Nine

“Nobody gets to pick where they’re born or who they’re born to, but everybody gets to pick their family. Make good choices with yours.”

—Alice Healy

Roving through the family compound, trying not to think about what’s about to happen in the barn

DISSECTION IS A FACT of life—and death—when your whole family is involved with the biological sciences. Evie needs to understand cryptids if she’s going to help heal them. Kevin needs to understand them so he can document them as accurately as possible, an activity that matters both now and in the future. We wouldn’t even know that there used to be two types of wadjet if not for some of the old family notebooks, which meticulously documented the differences between the Egyptian and Indian branches of the species before the Egyptian wadjet disappeared, probably forever.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like it, and it didn’t mean I had to be happy knowing they were about to take a member of my species apart, piece by piece, like she was some sort of puzzle to be solved. People aren’t puzzles. At least, they shouldn’t be.

I found Annie and the others in the kitchen. Both James and Sam had become the sort of blank spot that I associated with anti-telepathy charms, although Annie was as bright and visible as ever. Elsie was sitting on the couch, sullenly drinking a glass of orange juice. It was amazing how much resentment she could direct toward citrus.

“Hi,” I said, offering a small wave to James and Sam. “Now that you have your telepathy blockers, I won’t be able to read your minds. That’s for the best, for all of us, but you should be aware that my brain doesn’t process facial input very well.”

“Meaning?” asked Sam.

“Meaning that if you didn’t have a tail, the two of you would be essentially identical to me.”

Sam and James exchanged a look. “I can’t decide whether that’s racist or just insulting,” said Sam.

“Technically, I think it’s speciesist,” I said. “All humans look basically the same when I can’t read their minds.”

“Okay, definitely insulting,” said Sam. “Not human. Hence the tail.”

“Yes human, hence the no tail, but there are humans with this condition,” said James. “Face blindness is usually a result of something being wired slightly differently in the visual processing center of the brain.”

“Well, I don’t know whether that’s my problem, since we don’t have an MRI, or a reasonable assortment of cuckoos to put in the MRI, but it doesn’t matter, since we’re living with the reality of my situation, not the theory,” I said. “I can recognize voices. I can’t read your expressions, and if you want me to know what you’re thinking—emotionally—you may need to say it out loud, just to be sure.”

“Do we have to wear these things forever?” James plucked at the chain dangling around his neck. “I’ve never been overly fond of jewelry. It gets caught on things, and the chain gets cold.”

“That’s because you’re secretly a snow cone machine who walks like a man,” said Annie fondly. Her mood when she looked at him was a fascinatingly complicated mixture of regret, fellowship, and a fierce fondness that felt very similar to the way she thought about Alex.

“He’s your brother,” I blurted, and paused, feeling the embarrassing tingle in my cheeks that would have been a blush, if I’d had the capillary response to fuel it.

Annie simply nodded. “He is. I found him in a cardboard box labeled ‘free to good home,’ and decided I was going to keep him. He has his own room now and everything.”

“I wish that were less accurate,” muttered James.

Their trio was starting to make more sense now. I offered Annie a wan smile and waved a hand toward the stairs. “I’m going to go find Artie.”

“Good luck with that,” said Elsie. “I’ve looked everywhere. The jerk is hiding.”

“Yeah, but I know he didn’t leave the house—I would have heard him go—and I can’t hear him now, which means there’s only one place he can be.” I started across the room. “I’ll be back down as soon as we’ve hammered this out.”

“Good luck,” called Annie.

I waved vaguely over my shoulder rather than looking back and kept walking.

My family is remarkably effective in the field. We have to be. Hesitate when there’s a Covenant operative or a hungry lindworm in front of you and there’s a good chance you’re going to wind up dead. Not cool. But this means that we’re also incredibly relaxed and disorganized when we don’t have to keep it together. When we relax, we relax, becoming as difficult to herd as a clowder of cats. If I’d stayed to finish saying goodbye, I would have found myself caught in an endless loop of just one more thing, until something important enough to break the cycle happened. Bedtime is an eternal trial.

At least James and Sam had their anti-telepathy charms now. Annie must have explained why they were necessary. Neither of them had seemed afraid of me, but with their minds sealed off, how could I tell?

Sometimes coming from a predatory species really sucks.

A constellation of smaller minds came into focus as I climbed the stairs. They were too small to project very far, although each of them was fully sapient, as complex as any human. Some of them were blurry: we’d never met before. Others were bright, crisp and clear, elders of the colony who knew exactly who I was and would be thrilled to see me home. I took a deep breath, steeling myself. Then I kept climbing.

“HAIL! HAIL THE RETURN OF THE HEARTLESS ONE!”

Aeslin mice are small, but when that many of them shout in tandem, they’re capable of making a hell of a lot of noise. There were at least a hundred mice spread out across the second-floor landing, perched on the bookshelves and clinging to the banister. I stopped, blinking at them. About a third of the gathering wore the colors of Verity’s clergy, bedecked with more feathers than any mouse had any business wearing. The rest were a mixture of the active family liturgies, including a few I didn’t recognize. That made a certain amount of sense. Dominic, Shelby, now Sam and James . . . we’d had a few new additions to the family since the last time I’d been home in Oregon.

“Hello,” I said.

The mice cheered.

Aeslin mice are evolutionary mimics. They look like ordinary field mice, save for slightly larger heads and slightly more developed hands—two attributes most people would never be in a position to notice. They nest like mice, breed like mice, and happily infest the walls of human habitations, again, like mice. It’s just that they do all this while practicing a complicated, functionally inborn religion. Aeslin need to believe in something. Anything. Our family colony believes in, well, the family. We are, and have always been, their objects of worship.

No pressure. I mean, “these adorable, cartoony creatures love and trust you, and believe that you have the power to keep them safe when their species is otherwise functionally extinct” is a perfectly normal situation, right?

“Long have we Awaited your Return,” intoned one of the older mice, stepping to the front of the group. He used a long kitten-bone staff to hold himself upright. From the twinges of pain that laced through his thoughts, I could tell that bipedal locomotion was no longer as easy for him as it had been when he’d been younger. “Hail to the Heartless One! Hail to the Savior of the Arboreal Priestess!”

“Of course I saved her,” I said. “Verity’s my family. I had to.”

“We understand,” said the priest gravely. I frowned. He wasn’t wearing nearly enough feathers. “We also understand that we have been Unfair to you.”

That didn’t make any sense, but he meant it. All the thoughts rising from him were sincere ones. “What do you mean?” I asked. “You helped me locate Verity when she needed me. Well. Not you, exactly, but the splinter colony she had with her in New York. You were totally fair to me.”

“Please.” The priest bowed until his whiskers brushed the floor, easing some of the crackles of pain from his spine. “Please. We seek Forgiveness and Absolution. Allow us to petition you for these things, for only then may we be Properly Made Clean.”

Sometimes the Aeslin ability to make any letter into a capital one was enough to make my head spin. “All right,” I said. “What do you need from me?”

The priest straightened and turned, looking at another, younger mouse. This one was wearing glasses, twists of wire around magnifying lenses that made its tiny oildrop eyes look absolutely enormous. The rest of its livery was nothing I recognized, beads and bits of bone counting out complicated patterns across its back. They almost looked like a Fibonacci sequence. I smiled at the thought.

The younger mouse cleared its—her—throat, forced her whiskers forward, and said, “I am come to petition you, O Heartless One, called Sarah Zellaby, called Cousin Sarah, to Forgive us our trespasses against you, to Forget our refusal to clearly see what was before us, and to Formally Allow us to sanctify the clergy which has been assembled in your Name.”

I blinked. “Um, what?”

“We understand now that we were unwilling to set aside our prejudices and our fears for your species of Birth, and to acknowledge that what matters is not Blood, but Belonging,” said the younger mouse. “You are a daughter of this line, as truly as any who have been Born to it. You carry in your motions the Grace of Beth, the Forgiveness of Caroline, the Canniness of Enid, the Viciousness of Frances, the Determination of Alice, and the Persistence of Evelyn. You are a Priestess, and have always been, and we are sorry not to have seen it before now.”

I gaped at her, unable to figure out how I was supposed to respond to that, or whether there was a good response.

The mouse sat back on her haunches, whiskers still pushed forward as she focused her full attention on me. “We have assembled as much as we can of your catechisms, for you have never been a stranger here. Will you allow me to lead your temple, to learn your mysteries, and to reveal them to the acolytes who come before us with time, ready to pledge themselves unto your divinity?”

I stood there in silence for a long moment—long enough that the mice began to mutter nervously amongst themselves, their thoughts radiating concern and fear of rejection. Me? They wanted me?

If I didn’t say something soon, this was going to get ugly. I swallowed my fear and confusion and asked, “Are you sure? I’m not—I mean, all the other priestesses are—”

“The Polychromatic Priestess is not human, nor ever aspires to be,” said the younger mouse, sounding relieved. “Her veins carry the blood of the Lilu, and still she stands beside her family, and still she cares for them as well as any other of her kin or kind. Nor was the Violent Priestess fully human, for all that none has ever Learned precisely what else she drew from, and that inhumanity has kept her bloodline safe from the crueler of the Heartless, for their claws find little purchase on family minds. You will not be the First. You will not be the Last. Will you permit us to worship you as well as you deserve, and to be held in the regard we have always owed to you?”

The mice looked at me, whiskers vibrating, radiating hope, and I gave them the only answer I could:

“Yes.”

Their cheers could have woken the dead.

---

I’m not sure how long I spent on the stairs with the rejoicing mice. Eventually, Annie poked her head around the corner, called, “Celebratory cheese and cake in the kitchen!” and withdrew, leaving me to stand fast against the sudden rodent tide. I wasn’t sure she knew what the mice were celebrating, just that they were, and I couldn’t get past them.

A priestess. Me. A Priestess, as the mice would put it, slapping on that all-important capital letter. They didn’t have priestesses among their clergy, only priests, regardless of sex, showing how confusing they found human gender roles. Everything they did, they did because it was tradition, and this colony’s traditions had started with Beth Evans, a British farmwife and member of the Covenant of St. George who had been willing to bend her own traditions far enough to offer safety and succor to a small group of talking mice. According to Covenant law, she should have killed them on sight, condemning them for the crime of being unusual and unnatural and all the other things the Covenant didn’t approve of. She had refused to be recognized as a god, saying that it was improper for a woman to set herself above her husband, and so generations of labels had been indelibly set.

Watching Annie argue with the mice had always been a fun way to kill an afternoon when we were kids. She’d wanted to be a goddess—of course she had—and she’d wanted me to be a priestess, and Artie had been willing to give up his titles altogether if it meant the mice would stop shouting every time he came into a room. But the mice had always been firm on the idea that I could never be a priestess, because I wasn’t human and wasn’t a Price and was a member of a predatory species. And now I was a priestess.

I walked slowly along the silent hall, trying to wrap my head around the idea. Apparently, saving Verity’s life had been enough to make the mice change their tune. It was weird. I didn’t know if I liked it. But I knew that it would make Verity happy, and Annie, and probably Evie. That was what mattered. More than anything else, that was what mattered.

The door to my room was at the very end of the hall, near the stairway to the attic. It was closed. I hesitated for a moment, looking at it, before I took a deep breath and turned the knob, pushing the door open.

The room on the other side was good-sized, with pale green walls and a dark green carpet. Like most of the house, it was furnished in mismatched oak. Kevin liked to go to thrift stores and yard sales, find the sturdiest, most battered pieces he could, and then restore and refinish them out in the workshop. It meant nothing quite went together, but everything could be used to barricade doors or smashed for makeshift weapons if a situation suddenly went south. My family doesn’t believe in single-use décor when there’s another option available.

I didn’t mind the fact that the bedframe, desk, and dresser all looked like they’d come from different decades and schools of interior design. It made the room feel homey, like I lived here even when I wasn’t living here.

Artie was sitting on the bed.

I stopped in the doorway, looking at him, letting the soothing background radiation of his thoughts wash over me. Maybe it was weird to use him to calm myself down enough to deal with him, but weird is sort of what we do. Weird is normal, for us.

His attention was focused on his laptop, but he knew I was there, and was doing his best not to think about me. Naturally, this meant that the longer I waited, the more he couldn’t stop thinking about me. It was a vicious cycle. Finally, he looked up from his screen, radiating a combination of angry wanting and desperate unhappiness. It stung a little. It didn’t sting as much as his absence had.

“Can’t I get, like, five minutes of peace around here?” he asked. “Five minutes. That’s all I’m asking for. Is that too much?”

“It is when you look for peace by literally hiding in my room, yeah,” I said. “You do remember that this is my room, right?”

“We carved our initials into the bedframe when we were eleven,” he said, lowering the lid so that he could see me better. “When we decided we were going to be best friends forever.”

“Annie was so mad about that,” I said. “She told her mom, and Evie made us sand and varnish the whole frame, because it’s not safe to leave proof that something used to belong to you.”

“Move like ghosts, disappear when you leave,” said Artie, half-agreement and half-repetition of one of the many warnings that had haunted our childhoods. With a sigh, he closed the laptop and set it aside. “I know this is your room, but I can’t leave until my folks do, since my car’s all smashed-up and not here. I’m going to be dealing with mechanics for the rest of the year.”

I winced. “Um. About that.”

Artie’s thoughts turned wary. “It’s not smashed-up?”

“It was.”

“Now it’s. . . ?”

“Annie set it on fire.” His mouth dropped open, shock rolling off him in a wave. I put my hands up, like that would be enough to ward it off. “She had to! You’d bled all over the inside of the cab, and there was no other way to make sure some hiker or police officer wouldn’t come along, get a whiff of you, fall in love, and track you down to kidnap you. Remember what happened when you came to the mathletes competition with me?”

“Like I could ever forget,” he mumbled uncomfortably. His shock tempered itself into a more customary level of discomfort and discontent. “Why couldn’t I have inherited a nice, normal genetic condition? Annie sets things on fire with her mind. Sam turns into a big terrifying monkey-dude. Something nice and simple, like that, instead of ‘congrats, if someone’s into dudes, they’re into you, whether they want to be or not.’”

“It’s not fair,” I said. This was an old song. I knew which lyrics were mine.

“It’s not!” Artie shoved his laptop aside, turning so that he was facing the wall. I couldn’t read his expressions, but a lifetime of trying to keep them under control meant that sometimes he didn’t want me to see them anyway. “It’s not fair. It’s not fair that I can’t have friends without worrying about making them fall in love with me by mistake, and it’s not fair that Dad didn’t think about whether his kids would be able to control their pheromones before he went and married Mom, and it’s not fair that I never get to know whether—”

He caught himself, but the thought was already fully formed. It escaped despite his best intentions. Whether anyone really likes me, or whether it’s just these stupid pheromones.

I winced and walked over to the bed, sitting carefully on the very edge and facing the wall. Humans get weird when people focus on them during moments of emotional distress, and Artie, despite his biology, is very much culturally human. We all are, these days. We never had a choice in the matter.

“I really like you,” I said softly.

Artie didn’t say anything.

“I don’t know how many times we have to go over this. Your pheromones don’t work on me. I’m too biologically different.”

“You’re a mammal,” he said. “You have hair, you have three bones inside your inner ear, you can—” He caught himself, suddenly radiating embarrassment.

“Lactate, yes; so I’ve been told. Not that it’s ever going to happen. Can you imagine me hanging around with a cuckoo man long enough to get pregnant, even if I wanted children?” I shuddered. “If I want to subject myself to toxic people, I’ll just read the comments on literally any article about female-led comic book properties. It’ll be a fun reminder of why I should never, ever read the comments.”

“Your life is reading the comments.”

“Yes, and the things people think when they don’t know anyone can hear them are even worse than the things they’re willing to write down. Thanks but no thanks.” I took a deep breath, still staring at the dresser. “We’re getting away from the point, Artie. I’m a mammal, maybe, but I’m not a mammal from anywhere around here. You’re a mammal from around here.”

“That’s not what Dad thinks,” Artie said. “He thinks Johrlac aren’t the only ones who figured out a way to move between dimensions.”

“Okay, not from around here, but maybe from the next town over,” I said. “It’s close enough. Lilu are cross-fertile with humans. That means you can’t have traveled far.”

“It’s the cross-fertility that’s the problem,” said Artie.

“I don’t know. I think I like a world with you in it better than I’d like a world without you.”

Silence answered me, broken by the slow, roiling boil of his thoughts, which were too jumbled and fragmentary to let me pull anything specific out of them. Most people are like that, most of the time. Humans don’t walk around narrating their actions to themselves unless they’re trying not to forget a step in some unfamiliar chore; I’ve seen Annie load the dishwasher, wipe down the counters, and make herself a sandwich, all while thinking about nothing but the plot of some anime she’s been watching. Conscious thought and habitual action aren’t always friends.

Finally, Artie said, “I don’t want to have never existed. I just wish parts of this weren’t so hard.”

“They’re hard for everyone.”

“Try having everybody you meet fall in love with you even when they don’t want to.”

I twisted around, finally looking at him. “You mean the reason they really kept me in the house for five years? That’s what cuckoos do. You want to talk about violation? You make people fall in love with you. Fine. Only really, they’re falling in lust with you, and that’s gross, it’s icky and inappropriate and unfair, but all you have to do is walk away from them. You’ve been you for your entire life. How many people have you taken advantage of?”

Artie shook his head. “None.”

“I took advantage of at least four people today. That’s how I got here. And yeah, I tried to make sure they were people who deserved to be taken advantage of, but you know how I did that? I rooted around inside their heads, in their private thoughts, where they thought they were safe, and I found the things that would convince me it was okay to do whatever I wanted to them. I’m so much worse than you are. All I need to do is let my guard down and everyone falls in love with me. The whole world falls in love with me. I just have to want it and it’s mine. You really want to tell me you’re worse? Really?”

“At least you can go outside,” he said, refusing to meet my eyes.

“So could you, if you wanted to learn how to deal with what you are,” I snapped. “Elsie goes outside. Elsie spends all her time with roller derby girls. She has the same pheromones you do. She has the same problems dealing with humans as you do. She still dates. She still talks to people. You’re making choices, Artie. Here’s a fun one for you: if you’d been willing to choose to fly to Ohio, and choose to take a cab to the house, Mom would never have left you standing on the porch. You could have come to me a long time ago. So why didn’t you?”

He stared at me, trembling, eyes so wide that even I could pick up on his distress. Finally, in a small voice, he said, “You didn’t want me there.”

I considered closing my eyes. It wouldn’t do me any good. He’d still be in the room if I did that, thoughts still audible, turmoil still echoing through my head like a small, captive storm. I clenched my hands in the covers, balling them between my fingers until my wrists began to ache.

“I wanted you there,” I said. “Every day, I wanted you there. Except on the days when I was afraid that I’d never be myself again, because I was too broken, and I knew that if you came, you’d turn around and walk away and never want to talk to me again. And I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t survive that. That’s why I didn’t ask you. It’s why I didn’t beg. I wanted to beg. I knew I couldn’t beg. If I begged, you might actually come, and if you came, you’d never want to see me again, and if I lost you on top of everything else, that would be it. I’d be done. I’d be over. I couldn’t lose my best friend. I couldn’t, I couldn’t, I couldn’t—”

Artie suddenly leaned over and grabbed my hands, pressing them deeper into the mattress. I stopped talking and stared at him. He stared back.

This close, I could see every detail of his irises, every line and tiny gradation of color. They were beautiful. I didn’t need to be able to read his expression to know that they were beautiful, or that I wanted to keep staring at them for the rest of my life.

With his skin touching mine, his mind was barely shy of an open book. He was thinking of how much he’d missed me, how much he hated that I was right, and how wrong I was at the same time, because he would never have run away from me, no matter how broken I’d been; he would never have rejected me, because he . . .

He.

And here it was again, the thing I’d felt from him downstairs, the thing I hadn’t been ready to deal with then. The thing I wasn’t ready to deal with now. The thing I might never be ready to deal with.

“No, you don’t,” I said miserably. “You think you do, because I’m a cuckoo. You can’t help it.”

“My pheromones don’t work on you,” he said. “That’s what you keep telling me over and over, like it matters. I can’t force you to do anything you don’t want to do.”

Silent, I nodded.

“Do you remember my side of the family tree?”

“Um,” I said slowly. “Your father is Theodore Harrington. Your mother is Jane Price.”

“And her mother was?”

“Alice Price.”

“And her mother was?”

“Frances Price.”

“Frances Price,” repeated Artie. “Not even the mice know where she came from. She was found as a baby and raised by the carnival and she married Jonathan Price and they were happy. They were really, really happy.”

Slowly, I started to understand what he was saying. “And when they met a cuckoo, Jonathan got caught, and Fran didn’t.”

Artie nodded. “Fran didn’t. Fran was resistant. We still don’t know why, because we don’t know anything about her side of the family tree, but Fran was resistant. And her daughter is resistant. And her kids are resistant. Which means I . . .”

“You’re resistant.” I bit my lip, staring fixedly at him. “You don’t get caught.”

“No. I don’t get caught.” He looked down at his hands, still clasped over mine. “Even when it would be easier, I don’t get caught, because whatever it is you do to peoples’ heads, I’m resistant to it. Because of who my great-grandmother was.”

“I don’t like you because of your pheromones,” I whispered.

“I don’t like you because you changed my mind so I wouldn’t have a choice,” he said.

“I like you, though,” I said. “I like you . . . I really like you, really a lot.” The words didn’t feel big enough for the way I felt about him. They felt too big to be comfortable. I was teetering on the edge of the sort of thing that couldn’t be taken back once it was said, the sort of thing that could change everything, because sometimes people didn’t want to hear it. Sometimes people just wanted to go on pretending they couldn’t see the things that were right in front of their faces.

“I like you, too,” said Artie.

I bit my lip. “So now what?” I asked. “Do we . . . I don’t want you to hide from me. I wouldn’t have come back if I wanted you to hide from me. I don’t want you to do anything that makes you uncomfortable, but I can’t be here if you’re going to—”

He kissed me. Hands still locked over mine, pressing them down against the mattress, he leaned over and he kissed me. My eyes widened, very briefly, before they closed, before I melted into him like this was the thaw I’d been waiting for all my life, because I stopped trying to keep him out of my mind and myself out of his and let us come crashing together, him into me and me into him and he was kissing me, he was kissing me, his lips were on mine and my lips were on his and he was kissing me.

Then he pulled away with a soft hiss, letting go of my hands at the same time. The sudden loss of connection was dizzying. I blinked at him, half dazed and utterly confused.

“Sorry,” he said, rubbing his cheek and wincing. “I sort of forgot I had seventeen stitches in my face. Um. Ow?”

“Oh,” I said, and started laughing. Artie blinked at me, his bemusement hanging almost audible in the air. I shook my head. “I forgot, too. I forgot you got hurt, I forgot I got hurt, I forgot the whole—I forgot.”

“That’s a lot of forgetting,” said Artie. He started laughing, too, and leaned forward until our foreheads were touching. Some of the feeling of connection came springing back, but not all of it; not enough to be anything more than pleasant. I could feel his thoughts, a distant swirl of confusion, delight, and disbelief.

“I had other things on my mind,” I said. He laughed again. I leaned in, intending to go for a second kiss before this mysterious interlude into everything I’d ever wanted came crashing to an end.

Someone cleared their throat behind me. I pulled back and whipped around. James was standing in the doorway, one hand still raised to knock.

“What,” said Artie flatly. He didn’t sound happy.

“I lost the coin toss,” said James. “I was tasked to, and I am quoting here, ‘sneak up there while they can’t hear you coming and see whether they’ve figured their shit out.’ Was your shit making out like teenagers? Because if so, you appear to have figured it out, and I will hopefully never be asked to do anything like this ever again.”

“So you’re leaving,” said Artie.

“Sadly, no,” said James. “I would pay almost anything to not be standing here right now. Unfortunately for me, your Aunt Evelyn wants to see you. Downstairs. Now.”

“Why?” I asked. I was having a hard time imagining anything more urgent than what we’d been doing.

“They’ve finished their initial autopsy.” His voice turned grim. “There’s apparently some information she feels you need to have.”

Well. Anything but that.