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

chance that we’d just discovered an entirely new species.
    “I love science,” I said, and saved the file.
    It only took a few minutes to write up a cover letter describing the situation, attach the report, and mail everything off to my parents. I sent a second copy to the printer. I’d give it to the Aeslin, for safety’s sake. There is no better backup system in this world than a colony of Aeslin mice. They may demand to be paid in cheese and cake, but once they know something, they know it forever.
    With all that done, I checked on Crow—now soundly asleep—and sprinkled some baby bloodworms into the terrarium with my poison dart frickens, which goggled their brightly colored eyes and flared their brightly colored crests in a threat display that was as adorable as it was serious. The neon-tinted little amphibians were incredibly deadly.
    “Yes, you’re terrifying,” I said to the frickens, who ignored me, already engaged in pursuing their dinner. I walked to the closet, where I stopped, cleared my throat, and said, “The Time of Science is upon us.”
    Live with Aeslin long enough, you learn how to pronounce capitals. It makes things easier. There was a rustling from inside the closet, and then three sleek-furred young temple novices appeared around the edges of the door, whiskers forward and ears up.
    “We Are Ready!” they squeaked in joyous unison.
    “Great,” I said. “Let’s sort some feathers.”
    Aeslin mice excel at small, repetitive jobs that contain an element of ritual. Sorting fricken feathers by species, type, age of specimen, and whether or not they showed signs of fungal infection was fiddly enough and required enough very precise steps that the Aeslin couldn’t have been happier. I barely had anything to do once the three of them got involved. That was exactly what I’d been hoping for. I picked up the field guide, sat back in my chair, and started reading.
    According to the historical records, there were fifteen subspecies of fricken that could potentially appear in this region of Ohio. Five were considered common, six more were uncommon, and four were rare bordering on “may not be native, but we caught one once, and that means we need to make a record of it.” My family has never been what you’d call “restrained” when it comes to maintaining the regional field guides. With good reason. A lot of the smaller, apparently harmless cryptids, like the frickens, can be used as a general barometer of an area’s well-being. If they’re dying by the dozens, you probably have a problem. It’s best to find that out from the little things, rather than learning it from, say, a unicorn attack.
    (Unicorns like virgins. That part is true. But being liked by a unicorn is actually not very good for your health, and being disliked by a unicorn is even worse. Unicorns are deadly to things and people that they decide not to like. We’d have a shoot-on-sight order if they weren’t so vital to maintaining a healthy water table. Nature enjoys a good practical joke every now and then.)
    That was the historical record. Based on the recorded sightings from my fieldwork, my dissection results, and the slowly growing piles of feathers, there were currently
nineteen
subspecies of fricken living in the swamps of Columbus, Ohio.
    “Well, hell,” I said, staring at the heaps of feathers.
    Things exist for a reason. Nature doesn’t mess around with things that don’t have a purpose. Sometimes those things come into competition. Sometimes they edge each other out. Invasive species have been transforming the world in their own image for as long as animals have been capable of moving from one place to another. Humanity has hastened the process, since we’re the first animals to build airplanes and container ships, but we didn’t start it, and it won’t stop when we’re gone.
    If the number of frickens in Ohio was going up, they had to be filling a niche that was previously occupied by something else.