Shelby blinked at me. “You really mean all that. She’s not toying with your mind, is she?”
“Didn’t I just spend the last twenty minutes telling you my life story so you’d believe me on this?”
“That was my concern, yes: that you were telling me what you thought I wanted to hear in order to keep me from harming her. Again, Johrlac can be tricky.”
“Right now, Sarah’s about as subtle as a bull moose in the middle of a shopping mall.” I reclaimed my seat. “Now it’s your turn. Explain what you’re doing here, and why you’re so bent on shooting my cousin.”
“Why should I?”
“Because if you don’t, we’re going to have to shoot each other, and that would be a lousy end to an already lousy day.” I shook my head. “Also that would officially be my worst breakup ever, and that’s not a bar I was looking to exceed. So please. What are you doing here?”
Shelby sighed, leaning forward a little to rest her elbows on the kitchen table. “How much do you know about the Thirty-Six Society?”
“Um . . . Australian organization, very territorial, successfully drove the Covenant of St. George out of the country during my grandparents’ time, although according to the family records, the Covenant has been trying to get back in since the door was slammed in their faces.”
“Hence you thinking I might be a member; you thought the Covenant had succeeded and taken us over while your family wasn’t looking.”
“Something like that,” I agreed. “I mean . . . no offense, but you guys are awfully far away, and we’ve always had other things to deal with here at home. I guess you just fell off our radar.”
“That’s always what happens to Australian ecological concerns, if you’re not Australian, isn’t it?” There was a faint bitterness in Shelby’s voice, but it wasn’t aimed at me: more at the whole world. “There have always been cryptozoologists in Australia. They predate the word ‘cryptid’ by quite a lot, but for a long time, we weren’t organized. The Covenant never found us easy targets, but they could still make headway against us. The Thirty-Six Society was founded after the death of the last officially known thylacine—the Tasmanian wolf—in 1936. They were hunted to extinction over a relatively short period of time, and a lot of the incentives that were used to goad people into killing them were provided by the Covenant of St. George. Your Covenant always hated my country. Everything in the ecosystem looked like a monster to them.”
“They’re not my Covenant,” I protested. “We quit generations ago.”
“Some things take a long time to stop mattering, if they ever do.” Shelby shook her head. “We’ll never forget the thylacine. My parents were both members of the Thirty-Six from as far back as I can remember, and so were my grandparents. I grew up understanding that if I didn’t help protect Australia’s more . . . esoteric . . . flora and fauna from humanity, no one would.”
“It’s a big world,” I said, feeling obscurely bad. I shouldn’t have: North America is large enough that my family can’t patrol it all on our own, even as we enlist allies from the human and cryptid communities. Covering Australia as well would have been impossible, and would have stretched our already overtaxed resources to the breaking point. That didn’t stop me feeling like I should have helped.
“It is,” Shelby agreed. “Trouble is, we’re an island ecosystem. Sometimes things get in and turn out to be a great deal more destructive than they ever were in their original habitats. Game animals, mostly, imported by idiots thinking that Australia needs a native population of manticores or tailypo. But sometimes that extends to beings that can get their own passports and trick their way through immigration.” Her gaze slipped back to Sarah, who was peacefully drinking her sewage-colored orange juice and A-1 combination, seeming to ignore everything that was going on around her.
“Johrlac,” I said.
Shelby nodded. “Yes. A hive came over on a cruise ship about ten years ago. I don’t know why, or how they tolerated one another long enough to make it across the ocean without multiple murders, but they made it. We’d never seen a Johrlac in Australia before that. No one realized what they were until it was too late.”
Any story that started with “until it was too late” wasn’t going to end well. But if I wanted it to end without Sarah getting shot in the head, I needed Shelby to keep going. “What happened?”
“What always happens when Johrlac introduce themselves into an unprepared population: nothing remotely good. They spread out, and then one of them found a member of the Society.” Shelby stole another glance at Sarah. “She looked just like your cousin.”
“Cuckoos have minimal visual variance within the species,” I said. “It’s probably because they evolved from insects, not true mammals.” Every female cuckoo we had a record of looked enough like Sarah and Grandma to be their sister. Every male cuckoo we had a record of looked like their brother. Just one more clue that they didn’t handle mammalian biology the same way the rest of us did.
“Doesn’t make her look any less like the woman who killed my brother,” said Shelby calmly. She looked back to me. “She took out six Society members before someone found the anomaly in our records and we realized what was happening. Six! And she wasn’t the only one. There were eight Johrlac in Australia. It took us five years to catch them all.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry doesn’t bring back the dead.” Shelby shook her head. “All of us juniors wound up in field positions years before we expected, and for what? Because some horrible brood parasites wanted a vacation? It wasn’t fair. It was never going to be fair.”
“No, it wasn’t, and I’m sorry. But killing my cousin won’t bring back your dead.” I frowned. “If all your juniors got promoted to seniors, why are you here? Why aren’t you back in Australia, making sure that nothing starts eating people?”
“Manticores,” she said, with a shrug.
“Manticores?” I echoed.
“Some damn fool imported three breeding clusters around the turn of the century, to use as game animals. They ate him and got loose—”
I groaned. “Of course they did.”
“—and now we have manticore issues in Queensland and the Northern Territory. I was hoping that by coming here, I could learn more about how manticores behave in the wild, and maybe find a few solutions.”
“There are manticores in Ohio?”
“Oh, yeah.” Shelby frowned. “Hadn’t you noticed?”
“No, I hadn’t. I’ve been studying the local fricken population, and trying to convince my basilisks to breed. Which they are absolutely refusing to do, the lazy stoners.”
“Why would you want to breed basilisks?” asked Shelby.
“They’re big ratters, for one thing, and they tend to avoid humans whenever possible. They’re also the only known predator of stone spiders. So they have their uses, as long as we can keep them out of the cities.”
“You had me at ‘spiders,’” said Shelby. She took a deep breath, letting it out through her nose. “So. Here we are.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Here we are.”
The sound of a crossbow bolt being notched into place drew our attention toward the kitchen doorway. Grandma was standing there, a pistol crossbow in her hands, the point aimed solidly at Shelby. Grandpa was a dark shape in the hall behind her. If I squinted, I could just make out the cudgel in his hands.