“The legends shifted around over the years. Sometimes people said they could kill you, sometimes that they could turn you to stone—basically, if a basilisk looked at you, it was supposed to be bad. But my parents were big into shifter history, especially ancient shifter history, and they said that one of the original terms for basilisks was ‘nightmare serpents.’”
“Nightmare serpents?”
“Right,” Martin said. “They could figure out what you were afraid of... and they could make you see it. Or whatever else they wanted you to see.”
The fear gas.
The visual distortions that had only happened when they were looking at the men they were trying to identify.
The chameleon car.
Her vague memory that its driver had had unusual, captivating, almost hypnotic eyes.
“Monroe,” Cooper said. His face looked chalky.
“Monroe?” Martin repeated, confused.
She told Martin about Monroe, and he eventually agreed with them: as reluctant as he was to point the finger at another Marshal, he had to admit that it sounded suspicious.
“His whole team was suspicious,” Gretchen said. It was like Monroe’s untrustworthiness had broken some kind of dam inside her, and now all her frustrations were pouring out. “Everything Cooper’s told me about these guys rubs me the wrong way. Even outside of Monroe! We’ve got Phil, a guy who hates that his partner wants to look after a witness. We’ve got a Deputy Chief who wants to trade being a jaguar shifter—a perfectly good kind of shifter, rah-rah big cats—for being a basilisk—”
She cut herself off.
“Monroe and Roger must have been pretty close,” she said to Cooper. “If Roger wanted to get Monroe to turn him somehow, and if Monroe agreed to it.”
Cooper still looked almost gray with shock, but that was changing: he was getting angrier now, which was better. “I don’t know that either of them could get close to anyone, but I guess if they were close to anyone, they were close to each other. And yeah, there were two men in the car. If you’re asking me if I think Roger’s in on it too... I do.”
That meant they were going up against respectable, high-ranking US Marshals—one of whom could play with their minds. And take the form of a giant snake.
Gretchen would have preferred taking on the mob.
*
After their phone call, breakfast was understandably quiet.
They ate with Ford, who showed them into a little kitchen in the suite of rooms tacked onto the back of the motel’s front office. The walls were yellowed with years of cigarette smoke, but the kitchen was neatly kept, with scrubbed plastic placemats and a faded blue gingham tablecloth. Cooper thought that Ford was lonely, and the kitchen showed it, but he also thought that Ford was mostly happy, and the kitchen showed that too. The calendar on the fridge was up-to-date, with a few birthdays marked down there in red ink.
And the food was good, even if he had trouble concentrating on enjoying it.
Eggs, cornflakes, orange juice, coffee, bacon. It was certainly the best real meal he’d had in months, and as a matter of fact, it was actually better than any free continental breakfast he’d snagged in all the days he used to spend on the road.
All the days I used to spend on the road with the team who murdered my partner.
“You two are awfully quiet,” Ford said, and for once, he didn’t seem to be on the verge of making a suggestive, eyebrow-waggling remark about it.
“We figured out some bad news,” Gretchen said, glancing over at Cooper. She chewed, and the expression on her face said she wasn’t tasting the food any more than he was.
“Well, you don’t have to tell me,” Ford said comfortably. “I don’t need to know more than I already do. That’s a good rule to live by, if you own a motel.”
He pushed back from the table, studying them. His left eye, Cooper noticed, was a little clouded with cataracts, but his gaze was as sharp as any Cooper had ever encountered. Yesterday, Ford had looked old and a little scruffy, but today, even though he was still rumpled and in a bathrobe, his face was smooth and he smelled of soap and aftershave. He looked years younger than he had last night.
“We’ll pay for the room and the inconvenience, obviously,” Gretchen said.
Ford shook his head. “Don’t bother, dear. That just makes a paper trail proving you and your young man came through here, and I don’t figure any of us need that.”