“Yes.” I shifted inside the blanket the paramedics had wrapped me in. I was sitting in the chair, by the counter from which Gloria had leaped at me. The first responders sank fifteen vials of antivenom into my body and when that didn’t quite do the trick gave me five more. My head swam and I felt cold and clammy. Any other time I’d be miserable, but now being sick and woozy just confirmed that I was alive.

“What happened next?”

“She grew fangs and bit me.”

“With her fangs?”

“Yes.”

Detective Tsoi, a dark-haired Asian female in her late thirties, arched her pretty eyebrows at me. “So would you say she was like a snake?”

I looked at her. Behind Tsoi, Animal Control packed the last of the snakes into bins.

“I just want to be sure that we’re on the same page,” Tsoi said. “Are we talking about snake people?”

“Yes.”

Tsoi and Collins looked at each other.

“Everybody knows there is no such thing as reptilian shapeshifters,” Collins said.

“I didn’t say she was a shapeshifter.” And that wasn’t strictly true either. There were reptilian shapeshifters; they just weren’t the product of Lyc-V.

Tsoi pondered me. “Your file says you were discharged from the Order due to post-traumatic stress. You failed your psych eval?”

“I’m not crazy.” My head hurt and I still wanted to vomit. Every word was like a hammer to my head.

“Nobody says you are,” Collins said. “Nobody even mentioned the c-word.”

I took a deep breath, trying to keep what little liquid was left in my stomach from geysering out. They knew I was weak and they were trying to squeeze everything they could out of me, hoping I’d slip up. I didn’t blame them. In their place, I would’ve done the same thing. Get as much as you can while you can. They’d Mirandized me the moment I was conscious, which meant I was detained and this wasn’t a routine conversation.

“She isn’t crazy,” the ME said, straightening from where he was examining the corpse. “Got two retractable fangs here. Also something going on with her temporomandibular joint. Look at this.” He pulled Gloria’s lower jaw down. Her mouth gaped, not quite as wide as the maw of a snake, but far wider than any human skull had a right to open.

“Snake people.” Collins stared at him. “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

The ME spread his arms. “Hey, I call them like I see them. I tell you fangs and a jaw that opens one hundred degrees. You can draw your own conclusions from there.”

“Isn’t there some sort of a cult who thinks there are secret snake people?” Tsoi said.

“No, those are Reptilians,” the ME said. “They’re supposed to be more like lizards.”

“I shot her four times,” I said. “It didn’t even faze her.”