Pocket Apocalypse: InCryptid, Book Four Read Free Page A

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