Page 39 of The Fae Menagerie
Doyle signed, but it was no use. The cuddlebug had no free limbs to answer, and then all his limbs were flying toward us at a rapid rate, his body following, as he was flung from the doorway. He hit the window before us and rolled across the counter. He righted himself on his limbs so he could scuttle to the corner.
Movement from the doorway caught my eye. At first, I didn't know what I was seeing. The door was pulled the wrong way through the opening and torn off its hinges. Then, a gigantic mass of black filled the opening.
"Shit." The mass of black condensed on itself, growing thinner and shorter until an enormous snake fit its giant head through the doorway. It shrank smaller still until it could shove its body through the opening, too.
Horace had nowhere to go. He turned his face to the glass and hunkered down so I couldn't see him over the edge of the counter. The creature shoved itself through the doorway and forced its way into the room, breaking the wooden doorjamb and tile floor with its careless progress.
"It's going to break the glass." Doyle shivered beside me. "It's going to kill Horace, and then it'll come after us."
The snake's head swiveled toward Doyle.
"Fuck!" He whispered, but even that seemed to draw the creature's attention. "They're blind, but they can hear really fucking well."
With one toss of the giant snake's head, the kitchen counter, including the sink, went flying and a gout of water shot up from the broken pipe.
"Shut up, then!" I whispered back, hoping the sound of the fountain would mask my words.
As quickly as it started, the water shut off.
"Someone's watching,"Doyle signed to me. I assumed Aidan, or someone else in charge of the water in the menagerie.
"Is there anything we can do for Horace?" I signed back.
"He'll be fine until … oh shit."
The creature's tail snaked through the opening, and Doyle flinched as its tail whipped toward the tiny ball of Horace on the floor. I barely recognized him beyond his brown fur.
He wasn't small enough, apparently.
"What is that thing?" I asked. The creature's tail had two unmoving eyes, and it swayed back and forth the way a cobra would when hypnotized by a snake charmer. Through the tiny hole in our wall, I heard a humming hiss.
Horace tried to cling to his ball, but the sound drew him out. He rocked from side to side with his back turned to the creature, and then he slowly turned toward it. The moment he locked eyeson the creature's tail, a ray of gray light pierced his flesh and turned him to stone.
Now, the signs Doyle had flashed at me in rapid succession made more sense. Stone snake. This was a basilisk. A size-changing basilisk who had just made itself smaller to attack Horace.
Before it could swallow Horace whole, I slammed open our kitchen cupboard door.
Doyle hissed. "What are you doing?"
"It changes size." He cringed away from my shout, which did exactly what I'd intended. Instead of staring at Horace like he was a snack, the basilisk tilted its head, as though trying to find the source of our noise. The glass wall between us confused it.
"So?"
I pointed to the tiny open tunnel between our two enclosures. "If we show it the easiest way to get from there to here before it returns to normal size, it might stay small."
Doyle dove for the cupboard, shoving everything out of the way. He banged on the glass, which did nothing to attract the snake as it continued tossing furniture from its path. The table crushed beneath the snake, and it threw the chair beside the Horace-shaped statue toward us. I flinched when the wood splintered against the glass, but the wall remained between us.
"Is it attracted to smell? Do we have any?—"
Doyle leaped to his feet and crushed me to his chest in a hug. "That's it! The flute!"
"Flute?" I didn't know how he'd jumped from my request for meat, which probably wouldn't have worked, to a musical instrument.
He capered to the living room door. "Try to guide it toward the hole."
If I wasn't so scared, I would have made a funny sex joke about how Doyle was more suited for that job than me. Still, Igot down on my hands and knees and tried to coax the giant snake toward the tiny hole in the wall. I even wiggled my fingers around in it.
The snake was much more interested in me. It lowered its head to the floor and its tongue flicked the glass between us.
