Chaos Choreography (InCryptid, #5)(4)
Then the words sunk in. “Wait. Nemo?” I turned to look in the same direction as the plesiosaur. “You named it?”
The owners of the flashlights kept running. Dominic grabbed one by the shoulders, hauling the figure to a halt, but the other two got past him, becoming visible. Both were in their early twenties, at best; they might have been in their teens. One was faster than the other. He reached me first, and shoved me hard enough that I actually stumbled. His companion ran for the edge of the reservoir, where the plesiosaur was bowing its head to meet her.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded, going in to shove me again.
Right. I’d been startled before, but no way was he putting his hands on me a second time. I grabbed his wrist, spinning hard to the side and twisting as I went, until I wound up behind him with his arm bent at an angle that wasn’t quite going to dislocate his shoulder. Well, probably not. If he moved, all bets were off.
He made a guttural keening noise, surprisingly low for the amount of pain he was almost certainly in. His companion turned from the act of stroking the plesiosaur’s nose, her eyes gone wide with shock. He’d dropped his flashlight when I grabbed him. It was spinning, illuminating different parts of the scene.
“Hi,” I said brightly, giving the girl my best camera-ready smile. “Who feels like explaining what the hell is going on? I’ll give you a hint: it’s probably not your friend here. He’s sort of got other things to worry about.” I gave his arm another squeeze. He moaned again.
“What are you doing?” The girl stepped forward, putting herself between me and the plesiosaur. “Let Charlie go! He didn’t do anything to you!”
“Uh, wrong,” I said. “He shoved me. Didn’t anybody ever teach him that it’s rude to lay hands on a lady?”
Dominic came walking down the path, dragging another young woman by the arm. She had long brown hair, and looked like the sort of girl I was used to finding on my sister’s roller derby team. Too bad she wasn’t on my sister’s roller derby team. Antimony would have known about the plesiosaur if that had been the case, and we wouldn’t be standing here now.
“Please, we’re not hurting anything,” said the second girl. “We didn’t expect to see your flashlights, and we sort of panicked. Please, let us go.”
“Were you expecting to see the plesiosaur?” I asked.
“Nemo’s not a dino—” protested the first girl. Then she caught herself, and blinked, and said, “Um, yes. He’s ours.”
“I’m sorry. Maybe I got something in my ear when your friend here shoved me,” I said. “Did you just say the plesiosaur was yours?”
Dominic released the second girl, who rocked back and forth for a moment, torn between rushing to defend her prehistoric reptile and going to the aid of her much more modern, if not much more evolved, companion. In the end, the plesiosaur won, and she fled to stand next to the other girl, blocking “Nemo” from our deadly attentions.
“Yes,” snapped the first girl. “Nemo’s ours, and he’s never hurt anybody, and no one would believe you anyway, so you should just go. You hear me? Get out of here and go.”
“Since we weren’t doing anything but being near the reservoir when Nemo decided to pop his head out and start trying to bite my head off, I think you may be wrong about whether he’s ever hurt anybody,” I said. It was hard to sound gentle while I had their friend in an armlock. I leaned forward, murmuring in his ear, “Are you going to shove me again?”
“No, I swear,” he whimpered.
I let him go. He ran to his friends, cradling his arm and staring at me fearfully.
“You must have done something,” said the first girl. “Nemo wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Nemo has a fifteen-foot neck, which means he’s a pretty big boy,” I said. “Have you been dumping tadpoles in the reservoir to feed him?” They didn’t answer me. They didn’t need to. Their guilty expressions were answer enough. “There are a lot of frogs in there, so I’m going to wager that Nemo doesn’t eat frogs. They probably taste funny. So he ate all the fish in the reservoir—alas for the free-range goldfish population—and then he probably moved on to small mammals. There sure were a lot of missing pet fliers up at the mouth of the trail, did you notice?”
No missing kid fliers. Not yet. That was a small blessing. Things like Nemo were miracles of endurance and evolution, but they couldn’t be allowed to go around eating children.
The newcomers blanched. The second girl looked faintly sick. She must have been an animal lover, not just a plesiosaur fan.
The first girl leaned up to wrap her arms around Nemo’s head. The plesiosaur endured her affections surprisingly well for a prehistoric reptile. “I don’t care,” she said. “He’s not hurting anything, and we’re not going to let you hurt him.”
I sighed. “We’re not going to hurt him. But we might be able to help you save him. Or did you think you could keep him in the reservoir forever?”
The trio exchanged glances. Finally, the first girl asked, “Save him how?”
Girl #1’s name was Kim; girl #2 was Angie. The boy was Charlie. All three were students at the local community college, and had gone on an archaeological dig in Kansas the summer before. They’d fallen through a false floor in one of the caverns, and into a moist, warm chamber, where there’d been a nest mounded with leathery, football-sized eggs. Being scientists, they had naturally been fascinated, and being primates, they had naturally dealt with this fascination by stealing an egg from the edge of the nest.