“Once you make the carnival your home, you’ll always belong there. The boneyard remembers your stride. The midway remembers the sound of your laughter. Once a carnie, always a carnie.”

—Frances Brown

Passing through Michigan, just crossing the borders into Buckley Township, crammed into the back of a retro travel trailer hitched to a car that’s working well above its weight class

WE WERE BARELY OVER the boundary into Buckley when James’ car began making a horrifying rattling noise, as if the engine had abruptly been replaced by one of those old-fashioned rock tumblers, the kind they sell to elementary schools to teach kids that pebbles can be beautiful. He yelped and pulled over to the side of the road, taking his feet away from the pedals and leaning back in his seat like he was afraid the car was getting ready to explode.

“Is that a good noise?” I asked, half-hopefully.

Slowly, he swiveled around to stare at me like I had just asked the stupidest question in the world’s long history of stupid questions. “No,” he said, in a tone that made it clear he wasn’t humoring me, the way he sometimes did when he tripped over one of my rich veins of unexpected ignorance. “That is a very, very bad noise. That is a noise that means, potentially, we’re not going to be leaving here for quite some time.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay, well, that’s not great.”

James punched the steering wheel.

“I’ll just go update the others,” I said, and opened my door, unbuckling my belt as I swung my legs out of the car and slid from my seat into the crisp autumn air.

We’d been driving for four days, not quite solid, making worse time than we would have if we hadn’t been constantly distracted by the world, and if James had ever been outside the small town where he’d been born. America is a lot bigger than New Gravesend, Maine, and he was seeing it for the first time. If anyone had been primed to actually want to buy tickets to every roadside attraction in existence, it was him.

For the most part, I didn’t begrudge him our winding, weaving track across the country. As I’d expected, on our second day on the road, we had run into someone who’d been hunting for a car exactly like Cylia’s avocado-colored monstrosity for years. He’d been happy to trade us for our new-old travel trailer, which was actual retro, and not something new designed to look like it wasn’t. It was both surprisingly light and surprisingly palatial, with beds for four, a small kitchenette, and a bathroom. He’d thrown in all the accoutrements, and fifteen hundred dollars, all to sweeten the deal. I had no idea what could make a man want the world’s ugliest muscle car that badly, but I was glad he had. It made things a lot easier on the rest of us.

It meant that James was doing the bulk of the driving since he didn’t entirely trust Cylia with his car, and I didn’t drive. Sam did, but he was enjoying the chance to lounge around the trailer in full fūri form, rather than forcing himself to look human while he was behind the wheel. Fern didn’t drive at all, which made sense. When you belong to a species whose response to being threatened involves shedding most of your personal density, driving isn’t the safest activity.

I walked around to the trailer and stepped up onto the bumper, banging three times on the door before swinging it open and letting myself inside. “Knock three times” isn’t the best signal I’ve ever come up with, but since I’ve been riding in the car with James to keep him from stopping at every fruit stand in the Midwest, I didn’t want to institute anything that would slow down getting to the bathroom when we did stop.

Sam was sitting on the trailer’s narrow couch, not having bothered to shift back to artificial humanity. I bumped the door shut with my hip, struggling not to smile sappily at him. I didn’t really succeed.

Sam Taylor is the best accident I’ve ever had. His grandmother, Emery Spenser, is the current owner of the Spenser and Smith Family Carnival, which happened to have been the location of my assignment with the Covenant of St. George, a global organization of monster hunters that would have absolutely loathed every single person on our little road trip of the damned. Most of them would have only considered me and James to actually be people; we’re sorcerers, but that doesn’t actually expel us from the human race, even if I might sometimes wish it did. Fern’s a sylph, Cylia’s a jink, and Sam’s a fūri, although his grandmother’s a human. By all reports, his mother was, too. Fūri are one of the rare cryptid types to be actually genetically compatible with humans. It’s like how sometimes lions and tigers can breed, even though they’re very different species.

Sam’s default form is sort of “hot monkey guy,” although his simian features aren’t as pronounced as that implies. His hair is more like fur—dark, dark brown tipped in a slightly lighter shade; his ears are large and rounded, and his hands and feet are equally dexterous and larger than those of a human man. Most noticeable is his long, prehensile tail, which is strong enough for him to swing from, even when he’s carrying me. Which happens fairly often. He has more muscle density than a human man of similar height and weight, developed and honed by years spent on the flying trapeze. He hates shoes, bananas, and spending too much time around humans. He loves sweatpants, boring English classics, and me.

That last one has been the hardest for me to adjust to. I was always voted the least likely of my generation to fall in love or settle down—and that includes my cousin Artie the incubus, who seems destined to die alone in the basement of his parents’ house, thanks to a near-pathological fear of getting close to any girl he’s not related to. It’s not healthy, but hey. He’s family. Besides, I hadn’t been at the carnival looking for a boyfriend. I’d been looking for the source of a string of mysterious deaths and disappearances that had gone on long enough to attract the attention of the Covenant of St. George. I’d been undercover with them, pretending to be a trainee, and since my cover story had involved a carnival background, they had sent me to figure out exactly what was happening.

Carnivals and traveling shows have long been a haven for cryptids who could almost pass as human, but who had needs, attributes, or abilities that would inevitably unmask them to the locals. By hiding behind the mask of the sideshow or pretending to be skilled human athletes, they could keep themselves from becoming targets. They could live happy, functional lives without anyone becoming the wiser. That’s the principle by which the Campbell Family Carnival has always operated. I spent my summers there when I was a kid, falling in love with the flying trapeze and setting snares for my cousins, who took too long to learn to respect my need for personal space. Sending me to Spenser and Smith had seemed like the best possible choice.

Maybe it wasn’t for the Covenant, but it was for me. I had found the woman responsible for the murders, a carnival performer named Umeko who had discovered her own true nature as a Jorōgumo relatively late in life, and with no other members of her species around to help her. The transition hadn’t been easy. She’d started assaulting, and then eating, people who caught her eye, drawing the Covenant’s attention and resulting in my assignment to the show.

Sam had been the first person to find me skulking around the carnival boneyard, and he hadn’t liked me being there. Growing up a cryptid in an insular, largely human community left him with a deeply ingrained distrust of strangers, and he’d known almost from the beginning that I was lying to him. Chalk it up to his naturally suspicious nature and move on. I did.

Despite his suspicions, I’d managed to play along for long enough that he’d realized I was smart, funny, and reasonably unflappable, and he’d asked me on a date. I’d already known he was a fūri by that point, thankfully. I don’t think our burgeoning relationship would have survived if he’d learned that I was working for the Covenant before I’d known that he wasn’t human. But it had, and he’d left his family and the carnival behind to follow me to Florida when the situation forced me to go into hiding for the sake of everyone I’d ever cared about—him included.

Sometimes being a cryptozoologist is even more complicated than it ought to be. Because, see, my family hates the Covenant like nobody’s business. We’re mostly human, apart from some of my cousins, and my mother’s adoptive parents. And sure, I’m a sorcerer, but I get that from my Grandpa Thomas, who was a full-fledged member of the Covenant before he turned on them, so you’d think they’d be used to it. Nope. Magic is “unnatural,” so in their eyes, I’m little better than a cryptid myself. Probably worse, since I’m voluntarily banging one, and that makes me a traitor to the human race.

Treachery has amazing abs. I’m just saying.

“Where are Cylia and Fern?” I asked, looking around the small space. The trailer, despite being split into the “living area,” “sleeping area,” bathroom, and kitchenette, is slightly smaller than my bedroom back in Oregon. There wasn’t a lot of space to hide.

“They’re taking a nap,” said Sam, gesturing toward the closed curtain across the sleeping area. “Are we at another fruit stand?”

“No. The car made a really terrible noise, and James is upset, and we’re not moving anymore, and where are you going?”

Sam was standing, reaching for the jacket he had thrown carelessly across the arm of the couch. “I know a few things about engines, thanks to all the maintenance I had to do back at the carnival. I can probably help him out. Where are we?”

“Michigan.”

He wrinkled his nose. “Why are we in Michigan? I thought we were cutting down toward Ohio to shave off a few hours.”

“My family’s originally from Michigan,” I said. “We still have a house here.”

He perked up. “Great! Maybe we can take real showers before the smell in here gets strong enough to owe us gas money.” He grabbed his shoes from the floor and started for the back door, pulling them on and shifting into his human form at the same time as he walked. Unlike a normal person, he was coordinated enough to do all three things without tripping and falling on his face. Oh, the joys of dating a man who breaks all human laws of athletic grace.

The genuine joys, under most circumstances. He wasn’t being unreasonable. He just didn’t understand what he was getting into, doing essentially anything in Buckley.

My grandparents met there, when the Covenant sent my grandfather to spy on my great-grandparents. He was a sorcerer, too, so I guess in some ways, his relationship with my Grandma Alice was a nice mirror of my relationship with Sam. He eventually quit the Covenant in order to marry her, but not until after he’d been tricked into making a bargain with the crossroads. Just thinking about them was enough to steal the remnants of my good humor. Sure, they’re dead, and they’re going to stay that way if the anima mundi has anything to say about it, but they did a lot of damage to my family while they were still around.

We lost Grandpa. Not to death, which would have been understandable and ordinary and something we might have been able to collectively get over. No, I mean we lost him, through a hole in the wall of the world that swallowed him down in the middle of the night while Grandma Alice was pregnant with my Aunt Jane, whose impending arrival was the only thing that prevented Grandma from immediately jumping into the hole and going after him. As soon as she’d recovered from labor, she’d dumped both her children on our Aunt Laura, yet another in the string of aunts, uncles, and cousins who aren’t actually biologically related to us.

Dad and Aunt Jane grew up essentially as wards of the Campbell Family Carnival, and I know that Aunt Jane at least still considers the carnies more her family than her own mother. Grandma has never been able to regain ground with her biological children, even though all us grandkids love her desperately. So in a way, the crossroads cost us both of them.

Buckley Township, Michigan, is one of those places that gets talked about in hushed tones whenever there’s a census, a place where people die young and weirdly. If it wasn’t rural and reasonably poor, it would probably be empty by now—or maybe not. People can become surprisingly attached to their homes and don’t want to leave them for what they view as silly reasons. “Silly” can mean everything from “bank foreclosure” to “rabid jackalopes ate the neighbors, and now they’re coming for us.” So Buckley endures, even if it doesn’t precisely thrive, and while new people don’t often move to town, the ones who already live there don’t leave, and neither do their children. If those children die at a rate slightly higher than the national average, well, their deaths are almost always accidental.

Aunt Mary died in Buckley. So did Aunt Rose. So did all my Grandma Alice’s biological relatives. She’s the last branch of her original family tree, and the existence of some distaff cousins with the Covenant in England won’t unbury all the bodies in Buckley.

Somewhat clumsily, I said, “The house isn’t the sort of place where people generally go to get naked. Not unless they’re local teens doing it on a dare. It’s sort of, potentially, I don’t know, well, evil.”

Sam’s eyes widened. “How is a house evil? Is it haunted? Because I thought you had a pretty good relationship with your dead aunts.”

“No. If anything, it’s the opposite of haunted. Ghosts don’t go there if they have any choice in the matter. Aunt Rose won’t even cross the threshold. Aunt Mary will sometimes, but it makes her really sad, so we try not to ask her to do that. She knew my grandfather.” They were friends, even though they didn’t meet until after she was already dead—which means there’s a very good chance she was the one who handled the crossroads bargain that eventually claimed him. The crossroads were cruel that way. It’s a damn good thing that they’re gone and won’t have the opportunity to be cruel to anyone else.

“It was your grandfather’s house?” Sam stopped in front of the back door, folding his arms and frowning. All his attention was focused on me, to the point that he didn’t notice when the curtain behind him twitched aside.

I nodded. “The Covenant bought it for him when they assigned him to Buckley Township to keep an eye on my grandmother and her family. There were four of them when he arrived in Michigan: Grandma, her father, and his parents. Three generations crammed into one big farmhouse. We still own that one, too, but we rent it out to a nice human family, and they don’t like it when we show up without warning them first. I guess they’re afraid of being evicted.”

“Or possibly being shot,” said Cylia, voice still groggy with the remnants of her nap. She slid off the top bunk and dropped down to the trailer floor. “We’ve stopped.”

“The engine did an awful thing, and James thinks it might be dead,” I said. “Sam was just going out to see whether he could grease monkey his way to a solution.” I stopped and grimaced. “Sam, I’m sorry, that wasn’t an intentional pun, it just sort of . . . slipped out.”

“Uh-huh. See if I wash my hands after replacing the transmission.” Sam finally opened the back door and stepped outside.

“You will. You hate being dirty even more than I do,” I called back before he could close the door.

The last thing I heard from the outside was his scoff. Then the door slammed shut, and I turned back to Cylia.

“You didn’t tell us to be on the lookout for a bad luck event,” I said.

“Because we weren’t in debt,” she countered. “Sometimes things just happen, even when you’re traveling with a jink.”

Cylia Mackie looks perfectly human: tall, blonde, and slender, with cheekbones that could cut glass and freckles on her nose. It’s parallel evolution. She’s a primate, sure, but her species branched from humanity a long damn time ago. Jinks can sense, see, and manipulate luck, treating it like a pool they use to manipulate the probability of the world around them. Smart jinks, like Cylia, try to keep things as balanced as possible, only spending their good luck when they have enough that the backlash won’t be immediate and fatal. Her husband, Tav, died when he got the balance wrong, suffering a massive heart attack right in front of her.

Having Cylia along on our trip had been a godsend so far. Because of her, we’d been able to acquire our precious travel trailer, avoid speed traps, and not get food poisoning from the gas station sushi. All little pieces of good luck that could have happened to anyone, but which had consistently been happening to us since we left Maine.

Of course, that could easily mean that we were due for something catastrophic. Breaking down in Buckley certainly qualified.

“This isn’t on me,” she said. “If we’d had this much bad luck attached to us, I would have warned you. I wouldn’t have done anything to prevent it, but I wouldn’t have let it be a surprise, either.” She folded her arms and glowered at me. “Antimony Price, I thought we were past the point of mistrusting each other without a damn good reason.”

“Sorry, Cylia,” I said, shamefaced. She was right. After facing down the evil cabal controlling one of the country’s biggest theme parks and going toe-to-toe with the crossroads, we had reached a point where trusting each other needed to be the default, and not some sort of aberration. “It just came out of nowhere.”

“And you’re used to me controlling the luck, I got it,” said Cylia. She turned back to the sleeping nook, tugging the curtains open wider until the light from the rest of the trailer penetrated the artificial gloom. “Fern! Wakey-wakey!”

A small, sleepy sound of protest came from the darkest corner of the bed right before a dainty hand shot out, grabbed the curtain, and yanked it shut again. Cylia laughed. I grinned.

The fifth member of our little expedition, Fern, is a sylph, capable of controlling her personal density to such a degree that she can either float or punch holes in insufficiently solid floors. Despite being a dainty little thing, we’ve clocked her as weighing up to six hundred pounds when she wants to, all thanks to tweaking her own mass. The laws of physics are not invited to a lot of sylph parties, nor would they attend if they were.

Sylphs are relatively harmless, density parlor tricks notwithstanding. Unlike the fūri and the jinks, they didn’t have any way to defend themselves when the Covenant came calling, and so their population took an even greater hit. I don’t know how many sylphs are left in the world. I don’t think any cryptozoologist does. I’ve learned more about Fern’s species by hanging out with her than I ever could have from book research, and that’s only part of why I have almost no human friends.

“Fern,” said Cylia, leaning close to the curtain. “Showers, Fern. Hot water. A real kitchen. Pancakes.” She drew the last word out until it turned obscene.

Fern yanked the curtains open again. “I’m listening,” she said sullenly. Then she blinked. “We’re not moving. Why aren’t we moving? Are we in Oregon already?”

“We’ve been making good time, but not bullet train time, so no,” I said. “We’re in Michigan right now. Near my old family homestead, in fact, which means we’re also near one of my grandmother’s favorite bars. How do you feel about getting a drink?”

Fern blinked at me, looking confused. Cylia grinned.

“Finally, you’re speaking my language,” she said. “Let’s go.”

---

According to Sam, the engine had thrown a rod and would need to be replaced. James was distraught and unwilling to take the easy way out, which would have involved abandoning his car in Michigan while we grabbed a new junker off of Craigslist. Not even Cylia’s reassurances that the new car would prove to be remarkably resilient were enough to sway him. His car was one of the only things he had left in the world, and he was holding onto it.

I could sort of see where he was coming from. During my self-imposed exile from my family, I’d been incredibly protective of the few things I had to call my own. Come to think of it, I still was. I’d just expanded that list to include three cryptids and an untrained sorcerer from Maine. I should learn to pick more portable souvenirs.

Anyway, James had elected to stay with the car and call the local mechanic while the four of us went down to the Red Angel for a frosty glass of whatever was on tap. He’d get towed to the shop down on Lakeside Drive, and we’d join him there once we were done at the Angel.

The fact that I knew it was an easy walk, and that we’d have no trouble finding the place, was our first real piece of evidence that maybe breaking down in Buckley had been a better thing than breaking down in some town big enough to have a Motel 6 to call its own.

I waved to James before turning to lead Cylia, Sam, and Fern across the field between the state highway and Old Orchard Road. I wasn’t a Buckley native by any measure—no one in my generation was—but we’d all been visiting since childhood, and I could get myself to the big landmarks without too much trouble. The old Healy house, which we rented out to keep it from sitting empty and falling into disrepair; the old Parrish place, which Grandma Alice maintained mainly for her own use, and which was too cursed and overrun by tailypo to ever fall apart; the police station; the mechanic; the Red Angel. Maybe taking your kids to see the local bar is weird, but my parents did it anyway, the summer I was twelve years old. It was important. My family has a longstanding relationship with the Red Angel, and they weren’t going to let a little thing like the legal drinking age get in the way.

“You know I can’t actually drink, right?” asked Sam, stepping over a large rock in the field.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s hard to stay tense when I’m buzzed,” he said, waving a hand to indicate the still apparently human length of his body.

Most therianthropes—shapeshifting cryptids— default to their human forms and have to concentrate to change out of them. Fūri work the other way around. Sam has described the sensation of holding human form as being like fighting to hold in a sneeze that never quite comes.

I grinned at him. “You don’t need to worry about that.”

“Hold up, hold up,” said Cylia, grabbing the back of my shirt and using it to pull herself forward, miraculously not choking me in the process. “Are you telling me that there’s a cryptid bar in this middle-of-nowhere town?”

“I was hoping to surprise you, but if you really need to know, then yes, I’m telling you precisely that.”

“Holy crap,” said Cylia, with relish. “I would never have guessed.”

“Yeah, well, people take privacy seriously out here. Not like they do on the coasts, where there’s enough weirdness in the background radiation of daily life to cover up for a certain amount of slipping.” I reached back and twitched my shirt out of her fingers. She laughed and slung her arm around my shoulders.

“Anyway, the Red Angel has been here for more than a hundred years, and apart from one tiny little incident where my great-grandmother used a shotgun to knock when she was looking for her daughter, the owners have always been on good terms with my family.”

We had reached the edge of the field, which gave way to the gravelly, dubiously level surface of Old Orchard Road. I still made a small sound of relief as I stepped onto it, causing Fern to shoot me a surprised look.

“Do they not believe in asphalt in Buckley?” she asked.

“Oh, they do, on the roads that are actually inside the town limits, but out here, the rural roads, those are mostly left alone unless they develop bad enough potholes to be legitimately dangerous. And I’d say we have a few more bad rainy seasons before anyone’s willing to call the graveler out this way. It keeps municipal taxes low, and it keeps strangers out.”

“Not friendly people, your locals?” asked Sam.

“They’re friendly enough, to the other locals. They’re even reasonably friendly to my siblings and me. Wary, but friendly. Once you come from here, you’re from here forever, and that applies to your descendants. Only Dad and Aunt Jane left when they were little, little kids, and Grandpa was from England, which means some people still think of us as outsiders, while others insist that since Grandma was born here, we’re locals.” I snorted. “She wasn’t even born here. Great-Grandma Fran went into labor while she and Great-Grandpa Jonathan were visiting a town of finfolk out in Maine. Gentling isn’t that far from New Gravesend. We could have gone there to hide if things had turned out poorly.”

“Finfolk?” asked Sam.

“Like mermaids, but less cannibalistic, and more capable of breeding with humans,” I replied, and kept walking.

We made a weird little line, working our way along the side of the road, and we didn’t see any cars. I pulled out the cellphone I’d signed up for as soon as we were sure that Leonard Cunningham was on his way out of the country, taking the threat of the Covenant of St. George with him. I had a surprisingly good signal, considering our surroundings. I shot a quick text to James, asking whether he’d been able to reach anyone with a tow truck. His reply came just as quickly: the truck was on its way, and he’d been able to confirm with the mechanic that he could tow our trailer wherever we needed it to be.

I responded with the address of the old Parrish place. Maybe spending the night at my family’s least haunted house would be more tolerable if we did it in the trailer, and the tailypo probably wouldn’t be able to figure out how to get inside. Probably. They have creepy little serial killer hands, like racoons but with longer fingers. For all I knew, they could work locks.

Gradually, the road curved away from the orchards for which it was named, moving toward the lake. The township of Buckley became visible off to the right, a low, ramshackle collection of buildings with no skyline to speak of. Those were for big cities where things happened, not for good, honest places filled with good, honest people doing good, honest work.

I could have told the people of Buckley some stories about the things that could happen even in the absence of a skyline. But they wouldn’t have listened, or they would already have known those stories from their own family histories, where they were kept buried, quietly sanitized, or locked away.

The world is stranger than most people admit, and because no one ever wants to talk about it, no one ever seems to realize that they’re not unique. Everybody already knows.

The Red Angel was a low-slung building right on the edge of the lake, somehow managing to be two stories and squat at the same time, like it was crouching down and getting ready to pounce. The paint, what little there was, was an unassuming shade of brown that had probably looked sun-bleached even before it had started to peel. There were only a few cars parked in the churned-up mud around the building, each of them looking faintly ashamed of itself, like they knew they didn’t belong there.

I sped up. Sam matched me. Fern slowed down.

“I don’t want to go into the murder shack,” she said, in what would probably have seemed like a perfectly reasonable tone if I hadn’t been so eager to get something cold in my stomach and wash away the dust at the back of my throat. I turned and flashed her a smile.

“It’s not a murder shack; it’s a respectable drinking establishment that profits from being mistaken for a murder shack by most of the locals,” I said. “Come on. Don’t you want something to drink?”

“I don’t want to be murdered,” said Fern, uncertainly. “You’re sure we won’t die?”

“Come on. My family’s been going to the Red Angel for generations, and none of us have been—okay, a lot of us have been murdered, but not in the bar, and not by anyone who drinks here. We’re good at getting killed.” I shrugged broadly, trying not to focus on the sour look on Sam’s face. I guess being reminded that his girlfriend had the life expectancy of Bobby’s first grade hamster was hard on his nerves. “No one’s getting murdered today. Come have a beer.”

“I don’t drink beer,” said Sam.

“Come have a fruity cocktail with too many cherries in the bottom,” I said. “I promise they won’t offer you banana liqueur unless you ask for it.”

He wrinkled his nose but stepped forward and slipped his hand into mine. I resumed my trek toward the Angel, the others trailing along in my wake.

The main door faced the lake, a dazzling view that was fairly wasted on the windowless bar. I pulled the screen open, propping it with my hip before opening the actual door and stepping into the cool, dark confines of the Red Angel for the first time in literally years.

It hadn’t changed a bit. That wasn’t a surprise. This was the sort of place that viewed bar fights as the moral equivalent of redecorating and had never heard of modernization. The tables were round, scarred, and ancient, covered in thick layers of dark varnish that rendered them all functionally identical. The mingled scents of sour beer and cigarette smoke hung in the air. Technically, smoking indoors had been banned in Michigan since before I was born, but functionally, the health inspectors had a “see no evil, don’t get swallowed alive by an unspeakable terror from the dark woods” relationship with the ownership of the Angel.

The woman behind the bar was svelte and pale, with Nordic facial features, shockingly red hair, and an apron tied tightly around her waist. A little too tightly for how wide around she appeared to be; it curved inward at the back, like she didn’t have any internal organs to get in the way. That, combined with the swishing lash of her tail, confirmed her species as well as any sort of ID card. Huldrafolk.

Sam, who had entered right behind me, froze and stared at her. Rude. Fern and Cylia stepped around him, heading for the server. Cylia was already relaxed, beaming as she bellied up to the bar.

“Huldra?” she asked. When the woman nodded, she pointed to her chest and said, “Jink.”

“No luck bending inside the Angel,” said the woman. “We’ve had a couple of nasty scares.”

“Understood, understood,” said Cylia. “Can I get a beer? Whatever you have on tap is good.”

“Gin and tonic for me, please,” said Fern.

I turned my attention to Sam. “Hey, honey. You’re allowed to relax now. We’re inside, and no one who drinks here is going to rat you out.”

“That woman has a tail,” he said, in a stiff tone.

“Well, yeah. Cynthia’s been running the bar since my grandmother was a little girl,” I said. “She’s a huldra. They’re from Finland, originally, and they can live for hundreds of years before their skins harden and they turn to stone.”

“My wife is one of the angel statues out back,” said Cynthia, as she slid drinks to Cylia and Fern. “Hi, Annie. Mary stopped by and told me you might be passing through. I admit, I thought she was pulling my tail. Who’s your grim-looking friend?”

“This is Sam,” I said. “My boyfriend.” It felt weird to be introducing him that way to Cynthia, who had been a friend of the family for generations, ever since my great-grandmother had shot her door off its hinges.

“And is there a reason your boyfriend is scowling at me like that?” A note of cautious wariness slipped into her voice.

I couldn’t blame her. As both Grandma and Verity prove, my family isn’t always clever about picking our romantic partners. One too many Covenant foot soldiers for most cryptids to be really comfortable.

“You don’t have any security,” he blurted. “Anyone could just come in the door, any time they wanted to! How is this safe?”

“We’ve been here for a long, long time,” said Cynthia. “The locals tell lots of scary stories about us, how we cook runaway kids on the weekends, how people will break your jaw just for stepping into the parking lot. We’re hiding in plain sight by being part of the landscape. Sometimes that’s the safest choice of all.”

“But the Covenant—” said Sam.

“They know about the Angel,” said a voice from the far end of the bar. Its owner stood, pushing her drink away as she unspooled from her stool. She was short, curvy, and underdressed for the chill generated by the bar’s air-conditioning, in cut-off denim shorts and a red tank top. Tattoos covered her left arm, and the left side of her neck, complicated and interlinked. She looked at Sam with all the emotion and sympathy of an alligator assessing a stray dog that had wandered too close to the water. “They’ve known about the Angel for at least fifty years, and they’re smart enough to leave it the hell alone.”

“Mary came through, huh?” I said, with a glance at Cynthia.

“Maybe I wasn’t her only stop.” She shrugged generously. “You want your usual?”

“Please. Sam? This is where you order a drink, so the nice bar doesn’t throw us out.”

“Um. Hard cider, if you’ve got it,” he said.

Cynthia nodded and moved to start pouring drinks. I approached the woman who was still standing next to her stool, virtually glaring at Sam. She transferred her gaze to me as I got closer. It didn’t warm.

“Some of these tattoos are new,” I said, gesturing toward her wrist. I didn’t touch her. It was never a good idea when she had that absent, unrecognizing look on her face. Maybe she knew who I was and maybe she didn’t. If she didn’t, unwanted physical contact could get me shot. “Were you traveling again?”

“I’ve tried a few new dimensions, looking for Thomas, since the last time you came home,” she said. The numbness in her expression cracked. “I thought we’d sent you off to die,” she said, before sweeping me into her arms and crushing me against her chest. The rules against me touching her didn’t run in the opposite direction.

“Hi, Grandma,” I wheezed.

---

Motion out of the corner of my eye alerted me to Sam’s approach. When he wanted to be, he was faster than anything human. The fact that he was moving like that told me even without getting a good look at him that he had returned to his more customary fūri form. The true potential of his speed is reserved for when he’s moving with the bones and muscles he was born to, and not the human ones he occasionally tries on for size.

“Sam,” I managed, despite the lack of oxygen entering my body, “don’t hit my grandmother. Grandma, don’t attack my boyfriend.”

“Grandmother?” said Sam, at the same time as my grandmother said, “Boyfriend?” It was impossible to tell which one of them sounded more confused. But at least Grandma let me go.

I immediately stepped backward, out of easy reach, and started rubbing my sternum with one hand, encouraging the bone to stop aching. “Ow,” I said, with as much coherence as I could muster. “Grandma, did you forget that I’m not you?”

No one in our family is in poor physical condition. We’ve been lucky when it comes to illnesses and injuries, and all of us, even Alex, have chosen extracurricular activities that keep us in excellent physical shape. And then there is my grandmother. She’s been moving between dimensions for decades, trying to locate her missing husband, doing a lot of God-knows-what to keep her stomach full and her guns loaded during that time—and honestly, I don’t think she puts a priority on food. She could probably bench-press me and Sam both without breaking a sweat.

She looked at me flatly for a moment, and in her faintly confused expression, I could read the answer to my question: yes, she had forgotten, and not for the first time. Whatever function of her dimensional wanderings kept her young, it also left her occasionally bewildered about her own life and family, unable to keep straight whether something had happened to my sister or her mother. It made our relatively rare family dinners exciting.

“Uh, Annie?” said Sam. “This is your grandmother? How is that possible? She looks younger than you do.” Then he winced, like I was going to pull some stereotypical “girl in a sitcom” routine and get angry at him for telling the truth.

My grandmother was born in 1938, making her fifty-five years older than me. Despite that reality of our family tree, she looked like she was in her early twenties at the absolute most, and probably a few years younger than I was. That made her collection of tattoos, which completely spanned the left side of her body, all the more impressive; if her apparent age had been accurate, she would have needed to start the process when she was still in her teens, and some skilled tattoo artists were probably going to go to prison.

“It’s complicated,” I said. “Yes, this is my grandmother, Alice Price-Healy, originally of Buckley Township, Michigan. Grandma, this is my boyfriend, Sam Taylor. He’s a fūri.”

“I can see that,” said Grandma. “Honestly, him being a fūri is a lot less surprising than him existing at all. When you say ‘boyfriend,’ you mean . . . ?”

“I mean we’re dating.” I reached over and took Sam’s hand. His tail snaked around my ankle a beat later, like me touching him in front of my grandmother was permission for him to touch me back.

“Okay,” said Grandma, and took a swig from her beer. “Well, you’re a brave man, Sam Taylor. I should buy you a drink. Do you want a drink?”

“I asked for a hard cider,” he said. “I think I need a drink at this point, um, Annie’s grandmother. The terrifying, infamous, ex-Covenant monster hunter.”

“That’s a filthy lie,” said Grandma. “I was never a member of the Covenant. They wouldn’t have had me even if I’d wanted to join, on account of how my grandparents were filthy traitors to their cause and my mother was a carnie brat.”

“What a coincidence,” said Sam. “So am I!”

“A filthy traitor or a carnie brat?” asked Grandma.

“We met at his family’s carnival,” I said, desperate to seize control of the conversation back from my grandmother before she could decide that my boyfriend would make a lovely rug. Cynthia slid a bottle of pear cider down the bar. I grabbed it and thrust it at Sam. “He does the flying trapeze. We were partners for a little while before I had to burn the place down so we could get away from the Covenant handlers who thought I was working for them.”

“Oh, you have had a hard time, haven’t you?” Grandma shook her head. “I’m so sorry we sent you into that situation. I should never have agreed to it. But after your sister’s little indiscretion, it seemed like the best way to clear things up . . .”

“You mean after Verity declared war on the Covenant of St. George on live television? That ‘little indiscretion’?” I asked, not quite able to keep the disbelief out of my voice. My family has always downplayed Verity’s errors, leaving me and Alex to clean up her messes. It’s never great when it’s obvious who the family favorite is, and none of us had ever had any question.

“Everyone makes mistakes, Antimony,” said my grandmother. “If we’re lucky, they turn out to be mistakes that we can learn from and talk about later. For example, if you burned down a carnival, you’ve learned a lot about fire since leaving home.”

“Yeah,” I said. “About that.” I extended one hand toward her as balls of flame appeared above my fingertips, each about the size of a marble, ranging in brightness from lambent white to sullen red. “I’ve learned a lot about fire.”

For possibly the first time in my life, I beheld the rare sight of my grandmother struck completely speechless. I lowered my hand. She took another swig from her beer.

“Well, I always wondered when that was going to crop up again,” she said. “You kids hungry?”

“I could eat,” I allowed slowly. “But our friend James is with the car—we’re having mechanical problems—and we told him to meet us here. I’ll have to call him if we’re going somewhere else.”

“Oh, there’s no need for that,” said Grandma. “Cynthia’s always happy to have an excuse to fire up the barbeque, aren’t you, Cynthia?” She twisted around to look at the bartender, who sighed and reached back to untie her apron.

“For you, Alice, always,” she said. “All we’ve got in the kitchen right now is chicken. That work for everybody?”

“I’m not a vegetarian,” said Sam.

“I like chicken,” chirped Fern.

Grandma looked at Fern and Cylia like she had just figured out that they were with me—which, if she was having a bad day and hadn’t been expecting me to walk in on her, she might not have. She cocked her head slightly to the side.

“Sylph and . . . ?”

“Jink,” said Cylia, turning her attention toward our little group. “Annie and I played roller derby together.”

“And you didn’t bend her luck toward yourself?”

“No, ma’am. Manipulating luck when you have a dozen women on roller skates whipping around a track is a good way to get somebody killed, and I’m not that kind of girl.”

Grandma nodded, looking pleased. “You’ve got a good group here, Annie,” she said.

“Wait until you meet James.”

“He eat chicken?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Then he’ll fit right in. Come on. We can sit out back.”

“I’d rather stay inside if you don’t mind,” said Sam, gesturing to himself with one long-fingered hand. “It’s uncomfortable to play human for too long, and it’s harder when I’m trying to eat. It’s like trying to hold in a sneeze and swallow at the same time.”

“If you need privacy, there’s the old pool room,” said Cynthia. “As long as you don’t mind some cobwebs.”

“We’re good with spiders,” I said. Sam’s tail squeezed my ankle, acknowledgment of what was essentially an inside joke. The first hint he’d had that I wasn’t just some greenstick girl with no idea about the cryptid world had come when we’d been forced to fight a Jorōgumo—sort of a spider-centaur without arms—to make her stop killing people who just wanted to enjoy the carnival.

Normal people get meet-cutes. I get crime scene cleanup. But I’m used to it, and I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if the world decided it didn’t want to work this way.

“All right,” said Grandma. “Everybody grab your drink.”

---

Cynthia hadn’t been kidding about the cobwebs. The “old pool room” clearly got its name from the three pool tables that took up most of the floor space. What remained of their velvet was scratched and torn, making them useless as playing surfaces, although they still did an excellent job of getting in the way. It might as well have been called the “spider storage room.” Fern immediately squeaked in delight and launched herself into the air, spinning as she rose into the cobweb-choked rafters.

Grandma and I stared at her, briefly united in our positions as the only humans in the room.

“Well, she’s going to get a little dusty,” said Grandma.

“No bet,” I said, and touched the tip of my index finger to a strand of webbing, which promptly burnt away in a flash of light and crumbled into ash. “I can’t do the whole room; I’d burn the place down.”

“No need,” she said. “Cynthia must be keeping a thousand pounds of cobweb for a reason. I can’t imagine what it might be, but it’s the only reason I can think of for a health code violation of this magnitude.”

“It’s delicious,” said Cynthia, walking into the room with a Tupperware pan filled with raw chicken and what smelled like barbeque sauce. “So are the spiders.”

“Are you on a diet?” asked Sam, using his tail to swipe the cobwebs out of his hair. “Because I can’t think of any scenario that results in this many spiders where you aren’t on a diet.”

Cynthia laughed and continued onward to the back door, nudging it open with her foot and stepping out onto the back deck. Cylia followed her. The door banged shut, cutting off the sound of their laughter as they got away from our weird family drama.

Given that Fern was still up in the rafters, I was starting to feel a little bit abandoned by my friends.

“Does your boyfriend not understand sexual reproduction?” Grandma pulled a chair out from the nearest table, kicked it twice to scare off any resident spiders, and whipped it around so she could sit on it. Backward. Of course. If anyone’s going to get an emo teen for a grandmother, it’s going to be me.

That’s not fair. I love my grandmother very much, even if I sometimes worry about her stabbing me because I look too much like someone who’s been dead for decades. It’s not her fault that she’s forgotten how to age. At least, I don’t think it’s her fault. No one’s ever really been able to get her to discuss it.

“He understands sexual reproduction just fine, Grandma,” I said, steadfastly not looking at Sam. “He also understands protection, which is why we’re not going to be reproducing any time soon. If we ever do at all. ‘Boyfriend’ doesn’t automatically mean ‘serious enough that we’ve been talking about kids.’”

“You have more fun these days than we did when I was your age,” said Grandma, and laughed, while Sam uncomfortably pulled out and dusted off another chair, pausing occasionally to pick cobwebs out of his fur. He looked so monumentally miserable that I joined him, scorching the cobwebs off my own chair before sitting down.

“It’s nice to finally meet more of your family,” he said, sounding deeply, deeply uncomfortable. He settled next to me, tail once again winding firmly around my ankle. “She seems nice.”

“No, she doesn’t,” I said. “She seems like an unstable old lady who somehow keeps aging backward, and who carries grenades that are older than I am way too frequently for comfort’s sake.”

Grandma leaned on her elbows and smirked at me across the grimy table. “Please, keep talking about me like I’m not here. It’s a wonderful idea.”

“Um,” said Sam.

“Grandma, could you please stop trying to terrify my boyfriend? It took me a long time to find a guy I was interested in dating, and if you scare him away, I’m probably going to be single until I’m dead.”

She raised an eyebrow and took a swig from her beer. “That sounds pretty serious, you know. Have you told your parents?”

I deflated. “Not yet. I haven’t talked to them yet.”

“Why the hell not? They’ve been as worried about you as I have. More worried, even. You’re going to give your poor mother a heart attack if you don’t phone home soon.”

“Um.” I looked down at the dusty tabletop, suddenly deeply interested in the wood. “I wanted to get closer to Oregon before I called.”

“Worried she’ll be on the first plane to wherever you say you are?”

I took a deep breath. “Worried she won’t be.”

“Oh, sweetheart.” Grandma leaned across the table, putting a hand on my arm. “You know your mother loves you. You know she wants you to be safe and make good choices about your life. Don’t ever doubt that she cares.”

“It’s hard to believe that when she’s always been so willing to send me into danger in order to keep Verity out of it.” Most younger sisters worry that they’ll never live up to the standards set by their siblings. In my case, I have a little more reason to be worried than most. When Verity screwed up by declaring war on the Covenant of St. George live and on television, my family’s response had been to ask me if I’d be willing to go undercover, cut off all contact with the people who were supposed to be my backup, leave the continent, and place myself in the virtual belly of the beast. Sure, I’d agreed to go, but only because I hadn’t been able to imagine saying no and staying with the people who’d considered that to be a reasonable request.

And if I hadn’t gone, I would never have met Sam, the crossroads would still have been beguiling people into deals designed to destroy them, and James would probably still have been trapped in New Gravesend, unaware of the deal that bound him there. Me going undercover with the Covenant had turned out to be the best thing that could possibly have happened. But there had been no way of predicting that when I’d agreed to go. My own family had looked at me and decided that I was the expendable one, that out of everyone in my generation, I was the one they could somehow manage to live without.

“I know that look,” said Grandma. “You’re thinking that your family threw you away. But Annie, everyone’s been sick with fright, waiting to hear whether you’re okay—and waiting for Rose or Mary to bring you home the only way they know how.”

“You know they would have told you if I were dead. The crossroads would have allowed Mary to do that much,” I said. “Rose was only keeping her mouth shut because I asked her to. If something had happened to me, she would have broken her word in a heartbeat.”

“Maybe so, but that doesn’t change a parent’s fear. Your father was starting to talk about contacting the bogeyman community. Their whisper network can find almost anything.”

True enough, and they would charge dearly for any help they offered. Bogeymen don’t work for free. It’s one of the things I like about them.

I took a deep breath, trying to shove aside the feelings of resentment and abandonment that almost always accompanied thoughts of my family. Some of them were justified and some weren’t, and none of them were useful right now.

“I have something I need to tell you, Grandma,” I said.

“You mean apart from your sudden second calling as a flamethrower?” she asked. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten about that. It’s a little hard to miss.”

“Grandpa Thomas was a sorcerer, too, right?” I snapped my fingers, summoning a tiny ball of flame to balance on the tip of my thumbnail. “Aunt Mary says he was, and this stuff runs in families.”

“Yes. Yes, my Thomas could call fire out of nothing when he wanted it.” Grandma’s gaze went misty, the way it always did when someone brought up my grandfather without mentioning the fact that he was missing and very probably dead. “That man never had cold hands, not even in the very depths of winter.”

“Okay, one, too much information and ew, and two, good to know, I’ll have to work on that.” Being able to keep myself at a decent temperature no matter what was going on with the weather would be useful. “I guess the Price genes won out in my case. That explains the cheekbones.”

“It’s why I’ve always had to fight so hard not to let everyone see that you’re my favorite,” she agreed.

I blinked. “I’m not anybody’s favorite.”

“You’re my favorite,” said Sam mildly.

“Only because you didn’t meet my sister first,” I said. “Trust me, no one who meets Verity before they meet me chooses the spare.”

“Antimony Price, don’t you dare talk about yourself like that!” snapped Grandma, sitting up straighter. “You’re not the spare anything. You’re my granddaughter.”

“Sorry, Grandma,” I said, trying to ignore the alarmed look on Sam’s face as he stared at me. He didn’t like me talking about myself so negatively any more than she did.

The door we’d all come in through banged open, and James stepped inside, looking pale and shaken. “You could have told me this was a cryptid bar,” he said, voice dropping as he caught sight of my grandmother. “Or that you were going to be drinking with friends. Hello, ma’am. I’m James Smith.”

“Hello, Jimmy,” said Grandma cheerfully. “How’d you know I was a ‘ma’am’?”

“Every woman I’m not related to is a ‘ma’am’ until I’m sure they’re not going to eat me,” James said. “And I prefer ‘James,’ if you don’t mind.”

“Sorry,” said Grandma. “Annie, is this the friend you were talking about before?”

“It is,” I said. “He’s from New Gravesend, in Maine. One of his ancestors made a deal with the crossroads to make sure there would be a sorcerer in every generation. But they didn’t word it very carefully. The crossroads set the bargain to ensure that there would only ever be one sorcerer in New Gravesend. As soon as the next one was old enough to start manifesting their powers, the old one would die. Freak accidents and illnesses, stretching back generations. James, this is my grandmother, Alice Price-Healy. You’ll hear a lot about her from the cryptids you’re going to meet.”

“I’m sort of an urban legend among the urban legends,” said Grandma cheerfully. “People are a little freaked out by humans who live as long as I have.”

“Ah,” said James. “I mean—you’re not really—how are you Annie’s grandmother? You look like one of the girls I went to high school with.”

“Family mystery,” she said, laughing, a bright, cackling sound that seemed to fill every corner of the room.

“She never gives a straight answer to that question,” I said. “Whatever she’s doing, it’s not something she’s proud of.”

“So you age normally, right?” asked Sam. “I’m not going to wake up in bed with a middle schooler one morning?” He sounded genuinely unsettled.

I put a hand on his arm. “Good concern, and one I should have predicted, but no. I age like a normal human, or I always have up until this point; I’ve only been flinging fire around for about a year, so who knows what that’s going to do to me?”

“I’ve been freezing things for substantially longer than that, and I’ve been getting older,” said James reassuringly. “Don’t worry, I think your normal levels of perversion are all you’re going to have to deal with.”

“Thank the God of carnies and weirdoes,” muttered Sam, sinking a little deeper in his seat. Grandma raised an eyebrow. He shook his head and said, slightly louder, “I knew I was signing up for the modern Addams Family when I told Annie I was in love with her. I’m a monkey who pretends to be a man in love with a human flamethrower who’s on her way home to a congregation of talking mice, and it turns out there’s stuff that’s too weird even for me. Aging backward fits the bill.”

“Well, dear, it’s a good thing I’m not on the market,” said Grandma, leaning across the table to pat his hand.

“I’m not really into blondes,” he said. “I’d have started dating creepy dead aunt number one if I were, since she seemed a lot less likely to get herself shot in the head.”

“He means Mary, and he’s the one who got shot in the head,” I said, as Fern finally drifted down from the rafters with cobwebs and probably a few live spiders tangled in her hair. “It’s been an eventful road trip.”

“I should think so,” said Grandma. She tilted her head. “But what did you want to tell me that was so important that you keep trying to put it off?”

“The sorcery wasn’t enough?”

“I’m your grandmother. I know when you’re not telling me something. Now, I know you’re not pregnant—”

“Thank God,” I said, firmly enough that it would probably have been insulting if Sam and I hadn’t been so careful.

“—and I know you’d never lead the Covenant to the Angel, or to Buckley. So what’s weighing on you, my girl? What have you been up to?”

I took a deep breath. “I told you James’ family was laboring under a generational crossroads bargain. What I didn’t tell you was that I made a bargain of my own, while I was in Florida. I had to, in order to save myself, and to save Sam. Mary brokered it for me. She tried to talk me out of it, too, but I wouldn’t let her. I needed to live. I needed Sam to live.”

My grandmother, who had gone very pale somewhere in the middle of all that, stared at me like she had never seen me before. “You know your grandfather sold himself to the crossroads to save me,” she said quietly.

“Only because we’ve all been comparing notes for years. You never wanted to give anyone a straight answer about that.”

“Because I didn’t want any of you kids to decide that it was okay, or acceptable, or romantic! Saving your lover’s life doesn’t mean you get to stay with them. The crossroads are very clear about that. Mary tried to save my Thomas, bless that poor girl’s spectral heart, but they outsmarted her, and they’ll outsmart you, too! Oh, Annie. Annie, Annie, my girl . . . I never wanted this for you.”

“I’m fine, Grandma,” I said. “The crossroads aren’t going to hurt me. I killed them.”

“ . . . what?” The word was barely loud enough to qualify as a whisper.

“They wanted me to murder James in order to fulfill my debt to them and get my sorcery back,” I said. “I didn’t want to do that.”

“And I’m very grateful, but I don’t think your grandmother is breathing right now,” said James. “You may want to hurry this explanation up a little bit.”

“I’m not sure I can,” I said. “His best friend from school was a girl named Sally. She’d gone to the crossroads to make a deal when they were about to graduate from high school. The crossroads took her instead of honoring whatever she’d asked for.”

“I know Sally went to ask them for my freedom, and I know they didn’t grant it,” interjected James. “They took her, and they didn’t give her anything in return. That’s how we were able to get Annie the access she needed to beat the ever-loving shit out of them.”

The profanity sounded odd coming from James, who was usually so much more careful about his word choices than the rest of us. I couldn’t say that he was wrong.

“Because the crossroads violated their own rules, I was able to get Mary to take me for an arbitration. I bent time in the little pocket dimension where the crossroads ‘lived,’ and I saw them arrive in this world. They displaced the original force of the living Earth, the anima mundi. The anima mundi wasn’t expecting an attack from outside. They weren’t prepared to fight off whatever the crossroads actually were. I suspect they were the anima mundi of a dead world, someplace that couldn’t sustain them anymore. So they went looking for something new to eat, and they found us. Or they would have, if I hadn’t been waiting there to kick the crap out of them.”

Grandma stared at me blankly.

Sam nudged me in the side. “I told you that trying to explain time travel never did anybody any good,” he said. “The crossroads existed before you killed them. They did all the things you remember them doing.”

“I know,” I said wearily. “But because I killed them before they could kill the anima mundi, they never existed in this world. It’s a paradox. It sucks, but this is how it is now. We have to live with the repercussions of something that never happened. We have to clean up the messes the crossroads never had the chance to make. Magic is a headache given flesh.”

“You can say that again,” said Cylia cheerfully as she stepped back inside, leaving the door to slam shut behind her. “Cynthia says the chicken will be done in about ten minutes. Annie, your grandmother looks like she’s about to keel over.”

“Breathe, Grandma.” I leaned across the table to touch her hand. She let me. Under the circumstances, that was probably a good thing, and not a sign of shock. I hoped. “Mary is fine, because of us. As a family, I mean. We’re the house she haunts, and so when the crossroads went away, they didn’t take her with them.”

“Oh,” said my grandmother, very faintly. “That’s nice.”

“Mary thinks so.” I took a deep breath. “There were things she couldn’t tell you while she still served the crossroads—not unless you were willing to enter into a deal with them.”

“I never did it,” said Grandma. “I promised Thomas that I wouldn’t, no matter how bad things got or how tempted I might be, and I didn’t. Not ever.”

“I know,” I said. “But that’s why she couldn’t tell you that you were probably right. He might still be alive out there.”

Moving with terrifying speed, she grabbed hold of the hand that was touching hers, bearing down on my fingers until I bit my lip and groaned under the pressure. “What do you know?” she demanded. “Whatever it is, you have to tell me, and you have to tell me right now.”

The temperature of the air to my left dropped by several degrees. “Ma’am, I’m going to need you to let her go,” said James.

“So am I,” said Sam. “I can’t freeze you solid like James here, but I can punch you a lot.”

Grandma let go of my hand, settling back in her chair. “Are you boys really going to sit here and threaten me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said James. “We just met you. Annie’s our friend.”

I shook my hand, trying to make the throbbing stop. “Boys, stand down. Cylia, why didn’t you join in the threatening?”

“I love you, but not enough to threaten Alice Healy for hurting you,” she said. “Unlike the boys, I grew up in the cryptid community. I know what she can do to me.”

“Smart,” I said. The pain in my hand wasn’t as bad as it would have been if she’d actually broken anything. I still pulled it back, resting it in my lap as I said, “We got confirmation that the crossroads sometimes took people and put them somewhere far away, someplace where they couldn’t get home. The anima mundi doesn’t know exactly where they are, so they can’t help us, but the crossroads aren’t actively working to keep us away from them anymore.”

Grandma stared at me for a long moment, eyes wide and glassy, before she put her hands over her face and said, “Oh.”

“Oh?” I echoed.

“Oh.” She lowered her hands and smiled beatifically at me. “I told you so. I told you all. He’s alive out there.”

“Um,” I said. “He was. I hope he still is, for my sake as much as yours—I’d really like to have someone who could teach me how to be better at sorcery. Trial and error is resulting in a lot of scorch marks.”

“I’d love it if someone could teach her not to set things on fire while she was sleeping,” said Sam. “Burning fur smells terrible.”

“It’s worse for the rest of us,” said Cylia. “Trust me.”

Sam wrinkled his nose at her. The back door banged open, and we all tensed, Grandma reaching for the gun at her hip, Fern bouncing back up into the cobweb-choked rafters and disappearing.

Cynthia, who had just stepped inside with a platter of barbequed chicken in her hands, blinked at us like we were doing something truly ridiculous. “Food’s ready,” she said, hoisting the platter to show us all before she walked over and dropped it onto the table, adding a handful of plastic forks. “Let me know when you’re done, and I’ll come pick up the leftovers. If there are any.”

The chicken smelled delicious, like sweet hickory sauce and charred meat, and I grabbed a fork and speared a thigh before I could think better of it. “Thank you, Cynthia,” I said.

“You kids all right back here?” Something about the way she asked the question made it clear that her question encompassed my grandmother, who was still staring at me, looking like I’d offered her everything she’d ever wanted, but put it on the other side of an impassable lake of molten lava.

“We’re great, ma’am,” said Sam, his tail tightening around my ankle. “Thank you.”

“You’re a fūri, right?” she asked, eyes on Sam.

He nodded reluctantly.

“We used to have a fūri living local, back in the early ’70s,” said Cynthia, either unaware of the tension in the room or ignoring it. “She was a nice lady. Kept getting in trouble with some of the folk from town, since no one who grows up in Buckley is completely at ease with big, unidentified animals in the trees. You know your troop?”

“Troop?” asked Sam, blankly. “I was raised by my grandmother, ma’am. She’s human. So’s my mother. I never met my father.”

“This modern world.” Cynthia shook her head. “My mother was huldrafolk, like I am. My father was a grove of white birch, as is only right and fitting.”

“Your dad was a tree?” asked Cylia.

“No,” said Cynthia. “My father was about three dozen trees. They each contributed pollen to the making of me, and had any of them been absent, I would have been someone altogether different. My mother was their wife, until they were cut to the ground by humans who wanted the land where they grew. She moved to America with a baby in her arms and a coat on her shoulders to hide the bowing in her back. It was easier in those days to cross international borders without being unmasked as something other than human. No one ever asked her to disrobe, or to unswaddle me. We settled in Michigan, and she built the Red Angel with her own two hands before passing it on to me. She grows behind the building, on a stretch of land the state allows me to pretend I own. As if anyone could own land, apart from the trees, and I still have a century or more before I decide to put down roots.”

“You were part of what gave me the idea to keep snatching back my youth until I was done with it,” said Grandma, warmly. “I grew up and started growing old, and you never did.”

“Yes, well, we huldra are made of sterner stuff than you humans—or most of the people who can pass for human. It’s like having a fast breeding and birthing cycle made you careless with the way you live your lives.” Cynthia made a small scoffing noise. “I love you anyway. Alice, are you and the kids staying in town tonight?”

“We are,” I said. “Our vehicle won’t be ready until tomorrow at the very earliest. I figured I’d show the gang the old Parrish place, since we don’t have any tenants living there.” We never did. Renting out the old Parrish place would have upset my grandmother, the family of tailypo living on the property, and inevitably, anyone who thought it was a good idea to live there.

The house had been originally chosen by the Covenant as a way to punish my grandfather for the sin of disagreeing with them. It wasn’t haunted; sort of the opposite, as I’d told Sam. No ghost with any common sense was willing to pass its threshold, and no people with any common sense had any business going there either.

“I always stay at home when I’m in town,” said Grandma. “It’s why the power is still turned on.”

Cynthia nodded slowly. “You know I have a room for you if you ever want it,” she said. “It’d be healthier than staying there all by yourself.”

“I won’t be by myself tonight,” said Grandma cheerfully. “I’m going to have Annie and her friends with me.”

Cynthia sighed, looking briefly disappointed. Then she nodded. “I suppose you will, at that,” she said. “Well, if you kids need anything else from me, I’ll be at the bar. Enjoy your chicken.”

She turned and disappeared then, back out into the slightly cleaner, less cobweb-choked main room of the Red Angel.

As soon as the door closed, Grandma turned her attention back to me. “Where did the crossroads send him?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “The anima mundi didn’t know either. But they said that the people the crossroads sent away were alive when they went. That means he could still be alive out there. If he’s as resourceful as you’ve always said he was, he could still be hanging on.”

Of course, he probably wouldn’t have Grandma’s little anti-aging trick, and he’d been older than her when he disappeared, all the way back in 1965. He had to be in his nineties by now, and that could make bringing him home difficult. Not that my grandmother gave one good goddamn about difficult. She’d been throwing herself through endless hells since his disappearance, with no goal in mind beyond bringing her lost love home.

It was a little obsessive, sure, but I’d sold my magic and potentially my life to the crossroads to save Sam, and he and I hadn’t been together even half as long as my grandparents had. People do stupid things when they’re in love. That’s sort of what love is for.

It would be nice if my family could manage love with a little less disaster, but I guess it’s true what they say: people learn from example. And all of our examples are catastrophic ones.

I took another bite of barbequed chicken. Everyone else reached for their forks and speared pieces for themselves, and for a few minutes, there were no sounds but the sound of chewing, and of Fern bouncing about gently in the rafters. Then she drifted serenely down to floor level, stabbed a piece of chicken, and asked, “Are we staying with your grandmother tonight, Annie?”

I looked at Grandma, who nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess we are.”

---

Cynthia didn’t charge us for the chicken. “It’s nice to have proof that Alice has eaten something on this plane of reality more recently than the pie-eating contest we held back in 1992,” she said, waving us toward the door. “Now get out of here. This many humans makes the rest of my clientele nervous.”

Given that the rest of her clientele appeared to be two bogeymen, a swamp hag, and what might have been a minotaur, I had serious reason to doubt that, but not enough to make me argue with her until she gave us a bill. Instead, I waved and led the rest of our motley group to the exit, where Grandma was waiting.

“We’ll have to walk to the house,” she said. “I’ll leave my motorcycle here for the night. Not the first time, probably not going to be the last, and it’s not like I could fit all of you on the seat.”

“I know the way,” I protested. “We could meet you there.”

“Your mother would literally never let me hear the end of it if I lost track of you right now,” she said. “Evie’s a pretty dab hand with her necromancy, so you know I mean that literally.”

I rolled my eyes but didn’t argue. People leave ghosts when they die with unfinished business. It’s common if undiscussed knowledge among my family that if Grandma Alice dies hunting for her wayward husband, she’s going to keep coming to family dinners for the rest of time, because there’s no possible way she’s going to rest in peace. Again, love sucks, and again, there’s a reason I spent so much of my life purposefully not looking for it.

“This way, kids,” called Grandma cheerfully, before she started stomping down the road, heading toward the dark, somehow menacing edge of the forest. “Look alive, and don’t step on anything you don’t recognize.”

“She’s like a preschool teacher,” said James, stepping up next to me, a bemused look on his face. “A heavily-armed, questionably-stable preschool teacher.”

“Yeah, but she’s not wrong around here,” I said. “Buckley is what we like to call a high-weirdness zone. Sort of like New Gravesend, only your weirdness was artificially imposed. You had the full attention of the crossroads. We don’t. We just have the result of generations of cryptozoologists going out of our way to protect some of the weirdest wildlife North America has to offer. The local population is almost entirely human, because only the humans are stupid enough to stay in an area where rock scorpions and dire boars both like to live.”

“How does the Red Angel stay open if this is a mostly human town?” The question came from Sam, back in his human form as he stepped up on my other side.

“Cynthia owns most of the lakeside property that isn’t actually inside city limits, and this is a popular vacation spot,” I said, linking my arm through Sam’s as we followed my grandmother toward the woods. “She makes enough in rent from the summer people to pay her power and liquor bills, and while she doesn’t gouge, this is the only cryptid bar left in Michigan. Her customers are happy to chip in when she’s feeling skint.”

“Sounds real community-minded of them,” said James.

“She averages a wedding a week during the busy season,” I said. “You and me, we’re sorcerers, but we’re still human. You just have to find a girl who’s understanding about frostbite when you get frisky, and you’ll be fine. Someone like Fern, on the other hand, has to do a lot more work if she wants to find Mr. Right. Cynthia didn’t set out to be a matchmaking service, but she provides a safe place in a township the Covenant actively avoids, and plenty of alcohol. That’s more than good enough for this modern world.”

James flushed red and looked down at his feet, kicking a rock down the road without breaking his stride. Sam frowned.

“Why does the Covenant avoid Buckley?” he asked.

“Because they believe it’s haunted by the ghosts of three generations of Healys, all of whom are pretty pissed off about being murdered,” I said blithely. “It’s a long story.”

“Is everything in this family a long story?” he asked reproachfully. “Do you think there’s a chance you could make me like, some index cards with the short version on them, so I don’t completely embarrass myself when I meet your parents?”

“Since you’re adopting me, I’d like a set of those cards, too,” said James. “Just with the little things I need to know. Like you’d mentioned that your grandmother carries grenades the way most little old ladies carry those funky violent-scented candies, but you never said anything about her being younger than you. No wonder you jumped straight to time travel as a solution.”

“When something is normal for you, it doesn’t necessarily occur to you to mention it without a good reason,” I said. “Isn’t there anything you haven’t gotten around to telling me?”

“Nope,” said Sam. “My life is an open book where you’re concerned. Also, I think your grandmother is more dangerous than mine, which is sort of reassuring if you think about it, since my Grandma is pretty pissed off at me right now. If it comes down to Grandma-on-Grandma violence, I think yours will win.”

“We are not starting a Grandma fight club!” I said firmly. She was far enough ahead of us that I wasn’t worried she’d overhear, although Cylia looked back and smirked at me, clear amusement in her eyes. I did the mature thing and stuck my tongue out at her.

“I might have a few things,” said James, ears still red as he kicked his rock around the road.

“It’s all right if you have a crush on my girlfriend, my dude, even if she is volunteering to be sort of your sister,” said Sam magnanimously. “I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but she has an absolutely fantastic rack.”

“I have honestly not devoted much of my time to contemplating Antimony’s breasts,” said James.

I smacked Sam on the arm. “Don’t say things like that where people might hear you.”

“Why not? Your boobs come into a room before you do. People notice them.”

“It’s a good thing I already love you,” I said. “If I didn’t, I might shove you into the lake for the bloodworms to swim off with and find myself a boyfriend who doesn’t try to make my adopted brother uncomfortable for fun.”

“You’d miss me.”

“I would,” I allowed.

We kept walking. The trees grew closer, dark and tangled and menacing. There was nothing forgiving in the shadow of those trees. I couldn’t imagine growing up here in Buckley, in the sight of that forest. The trees in Portland were dense and tangled, but they were forgiving. I had always known that they were on my side.

These trees weren’t on anybody’s side but their own. These trees had no interest in showing people where the bodies were buried; those bodies belonged to the trees now, and they weren’t going to give up what was theirs. I shivered and shifted a little closer to Sam as we walked, creating a tripping hazard. James stole a glance at the tree line and moved closer to me in turn.

“You feel it, too, huh?” I asked. I had never been comfortable in the Buckley woods, but they had never felt this oppressively hostile before.

“The trees are watching me,” he said. “I don’t like it.”

Grandma looked over her shoulder at us, and said, “Your grandfather was the same way about my woods. I think it’s a sorcerer thing. They don’t like you. I don’t know why. Maybe a sorcerer hurt them once. They like me just fine.”

“Of course the terrifying murder wood likes you,” I called. “You’re a terrifying murder lady.”

She smiled. “Now Annie, don’t be jealous. I’m sure there’s a nice deciduous forest out there somewhere, just waiting to fall head over heels in love with you.”

I snorted, but to be fair, her description wasn’t far off. I’d read all the diaries documenting her teen years in Buckley, and her courtship with my grandfather. The trees here genuinely seemed to love her and had saved her life in their immovable way more times than was strictly realistic. She’d had two true loves in her lifetime: my grandfather, and the Buckley woods.

“I’ll stick with my monkey, thanks,” I said.

Sam preened.

“She just said she’d pick you over a literal forest,” said James. “I wouldn’t look so smug if I were you.”

“Why not? Forests are great. Lots of trees to climb, lots of interesting toads and beetles and stuff to look at. I’m pretty sure that was the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about me.”

The boys fell to squabbling gently over my head as we walked. I smiled to myself, tuning out their words in favor of listening to their tones. They sounded perfectly relaxed, trusting me and Grandma to keep them safe in this familiar-to-us place. It was comforting, knowing they could trust me that much.

Up ahead of us, Cylia caught Fern’s arm as the latter started to fall, having tripped over a rock in the path while her density was dialed down too far to let her recover on her own. I grinned. This was my family now, as much and as concretely as my biological family. We’d been through too much together to be anything else. We might not be together forever—probably wouldn’t be, since Fern eventually wanted to meet a nice sylph boy and have babies of her own, and the sylph creche structure didn’t really allow for her hanging out with humans and other cryptids while she was trying to reproduce—but we would always be a family, and that was remarkably reassuring.

Something had to be. We followed Grandma around a bend in the road, and a house appeared up ahead of us, tall and narrow and remarkably imposing, painted in an almost gangrenous shade of brownish-green. The shutters on half the windows were actively askew, creating the odd impression that the house was watching us approach. The architecture was somehow subtly wrong, like if we took a level and a protractor to the walls and angles, we’d find that they didn’t line up and the structure didn’t technically exist in this plane of reality.

The tension went out of Grandma’s shoulders, and for the first time since I was a child, I actually believed the age she appeared to be. She looked like a teenage girl as she gazed at the house she’d shared with her husband, where my father had been born, where she’d either lost or given up everything she had. Her history wasn’t a love story; it was a tragedy still in process. She sped up, heading for the porch. Cylia and Fern hung back. We caught up to them quickly.

“You’re sure this place isn’t haunted?” asked Cylia, voice low.

“According to the ghosts, it’s not, and I usually listen to them,” I said. “We could call one of them, if you’d like.”

“I think it’s looking at me,” said Fern.

“A bunch of people got murdered here before the house belonged to my family,” I said. “Something about a swamp god convincing the last owner that chopping his family into hamburger meat would win him its favor. Never go courting the favor of unspeakable gods of the swamp. They don’t have a good track record when it comes to leaving their worshippers alive. Anyway, the ghosts don’t like the house because of the whole ‘swamp god was here’ thing. They respect the territorial claims of the unspeakable.”

Grandma had reached the porch. She hopped up the sagging steps, bending to pat something on the porch swing, and turned to wave at the rest of us. “Well, come on!” she called.

We came on.

She had the door unlocked and open by the time we reached her, allowing the distinctive dusty smell of a house that had been sealed off for a while to drift out into the afternoon. A ball of brown-and-black fur chittered at us from the porch swing.

“How cute, a raccoon,” said James.

The “raccoon” stood up, uncurling a tail that was easily three times the length of its body, and chittered again before reaching for him with eerily simian hands.

“Not a raccoon,” corrected James, a faint edge of panic in his voice.

“Tailypo,” I said, reaching down to let it sniff my hand. “The American lemur. They’re almost extinct now.”

“But your grandfather always liked them, and he encouraged a colony to form around the house,” said Grandma, from her place just inside the front door. “Lord love the man, sometimes he made me look like the one with common sense in this relationship.”

“I just met her, and I know that’s terrifying,” muttered Sam. I laughed and elbowed him in the side before taking my hand away from the tailypo and following Grandma inside.

Despite the lingering smell of dust and ancient paper, the house was remarkably clean, with none of the cobwebs that had blazoned the Red Angel. The couch had been turned into a tidy makeshift bed, with two reasonably new-looking pillows under a threadbare patchwork comforter. Grandma’s camping supplies were stacked in the corner, out of the room’s main walkway. She perched on the arm of the couch as the rest of our group filed in, James at the rear with the tailypo at his heels. It chittered at him as it ran for the kitchen, and he jumped.

“Don’t mind them,” said Grandma. “There are two males and three females currently living on the property. They have kits every spring and drive them off as soon as they’re properly weaned. We may wind up with the last viable population of tailypo in the country, and all because my husband didn’t have the heart to say ‘no’ when I brought him an injured animal—or when that animal started courting and showing off how nice its situation was.”

“Will they bite us while we’re sleeping?” asked Fern. “Or touch us with their creepy little hands?”

“They don’t bite; we’ve had plenty of time to reach a compromise on living space here, they and I. Anyone who arrives in the company of a family member is safe and welcome. They don’t bite strangers, either. When local teens decide to dare each other to go into the murder house, the tailypo will make a lot of noise and drive them off, but not by biting. They know that biting tends to summon animal control, and any of their children who’ve been taken away by the dogcatchers don’t come back again.”

“That’s a little smarter than I like my weird woodland creatures to be,” commented Cylia. “Are they people-smart?”

“Not quite,” said Grandma. “But they’re smart enough to know when they’ve got a good thing going, and I’m here rarely enough that they basically own this house most of the time. They have for years.” She smiled wistfully after the tailypo.

“Well, this is all nice and portentful, Annie’s Grandma,” said Sam, sitting down on the floor and shifting into his monkey form at the same time, so that he could wrap his tail around my ankle again. “Are you going to be in Buckley long?”

“Just as long as you kids are,” she said. “I was stopping by between bounties. I’ll go when your car’s fixed.”

That couldn’t have been her original plan—my grandmother’s not an oracle, she can’t see the future—but Healy luck is a real thing. It’s not like jink luck, where they can control the outcomes. It’s more like an extreme form of being prone to coincidence. Sometimes it’s almost unbelievable, but I’ve seen it in operation my whole life, and I believe. It would be hard not to. Dad and Aunt Jane have the same thing, in a slightly less extreme form, and then by the time you get to my generation, it’s just a higher-than-normal tendency to run into cryptids every time we turn around.

I’d give a lot to know what kind of things my great-grandmother Fran’s ancestors got up to behind the woodshed, is what I’m sort of saying here. There’s something in our bloodline on that side of the family that’s not human, and while whatever it is doesn’t seem to be hurting anything, it would be nice to know what we’re working with.

“And where will you go?” I asked, in a challenging tone.

Grandma sighed, looking around the room at my friends before focusing on me. “You really trust these people.”

“They went with me to face the crossroads, so yes, I really do.”

“I’m so glad.” She smiled so broadly it looked painful. “I was worried you’d never find people you could trust that way. Verity can take up all the air in a room—she gets that from my side of the family—and Alex is good at holding his breath, but you never could. You needed to get out, and you needed to breathe. And now you can go home and keep on breathing. My perfect girl.”

“Where are you going, Grandma?”

“Off to talk to Mary, and then to find my husband, and this time, I’m not coming back until I do.” She offered me her hand. After only a momentary hesitation, I took it. “If Mary says he’s alive, he’s alive. I’ve known her since I was a baby, and there’s no one I trust more where the crossroads are concerned. If he’s alive, he’s out there somewhere, waiting for me, and I need to go find him before he gives up.”

Somehow, I didn’t think he was going to hold out all this time only to give up on her now. If he was still out there, he was going to be thrilled when his inexplicably young, hot, emotionally disturbed wife showed up to pull him out of whatever weird oubliette the crossroads had chucked him into. I couldn’t imagine my grandmother would be this dedicated to a man who didn’t deserve it, although it was difficult to ponder what he might have done so wrong in his life as to deserve her.

I made a face. Grandma laughed. “Did you honestly think telling me you’d found and killed the crossroads would get you any other response? Of course, I’m going to go find your grandfather. You know he must be dying to meet you all.”

“Um,” said James.

“All right, probably not all of you, but he disappeared while I was extremely pregnant, and he probably knows it’s been long enough for his children to have had children. I know I would be wondering about my descendants if our positions were reversed.”

“I would certainly hope so, since I’m one of them,” I said.

Something rustled in the backpack next to the couch. James flinched away from the sound.

“Is it another tailypo?” he asked. “Or worse—rats? Do you put traps down here?”

“I would never,” said Grandma, and reached into her bag—not with a grasping hand, like a normal person, but with her fingers fully extended and her palm flexed. It was a position I was deeply familiar with, and I smiled even as she pulled her hand free, displaying two mice, one brindle and one pale fawn, sitting in the center of her palm. Both of them were wearing jewelry made from bullet casings, and the brindle had a cloak of stitched-together candy bar wrappers.

“Whoa,” said Sam. “More mice.”

“More?” asked James. “I wasn’t aware that mice were a risk.”

“Why are those mice wearing clothes?” asked Fern. “Does this mean that all the other mice I’ve seen were naked?” She sounded genuinely distressed by the idea.

Cylia nodded toward my grandmother’s palm. “S’up, Aeslin buddies?”

Grandma and I both turned to stare at her. She shrugged. “I get around. I’ve heard the rumors about you people having an intact colony. A lot of jinks get mixed up with the exotic animal trade. Easier to poach when you’re guaranteed to find what you’re looking for. You know what your friends there would go for on the open market?”

Grandma pulled her hand closer to her body, taking the mice with it. “Our mice are not for sale.”

“I never said they were, and that whole gig isn’t my thing. I have cousins who work the shows, but I haven’t spoken to them in years. I’m not threatening your mice, I swear.”

Grandma looked at me. I nodded encouragingly.

“I trust Cylia,” I said. “She’s saved my ass more than once. She’s not going to hurt your mice. Speaking of, hello.” I shifted my attention and address to the mice. “Are you the current head clergy of the Pilgrim Priestess?”

“We are,” squeaked the brindle, puffing out its chest at the same time. As was often the case with Aeslin mice, I couldn’t tell whether it was a boy mouse or a girl mouse, and I wasn’t sure it mattered. Not being human, or even humanoid, the mice tend to prefer “it” as a gender-neutral pronoun, and we all go along with that, even as it makes some of us profoundly uncomfortable. Aeslin mice have a casual relationship with human concepts about gender at best. It’s not that they don’t care about our social norms. It’s that once they have an idea in their heads, they don’t let it go easily, and they got all their concepts about how humans think about such things from four-times great-grandmother, who found them in her chicken coop on what I’m sure was a very bracing morning.

“I am to be traded to the temple of the Noisy Priestess when this pilgrimage is done,” said the fawn mouse.

Grandma Alice is sort of weird within the family because she has two separate temples dedicated to her mysteries. One of them observes the rituals created before Grandpa Thomas disappeared, while the other is occupied in chronicling her life as it continues to happen. They’ll switch roles if he ever comes back. It makes my temple’s structure seem simple and easily understood.

“Annie.” James grabbed my arm, white-knuckled. “Annie, the mice are talking.”

“Of course they are,” I said. “They’re Aeslin mice. The hard part is getting them to shut up.” I looked at Grandma. “Just the two?”

“I can’t take a whole colony with me when I’m moving between dimensions,” she said. “It’s too dangerous. Size doesn’t impact the rituals I use, but the number of living things does.”

“Ah.” I nodded. “Three is within your limits?”

“I can’t use rituals that won’t accommodate at least two. What would happen if I found Thomas and didn’t have anything on me that would get us both home? Three is a strain sometimes, but it’s better than asking one of the mice to travel alone with me the way I used to.”

The Aeslin mice are the living history of my family. They remember everything they see and hear, so as long as someone travels with their mice, everything goes into the record. There had been days when I missed the presence of my own mice so badly that it was all I could do to keep from screaming. I’d sent them back to Portland after I burned down the carnival, once it had become clear that it wasn’t safe for them to stay with me while I was running from the Covenant. If I’d died while I was in my self-imposed exile, I would have been the first member of the family since great-great-great-great-grandma Beth to be even partially forgotten. Bemoaning the lack of privacy brought on by having a colony of nosy, intelligent rodents living in the walls is practically a family pastime, but I was going to sleep so much better when I was back with my mice.

“Here.” Grandma held her hand out to me, mice still on her palm, looking at me with quivering whiskers and bright, curious eyes. “You need to take them home with you.”

“Grandma . . .” I raised my hand automatically. The mice transferred from her palm to mine. I pulled them protectively toward my chest as she moved her hand away.

“You are going home, aren’t you?” She frowned. “Your parents are worried sick. So are your siblings. Alex has asked me to go looking for you, twice. Verity’s still in New York, and it’s not safe for me to go see her, but I spoke to Dominic, and he asked about you. You need to show them that you’re still alive.”

“We will Chronicle your journey!” squeaked the brindle mouse, proudly. “We will Recount it to your clergy with precision.”

“This is too weird,” said James. His face had gone pale, and the temperature of the air around him was still dropping. Poor guy kept thinking he’d hit the threshold of how weird the world could be, and then discovering that once my family got involved, that was a well with no bottom. “Talking mice. And this is normal for you.”

“She had two in her backpack when we met,” confirmed Sam gravely. “I took them to the airport when she left me. Which she’s never allowed to do again—it was very distressing.”

“Yes, dear,” I said, patting his arm.

The mice cheered. James jumped, obviously startled by the volume. I smirked at him.

“The Aeslin mice are a lot louder than you’d think they could be, sometimes,” I said. “And they take a very close interest in the romantic lives of the family. So you’d better get used to it.”

“Is a New Relative discovered?” asked the fawn mouse, whiskers quivering with barely contained excitement.

“James here is my brother now,” I said. “His old family didn’t take proper care of him or appreciate him enough, so I stole him.”

“HAIL TO THE COMING OF THE STOLEN GOD!” shouted the mice in unison. Grandma laughed.

“Oh, you’re in it now, boy,” she said. “Once the mice take to you, you never hear the end of it. Do you like cookies?”

“Yes,” he said uncertainly. “Why—”

“I’ll bake you a batch when I get home, to say welcome to the family.” She rose, spreading her hands to indicate the cluttered living room. “The house is yours, as long as you need it. There’s a key under the mat. Lock up when you leave, then give it to the tailypo. They’ll take care of things.”

“Right,” muttered James. “Of course, the tailypo will take care of things. Why would I expect anything different?”

“Why do I need to take your mice, Grandma?” I asked.

“I don’t currently have a charm that’s strong enough to get four people across a dimensional border,” she said. “And I told you, I’m not coming home without Thomas. Not this time.”

The numbers didn’t add up. “If you don’t have a charm that’s good for four, how have you been traveling with two mice for this long?”

Her expression sobered. “I’ve been losing faith, my lovely. Even I can’t keep going without answers forever, and I suppose I was . . . I was starting to believe I’d lost him. Thank you for giving my faith back to me.”

“Are you leaving right now?”

She looked at Sam, smiled knowingly, and looked back to me. “Wouldn’t you?” she asked.

She grabbed her backpack, which rattled in an ominous way that probably meant it contained more ammunition than any one person needed unless they were planning to challenge an army, and then she was heading for the front door.

She didn’t look back.

“Well,” said Cylia, once she was gone, leaving the five of us alone. “She seems nice.”

“She seems terrifying,” said Fern.

“She’s both those things,” I said, looking down at the mice in my palm. “She’s my grandma. I’ll go check the kitchen, see if she left us anything to eat.”

I transferred the mice to my shoulder as I walked out of the room. They promptly hid themselves in my hair, their claws scratching against my scalp in the soft, reassuring way they had since I was old enough to be considered responsible and capable of caring for my own clergy. No one followed me.

The fridge contained eggs, milk, and half a roast chicken. The cupboard had sugar, coffee, and a loaf of bread. My grandma may be half-feral these days, but part of her still trends more toward Donna Reed than Norma Bates. Lucky for us, although we were going to be pretty sick of chicken by the time we got back on the road.

The tailypo was sitting on the counter, tail wrapped several times around its haunches. It looked at me and chirped. I handed it a raw egg and left the room as it was working to chew through the shell.

“There’s breakfast,” I said. “Hopefully we’ll be on the road pretty soon after we eat. I don’t like to stay here longer than I absolutely have to.”

James sat up straighter. “Is your grandmother really heading for another dimension?”

I shrugged. “Probably. She doesn’t tend to lie about things like that. I think she doesn’t see the benefit of lying to her family.” She might have had a better relationship with her kids if she’d been a little more dishonest. But then again, they could have gotten the real story any time they wanted it by talking to the mice, and then she would still have deserted them, she would have just lied while she was doing it. Family is difficult sometimes. “We’re all used to the fact that none of us matter as much as a man that most of us have never met. Dad was really little when Grandpa Thomas disappeared. Aunt Jane wasn’t even born yet. Mary remembers him—they were friends—but she hasn’t been able to talk about him for as long as I’ve been alive.”

“The crossroads wouldn’t let her?” asked Sam.

I nodded. “They really wanted us to just let him go. I don’t think Grandma knows how to do that.”

“Maybe she won’t have to,” said Cylia. “That’s a lady with a lot of luck braided all around her. Good and bad mixed together until even I couldn’t pull them apart.”

“Healy family luck is funky,” I said.

“It didn’t look entirely human,” said Cylia.

“Like I said, it’s funky.” I shook my head, all too aware of the weight of the mice clinging to my neck. “She’ll be fine, or she won’t. Either way, I’m not going to be the person who tries to stop her. I like her liking me.”

James was looking increasingly alarmed. I flashed him a narrow smile.

“She’d never hurt me. Once the mice formalize your adoption, she’d never hurt you, either. The colony would never forgive her, and she values their good opinion more than she cares about anything human.”

“Um,” said Sam.

“Anything else intelligent,” I corrected. “Now come on, let’s all find places to sleep here in the big, creepy house.”

---

Sam and I wound up upstairs, in a bedroom painted the exact color of raw steak. The bed was big enough for both of us, and there wasn’t much dust; it was fine.

The mice bedded down in the chest at the foot of the mattress. Sam climbed in next to me, looping an arm around my waist and pulling me close. “When are you going to call your folks?” he asked.

“Tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll use the phone down at the Red Angel, and I said it in front of the mice. That makes it basically a promise.”

A soft cheer rose from the chest. I rolled my eyes, safe in the knowledge that no one could see it.

“You’re sure your parents aren’t going to be mad?”

“About what? They know why I had to go into hiding. Mork and Mindy will have confirmed everything that happened, and the first rule of the family is that you don’t endanger the family. Save yourself, then save everyone else, and that’s exactly what I did. I followed the rules.”

“I meant about you coming home with a bunch of weirdoes.”

“Cylia and Fern are from Portland. They’re going to go back to their lives, although they’re basically family now—they dropped everything to make sure I was okay, and that’s too big a gesture to forget because the road trip is over. Or do you mean ‘are they going to be mad that I came home with a boyfriend’?” I rolled over, so that we were facing each other in the bed. Sam was looking at me with sincere worry in his eyes. I reached up and ran my fingers through the fur that crowned his cheek. “A boyfriend who isn’t human?”

He nodded silently, biting his lip.

“They’re going to love you, because I love you, and they’re smart enough to know that I don’t give my love away for nothing. I think they’d given up on the idea of me ever falling in love with anything that wasn’t a weapon. They’re going to adore you, and you’d better tread carefully, or the mice will adopt you, too, and once that happens, there’s no getting away from this circus act. All right?”

Sam nodded, still looking unsure, so I leaned forward and kissed him. The mice cheered again, louder this time. I grinned. “Or maybe it’s too late for you already,” I said.

“It’s been too late for me for a long time now,” he said. This time he kissed me, and we didn’t let the cheering of the mice distract us. It had been a long day, after all. We deserved a little time to ourselves.

Fern, Cylia, and James were all asleep downstairs. Tomorrow, we’d be back in a little travel trailer with no privacy, bound for Portland to deliver my grandmother’s mice and face the music for my long absence. Tomorrow, I would call my parents.

But tonight, there was nowhere else in the world I’d rather be.