Six

“Every relationship, good or bad, is different. Some of them are just more different than others.”

—Enid Healy

On the way to a safe, secure, intentionally isolated family compound in the woods outside of Portland, Oregon

SHARING THE BACKSEAT WITH Artie meant riding with his head resting in my lap, since the seatbelt could keep him safely restrained, but it couldn’t keep him upright. I stroked his forehead with one hand, savoring the foggy glimpses of his thoughts that came with the contact. It wasn’t enough to tell me what he was thinking—or whether he was aware enough to be thinking anything at all, rather than displaying flashes of random brain activity—but it meant he was alive. That was what really mattered. Artie was alive.

I let my hand rest against his skin, reaching deeper, looking for signs that the faintness of his thoughts was somehow related to the damage he’d suffered in the accident. Elsie’s words from before were haunting me, making it difficult to focus on anything but worrying.

People die from head trauma. People die. Artie was people, and Artie had hit his head, and no matter how silly and overdramatic the thought might seem, Artie could die. I could wake up tomorrow to a world that didn’t have an Artie in it, and I would never have told him—

And that didn’t matter, because I was pretty sure he didn’t feel the same way about me. He loved me because I was his cousin, not because I was a girl who liked him more than girls are supposed to like their cousins, even the ones who belong to a completely different species. All I could do by saying something was make it weird.

Still, I pushed deeper into his blurry, half-formed thoughts, looking for some sign that they were anything out of the ordinary. What would thoughts born of a concussion even look like? Would they be tattered around the edges, or too scrambled to hold themselves together, or something else, something worse and more confusing?

“—are you listening?”

Annie’s voice. I raised my head, pulling myself out of Artie’s thoughts, and said, “Huh?”

“You weren’t listening.” She twisted in her seat so she could look at me. “I said, we’re almost to the house. How’s Artie doing?”

“Still knocked cold, but I’m not finding anything scary in his head. Just a lot of jumble. Pretty normal for someone who’s hit their head. I’m not too worried. I’m pretty sure I’d be able to tell if something was really wrong in there.”

“And if you couldn’t?” asked Elsie.

I took a deep breath. She was worried about her brother. Of course she was worried about her brother. Drew was enough older than me that we’d barely ever lived in the same house, and I’d still be worried about him if he’d been in a car accident. “If I couldn’t, if I can’t, then Evie will be able to figure it out. He’s going to be okay.”

Elsie didn’t say anything.

The woods unrolled around us, dark and tangled and so crowded that they became featureless, a solid wall of black wood pressing in from all sides. I tensed every time we passed another road, waiting for the truck to make a second appearance. It never came. We were driving on a virtually deserted road, deep into the middle of nowhere, and while we might not be safe, we weren’t in active danger.

Artie stirred in his sleep, mumbling something that was almost, if not quite, a word. I stroked his forehead again, stealing glimpses of his tangled half-thoughts. Were they getting stronger, or was that just wishful thinking on my part? I wanted him to wake up so badly that I could be imagining signs of improvement.

We were moving too fast for me to have any good sense of the minds in the woods around us. I would have known if there’d been a large gathering of humans—campers are surprisingly psychically noisy—or anything like that, but the smaller, individual thoughts of the night were slipping through my mental fingers before I could really clamp down on them.

Then we turned a corner onto a half-concealed private road, and a new set of thoughts washed over me, strong and bright and terribly familiar, now that we were past the charms buried at the borderline.

My family.

Evie was there, as fierce and quick and eager to help as always. She was the best big sister I could have asked for, unjudgmental and constantly willing to take the time to make sure I understood what was going on. Her husband, Kevin, was with her, and while he had more of a core of worry than she did, he was still ready for us. There were two more minds in the house, both male, both unfamiliar enough that I couldn’t pick up anything more than the most superficial of impressions—I needed to meet them before I’d be able to get more than that without pushing. And I didn’t want to push. After the day I’d had so far, pushing seemed like a terrible idea.

“Almost there,” said Elsie, and she sped up, taking us around the curves of the long road to the front gate like she thought she was being timed. It would have felt unsafe if I hadn’t known that she’d done this hundreds of times over the years, speeding up a little more with every trip, sometimes while actually being timed.

The Oregon compound started out as Kevin’s idea. His mother, my Grandma Alice, hadn’t really been there when he’d been growing up; he and his sister, Aunt Jane, had both been raised by the Campbell Family Carnival, which was sort of like growing up with family, and sort of not at the same time. He’d been dreaming of real roots, a home he could design and defend, since he was a little boy. After he met Evie and realized it was time to settle down, he’d set about making his dreams a reality. A house, isolated from the nearest human communities, big enough to host not only his immediate family, but every other living relative and maybe a dozen extras. Outbuildings and barns and fences and floodlights. Everything your average small militia needs to feel like they’re not going to be crushed under the heel of “the Man,” only in this case the militia was more like a wildlife conservation convention, and “the Man” was the Covenant of St. George.

Elsie screeched to a stop at the front gate, which was towering, solid, and very locked. Annie hopped out of the car to enter the code. Elsie looked over her shoulder at me.

“Everything all right back there?” she asked. Is my brother alive? her thoughts asked.

When I was a kid, I couldn’t always tell the difference between the questions people asked out loud and wanted you to answer and the questions they thought so loudly that I couldn’t avoid overhearing them. There is a difference. Thoughts can be soft or loud, but they always sound exactly like the person they belong to. There’s no distortion, no getting drowned out by the sounds around them, no getting lost.

“He’s still asleep, but I can hear him,” I said, trying to sound encouraging. “I don’t know enough about head injuries to be absolutely sure what’s going on, but I’ve been with Verity when she had a concussion, and he sounds clearer than she did then.”

Of course, Verity had been awake with a concussion, not knocked cold. I didn’t think saying that to Elsie would be a very good idea.

Elsie’s thoughts were a roil of half-formed notions and questions she couldn’t quite put into words. She opened her mouth, a question starting to crystalize, and stopped as Annie threw herself back into the passenger seat. The gates began creaking open.

“They’re ready for us,” said Annie. “Drive.”

Elsie drove.

The compound “yard” was really more the compound meadow: a long stretch of reasonably flat ground that had been divested of trees and major obstacles, but otherwise left alone. Sometimes the carnival pitched tents there, when they were in town and wanted to visit their extended family. I had spent hundreds of hours there as a kid, racing around with my cousins, shrieking, having the normal childhood that most cuckoos are denied by their territorial, homicidal natures.

My species isn’t inherently evil—my existence, and Mom’s, proves that—but wow can we do a lot of damage when we’re not raised right. And almost none of us are raised right.

All the lights in the main house were on, turning it into a beacon against the grasping hands of night. As we got closer, I felt Evie’s mind snap into focus against mine, the sweet, generous thoughts of my beloved big sister instantly soothing me. If anyone could help Artie, it would be Evie. Kevin’s mind came into focus a few seconds later. We hadn’t spent quite as much time together, since he wasn’t my sibling or someone my own age. Still, he was a stable presence, calm, steady, ready to do whatever needed to be done. I relaxed a little, my hand still resting against Artie’s forehead. They would know what to do. They would fix this.

The other two minds I’d detected in the house were nearby, both bright and unfamiliar and subtly . . . off . . . from the human norm. I didn’t have enough of a grasp of what they were to understand the deviations I was picking up on, but neither of them felt hostile. That would have to be enough.

Elsie whipped down the driveway fast enough to make my shoulders tense, screeching to a stop in front of the porch. Evie and Kevin immediately descended the brick steps, moving toward the car. Evie opened the door next to me, warm welcome radiating from her.

“Hi, Sarah,” she said, leaning quickly in to brush a kiss against my forehead. The brief skin contact let me pick up more of her thoughts. She was frightened but keeping it under rigid control, not wanting to worry Elsie more than she already was. Injuries are common in our family. Injuries bad enough to leave a half-incubus unconscious for an extended period of time are not. “Mom told me you were coming. Can you keep your hands where they are while I check Artie’s pulse? I want you to say something if his thoughts change at all.”

“Sure,” I said. “Mom wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, though. In case I didn’t make it to Oregon.”

“I know, and she told me as much, but I’m out of practice at controlling my thoughts around a cuckoo, so I figured it was best to get things out in the open.” She leaned into the car, checking Artie’s pulse with practiced hands. “She wanted to make sure your room would be ready when you got here. We haven’t had a telepath in residence for years.”

Not since I’d gone and hurt myself. Cuckoos don’t normally make good house guests. “Thank you.”

“You’re family, silly. You don’t thank us for welcoming you home. You thank us for letting you settle in before we put you on the chore rotation.” Evie felt her way along the sides of Artie’s neck and skull before looking at the gash along his cheek. “You bled on him?”

I nodded.

“Good girl. That should slow down any infection enough that we can deal with it. No hospitals needed.”

Taking Artie or Elsie to a hospital was always a fraught thing, since their blood had a tendency to scramble human emotional responses in negative ways. I paused, realizing that the three of us were alone in the car. Elsie was talking to Kevin, and Annie was . . .

“Evie, why is there a monkey?” I asked, in a small, tight voice.

“That’s Sam,” said Evie. She stepped back. “He’s Annie’s boyfriend. He’s a fūri—a kind of yōkai therianthrope. We try not to call him a monkey; he doesn’t like it.”

“I can hear you, you know,” said the monkey—sorry, fūri—without taking his hands off Annie’s waist. He was easily six feet tall, with a tail almost as long as the rest of his body. He was also wearing jeans and a denim jacket, which made him unique among the monkeys I had known.

Humans are a kind of monkey. This was no stranger than Aunt Jane and Uncle Ted, or than Mom and Dad, honestly. Love finds a way.

“Sorry,” I called back. “Didn’t mean to be rude.”

“Hey, Sarah,” said Kevin, stepping up next to Evie. His thoughts radiated joy and concern in almost equal measure. He was as relieved by my return as my sister, which was nice. “Can you get out of the car? We want to move Artie inside.”

“Sure.” I undid my belt, sliding carefully out from under Artie. Kevin answered the question of what I was supposed to do next by ducking in and placing his own hands under Artie’s head, keeping it supported in basically the same position.

I stood, and Evie and Kevin crowded me out, attention focused on getting Artie out of the vehicle without jostling him more than he already had been. I took a step backward, and then another, wrapping my arms tightly around myself. I was still wearing Artie’s jacket. It was too big on me, and I didn’t need the warmth, but I didn’t take it off. Anything that made me feel like I was still anchored would be better than feeling like I was about to float away.

How had everything gone so wrong? And why had the wind only been blowing on one side of the street? Something about that seemed wrong. It seemed like a threat. I just couldn’t figure out what it was.

“So you’re the mysterious Sarah.”

The voice was new. I turned. There was a human man behind me, dark-haired, pale-skinned, and dressed in what I thought of as “mathematician casual”—button-down shirt, dark jeans, a light windbreaker. I got the feeling he didn’t stand out in crowds even when he was dealing with people who could see faces the way humans saw them. His thoughts were curious, wary, concerned, a swirling maelstrom of vaguely negative emotions that made him feel as prickly as a nettle under the questing fingers of my mind.

“I’m James,” he said, apparently reading the blank confusion in my expression. “Annie adopted me after she decided my father didn’t deserve me anymore.”

“He never deserved you in the first place,” called Annie. “You’re a Price now. Deal with it.”

“It’s James Smith, actually,” said James, and extended his hand toward me.

I looked at it warily. “I’m not sure you want to do that,” I said. “Did Annie tell you anything about me, other than ‘that’s Cousin Sarah’?”

He shook his head, hand still outstretched. “She said you’d been injured and were convalescing, and that she hoped I’d have the chance to meet you someday, but that was all.”

James wouldn’t be living at the family compound—or, apparently, be an honorary member of the family—if he hadn’t had a high tolerance for weirdness. From the spiky, almost crystalline edges of his thoughts, I was willing to bet there was something out of the ordinary about him, some little tweak or twist to his DNA that made him safer here than he’d be in the world outside. But he was still human. I could tell that as easily as I could tell that he was breathing. And unlike Evie, who’d grown up in a cuckoo’s house, or the biological members of the family, who’d inherited Fran’s inexplicable resistance to cuckoo influence, he didn’t have any protection from me.

Crap.

“I can’t shake your hand.” I took a big step backward. “I shouldn’t touch you at all, ever. And as soon as we’re done taking care of Artie, you need to ask my sister for an anti-telepathy charm. It’s dangerous to let me into your head.”

His thoughts turned quizzical—and oddly excited. “You’re a telepath?”

“Um. Yes.” Behind me, Evie and Kevin had managed to pull Artie out of the car and were carrying him toward the porch steps. Annie and her boyfriend moved to help. The four of them moved quickly, heading toward the light and warmth of the living room.

I itched to follow. I wanted to know that Artie was okay, and more, I wanted to talk to Evie about what had happened in the woods. If anyone would be able to reassure me, it was going to be her.

“Are you a sorcerer?”

I paused, blinking at James. “What?”

“A sorcerer.” His excitement was growing. “My mother’s journals mentioned that some sorcerers can learn how to project their thoughts, and that it’s a knack, like any of the elemental affinities. Annie and I have been trying to find instructions, but—”

“You want to learn to be telepaths?” This was just getting more confusing.

“Yes, exactly.”

“Um, no.” I shook my head. “I mean, sorry, but no. I can’t teach you. I’m not a sorcerer. I’m sort of . . . not human?”

“Ah.” James laughed, wryly. “Seems like that’s half the people around this place. It’s been a bit of an adjustment.”

“Humans have been the dominant species for so long that they don’t know what it’s like to be outnumbered anymore.” Evie and the others had made it inside. I realized with a start that Elsie was gone, too, following her brother into the house. Sudden suspicion arrowed through me. I narrowed my eyes. “Did Annie ask you to keep me distracted out here?”

James shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Did she tell you why?”

“She said you and Artie have been dancing around each other for years, and she didn’t want to upset you if there was something really wrong with him.” He didn’t even have the good grace to sound sheepish.

I stared at him for a moment, open-mouthed. Then I whirled and ran for the house, shouting, “Get that charm!” over my shoulder. I didn’t slow down to see whether he was following me or staying where he was. I just ran.

---

Houses designed by eccentric cryptozoologists who grew up with a traveling carnival are rare, and they all have one trait in common: they’re idiosyncratic at best, and seriously weird at worst. The family compound fell into the “seriously weird” category. The front door opened, not on a foyer or stairway or other reasonable architectural choice, but on the mudroom connected to the kitchen, on the theory that the kitchen had a lot of flat, relatively sterile surfaces, and most people would either need hot water or food when they got to the house, depending on how injured they were. And as a theory it wasn’t wrong. It was just strange.

I ran into the empty kitchen and looked wildly around, reaching out to try to figure out where my family had gone. There wasn’t any trace of them, which meant they’d continued on to one of the shielded parts of the house. Only the cuckoo-friendly guest room was completely shielded from psychic influence, but there were charms and protections built into various areas, largely because someone who’s injured can make a lot of psychic noise when they wake up, and sometimes that attracts unwanted attention.

“Think, Sarah,” I mumbled. They wouldn’t have wanted to take him up any unnecessary stairs, and Evie would never have allowed a still-bleeding incubus on her couch, not even when it was her nephew. Which meant . . .

I turned toward the pantry door. It was standing very slightly ajar. I walked over and gave it a push, revealing the packed shelves that lined the small, square room, stopping at the door on the back wall. It was almost hidden behind its burden of spice racks, but the knob was visible enough. I turned it, pulling the door open.

The thoughts of my missing family members washed over me like a wave: Elsie scared, Annie angry, Evie and Kevin trying to smother their fear under a veil of calm practicality. Even Sam was there, although his thoughts were still too unfamiliar to betray much beyond his presence. I stepped through the doorway, walking down the short hall on the other side until I reached the recovery rooms. There were three of them, each kept perfectly sterile, each warded against all possible negative influences. Even the dead couldn’t enter the recovery rooms, a fact our collection of friendly family ghosts found annoying, if understandable. There are a lot more hostile spirits than helpful ones.

That’s true of cuckoos, too. That’s why I’ve never taken the anti-telepathy charms personally. At the moment, however, it stung.

Evie looked up when I stepped into the room. Artie was stretched on the bed in the middle of the space—hospital issue, of course. We like to be prepared for any eventuality in this family. He still wasn’t moving, and there was no crackle of his thoughts in the air, no psychic sign that he was there at all.

“Sorry to run off on you like that,” she said, and her thoughts turned her words into a lie, because she wasn’t sorry; she wasn’t sorry at all. She was doing her best not to think about how worried she was, but she was out of practice, and all she was doing was throwing her fear at me, over and over again, like a series of stones. “I wanted to get Artie someplace secure.”

Annie and Sam were on the other side of the room, sitting on the industrial-green couch. Sam had his tail wrapped around Annie’s waist. Elsie was standing next to Evie, one of Artie’s hands clutched in hers. Kevin was at the head of the bed, fussing with the machines hooked to the frame.

Those machines would be hooked to Artie if he didn’t wake up soon. Machines to make sure he kept breathing; machines to make sure he had all the fluid and nutrition he needed. All because I’d come home—and he’d come to the warehouse to meet me. All because I was here.

“Did he crack his skull?” I moved to the head of the bed, shoving myself in next to Kevin. They had already sutured Artie’s cheek, stitching it up with a series of quick, tidy lines. Between that and my blood, he might not even scar. That would be good. People don’t like it when they scar.

“There’s nothing physically wrong enough to be keeping him unconscious,” said Evie. “He’s taken worse hits running around the yard. I’m not sure what’s going on. It could just be shock. He’ll probably wake up soon.”

She didn’t sound like she believed it because she didn’t believe it. Her thoughts were a tangle of fears and concerns, none of them fully formed, all of them centered on the idea that if Artie had just been knocked unconscious, as I had been, he would have woken up already. Something was genuinely wrong.

“I don’t think he’s going to wake up on his own,” I said slowly. “And I don’t think . . . I don’t think it was an accident.”

The room grew tight with tension as everyone turned to look at me. I felt a flicker of unfamiliar thought behind me; James had arrived. That was probably good. It meant I’d only need to explain this once.

“There was another cuckoo at the airport,” I said, eyes on Evie. “A woman. She tried to attack me for trespassing on her territory.”

“I take it she didn’t succeed?” asked Evie.

“I mean, she did attack me,” I said. “She just didn’t win.” Technically, I’d attacked her, turning her ambush around on itself. That was just semantics. She had come into that bathroom intending to do me harm, and that made everything I’d done a matter of self-defense.

“What’s a cuckoo?” asked James.

“I’ll explain later,” said Annie.

A feeling of growing horror slithered through the air, as venomous as any snake. I turned. Sam was looking at me. The horror was coming from him. I sighed, shoulders slumping slightly. This was a complication I hadn’t been expecting in my sister’s house, and one I certainly didn’t need right now.

“Sam knows,” I said.

“I’ve never heard them called ‘cuckoos’ before,” he said, eyes still on me. “But she’s pale and dark-haired and that cut on her forehead isn’t bleeding when it should be. She’s a Johrlac. I thought they were a myth. Something people made up to scare little carnie kids into staying away from weirdoes on the midway. She’s real. They’re real, and one of them is in your house, and I think maybe we should all be running away now.”

“Evie?” I said plaintively.

“Sam, Sarah has always been a Johrlac—a cuckoo—and so is my mother, and she’s a part of this family. No one’s running anywhere.” Evie’s voice was calm, level, and left no room for argument. “We can explain more later, once Artie’s awake. Sarah, why don’t you think Artie will wake up on his own?”

“Because it doesn’t make sense for a cuckoo to attack me in the airport, and then for us to have an accident like that,” I said. “The truck came out of nowhere—I didn’t hear the driver’s thoughts before they hit us. How does that make sense? Our headlights were on. If they’d been drunk, they would have been louder than usual, not quieter. I think the cuckoo I beat up decided she wanted to get back at me, and she set an ambush.”

We’d stayed at the warehouse playing reunion for too long. I should have been more careful, should have treated my family the way I’d treated the strangers who’d carried me from the airport to the city—like potential casualties. But no. I’d been too tired and too happy to see them and too certain that they could handle any threats that came their way. I’d left plenty of time for the cuckoo to find me, figure out who I was with, and make plans to get back at me.

“This is my fault,” I said softly, brushing my fingertips against Artie’s cheek and getting rewarded with another burst of blurry, half-formed thought. “He’s not going to wake up on his own because there’s nothing physically wrong with him.”

“Sarah—” said Evie warningly.

“I’ll be fine,” I said, and closed my eyes, and drove myself into Artie’s thoughts like a knife through ice. The world cracked around me, crystalline and perfect, and I had time for exactly one second thought—I shouldn’t be here—before everything shattered and was still.