I was happy about that. The alligator snapping turtle, maybe not so much.

Crow flashed by overhead with a squirrel clutched in his talons, cawing triumphantly as he passed. I sighed. Church Griffins are basically what you get when Nature decides to Frankenstein a Maine Coon and a raven into one endless source of mischief. Crow was about the size of a corgi, with the predatory appetites of a cat that had somehow been equipped with functional wings. I kept him inside most of the time, both to prevent him from being discovered by people who wouldn’t know what to do with a Church Griffin, and to protect the neighborhood birds, squirrels, frickens, and smaller dogs.

“He’s going to spread that thing’s guts through a mile of treetops,” observed Dee mildly.

“At least it means I won’t have to feed him tonight. Come on: this way looks promising.” Our hike had brought us to one of the more solid patches of marsh. The ground grew firmer under our feet as we continued, finally becoming rich, deep, subriparian loam. A small ring of frilly green plants poked up out of the dirt, each about three inches high. They stood out vividly against the autumnal background. I grinned. “So Dee, you were telling me screaming yams don’t exist.”

“Because they don’t.”

“Says the woman with snakes for hair. Watch and remember how much you have left to learn.” I stooped, picked up a rock, and lobbed it gently underhand into the middle of the circle. It hit with a soft thump.

For several seconds, nothing happened. Then the earth exploded as a dozen screaming yams uprooted themselves and began hopping wildly around, their fibrous mouths gaping open, their characteristic screams echoing through the marsh. They had no legs, and propelled themselves like tiny pogo sticks, their threadlike root systems whipping in the breeze generated by their forward motion.

After hopping several times around the clearing, they gathered on another patch of clear ground and burrowed back down into the earth with surprising speed, becoming a circle of standing leaves once again.

“Screaming yams,” I said. “If it were spring or summer, they’d have run away from us, but they’re getting ready to hibernate, so they’re counting on confusion to drive us away.”

“Works for me,” said Dee faintly.

I laughed.

Mapient, rodentlike cryptids which present as near-idenams weren’t a normal part of my work environment, they were a great bonus. After three years in Ohio, I was still discovering things about the state and its ecology that could surprise and delight me. That was good, since I’d never expected or planned to stay this long. When I had first come to the West Columbus Zoo to oversee the basilisk breeding program established by my predecessor in the back room of the reptile house—without the knowledge of the zoo administration, of course, since basilisks supposedly didn’t exist—I had thought I’d be there for maybe six months. A year, tops.

That hadn’t exactly worked out as planned. Since my arrival, I had opened diplomatic relations with the local gorgon enclave, nearly been turned to stone, cataloged the native fricken species, nearly been eaten by a lindworm, fed two people to the zoo’s alligator snapping turtle, nearly been killed by a Pliny’s gorgon/Greater gorgon hybrid, and helped my grandparents nurse my cousin Sarah back to something resembling health after she managed to telepathically injure herself saving my sister Verity’s life.

What was sad was that all of this was basically within my job description. I’m a cryptozoologist. As long as I’m working with things that science says don’t exist (including my cousin Sarah), I’m fulfilling my mandate, and serving the cryptid community.

Fortunately for me, there are a lot of ways to serve the cryptid community. Verity is basically a cryptid social worker, with a side order of kicking people’s teeth in when they refuse to acknowledge that “being a good neighbor” doesn’t mean eating the neighbors. My mother is a cryptid health professional, and my father is a chronicler and general historian. (My youngest sister, Antimony, is still trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life. For the moment, it mostly seems to be roller derby, the occasional monster hunting job, and getting pissed at our parents.) I’m a life scientist. My contributions are sometimes medical—when you’re working with a community that doesn’t exist in the eyes of the government, you don’t need to have gone to medical school as much as you need a solid understanding of nonhuman anatomy—but more often strictly scientific. If you need a basilisk bred or a stone spider relocated, I’m your man. And for the moment, I was the man in Ohio.

Dee was uncharacteristically quiet during the drive back to the zoo, sitting in my front passenger seat with her arms crossed and her eyes fixed on the road. If not for the low, constant hissing of the snakes concealed inside her wig, I would have wondered whether she’d figured out a way to turn herself to stone. (Dee is a Pliny’s gorgon, capable of petrifaction under the right circumstances. They’re immune to their own stony gaze, of course, but the idea of a gorgon looking in their rearview mirror and turning themselves into a statue was amusing enough to be worth considering.)

“Something up?” I asked as I turned off the freeway. Crow churred contentedly from the backseat, his belly full of squirrel and his feathers full of shredded leaves. Since both cats and birds love to self-groom, he was going to have a very satisfying afternoon ahead of him.

“I didn’t think they were real.” Dee’s voice was flat, dull, like she was answering a question during a bad performance review. “You told me they were real, and I thought you were messing with me.”

“Hey, it’s okay. No one knows everything until they learn about it. That’s the whole point of learning things, isn’t it? We go out, we learn, we know more. It’s cool.” I flashed what I hoped would come across as an encouraging smile. “Screaming yams are one of the more outré offerings nature has for us around here. Mobile vegetation is a lot less common than it used to be. It’s not even a Covenant thing, for once—they didn’t hunt the screaming yams into near-extinction, people just paved most of the migration routes. So you have to really know what you’re looking for.”

“I’ve lived here my whole life, Alex,” Dee said. The dullness dropped away, replaced by frustration. “My brother and I grew up on a farm. We should know about every kind of edible plant that grows in this state. We should be cultivating beds of those things if they’re as tasty as you say they are. We could be helping them to reestablish a viable population and filling our tables at the same time, and instead we’ve been rotating our crops and planting things that aren’t even native. We should have known. I should have known.”

“Huh.” I hadn’t considered the possible applications the gorgon community would have for screaming yams. “They’re endangered, but I know of five colonies currently growing in the local forests and marshes. We could transplant one of those to a dedicated bed once the ground freezes. They’ll seed at a rate of about six roots a year, and most of those don’t reach maturity, due to predation from the local animals. If you were willing to commit to only eating half the seedlings, and keeping the rest as, heh, ‘root stock,’ or releasing them back into the wild . . .”

“I’ll consult with our garden planners, but we should be able to do that,” said Dee. “You’ll help me find good, strong roots for the farm?”

“Yeah. I think everyone benefits from that.” Not the yams that would be eaten, not on a micro level, but on a macro level? The arrangement would allow more screaming yams to grow to maturity, and might even give them a chance at surviving for another hundred years. It was a gamble worth taking.

I pulled into my reserved parking space near the zoo gates and stopped the car. “You want to go on ahead?” I asked. “I need to get Crow out of the backseat, and that might take a while.”

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.

Two

“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

“HELLO, SHELBY.” 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 in