“Oh, we’ll need to fix that,” said Shelby, with a degree of joy that would have been disturbing if I hadn’t been focusing so intently on keeping Dee in sight. Maybe that was a life lesson in disguise: when there’s any chance your girlfriend is going to exhibit an unnatural amount of glee over something that seems perfectly mundane, take her on a high-speed car chase. It’ll take the edge off. Then she sobered. “Didn’t expect you to call me today.”

“Shelby, is this really—”

“You made me have a relationship talk while we were hunting monsters, I think this is fair. Thought we were probably finished after last night.”

“I needed your help.”

“Is that all we are now? People who help each other?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I’d like to be more, maybe. But I can’t afford to be distracted right now. And then there’s the whole thing where your introduction to my grandparents involved waving a gun at their adopted daughter, so . . . yeah. I recommend not pulling out any more firearms unless there’s a really excellent reason.”

“I suppose ‘being a Johrlac’ isn’t an excellent reason, right?” Shelby’s tone was unsteadily wry, like she was trying to make a joke but wasn’t quite sure how appropriate it was or how it was going to be received.

I sighed, still focusing on the road, where Dee was doing her best to set speed records. “No, it’s not. They’re my family, Shelby. If we want this to work out, knowing what we both know now, you’re going to need to learn to be okay with that. They’re not the Johrlac who came to your country and hurt the people that you cared about. They’ve been here this whole time, not hurting anybody.”

“Are we, then?” asked Shelby.

“Are we what?”

“Are we going to try and get this to work out?” Shelby twisted in her seat to face me.

I was silent for a moment. “Do you want to?” I finally asked. I knew it was unfair of me, but I needed to know.

“It’s different, now that we don’t have to hide anything. But . . . I don’t know if I would have gotten involved with you if I’d known you were a cryptozoologist.”

“Ah, but if you had, I wouldn’t have needed to make nearly as many excuses.” I shook my head. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we need a dating service.”

“How would you keep the Covenant from signing up?”

“That is why we’re never going to have a dating service.” I laughed. It felt good. So did Shelby. That felt better.

And then Dee turned again, this time into what looked like a wall of solid green. There was no opening there: nothing but undifferentiated trees and the broken, rocky ground between them.

Illusions happen. Whispering a quick prayer to anyone who might be listening, I followed her, tensing myself against a crash that never came. Instead, the turn ended with us driving onto a smooth, gently curving private road. Dee was just ahead, and she’d slowed down enough that I had to slam on the brakes to keep from rear-ending her. Apparently, we no longer needed to drive like maniacs to avoid being followed.

“Holy . . .” breathed Shelby. I glanced to the side. She had her hands pressed flat against the passenger side window, and was close to doing the same thing with her nose. I craned my neck, trying to get an idea of what she was looking at.

The road followed a natural curve in the landscape, winding down into a bowl valley of the type that are common in some forested areas. The trees had been cleared within the valley itself, opening up a wide swath of farmable land. In the middle of the bowl was what looked like a small mobile home park. The individual homes were arranged in a circle that mimicked the bowl itself, and would be a great mechanism for reducing traffic jams if they ever needed to drive out of here. They could start up the lead mobile home and unwind the whole community like a vehicular snake, slithering its way up the road and on to some new safe haven.

I chuckled. Shelby turned away from the window, raising her eyebrows.

“Something funny?” she asked.

“Just that I’m already starting to think in really tortured reptile metaphors,” I said. “Don’t let me try to talk dirty until we’ve been away from here for a few hours.”

“Don’t be silly, Alex. I never let you talk dirty to me if I can help it. You’re a great kisser, and you’re better in bed, but your idea of romance has always been way too centered around reptiles.” She pressed her nose back against the window. “I see corn, tomato plants, there’s even a small apple orchard. These people must have been living here for years.”

“At least twenty, I’d say.” The road was well-maintained, but it must have been put in before wide Internet surveillance was possible. If it were more recent, people would have noticed the construction, illusions over the entrance or no. “I wonder if this place appears on Google Earth . . .” I made a mental note to check when I got home.

“I’ve got cell service in here, if that makes a difference.”

“That makes sense, actually. A lot of Pliny’s gorgons go into day trading or technical writing or other professions that don’t necessarily bring them into contact with people on a regular basis.” I smiled a little. “There’s at least one romance writer who never goes to conventions, because she’s actually an eight-foot-tall grandfather.”

“Why do they do that? Dee does fine with humans. I’d never have guessed.” Shelby grimaced. “Although to be fair, I wasn’t looking. I should probably have suspected something.”

“Dee’s very good at fitting in. And as for why Pliny’s gorgons arrange their lives that way, well, it helps them hide the fact that they—the males at least—are a lot taller than humans. Females top out between five and seven feet, but males can be up to nine feet tall. Not so useful if you want to pass for human, so they get jobs that don’t require them to try.”

“So what, they’ve got their own cell tower?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. They probably had DSL before most of the rest of the state.” A surprising number of telephone company technicians are cryptids, or know cryptids exist and have simply chosen not to care. Once you’ve determined that the giant ball of fangs and tentacles isn’t going to eat you, there’s no good reason not to fix its phone service.