“Yes . . .”

“This is one of those times!”

Crow squawked as the lindworm managed to catch one of his tail feathers. He pulled himself free and resumed harrying, but Dee was right; this wasn’t going to work forever. I shrugged off my backpack and put it down on the mud, crouching to begin rummaging through its contents.

“All right, this is what we’re going to do,” I said. “Dee, when I give the word, you’re going to take off your protective gear.”

“Alex—”

“Trust me, get in front of me, and do as I say.”

She gave me a flat look. “You’re going to get yourself killed.”

“Not if you know how to listen.” I straightened up, the vial of ketamine in my hand. “Get in front of me.”

Dee sighed and moved into position, crouching in front of me like we were about to play a game of touch football with the giant reptile. In a way, we were.

Crow was still harrying the lindworm, but he was slowing down; Church Griffins are more like cats than ravens in many ways, including stamina. He was doing his best. He couldn’t have kept that up much longer.

It was a good thing he didn’t have to. I whistled again before shouting, “Crow! Home!”

Crow doesn’t know many commands, and he doesn’t reliably listen to any of them (except for maybe “dinner”), but this was one he both recognized and was glad to obey. He whipped around and flew back toward me, landing heavily on my shoulder. I clamped my free hand down over his eyes, an action that he only protested weakly. There wasn’t time to be gentler. The lindworm was already turning, mouth open, shrieking furiously.

“Now, Dee!”

Cool as a cucumber, my assistant reached up, removing her wig with one hand and her glasses with the other. The snakes growing from her scalp in place of hair rose, hissing, as her eyes locked onto the lindworm’s. It stopped mid-charge, looking dazed. Then, with an unceremonious “thud,” it toppled over to the side.

“Glasses, please, Dee,” I said. The snakes at the back of her head were looking at me, their tongues scenting the air. I offered them a pleasant smile. The snakes that top the heads of Pliny’s gorgons are venomous, and it never hurts to stay on their good side.

If the snakes cared that they were being smiled at, they didn’t show it. “You know, I could have stunned it without you here,” Dee said, putting her glasses back on. She turned to frown at me, her wig still held loosely in one hand. “You’re the one who asked me not to go and paralyze anything we found in the swamp.”

I relaxed as soon as Dee’s eyes were safely covered. Only the human-seeming eyes of a Pliny’s gorgon carry a paralytic. The snakes atop their heads can’t petrify so much as a mouse, although the gorgon’s gaze seems to work better when their snakes are exposed. It’s just one more quirk in the incomprehensible biology of the gorgon.

“No, I asked you not to paralyze anything I hadn’t asked you to paralyze. There’s a difference.” I took my hand off Crow’s head. He launched himself from my shoulder and flew to the nearest tree. Perching on a low branch, he began to preen his feathers, churring sulkily the whole time. I ignored him as I walked over and knelt beside the unconscious lindworm. “Reptiles are delicate. I’d rather not kill anything today that we don’t have to.”

“So why was it okay for me to paralyze the—what did you call this thing?”

“It’s a lindworm, and it was okay for you to paralyze it because very little kills a lindworm. Seriously. The only reliable method of killing them that we have on record is decapitation. Even then, there are some pretty plausible reports of lindworm heads surviving without their bodies for up to a week before they expired, presumably of thirst.” I pried the lindworm’s mouth open. Filling a syringe with ketamine, I injected the sedative into the lining of its mouth. “If a Pliny’s gorgon could kill a lindworm, I’d know.”

“Oh.” Dee walked over to join me, squinting at the lindworm. “It’s big.”

“It’s male. The female would be over twenty feet, and have slightly more developed hind limbs. She uses them to dig the den she and her mate will hibernate in over the winter. Get my bag, will you? I want to take some measurements on this fellow before he wakes up.”

Dee lifted one artfully drawn-on eyebrow. “You mean we’re not leaving right now?”

“Of course not.” I beamed up at her. “This is the fun part of science.”

Between Dee’s paralytic stare and my tranquilizer, the lindworm stayed sedated long enough for me to get length, estimated weight, some scales, and a blood sample. I slipped a radio tag onto one of its hind legs. If it started eating people, we’d be able to find it and make it stop. If it stayed in the swamps, doing what nature intended it to do, we weren’t going to interfere. Lindworms may be unpleasant creatures to share a swamp with, but their presence keeps some even nastier things away. It’s a fair trade.

Dee seemed to have decided that the presence of a giant snakelike cryptid made her hair less outré, because she didn’t put her wig back on while she wrote down the lindworm’s measurements. Crow stayed in the trees, wings drooping as he watched suspiciously. He clearly expected the lindworm to get back up at any moment, and I couldn’t blame him. Heck, I half expected the lindworm to get back up, and I was the one who’d sedated it.

“So if these things aren’t native to Ohio, where did this guy come from?” asked Dee.

“That’s the thing. They might be native to Ohio. I’m not sure this is a species of lindworm that we’ve seen before. The first recorded species were in Europe—Sweden and the United Kingdom, mostly—but we’ve found them all over.” I capped my pen and tucked it, and my notebook, back into my bag. “Maybe we just made cryptozoological history.”

“Be still my heart,” said Dee dryly. Her hair hissed agreement.

“Lindworms are a sign of a healthy ecosystem,” I said, straightening. “Now let’s get out of here before the healthy ecosystem eats us. I think I have enough specimens for today.”

Dee rolled her eyes. “Sure thing, boss.”

Side by side, with Crow flying behind us, we squelched our way through the swamp toward the distant road, leaving the lindworm to peacefully sleep off the rest of the ketamine.