“You’re going to have to start calling me Martin again if you’re going to be one of the family. Only Theo calls me ‘sir,’ and that’s just because dragons hoard their habits, too, and it’s too damn hard to get them to stop. I wish I’d known you could shift, Cooper. I would have recruited you years ago.”
Now Cooper looked like he was the one with a lump in his throat. If Gretchen had to guess, she’d say that no one had ever called him family before, let alone invited him to be part of theirs.
Cooper had known so many jerks. Gretchen was determined to introduce him to a ton of good people. She squeezed his hand.
Cooper shot her a glance that was so full of love it made Gretchen’s toes curl—what she wouldn’t give to take him back to bed!—and then he cleared his throat, like he didn’t want to sound openly emotional on the phone.
“Before Ford came in, you were telling us Keith woke up?”
“Right,” Martin said. “Keith couldn’t
remember everything that had happened around the gunfight, but he said he remembered that there were snakes.”
“There weren’t snakes,” Gretchen said, though—didn’t she remember Keith having said something like that at the time? Maybe that they needed to run away from the snakes? It was weird how often snakes were coming up lately. “Trust me, if there’d been snakes, I never would have gotten out of the car.”
“I have an idea that’s a little off-the-wall,” Martin said, “but maybe he didn’t mean actual snakes. Maybe he meant basilisks.”
Cooper went completely still. “Did you say basilisk?”
Martin, of course, couldn’t know exactly what that meant to Cooper. “I know, they’re not supposed to be around anymore. It’s a wild guess, but it fits.”
Gretchen’s hand tightened around Cooper’s. She felt like he was holding onto her for dear life.
If his old teammate Monroe had been responsible for this, then Cooper hadn’t just been framed. He’d been betrayed. The idea had clearly knocked him for a loop, which meant she had to be the one to get to the bottom of this.
She kept her voice steady. “What do you mean? Are they supposed to be extinct?”
“That’s what I always heard. There were purges, like the Salem Witch Trials. Even other shifters turned on them. It was a nightmare.”
That sounded even worse than what had happened with pegasi, and Gretchen remembered Martin soberly telling her about how they’d been hunted for their wings back in Ancient Greece.
“The basilisk hunters were stirred up by fear and hate,” Martin said. “And some people say they wiped the basilisks out forever.”
“What were they afraid of?”
“The basilisk stare?” Cooper said, finally speaking up. His voice sounded lifeless, though, and it worried her. “Because they’re supposed to be able to kill people by looking at them? Because Monroe—” He cut himself off. “Because I always heard that was a myth.”
“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—”