“The relationship between Alice Healy and the Galway Wood is inexplicable and strange. Someday I’ll understand what it means, assuming she hasn’t already buried me there.”
—Thomas Price
The old Parrish place, Buckley Township, Michigan
THE PHONE WAS ABSOLUTELY an antique. I’m not up on modern technology by any measure, and even I knew it was ancient. I cradled the receiver between my cheek and shoulder as I dialed, then moved to check the fridge. I didn’t usually leave things there to rot when I went traveling, but “usually” is not the same as “never.”
The phone rang four times before there was a click and a familiar voice said, “You’ve reached the Red Angel, this is Cynthia speaking, how can I help you?”
“Cyn, it’s Alice,” I said.
“You’re back!”
“We are,” I confirmed. “And I was hoping whatever you had on for dinner would stretch a little farther.”
“You could have just come to the bar, you know. No one here’s going to run screaming from the sight of a human.”
“Not so much an option yet.” There was nothing in the fridge except for a few bottles of beer and some ancient condiments. I was pretty sure the mustard was old enough to vote. “Oh, and if you have someone who could go on a grocery run tomorrow, the cupboards are bare over here.”
“Yeah, I’ve got a girl who can make the run for you, as long as you tip well. How long are you planning to stay?”
“Maybe you’re not listening to me,” I said. “We’re back. We’re staying. For good.”
“‘We’ being you and the mice?”
“No.” She was the first person I was going to tell with words, the first person who’d known him before everything went to hell. This call had been essential, and had felt like a good idea when I made it, but suddenly my tongue was dry as cotton in my mouth, and the next words fought me, refusing to come without a fight. “We being me, Thomas, and the stray Thomas picked up along the way. Her name’s Sally and she’s human, but she’s essentially his adopted daughter and the mice have already deified her.”
Cynthia gasped, the sound short and sharp. I could hear her fingers tighten around the receiver, the plastic groaning under the force of her grasp. “You found him? Alice, you found Thomas? You brought him home?”
“That, or I found a doppelganger so good that he could fool me completely.” Wouldn’t that be a fun turn of events, given how concerned he’d been about me being an imposter? But no. He knew too much. He knew me. He was the real deal.
Cynthia made a weird choking sound that I realized after a moment was laughter. Oddly strained, but laughter all the same. “You ridiculous . . . Okay. So you found him, he’s alive, and you’re at the Parrish Place, yeah?”
“Three people,” I repeated. “No dietary restrictions I know of. Oh, and if whoever you send to the grocery store could grab us a sheet cake, the mice are sort of worked up right now, and they’d really appreciate it.”
“Are you sure you’re not a doppelganger? Alice Price, offering store-bought cake?”
“I’m going to need to clean this kitchen to the bolts before I feel like I can bake here, and that’s not happening until I’ve had half a dozen showers,” I said. “The mice can deal with substandard baked goods for a few days.”
“Got it. Oh, and Alice?”
“Yeah?”
“Welcome home.”
She was laughing again as she hung up, sounding like she was teetering on the very edge of hysteria. I looked at the phone, thinking about all the other calls I needed to make, all the big, important, inescapable calls . . . and then I set the receiver gently back in the cradle. Only one of those calls needed to happen tonight, and it wasn’t going to involve a phone. In fact, I’d probably take the phone off the hook before I made it, to keep everyone else who was immediately going to try checking in from getting through.
Of course, that might trigger a panic and cause all of them to descend on Buckley before I was ready, but would that be worse than putting off talking to the one other person who’d been there since the beginning? I didn’t know. Why did everything have to be so complicated all of a sudden?
I closed the fridge, resting my forehead against the cool metal. For fifty years, my life had been incredibly simple. Go: search: fail: heal: repeat. I’d been following a very straightforward set of commands, searching for a man who might or might not be out there to find, letting the situation provide whatever complications I was going to need to deal with. And now we were back in the real world, where things were complex and tangled and didn’t follow straight, predictable lines. Two kids, six grandkids, two ghosts, and an unknown number of allies, most of whom wouldn’t have been born yet when Thomas disappeared, but who knew me well enough to want to check in. Once they learned we were here, things were going to get very complicated for a while.
But this was what I’d wanted. This was what I’d been searching for. And exhausted and overwhelmed as I was right now, I wouldn’t change a thing, because he was home. With me, in Buckley. We were both still ourselves, bar a little—or a lot—of trauma, and some telepathic tinkering with my head that we might never have all the details on. We were home.
That would have to make up for everything else.
I straightened, pushed my hair away from my face with both hands, and put on a sunny smile before heading back to the living room. Sally was still sitting on the floor. Thomas was still apparently unconscious on the couch. I walked over to the armchair I’d been seated in before, shooed two tailypo out of it, and settled again. They hopped down to the floor, then back into the chair, where they curled in my lap. That was fine. That was normal, surreal as that might seem.
The tailypo are not in any way domesticated; they’re wild animals that have decided to den in a human house, mostly because decades ago, I managed to trick Thomas into playing animal hospital for an injured one, and they’re smart enough to remember when they’ve got a good thing going. They know what they want and they know what they like, and they’re reasonably well behaved as long as you don’t try to make them do anything they really don’t want to do. Like stay out of my lap.
“Cynthia’s going to send someone by with dinner, and she’s got someone else who’s going to go by the grocery store for us tomorrow morning, meaning we’ll be able to cook and keep ourselves alive while we recover enough to want to deal with the locals.”
“Are the locals that bad?”
“Eh.” I wobbled a hand in midair. “Typical small-town stuff. Everyone knows everybody else, and even though I’m officially a local, I’ve been scarce enough since I assumed this particular identity that people have questions. There’s going to be an adjustment period, and that’s why it’s so important for us to have our stories straight before we start interacting with them. Whoever Cyn sends with the groceries will be a cryptid. Dragon princess, probably, since she usually has a few of them on staff, or a gorgon, or someone else who can pass for human long enough to do the shopping. Species doesn’t matter. What matters is that everyone on her staff knows my deal, they know Thomas’s deal, even if he’s an urban legend more than a person to them, and they won’t ask any really stupid questions, or try to catch us out in logical contradictions that make us sound like we’re secretly international jewel thieves or something.”
“We provide . . . leverage,” said Sally, in the ponderous tone of someone who was quoting something. Then she cackled, clearly delighted with herself.
I blinked slowly. “Okay, whatever that means. Anyway, food soon, house tour when Thomas is awake, then showers.”
“And in the meantime, you can tell me who the players are.”
I raised an eyebrow. “The players?”
“You keep mentioning people like you think I’m not joining this show in the middle of the season. Like this Cynthia who’s bringing us dinner. You said she’s a ‘Huldrafolk’? What the hell is a Huldrafolk? What’s a dragon princess, for that matter? Cryptids are things like Nessie and the Mothman, not things that go down to the Hannaford’s to buy milk and eggs.”
“Guessing that’s a grocery store, and um, wow. You’ve been cool enough about everything, and I found you in a weird murder dimension, that I guess I forgot you wouldn’t have grown up with all this stuff. You want me to start at the beginning?”
Sally nodded vigorously. “Please.”
“Okay. How much do you know about the Covenant of St. George?”
“You and the boss have both mentioned them, and neither of you likes them much, and you said earlier that they started out by killing dangerous things but moved on to killing things like the tailypo. Explain it like I don’t even know that much. I promise not to get offended by you talking to me like I’m five.”
“Right. Okay, so centuries ago, dragons were fucking things up for people, and—”
“Hold on. Hold on.” Sally held up her one hand, motioning for me to stop. “You’re already assuming something there. Dragons are real?”
“Were real, mostly. They’re not extinct, but they’re so close that a few bad days could take them out. It’s complicated. But once, they had the kind of numbers you really don’t want a massive apex predator to have. Once, they ate people, and burned down houses, and generally made themselves unpopular. So the Covenant formed to make them stop. An organization of monster-hunters dedicated to the idea that humans deserved to survive, and to be safe.” I sighed. “It wasn’t a bad idea in the beginning. They were even pretty cool for their time. They let women join. They didn’t care about race or religion. They just cared that you were human and wanted humanity to endure.”
“So what happened?”
“They won.” I shrugged. “And like any underdog who wins when they didn’t think it was possible, they started getting full of themselves. They decided it wasn’t good enough to protect humanity, they had to eradicate the dragons. Then they had to do the same to anything else they didn’t like or understand, or that they thought might be dangerous. I don’t know when religion came into it—it wasn’t there in the beginning; someone found a way to graft it on later and make it stick—but some clever asshole decided they were going to redefine their mission as wiping out anything that hadn’t been on Noah’s Ark. So if it wasn’t mentioned in the Bible, it was out. With a little creative interpretation, of course, since the Bible mentions unicorns, dragons, and all manner of other things the Covenant decided they had the right to slaughter.”
Sally made a face. “They don’t sound like very nice people.”
“Not so much. Again, maybe they were in the beginning, but once they were on top, they got more and more determined to stay there, and they became more and more willing to kill anything that got in their way. Eventually, they were too good at their own jobs, and they killed so many of the ‘monsters’ that everyone else decided the monsters had never been real in the first place, and the Covenant started losing power. Success drove them underground, and that made them bitter, so they got even more aggressive about hunting down and killing innocent creatures.
“You asked what a cryptid was. Well, technically, a cryptid is any living organism whose existence has yet to be proven by science. So all your neighbors back in the bottle dimension, Helen and Phoebe in Ithaca, everything we saw during our road trip, all cryptids—or they would be if they came here. Since most of them are staying in their home dimensions, they get to be just people there.”
Sally nodded. “So some cryptids are things like the tailypo or the mice, and others are people?”
“Don’t let the mice hear you implying they’re not people; they learned a great lecture on sapience from one of my grandkids, and they can repeat it word for word. Which they will, with great enthusiasm, until they decide you’ve actually listened. We use ‘people’ as a label for anything that can reason for itself. So some people are bipeds, like humans, and some of them look enough like humans that they can hide in plain sight. Some of them are roughly human-shaped, but can’t pass unless they have cover or some sort of a disguise. And some aren’t bipedal at all. Dragons were people. They were just people in positions of power who didn’t see humans as people. And that’s been the problem since the beginning. When someone looks around and decides they get to make that call, things always go bad.”
“Like how the Covenant kills cryptids.”
“Yes.”
“And you know so much about the Covenant because . . . ?”
“My grandparents were members,” I said. “So was Thomas. The Covenant sent him to Buckley to keep an eye on my family, because we were ‘dangerous traitors’ who might decide to share their secrets. As if anyone would believe us.”
Sally blinked. “Your family belonged to the Covenant.”
“Thomas, too, in case you missed that part. And yeah. They were enthusiastic members of the ‘Earth is for humans and humans only, and anything humans don’t like deserves to die’ club, until they weren’t, and then they came here.” I waved a hand, airily. “I’m simplifying, of course. You’ll get the whole story when it won’t be completely overwhelming.”
“Because this isn’t overwhelming?”
“No, this is the short version. My grandparents quit the Covenant because they figured out it was bullshit, left England, moved to the middle of nowhere to raise a family, and that might have been the end of it, except the Covenant is made up of paranoid bastards, and they sent Thomas to spy on us. He showed up when I was sixteen, and he was the most incredible man I’d ever met.” I couldn’t stop my voice from turning a little dreamy at the end.
Sally made a face. “Okay, ew, border of too much information and ‘I don’t want to think about my father figure’s sex life.’”
“You’re gonna meet our kids eventually.”
“Still. You could have adopted.”
I smiled at her. “You’re remarkably weird for someone who’s been through as much as you have.”
“Pot, kettle.”
“Right. So I met Thomas, fell in love with Thomas, convinced myself I would never have a future with Thomas, went into the woods trying to find the thing that killed my grandmother, got bitten by a super-venomous sort-of-snake, nearly died. Thomas, meanwhile, met me, fell in love with me, told himself he wasn’t in love with me because we’d never have a future, then sold himself to the crossroads to save my life. Oh, and then he didn’t tell me he’d done that, the fucker, so I went off to college and didn’t come back for years. We were kind of a disaster. The kind where the authorities sift the ashes and make politely unhappy noises about how there were no survivors.”
Sally looked thoughtfully at Thomas. “He’s different when you’re around. Calmer, somehow. Less like he wants to fight the whole world. He also yells more. I think you’re a disaster, but you’re good for each other at the same time.”
“I hope so, because it’s going to be a while before I let him out of my sight.” I stroked one of the tailypo curled in my lap. “His deal with the crossroads was brutal. It didn’t take him right away. For whatever reason, they decided to play with their food. First he got locked inside the Buckley town limits. Then he got locked inside his house. I know this sounds fake, but it was a different time. We had telephones, and we had the mail, and he had no reliable way of using either one.”
Sally blinked. “How’s that?”
“Telephones used to go through an exchange. You’d dial, and then the operator would connect you to the number you were trying to reach. I think they phased out the humans in most big cities by 1950 or so, but here, they hung on for another decade. I was an unmarried woman ten years his junior, and he was a foreigner who had taken to his home with some unknown illness. If he’d tried to call me, even if my father had allowed me to take the call, the operator would have stayed on the line hoping for some juicy gossip.”
“You’re right,” said Sally. “That sounds fake. But I’ll allow it.”
“So he couldn’t call me, and I couldn’t call him without risking damage to my reputation. And I was angry, because he didn’t tell me about his deal right away. He didn’t want me to feel like I owed him for saving my life. So I thought he was cutting me off for no reason, like he was punishing me for getting hurt. And I went off to school, and he stayed here, locked inside this house.” I waved my hands. “Maybe he’ll want me to reclaim my family home once he’s had some time to get his footing back. It’s a year-to-year lease, we’d have to wait twelve months at the absolute most before we could move. Or maybe he’ll feel the way I do, like the good times we had here outweigh the bad parts.”
“So you couldn’t call each other. What about the mail?” asked Sally.
“My father didn’t like Thomas. Thought he had come to Buckley to abduct me, drag me back to Britain, and force me to join the Covenant against my will, and he refused to see that I was always going to be my mother’s daughter, and I was never going to turn into the mild-mannered, accommodating princess he wanted. So he ‘helpfully’ agreed to mail Thomas’s letters, and they never reached me, and my letters to him never reached him, and we both thought we’d been abandoned. For years.”
“How the fuck did you wind up married?”
I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. “Long, long story. Wasps killed my father, I thought they were going to kill me too, I didn’t want to die without banging the man I’d been in love with since I was a teenager, so I came here to screw him senseless before I made my last stand. I did, and then I did, and I didn’t die, courtesy of the mice, and I came back and he dug the wasp eggs out of my back, and then I just never left.” I gave him an unabashedly fond look. “I never left. He told me about the terms of his deal eventually, and then I married him, and yelled at him a lot for thinking I’d have been willing to do that out of obligation, and we got five years of happily ever after before the crossroads took him away from me. Oh, and he quit the Covenant. Right around the time he sold his soul. Guess he didn’t want to risk them showing up and finding out how weird things were getting around here.”
“Okay,” said Sally. “But what about—”
The doorbell rang.
I stood, scattering tailypo in all directions. Sally rose from the floor, her grasp on her spear shifting from casual to anticipatory. I glanced back at her. “No stabbing,” I said. “We are currently in a no-stabbing phase of our lives. I’ll let you know if that changes.”
She scowled at me, but lowered her spear.
I opened the door.
The redhead on the porch would have looked perfectly normal in any crowd, as long as she wasn’t expected to remove the overstuffed down jacket encasing her arms, shoulders, and back in a puffy layer so thick that the actual shape of her was all but obscured. She had a large foil pan in her hands, a paper bag perched on the top. She blinked at the sight of me, and blinked again as she looked past me into the house.
“You were serious,” she said, sounding faintly awestruck.
I smiled. “Hi, Cynthia,” I said. “Come on in. Don’t mind the mess; we just got back. The mice are on time-out, so they’re not going to swarm you.”
“That’s good to know,” she said, and stepped inside moving with an incredible lightness. She looked Sally up and down, clearly taking her measure, and barely glanced at the couch before heading for the kitchen.
The very tip of her tail dangled under the hem of her skirt, only visible once she had turned her back to us. I wasn’t sure Sally would even notice it, since she’d never dealt with a Huldra before. I followed after Cynthia.
“Is that all?” I asked.
She set her pan on the counter, removing the bag before unsealing the lid. “Dinner tonight is barbequed spare ribs—from a few of the dire boars that wander around near the swamp, not from anything you wouldn’t want to eat—with baked beans and cornbread. I’ll swing by at closing with peach cobbler, but it won’t be ready for hours yet.”
A tailypo scampered up to investigate what she was doing. She dipped a hand into her coat pocket, producing a hard-boiled egg and forking it over. The ring-tailed pest chirped and ran off with its prize, taking up a place atop the china hutch and shoving the egg into its mouth as fast as it could physically manage.
“Oh, now you’ve done it, they’ll all be coming in here to beg for treats,” I said. “But seriously, Cynthia, what’s going on? You seem pissed.”
“What’s going on is that you’ve been on an impossible mission for fifty years, and I’ve supported and encouraged you, because I’ve always known it was futile.” Her voice was low and tightly controlled. She glanced from the tray of ribs and beans to me, eyes flashing. “I’ve always been here. Patient and kind and keeping things on an even keel, and never telling you what a terrible idea this was, but Alice, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a terrible idea.”
I stared at her. Cynthia shook her head, and continued.
“You bring that man here, back to Buckley? Back to the place where my mother’s trees are growing? Where your trees are growing? I thought your happy ending would be eventually coming home and marrying the Galway like the widow you were, not hauling a dead man out of the grave. The Covenant’s been sniffing around the edges of this continent since your damn granddaughter went on live TV and declared a fucking war. More than sniffing around on the coasts. They just haven’t made it this far inland yet. You really think they’re not watching this place, now that they know they didn’t manage to kill off your whole family? You really think they’re not going to notice him? You’ve put us all in danger, Alice, so you could play house again.”
“I thought you’d be happy,” I said, voice small. “He was . . . You were his friend. You’ve been my friend. You made sure the mice and the tailypo were fed while I was gone. You . . . you took care of me.”
“I was hoping if I took care of things long enough, you’d come to your senses, not do the impossible,” she said, turning to face me. “If you’ve put this town in danger, if you’ve put my people in danger, I don’t know that I’ll be able to forgive you.”
“I’m not calling the Covenant, and neither is Thomas,” I said. “Sally’s new to all this, but she’s not going to do it either.”
“See that you don’t,” she said. “You’ll have groceries in the morning, and cobbler when I get off shift. I’ll make a social call in a few days, when I’ve had time to calm down and we’re not all dead.”
“I appreciate it,” I said, somewhat stiffly. I’d been expecting a joyous reunion, not a borderline accusation that I was putting the entire township in danger by doing what I’d always been very open about trying to do. This was only a surprise because apparently even Cynthia, who had been my ally since the beginning, hadn’t been able to believe I was going to accomplish it.
Finding out that people don’t have any faith in you sucks. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, but apparently not.
“Have you called your family yet?” she asked, with less open accusation in her tone.
“Getting here wiped Thomas out,” I said. “He’s been sleeping since we got home, which is part of why I don’t want to go shopping on my own. That, and I’ll need to get the truck out of storage and make sure it runs without catching fire or something before I can haul more than I can carry, and I’m planning to be here for a while. I want to bake.”
“You and your Bundt cakes,” said Cynthia, sounding almost fond.
“There’s nothing wrong with a quality Bundt cake,” I said. “I’ll call Kevin and Jane once Thomas is ready to deal with company, because you know they’ll be here as soon as they can catch a flight.”
“That’s part of what I’m afraid of. You called that babysitter of yours?”
“I don’t think she’s been my babysitter for a long time, and no. Once she knows, she’ll tell the others, and then everyone will know, and we’re back to ‘I’d like Thomas to be awake and able to say he doesn’t mind before I call a family reunion down on his head.’”
Cynthia nodded slowly. “You’re being smarter about this than I expected you to be.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not a kid anymore.” I shrugged. “I had to figure out how to plan before I punched a while ago.”
“Not so I’ve seen.”
“You’ve seen me when I was catching my breath,” I said. “I’m not catching my breath anymore. I’m home. There’s a real difference.”
“Okay. Maybe you’re not going to cock this up completely. I’ll have hope, anyway.” Cynthia offered me a pale smile, then turned and walked away. I followed her to the living room, watching her offer Sally a brief nod before heading to the door.
Sally, standing and clutching her spear, didn’t say anything or introduce herself as Cynthia stepped outside.
“I’ll see you later, Cyn,” I said. “Hopefully Thomas is awake when you come back with the cobbler. You can meet Sally after we’ve both had a chance to shower.”
“Remember what we talked about,” said Cynthia, and shut the door.
I snorted. “She can make anything sound dire.” I turned back to Sally. “There’s food if you’re hungry, although it’ll keep if you’re not. It’s a little early for dinner, and we haven’t used the dining room in decades. I know it’s going to be clean. That doesn’t mean it’s in any condition to host a sit-down meal. We’re probably eating on the couch, and that means waiting for himself to wake up and share it.”
Sally blinked, still staring at the door. “That woman . . .” she said, and stopped, clearly unsure how to continue.
“Yes?” I prompted.
“That woman had a tail,” she said. “An actual tail. It moved. When she walked, it moved. She wasn’t just a furry. What the actual fuck?”
“You’re going to have to get used to people with tails,” I said. “One of the grandkids is dating a fu¯ri, and he has a tail when he’s not playing human. Which seems to be most of the time, since fu¯ri don’t have ‘look like a hairless biped’ as a default form. He looks human enough that it’s not as weird as it could be, which is a good thing, since her sister would never stop tormenting her if she could spin their relationship into being something kinky.” I paused. “Honestly, Verity probably does that anyway. I didn’t have any siblings, and watching the two of them interact makes me sort of happy about that. Verity is not kind to her younger sister.”
“But . . . a tail,” said Sally. “On her body. How does that make anatomical sense?”
“I mean, it probably makes more sense than humans evolving not to have them, given the way our spines work, but we have books you can read, if you’re that interested in cryptid anatomy. When she comes back with dessert, if she’s less cranky, I’ll try to get her to take her jacket off. That’s really going to blow your mind.”
“Why?”
“Huldra are . . . honestly, no one’s quite sure what Huldra are. They don’t tend to leave bodies when they die, and that makes autopsies impossible. They come in three primary types. One turns to stone upon death. One basically melts into water, and one literally takes root and becomes a grove of trees. All three kinds, though, have hollow backs, and are sanguivores.”
“I feel like I’m going to be unhappy when I learn what that word means.”
“It means they live on blood, Sally,” said Thomas from the couch, his voice raspy from his impromptu nap, but clear all the same. “Vampire bats are sanguivores. So are mosquitoes. Huldra are the largest and most sophisticated sanguivores in the world.”
“They’re vampires?” Sally gave me a disbelieving look, before switching it over to Thomas.
“Not in the way you’re thinking, but it’s a close-enough term,” said Thomas. “They feed on blood. They’re as much vegetable as animal, but as Alice said, we don’t fully understand their biology. The world is full of mysteries, and we should be grateful, as a world completely understood is a world with little enchantment left to offer.” He lifted a hand, resting it on his forehead. “And on that note—can anyone solve the mystery of where I am right now?”
“We’re home, honey,” I said, walking over and bending down to brush a kiss against his fingers. He opened his eyes and smiled blearily up at me. “How are you feeling?”
“Exhausted. Home, meaning . . . ?”
“Buckley.”
“Ah. That explains the lumps in the couch.”
I paused, frowning. “We already had this conversation,” I said. “You woke up, explained the Aeslin mice to Sally, and went back to sleep. You asked why I never moved back to the house where I grew up, so I could be closer to the woods.”
“And I asked how it was possible to be closer to the woods, since those trees are practically knocking on the back door already.”
“You really don’t remember?”
Thomas shook his head, eyes still open, and began pushing himself into a sitting position. I stepped quickly away, giving him the space to move. “I’m afraid not,” he said, apologetically. “I’ve never attempted that many dimensional transits in close succession before, and I’m afraid I’ve tapped my reserves a bit more than I expected to. It doesn’t help that they won’t refill as quickly now that we’re back on Earth.”
“Helen said the pneuma had continued to recover in the absence of the crossroads,” I said. “The world’s getting better.”
“Yes, but a creature in the process of healing doesn’t necessarily have strength to spare,” he said. “I can feel the ambient magic of the world, and I’ll rebuild my own over the next weeks, but it’s not the endless wellspring it was in some of the dimensions we passed through. It’s going to take time.”
“Good thing we’re staying here, then,” I said. “If we want to go to Portland, we’ll call the routewitches for a ride, like normal people.”
“What the hell’s a routewitch?” asked Sally.
“Okay, like seriously weird people who want to get to Oregon,” I amended. “I’d say we’d fly, but we need to go to Vegas first, get some new identities for the two of you. I wouldn’t even try to take you on a Greyhound right now.”
“Vegas?” asked Thomas.
“We have some new allies you need to meet,” I said. “The current family forger is Big Al, a Jink living in Sin City. He can set us up with papers for you and Sally. Things that won’t set off alarms in some ancient government database somewhere that thinks your visa expired fifty years ago and Sally needs to be returned to her parents.”
“Oh,” said Sally.
“Getting him to set Thomas up may be a challenge, but it won’t be worse than anything else we’ve done recently, so we’ll be fine.” Thomas gave me a puzzled look. “His family got caught in a Covenant purge. He hates the Covenant. Helping a traitor will probably appeal to him, after we convince him you’re not some sort of deep-cover agent.”
“Things are real complicated around you people,” said Sally.
Thomas took my arm, pulling himself to his feet, and smiled beatifically. “Yes,” he said. “Isn’t it wonderful?”