He’d started to tell his nephew good job, but then he stopped, realizing that the only name he knew was AJ, and that was how he’d spent the last ten minutes, trying to figure out what AJ stood for. Luisa was already after him for being a bigger part of his nephew’s life—he didn’t need her to figure out he didn’t know the kid’s full name.
“Andres James? Antonio Joel?”
No reaction, and then his phone chirped. Still watching his nephew, Luca answered.
“So you at home?”
Dag was a Midwesterner through and through, and if he wasn’t bothering with the standardhello, how-are-you, how’s-the-family-pets-property,that meant that something was up. Luca sat up straighter with a frown.
“Almost there, but I’ve got–”
“Someone found a Greek cerastes in Clearwater, Illinois.”
“Wait, seriously?”
“Yup, got the report from some of Cass’s family in the area.”
“That’s Wil and Rikki, right?”
“Wil called me, because the mayor of Clearwater called Rikki,and if it ain’t a cerastes, then we want to know what the heck it actually is.”
Luca’s mind raced, because so far as he knew, every single cerastes in the world was accounted for. It was pretty easy when there were so few of them. They had always been exceedingly rare, made rarer by people who thought they contained the secret to immortality, and the idea of there being one unaccounted for and in Illinois of all places staggered him. It had to be some late hatching, some egg that went astray, and given the incredibly long incubation time–
“Luca, man, you there?”
“Yeah, yeah, I am, sh-sugar.”
He glanced apprehensively at his nephew who was moving the last few raisins on his plate with the kind of gravityusually reserved for World War II generals moving platoons across no-man’s land.
“Kids don’t remember things before they’re three, right?”
“Memory’s a funny thing,” Dag said without missing a beat. “Human kids and shifter kids both start forming lasting memories around the age of three, but these memories can be wrong as often as they are right, especially with a mind that’s too young to easily distinguish between dreams and reality.”
“Oh–”
“But, Luca. The extremely endangered snake?”
“Right! Right. Fu–Funny. That’s funny. Yes. Send me the mayor’s number. I’m going to stop at home to pick up some equipment, and, oh hell. I have my sister’s kid with me.”
“How big a kid?”
“About thirty pounds, three feet tall? Er, and he’s two. I’m going to need to some place to park him if I’m going cryptid hunting.”
The moment he said it, he got a guilty feeling in the back of his head, as if he was running off to play hooky instead of watching his nephew. He reached over and clumsily patted AJ’s hand. AJ gravely patted his arm in return, which felt like maybe it was permission? He didn’t know.
“Yeah, I’ll call Wil and Rikki back, see what we can do.”
“Thanks.”
He ended the call, and picked AJ up. When AJ whined to get down, he remembered that he’d been walking for a while and set him on the ground again.
“We’re gonna go find a snake,” he said uncertainly. “Isn’t that going to be fun?”
*
He and AJ pulled into town around sunset.
It was, he thought, passing the Welcome to Clearwater sign(Home of the Girls 15-17 Track and Field State Champs!)a small town like so many of the small towns scattered through the Midwest, a tight clump of houses and businesses surrounded by a sea of prairie, soybeans and corn in all directions.
