Page 40 of The Fae Menagerie
"That's it," Doyle said. Then, he noticed where my fingers were, and he laughed. "What are you doing?"
"You said to guide it!"
"Never mind. This might do the trick."
He blew into the flute. Nothing happened, nothing I could hear, anyway. Then, the basilisk angled its head from side to side to catch the direction of a sound. Its head flattened against the side of the glass, lower and lower until its ear was as close as it could get to the hole.
Then, the basilisk began to shrink.
"That's it!" I slapped Doyle's shoulder a little too hard in my excitement, and he almost dropped the flute. From the way the creature hastened its progress, it must have taken the sound Doyle made as a sign of distress.
Doyle resumed playing, and the creature shrank to the size of a regular snake, although far longer than any snake I'd ever seen.
"The tail can still turn you to stone," Doyle warned. "We can't let it through."
"We can't let any of it through!" I shouted.
"We must," Doyle said. "Cutting off the tip of its tail is the only way to kill it."
"What?" That seemed like an impossible task, even if it stayed this small. Doyle had no sharp objects in his enclosure. What was he supposed to do, use his claws?
"I'll have to time it perfectly," Doyle said. "It has to stay this small, it has to double back so it can see its tail, and when I cut it off, it will turn itself to stone. If we miss, the tip of the tail growsback in a few hours, but we'd be dead by then. It doesn't have to turn us to stone to eat us."
"Thanks for that image."
That was it. The snake was going to eat us.
Chapter
Fourteen
DOYLE
Parker bent over his knees,his breath coming fast as he stared at the shrinking basilisk through the opening beneath our sink.
"What did you think the giant snake would do to us?" I asked. I was glad he had distracted it before it ate Horace. The stone spell only lasted a few minutes, but it was long enough for the snake to swallow most prey.
"Here it comes."
The basilisk had shrunk to the diameter of a garden snake to enter the tunnel through the inches-thick glass, its tongue flicking as it slithered effortlessly through the small space. When its head cleared the opening, it lunged for me. The glass hindered its strike. It would have to get several inches into the room before it could recoil enough to hit me. The snake's bite wasn't dangerous, not when it was this small. No, the most dangerous part was still on Horace's side of the glass. Its tail flashed its eerie gray beam again, and it reflected harmlessly off the thick pane between us.
"Ha." I grinned at Parker with false confidence. I honestly thought it would turn me to stone, but the enclosure's walls of spelled glass contained it, which made me wonder how the creature had gotten loose.
"Is it venomous?" Parker asked.
"No."
"How do we kill it?"
I knew how to kill a basilisk, in theory, but I didn't have a single item in my enclosure that could do it. "Cut off its tail," I repeated. It was more than that, though. The tail had to be severed while the creature was in the path of its own stone ray. Cutting off the tail would activate the ray, and then it would turn itself to stone and die.
There was a chance the snake was too small to cut true with a sword or even a butcher's knife. If I accidentally severed too close to the stone eyes, the ray wouldn't function, and its magical tail would grow back.
The problem was, I didn't have a sword, dagger, knife, or even a letter opener. My mother had placed me on suicide watch from the beginning. I possessed enough cloth to hang myself ten times over, but not a single sharp object in my enclosure. I could hack at the beast's tail with a fork, rip at it with my claws, or try to crush it with my foot, but none of those options would allow me to turn the creature to stone.
I must have been talking through our predicament aloud because Parker followed with an astute question.
"Do you need to cut its tail off, or will turning it to stone kill it?"
