“No, no,” Greta interrupted. “You went to call me and realized I’d been calling you for an hour and a half but you’d left your phone on silent.”

“Yeah, fine. So I pick up my phone, and can you guess what happened?”

Ramona actually paused to allow Carys time to guess.

“I don’t dare,” Carys said gamely.

“This absolute ninny had gotten herself locked in a monkey cage!”

Greta felt her face heat.

Carys looked to her, clearly waiting for her revision of that sentence.

“I did,” Greta confirmed. “Not with a monkey. But there was this extra cage, and I was moving some of the supplies into it, and the door shut behind me.”

“Oh my lord,” said Carys.

“Yeah, the rest of her lab group didn’t show up—obviously, since it was the Friday of Hallo-freaking-ween—so she was just stuck in there, like.” Ramona made like she was clawing at a cage and Greta snorted. “I went down and let her out. God knows what might’ve happened if I hadn’t!”

“You also magnanimously brought my costume so I could change in the monkey cage because you said there wasn’t time to go home.” Greta turned to Carys. “We lived four blocks from the psych lab.”

Carys grinned.

“We were already very late to the party,” Ramona explained. “Missed the costume contest!”

“Which you wouldn’t have won anyway.”

“I might have.” Ramona sniffed.

“Rebekah was dressed as a full-on owl with wings that flapped and her face covered in real feathers. You would not have won.”

“Well, I guess we’ll never know now, will we?”

“Lucky you have Mardi Gras now for any costume cravings,” Carys said.

“Hallelujah. Thank god I ended up someplace primed to appreciate me.”

Something moved in the water to Greta’s left.

Slow and ineluctable, an alligator rose.

“Holy fucking hell,” Greta breathed.

In the flesh, it was terrifying. A dinosaur. A predator. It looked fake, like the plastic and resin models she’d seen all her life. And that just made it scarier. But the way it moved was hypnotic, arms dragging its muscular bulk from the water.

“Gah.” Ramona shivered. “They’re so toothy.”

“A friend once took me canoeing underneath I-10,” Carys said softly. “There hadn’t been that much rainfall lately, and the water was low enough you could see the roots of all the cypress trees. So we’re just getting high in the middle of the water, letting the boat drift because there was a lot of surface crud and rowing was hard. And something moved out of the corner of my eye. A gator was in the tree. Like, sunning itself on a branch eight, ten feet above the water. The thing could’ve just dropped into our canoe like a spider.”

“They do that?” Greta shuddered. “What did you do?”