Page 49 of Where the Snakes Sleep

“Oh my fucking God,” he whispers, his voice barely audible.

I follow his gaze across the room.

Rows of enclosures line two walls, some tall and heavily planted for arboreal species, others broader and lower, each separated and secured. Environmental controls give the room a constant underlying hum of noise, and the low lighting inside several habitats creates pockets of amber and green among the stainless-steel work surfaces.

Ryan’s fingers clamp tightly around my forearm as his eyes travel from one enclosure to the next.

His shoulder presses against my arm while he peers toward the nearest enclosure without seeming to realize he has reduced the space between us to nothing.

“Are they all venomous?” he asks quietly.

“Most.”

“Most?”

“Some are here for comparative behavioral work.”

“So some are just regular murder snakes instead of venomous murder snakes.”

“I am increasingly concerned about your scientific vocabulary.”

He ignores me, his gaze catching on Estelle; rightfully so, as she is impossible not to notice.

Under the enclosure light, her scales appear almost unnaturally blue, turquoise deepening to cobalt along the shadowed curves of her body.

Ryan takes one cautious step forward. “Whoa.”

That response is softer.

I watch his face rather than the snake. “Estelle.”

He glances back at me. “That’s her name?”

“Yes.”

“She’s… beautiful.”

“She is.”

Ryan moves closer to the glass. “How is she real? I didn’t know there were blue snakes.”

I step behind him. “Trimeresurus insularis. The white-lipped island pit viper, endemic to the Lesser Sunda Islands of Indonesia. Most of her kind are green, some yellow. The blue morph occurs almost exclusively on Komodo.”

Ryan jerks backward as Estelle’s tongue flicks out in interest. I catch him by the waist, pulling a soft gasp from his mouth as my fingers tease at the strip of bare skin he’s showing off.

He looks up at me, his breath caught somewhere in his throat. “Are you… feeding her?”

“No. I need to do a venom extraction. That’s what I was doing when you arrived.”

He stares at the snake, then at me, then at the array of implements on the steel table nearby.

His voice is feather-light as he says, “That sounds fucked up.”

“It is necessary for the research and doesn’t harm the snake.”

He sucks his lower lip between his teeth, uncertain, and then asks, “How do you do it?”

“You’ll see as you watch.”