“Absolutely,” I said. “We’ll talk before I leave.”

The rest of the day seemed to fly by. The lull I’d found Dee in when I exited my office only lasted for the amount of time it took us to finish wiping the smudges off Crunchy’s tank. That was when the late afternoon rush of chilled school groups began, packing the reptile house to capacity with shivering bodies and endless questions. All four staffers on duty were kept busy running between enclosures, explaining facts about the reptiles they contained or helping to break up small arguments before they turned into sugar-fueled pushing matches. By the time the loudspeakers announced that the zoo would be closing in twenty minutes, all of us were ready to hand-carry the patrons to the parking lot, put them down, and bid them a firm “go the hell away.”

“I’m going to sleep for a year,” announced Kim, one of the reptile house’s junior zookeepers. She bent double, resting her palms on the floor and her nose against her knees. “A year. That will miraculously end right before my alarm tomorrow morning.”

“Sounds good to me,” I agreed. “Nelson, you got everything under control with the caimans?” Nelson was our other junior zookeeper, and it was his turn to feed the long-jawed crocodilians their supper.

“I’ve got it,” Nelson said.

“Great. On that note, you are all amazing, and I am going home. Dee, we’ll talk in the morning?”

“Count on it,” said Dee.

“Great,” I said again, and turned to walk to my office, where I swapped my lab coat for my wool jacket, grabbed my briefcase, and let Crow out the window with a firm admonition to, “Go to the car, Crow, car.”

He flapped away into the evening air, wings beating hard, and I just had to hope he was doing as he’d been told. He was pretty good about following orders most of the time—largely because I controlled the food—but he was still half-cat. One day he was going to do whatever he wanted, with no concern for the consequences, and then there would be hell to pay. Maybe it was irresponsible to keep a pet that was basically a ticking time bomb of complications, but I’d had Crow for years, and I was fond of him. Maybe next time I wanted to get a pet, I’d go with something simpler, like a bulldog, or a very small gargoyle.

Oh, who was I kidding? I’d be first in line at the griffin aviary, waiting for a chick in need of a home.

I waved to my coworkers as I passed back through the reptile house, and then I was out into the sweet autumnal air of the zoo, which tasted of fallen leaves and bonfires—all the good parts of the fall, with none of the pesky leaf mold and early frost downsides. I love autumn evenings. They’re the one thing about the season that my sisters and I were always able to agree on. (Verity’s passion was Halloween: trick-or-treating and as much candy as she could stuff into her face during the two-day cheat period she allowed herself before she went back on her strict dancer’s diet. Antimony was all about the pumpkin spice. Pumpkin cookies, pumpkin loaf, pumpkin everything. Attempts to make her admit that most of these products contained no pumpkin, and were just a trumped-up delivery mechanism for cinnamon and ginger, were met with violence. Antimony never found a cause she wasn’t willing to die—or better yet, kill—for.)

The guards had already escorted most of the zoo patrons out. Groundskeepers and zoo employees passed me as I walked toward the gate, on their way to begin what many of them considered their real work. Keeping the public interested in wildlife was all well and good, but these keepers dedicated their lives to the plants and animals in their care. Some of them only left the zoo because their showers at home had better water pressure. I was honored to be part of their society, even if only temporarily and under false pretenses.

My time at the zoo was winding down. It had been for a while. The basilisks were finally reproducing, and my survey of the cryptid wildlife of the area was nearly complete. Before much longer, it was going to be time for me to pack my things and head off to the next challenge, whatever that might be. Maybe I’d take Verity’s place in Manhattan and spend some time getting to know William, the last of the great dragons.

(We’d thought dragons were extinct until my sister was nearly sacrificed to him. The species needed help getting reestablished, and I could spend a year or two learning everything there was to know about them. It was tempting.)

And, of course, there was Shelby to be considered. Our relationship had started as a bit of fun—it was something neither of us expected to last—and turned serious when she learned that I was a Price and I learned that she was a member of the Thirty-Six Society, an organization of Australian cryptozoologists dedicated to protecting their surprisingly delicate, disturbingly dangerous island ecosystem.

The discovery of how much Shelby and I had in common had deepened our casual little relationship into something that was frighteningly serious, and was going to be incredibly hard to end. I loved her. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her . . . but she was only in America to learn about our big carnivores. Once she knew as much as she needed, she’d be taking her education with her back to Australia, where it, and she, could better serve the goals of the Society. And that was the whole problem, because I couldn’t go with her. Not for keeps, anyway. My family needed me here.

Crow was sitting on the hood of my car when I got there. He was preening his left wing in the purposefully sullen manner that meant he thought I’d taken too long, and had probably been on the verge of coming to look for me. “Thanks for waiting, buddy,” I said, pausing to scratch him behind his feathered “ears” before I unlocked the driver’s-side door.

He creeled once and was in the air like a shot, flying through the open door and curling up on the passenger seat before I could swing myself into my own spot in the car. “Better?” I asked. He clucked before tucking his head under his wing.

I chuckled and started the car. Sometimes it’s nice to spend some time with the predictable things.

Columbus was always beautiful in the fall: I had to give it that, even as my coastal heart wished for the slower, subtler changes of season that we’d had when I was growing up. I drove through the city, admiring the Halloween decorations festooning virtually every storefront and telephone pole I passed, enjoying the brightly colored leaves that were clinging gamely to their trees, not yet clogging the sidewalks and gutters and becoming a public nuisance.