Matthew pulled into the garage with a squeal of tires. His phone buzzed as he turned off the engine.
“Uh-oh,” he said, checking the screen. “Mom says they’ve started closing arguments.”
“Already?” Zoe cried. She pulled out her phone and saw the same message. She’d expected them to take the whole afternoon on the trial, but it was barely past four. Neither of her parents were answering their phones, which was why she’d called Matthew from Miss Sameera’s house instead.
“Does it matter?” Logan asked. “We have Pelly—so he’s obviously innocent, no matter how the trial turns out.”
“I don’t trust that Exterminator, though,” Zoe said, her skin prickling. “He looks like he’s itching to execute a dragon as soon as possible.” She jumped out of the van and pulled open the back doors.
“Exterminator?” Miss Sameera said in a wobbly voice.
“Only in extreme circumstances,” Blue said, patting her shoulder.
Logan and Zoe wrestled the blanket-wrapped Pelly out of the van, through the door to the Menagerie, and onto a golf cart that was waiting for them. With Matthew behind the steering wheel, there was room for only two more people.
“You two go,” Blue said. “I’ll take Miss Sameera into the main house.”
The librarian was staring around the Menagerie with her mouth open. “This place is huge!” she said. “How has nobody noticed it before? Don’t airplanes fly overhead and spot you?”
“We have a thing,” Zoe said, fighting the mental drag that always came with mentioning the deflector. “We don’t talk about the thing.”
“INTRUDER! INTRUDER! INTRUDER!” the dragon alarm bellowed.
“Oh, brother,” Matthew said, unclipping a walkie-talkie from the front bar of the golf cart. “Mooncrusher, tell Clawdius we know!” he yelled into it. “We brought her in!”
“BLAAAAARGH!” agreed the walkie-talkie, and a few moments later the bellowing stopped.
Zoe held on tight to the side rail as the golf cart zipped down the hill, around the lake, and up to the yeti’s area. The crowd around the trial seemed bigger than she would have expected, and she realized several of the merpeople had decided to come watch the proceedings. King Cobalt stood in the middle of them, towering and majestic-looking as usual, spinning a trident slowly between his hands.
“Blue’s dad thought he should get to judge the trial,” Zoe whispered to Logan. “Since he’s ‘the most royal personage on the continent,’ apparently. He wasn’t too pleased when SNAPA said no.”
The flamingo-looking judge sat behind a card table, facing the lawyers. His long neck twisted as he followed the ping-pong argument Ruby and Runcible were having from their separate tables. Off to the side, the jury sat with expressions ranging from bored (Firebella) to extremely bored (Sapphire). And on the other side was Scratch, laden with chains and drooping gloomily. Zoe’s dad stood beside him, holding an electric shock wand and wearing most of a fireproof suit, apart from the helmet.
And standing ominously next to the prosecution’s table was a masked figure, all in black, with the hood of his coat pulled up. Even seeing him from a distance made Zoe shiver.
“You don’t need more time!” Runcible shouted at Ruby. “You have no witnesses! You have no evidence!” He pointed to the qilin, standing peacefully beside the judge with her horn glowing softly blue. “The qilin knows he’s guilty, so give up!”
“We’ve presented our theory regarding his guilt over the sheep; the qilin cannot distinguish what he is guilty of,” Ruby yelled back. “And we might have a witness if he would stop setting himself on fire every time we go anywhere near him. We need to force the phoenix to testify before we can close this case.”
“He was probably a pile of ashes during the murder, too,” Runcible growled. “He won’t know anything, and he’s unreliable even if he claims he does.” Zoe noticed that the agent’s eyebrows seemed bushier than usual—and were his teeth getting a bit longer and sharper? She couldn’t exactly blame him. Talking to Ruby usually made her mad enough to turn into a wolf, too, if she could have.
Delia put a calming hand on Runcible’s shoulder, but he shook her off.
“We don’t know that for sure,” Ruby pointed out. “And we want those feathers tested. We have reason to believe they’re not Pelly’s at all—”
“A reason you’ve declined to share with the court!” Runcible said, flinging up his hands and giving the jury a can you believe this? glare.
“Judge Martindale, all we’re asking for is a three-day extension—” she began.
“Wait!” Matthew called. “Stop the trial!”
Everyone turned around, and Zoe suddenly felt like she was in one of those dreams where she had to give a speech to a million people but she’d overslept, run onstage in her pajamas, and forgotten what the speech was supposed to be about.
Matthew lifted the bundle from the back of the golf cart and hauled it over to set it down in front of the judge. Logan and Zoe stood on either side of him as he unwrapped the blanket with a flourish to reveal the slumbering form of the golden goose.
Muffled gasps came from the audience and the jury.
“Pelly’s dead body!” Sapphire shrieked.
“No, no, she’s alive!” Zoe shouted over the uproar that ensued. “She’s just drugged! She was kidnapped!”
“Scratch was set up!” Logan added. “He’s innocent!”
Zoe glanced over at the dragon, whose whole body was alive with hope now. Scratch’s eyes glowed and he clawed at the ground.
The SNAPA agents nearly overturned their table in their haste to get up and examine Pelly. Delia brushed her hair behind her ears, looking pale as she felt for Pelly’s pulse. Zoe wondered how it must feel to have nearly condemned an innocent dragon to death—especially when your whole mission in life was to keep them safe.
“They’re right,” Delia said, then, clearing her throat, she said it again louder. “They’re right. Judge Martindale, this goose is alive.” She turned to Zoe. “So what about the blood on the dragon’s teeth?”
“Just from the sheep he ate,” Zoe said, shaking her head.
“You’re sure?” Delia said anxiously. “He didn’t attack any people while he was loose?”
“Xanadu’s a small town,” Matthew said. “We’d know if anyone had been attacked by a dragon this past week. I promise.”
The SNAPA agent breathed a sigh of relief. “Very well. We withdraw our case against the accused, for now.”
Runcible let out a small growl and stalked back to the table, where he started slamming papers and books around.
Delia’s hands brushed through the goose’s feathers, checking for injuries. “And she seems okay,” she said. “Did she tell you what happened to her or where she’s been?”
“Not yet,” Zoe said. “We found her at our librarian’s house, but we think someone else took her from here, and then Miss Sameera rescued her by accident.”
Delia tilted her head. “Did you say Sameera?”
“Yes,” said Zoe. “Sameera Lahiri, our school librarian.”
The agent sighed. “Oh, lord. The craziest Free Ranger of them all.”
“What’s a Free Ranger?” Logan asked. Zoe had never heard of them, either, before seeing Miss Sameera’s letter.
“A misguided movement to find and free all our mythical creatures,” Delia said. “They’re like SNAPA’s worst nightmare. They have no real proof that these animals even exist, but they’re so convinced and so determined that we can’t seem to shake them. It turns out kraken ink doesn’t work on memories of completely made-up supernatural encounters.”
“Oh,” Logan said. “Like people who say they’ve been abducted by UFOs.”
“Right,” said Delia, “except those people usually have had a real run-in with a will-o’-the-wisp or a tooth fairy.” She stroked Pelly’s head. “Sameera Lahiri has been trouble before. She exposed a menagerie in Missouri and we had to dose the whole town. I thought we got to her, too, but maybe our dosage wasn’t high enough. Some people have stronger resistance to kraken ink than others.”
“Well, we brought her back here to answer some questions,” Zoe said. She made a mental note that they’d have to give Miss Sameera extra kraken ink—maybe a lot extra. She hoped that would work; she’d never heard of anyone resisting it before. “So we’ll see what we can find out, and where she found Pelly, which might lead us to the real kidnapper.”
“Good idea,” Delia said. “Runcible and I will interrogate her as soon as we’ve packed up here.”
A movement behind the agent caught Zoe’s eye, and she turned to watch as her dad unclipped most of the chains from around Scratch. The dragon stretched his wings, beaming happily.
Runcible came storming back and stood over the goose, fuming. “You still have to answer for that dragon escaping,” he said. “I can see plenty of reasons to shut down this whole place.”
Zoe’s heart sank. After all that, hadn’t they saved the Menagerie?
“Oh, I think not,” said a voice behind Runcible. He stepped aside with a frown as Melissa Merevy strolled up with a clipboard full of forms. She tipped it so he could see the top page, where several lines were highlighted. “According to the SNAMHP rule book, anyone who’s been a werewolf less than seven years is not allowed to run free in wolf form within fifty miles of human habitation, regardless of whether he’s tracked and monitored. Moreover, with children out in the woods Sunday night, you could both be facing serious endangerment charges.” She paused, letting that sink in as Runcible turned purple and Delia stared blankly. “Unless, of course, we can reach some kind of mutual agreement about the longevity of this Menagerie’s prospects . . .”
“What?” Logan whispered to Zoe.
“I think she’s blackmailing them into letting us stay open,” Zoe whispered back.
“Oh,” he said. “Awesome.”
He grinned, looking relieved. She wished she felt that way, too, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that their problems were far from over. She kept thinking about those goose feathers—the ones that weren’t Pelly’s—and wondering where they came from and who would have had access to them.
She felt someone’s gaze on her and turned to see the Exterminator watching, dark eyes glittering through his mask.
They’d returned Pelly and saved Scratch, but they hadn’t figured out who was trying to sabotage the Menagerie.
And Zoe was sure whoever it was wouldn’t be giving up that easily.