“If family’s in trouble, I don’t care if the damn house is on fire. You get out there, and you help them. That’s what keeps us worthy of being a part of a family. Being willing to help when they need us.”
—Enid Healy
The old Parrish place, Buckley Township, Michigan
FORTUNATELY, SALLY’S DEPARTURE FROM Earth had been recent enough that she knew what a Walmart was, and while Buckley is too small to have anything like that within town limits, it’s only about a forty-five-minute drive to Gaylord, where there’s a Walmart Supercenter that—best luck yet—stays open until midnight. Even more fortunately, keeping the house accounts paid for all these years has meant keeping me vaguely up to date, on a financial level. I prefer to use cash when possible, and mostly squirrel it away under the couch cushions. Sally had been handed five hundred dollars and instructions to come back with as much of a wardrobe as she could assemble, plus whatever else caught her eye, plus ice cream if they passed a drive-through.
Cynthia was driving her. My only real regret about the evening was that I couldn’t go with them to watch the fireworks. But I was doing something much more important. I was sitting on the edge of the bed I hadn’t slept in for years, sharpening one of my knives on a small whetstone while Thomas dug through his wardrobe, studying clothing he hadn’t seen for decades. It was oddly domestic, and might even have been relaxing, if we hadn’t been gearing up to head for New York first thing in the morning.
Rose had promised to come with whoever came to pick us up, at least to make the handoff and reassure us that we were with the right driver, which meant we’d be riding with someone who knew the situation, and not someone who’d just been drafted into driving some weirdoes to another state.
That was nice.
“Alice?”
I looked up from my knife. Thomas was watching me, a tie in one hand, a kukri in the other. “Yes, dear?”
“What was that Rose was saying before, about the windows getting shot out?”
“Oh.” I waved my knife airily, then studied the edge as I said, “It was nothing. It happened about two years after you vanished. The Covenant didn’t know you were gone, of course, but they knew about our marriage, and they knew we’d had at least one kid. They wanted him.”
“What in the world could they possibly have wanted with a five-year-old?” Thomas asked. “They’re sticky. All the time. It’s the purpose of five-year-olds.”
I lowered my knife so I could stare at him. Thomas blinked, raising his eyebrows.
“What? He was three when I disappeared, he would have been five and, hence, sticky. Why would the Covenant have wanted him?”
“Blood charms?” I waved the knife again, before setting it beside me on the bed. “The ones keeping the Covenant out of the Price family accounts? Your banker in London passed away, by the way, although he gave his client list to his son. He’s been handling things for the last twenty years.”
Thomas had left a banker’s key, attuned to the family account, with his man in London. If someone the blood charms recognized as a Price wrote and asked for money, the key could be used to authorize a withdrawal in the requested amount. It was a complicated piece of magic. As I lacked the ability to recreate it, and had never seen a way it could apply to my search for my missing husband, I’d left it pretty much alone. It kept the money safe from the Covenant. Kevin could make withdrawals, which meant he could give me money to pay the bills for this old place without putting a financial strain on himself or the family. That was all that really mattered.
“We weren’t that wealthy,” Thomas objected. “Coming to America and abducting a child to get at a few pounds seems excessive, even for the Covenant.”
I made a noncommittal sound. I’d never seen the account balances—it wasn’t allowed, even for the widow, when the key wouldn’t work on my word—but Kevin had been paying maintenance and upkeep on this place since he turned fifteen. Prior to that, I’d been burning through my own meager savings and depending on the kindness of every ally I had to keep the roof from caving in. The rent from my childhood home had helped, as had the fact that even people who’d hated my dad still thought well of my mother. Frances Brown made friends everywhere she went, from the day she was born until the day she died.
Point was, I knew what it cost to keep the house going, and Kevin had funded it for the better part of fifty years. Whatever number we were talking about here, it was definitely more than “a few pounds.”
“They really tried . . . Oh, Alice.” Thomas suddenly seemed to realize his response had been more analytical than was necessarily appropriate when talking about an incident that had involved armed Covenant soldiers attempting to abduct our child. “What happened?”
“Well,” I began. “It took me a while to wrap my head around the idea that you were actually gone, even with Mary trying her best to convince me the crossroads weren’t going to give you back.” I realized midway through the sentence that I’d said Mary’s name aloud, and winced, waiting for her to appear. When she didn’t, I relaxed and continued.
“The bills kept coming in, of course, and I didn’t know what you’d had the time to pay before you vanished, so I went through your office. I’m sorry!” I help my hands up before he could say anything. “I couldn’t risk the power being cut off while I was away, and I was just starting to experiment with ideas to get out of this dimension and look for you, and the more I could handle before it became a problem, the better.”
Thomas took my hands as he sat on the bed, lacing our fingers together and tugging them down, until our joined hands were resting in his lap. He looked at me gravely. “I’m not your father, Alice, to protect my office from my wife the way a wolf protects its kill from scavengers.” His voice was gentle. “You know you’ve always been welcome anywhere I am. If I asked for privacy at times, it was because I was working on elemental spells that could have harmed us both if disrupted.”
“I know, I know,” I said, looking down at our hands. “I know. You never told me to keep out. I did that on my own. Yell at a person enough times, they stop doing whatever it is that gets them yelled at, I guess. Even if the person who did the yelling is gone. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize to me. Not ever.”
“Oh, I’m sure I’ll think of something I need to apologize for,” I said, and smiled, trying to look coy.
Either I missed the mark or he was more concerned about the Covenant’s attempt to abduct Kevin than I’d realized, because his expression didn’t waver. “What happened? What does my office have to do with anything?”
“Oh. That.” I took a deep breath. “Like I said, I wanted to make sure everything was in order, so I went through your office . . .”
The first six months after Thomas disappeared had been the hardest of my life. Everything reminded me of him. The house, the Red Angel, the streets of Buckley, the library, the children. Everything except the woods. The Galway was still my sanctuary, and the trees loved me the way they always had. If anything, they might be glad he was gone.
From anyone or anything else, I would have resented that potential joy in my misery. From the Galway, which had never liked him in the first place, it was only natural, and proof that at least something was still the way it was supposed to be.
Like Kevin, Jane had been born at home, eased into the world by Laura and Mary, with Cynthia and Basilia Kalakos assisting. Having a sanguivore on hand meant I didn’t get blood all over the rug, and Basilia was not only a trained midwife, her paralytic gaze worked remarkably well as a painkiller. Better than I would have received at the hospital, that’s for sure.
With Basilia’s help, I was able to sleep through more than half of my labor, coming back to consciousness only when she allowed the effect to wear off so I could push. The first person to hold my shrieking, squalling little girl was Mary, the dead girl who’d practically raised me, and that seemed only right, just like the absence of my daughter’s father seemed entirely wrong.
But it was temporary. It was only temporary. I was going to find him, I was going to bring him home, and we were going to be a family. We were.
After Kevin was born, Laura had stayed for two weeks, giving me time to adjust and recover, while Thomas learned what was going to be expected of him and the baby figured out how to nurse. Despite not having—or wanting—children of her own, Laura seemed to have a natural gift with infants. I’d been expecting the same two weeks this time, before Laura left me with Mary and the babies and went back to the carnival to resume her own life. But it had been six months, and she hadn’t left me yet.
Jane spent most of her time shrieking, but she stopped crying the second she was in Laura’s arms, hiccupping and looking around with huge blue eyes, or simply sliding into sleep. Either way, giving Laura the baby was sometimes the only way to make the screaming stop. Part of me wanted to be ecstatic about that, to see it as a sign Laura was going to stay forever, that I’d get to have my best friend with me while I raised my babies. She could have one of the downstairs bedrooms, and Thomas would be thrilled when he got home.
Another, larger part of me, saw her ongoing presence as a silent criticism. Better than anyone—even better than Mary—Laura knew how close I was to falling apart. I’d gone almost three days without eating, and over a week without bathing, before she’d shown up to check on me and the progress of my pregnancy. Jane had been born the day after Laura’s arrival. The fear that I’d slide back into depression had to be enormous, and if I did that, the babies could die. Cynthia and Mary would do their best, but they both had other things to worry about.
Which was why, six months almost to the day since a rip in the world swallowed my husband whole, I was in his office, going through the papers on his desk, looking for any financial paperwork or banking information that could help to keep us from losing the house.
Instead, I found was a small stack of letters. One was addressed to Nicholas Cunningham at Penton Hall, in England. Others went to Australia, Hawaii, Japan—places I’d only heard of, never been, but which I knew Thomas had visited before he came to Buckley.
And the last was addressed to me.
I sat on the floor of his office, staring at the envelope. It wasn’t sealed. He’d been expecting me to find this; he’d been expecting me to read it, and he was sparing me the agony of deciding whether or not to rip open something he’d sealed. I’m not normally precious about envelopes, but the idea of destroying something he’d touched . . . right now, it was too much.
Gingerly, as if I was afraid it might bite me, I eased the envelope open and pulled out the letter he’d folded neatly inside.
His handwriting was elegant and precise, the result of years of careful tutelage under the watchful eye of the Covenant matrons, of whom he rarely spoke, and never without an uneasy expression. Just seeing it made my eyes blur with tears. I wiped them dry, and started to read.
My dearest Alice—
I know your aversion to entering my office, even if I’ve never encouraged it. If you’re reading this, I’m gone. I hope it will help you, at least a little, to know that I’ve held out far longer than I thought would be possible; this is the eighth such iteration of this letter I’ve composed. You can find the others in my bottom drawer, if you desire to read them. Perhaps it will be too much like salting an unhealed wound, or perhaps it will be the salve needed to help you heal. There’s never been a time for us when a lack of letters would have made the situation better, after all.
I laughed, choking back tears, and kept on reading.
We knew when we began our time together that it was limited. I was a man with a terminal illness, and you were the angel of mercy who chose to love me anyway. Our marriage has been one of the truest joys of my life, and I am honored every day that you chose me for your husband, and not any one of the men who could have given you a better, more stable life. I love you, Alice Price. Please, no matter how far away you are from me, don’t allow yourself to forget that. I will always love you, for however long I live.
If our marriage was a blessing, then our children are a miracle. The Price line lives on in them, and they will have access to our family accounts in England once they grow old enough to make financial requests. Instructions are written in the black book in the top drawer of my dresser, along with the number for my banker and the current key. It must be held in the hand, near enough to taste blood, when any withdrawals are authorized. It’s barbaric, I know, but without it, the Covenant would have emptied the accounts the day they sent me here, and even the small comforts I have been able to afford our family would have been denied. The blood charms protecting the family fortune were spun by my great-great-great-grandfather, Bancroft Price, whom I suspect of having been a sorcerer in his own right. They will hold, and more, they will render Kevin untraceable. So long as he holds the key, the Covenant will be unable to follow any funds to his location. The same will hold true for Jane, should they decide between themselves that she would be better suited to balancing the family accounts.
It was never my intention that any of you should struggle, nor want for anything, simply because I cannot be there to provide. And before you let your pride win out and tell me where to stuff my concern for money, please remember that I would be taking care of you if I were there with you. I swore to care for you until the end of our days. Even if my days are over, allow me that privilege. I beg.
You may, if you prefer, open my other letters and read their contents before sending them, but I would prefer they be sent, and in my own handwriting, if at all possible. Most are to old friends and allies, to tell them I am no longer available to respond to their correspondence. They’ve been expecting this for some time now. They won’t be surprised, although some may send you condolences over the next few months.
The one which has, I’m sure, confused you most dearly is addressed to Nicholas Cunningham, of Penton Hall. He is second-in-command of the Covenant, and the highest-ranking likely to subject himself to a communication from a disgraced exile. He is a reasonable man, as much as a man who has dedicated his life to fighting monsters who wish only to be left alone can be considered to be. He was among the group which decided I should be sent to Michigan to watch you and your family rather than put to death for my crimes against the Covenant. I believe he will listen.
I am not telling him of my disappearance, or of your vulnerability in my absence. I am not saying anything that could encourage the Covenant to come to our home or endanger our family. I am simply making him aware of a threat to humanity which has been thus far overlooked, and needs to be addressed.
The Cuckoos, Alice. Loath as I am to share any information with them, the Covenant must know more about the Cuckoos than your grandfather was able to share with them. That we have managed to overlook them for this long only underlines how dangerous they truly are. Humanity cannot be left defenceless against them. And who knows? Perhaps, if we provide the Covenant with an enemy worthy of fighting, they will learn to leave the rest of the world alone.
It is a small hope. It is the only hope we have remaining. They no longer count my name among their number: perhaps, with this, they will no longer list us as dangerous enough to watch. Perhaps this is how I can finally protect you.
I love you, Alice. I have loved you since before I knew you, and I think I was always going to love you, whether I came to Buckley or not. You are my heart and my home, and I am so sorry to leave you.
With all my love,
Thomas
I could barely see through my tears by the time I reached the end of the letter, but I still managed to fold it and tuck it back into the envelope. I put it aside, proud of the fact that my hands weren’t shaking, and flipped through the others one more time, taking quiet note of the precision with which he’d written their addresses. All had a return address, except for the one to Penton Hall.
The Covenant had purchased this house for him, back before he tendered his resignation, of course. He had probably assumed they knew where he lived.
Moving slowly, like I was afraid anything faster would break me into a million pieces, I levered myself off the floor and went back to the living room, to take Jane for a feeding and tell Laura I hadn’t found the account books but had found something that might be even more important, at least in the short term.
The plan, sketchy as it was, was that she would stay in the house with the children for the next few months, while I went to the routewitches and petitioned them for aid. We’d already determined that umbramancy wasn’t going to be the answer. I needed access to the living dimensions surrounding our own, the ones Naga had told me stories about, not to the lands of the dead. And unless I wanted to experience a katabasis, Orpheus-style, going to the lands of the dead wasn’t going to do me any good, anyway.
The crossroads had ripped a hole in space to take my husband. There was no way they wouldn’t have left a body to torture me if they’d killed him. So he wasn’t in the lands of the dead, and that meant going to some pretty dark places, looking for some pretty shady solutions. It wasn’t a quest for children. Thankfully, Laura was willing to take care of them until I came back.
I’d heard her the night before, talking to Mary in the kitchen when they both thought I was asleep, exhausted from the combined stresses of grief and trying to keep two small children, one too young to do much more than hold her head up for short periods of time, alive. “You know this might be forever,” Mary had said. “She might not come back for a very long time. She might not come back at all. Are you prepared for that?”
“Alice always comes back to me.” Laura had managed to make a statement of absolute faith sound perfectly reasonable, like she was remarking on the weather. “If she’s alive, she’ll come back. She just has to find Thomas before she can stay.”
“Have you been reading futures?”
“You know I wouldn’t tell you if I had.” Laura’s voice had been almost chiding. “That monstrosity you call an employer would interfere if they thought Alice was going to succeed, and you’d try even harder to keep her here if you thought she was going to fail. Alice needs this. If she doesn’t at least try to bring him home, she won’t be Alice anymore. I’d rather she be Alice and far away than something broken and fading in the corner, but here. You remember Jonathan.”
“I do,” Mary had admitted. “You don’t think she would . . . ?”
“I don’t know. Did you think he would?”
I had withdrawn then, reassured and stung in equal measure. Reassured because Laura understood why I had to go; stung because the woman who’d been my best friend since we were both children thought I could turn as cruel and brittle as my father if I didn’t get my way. Was she wrong? Not necessarily. But that doesn’t mean I’d wanted her to think it.
And then it had been a new day, and I’d agreed to go into Thomas’s office to make sure our affairs were in order. After finding the letters, I went upstairs and dressed for the field, denim and flannel and sturdy boots, before coming downstairs, kissing Jane on the cheek and giving Laura a hug, and announcing, “I have to go into town. Thomas left some letters I really ought to mail, and I think I’m going to go check on a possible routewitch that Cynthia flagged for me.”
Laura stepped back and looked at me gravely for a long moment before she nodded, and said, “I didn’t think you’d make it this long. I love you, Ally. Try to remember that, and try to come home to us.”
“I always do,” I said, and the finality of the click the door made when I closed it behind me only sounded a little bit like my father hissing “liar.”
That routewitch was a bust, but he knew the address of a cunning woman who directed me to a coven of would-be snake cultists who’d never managed to summon anything larger than a headache, and even that lead went away when I pointed out that they might be better off conducting their rituals in a space with slightly better ventilation. I was in Tennessee by then, and Rose found me shivering outside a diner, trying to decide between spending my last two dollars on bus fare or breakfast.
For a moment, she almost looked disappointed. Then she said, in that slippery way of hers, that someone named Apple wanted to see me, and so I needed to get into the next car she flagged down.
Apple turned out to be the Queen of the North American Routewitches, which was not a thing I’d even known existed before she sat down with me at a truck stop table, a plate of pancakes in front of her and a whole gang of bikers arrayed behind her, ready to defend her honor if I tried to present any sort of threat. She was yet another eternal teenage girl—between her, Rose, and Mary, I was starting to feel like being allowed to finish puberty was something unusual—dainty and dark-haired, with the practiced smile of a lifetime politician. She was older than she looked. I could tell that even before she opened her mouth, and she spoke with the voice of someone much older and wearier.
“The answers you’re looking for won’t be found among my routewitches, or at the crossroads, Alice Price,” she said. “You should still be able to find some, if you look hard enough. My Lady says the way is open, for the careless and the clever, and I think She means you. But you’ll have to be quick and you’ll have to be unrelenting, and you need to leave my routewitches alone. They can’t help you. It’s time for you to go home. Everything you’re looking for is there, in the last place you expected to find it. You have your own problems knocking on the door, and if you don’t handle them, they’re going to handle the rest of us.”
Disagreeing with her seemed like a terrible idea. After our meeting-slash-interrogation was over, she instructed one of her bikers to drive me back to Buckley, and he agreed without hesitation, loading me into the sidecar of his motorcycle and taking off down the highway as the sun was beginning to rise. It would have been picturesque, if it hadn’t felt so much like a failure.
And then I was standing on my own front porch, and somehow it had been more than two years since the last time I’d been there, and when I rang the doorbell, Laura answered, flour in her hair and cake batter on her cheek, and stared at me for a long moment before she said, “It’s about time,” burst into tears, and pulled me into an embrace that seemed to last forever.
It didn’t, of course. It only lasted until a toddler with big blue eyes and curly white-blonde hair pulled into pigtails on either side of her head came up and grabbed Laura’s leg, shoving herself neatly between us. I let go immediately, stepping back and looking down, and Laura took that opportunity to scoop Jane off the floor and hold her up so I could see her, so she could see me.
“Look, Janey!” she cooed. “It’s Mama!”
“Hi,” said Jane, voice a little-girl lisp. Then, hopefully, “Andy, cookie?”
“Just don’t tell the mice,” said Laura, and set her down again. “Go wait in the kitchen, sweetheart. We’ll be right there.”
Content with this, Jane turned and toddled off, not saying anything more. It wasn’t much of a reunion, and it wasn’t until much later that I realized how little I felt, seeing my daughter for the first time in over two years.
I started to step back. Laura grabbed my wrist before I could go anywhere. “No, you don’t,” she said, and dragged me inside.
Everything looked exactly the same, and everything was different. Thomas’s books were still all over the living room, and a pair of tailypo were curled atop the tallest bookshelf, their tails balled around themselves until they looked like plush dolls. Kevin’s toys were strewn across the floor, along with some brightly colored pieces I didn’t recognize but which I assumed belonged to Jane. She looked good. Healthy, well-fed, not traumatized at all by my absence. That was a good thing.
Laura waited until we were away from the door before she turned and asked, “So, are you here because of the Covenant, or because you’re ready to come home?”
“Am I here because of what?”
Her face fell. “Oh,” she said. “I see.”
Then she explained, and I saw too.
Those letters I sent had notified the world that Thomas was gone, and warned his allies we might need a little extra help. That was good. But they had also informed the Covenant about a threat to humanity large enough to make a happily exiled former member reopen contact. Honestly, I’d been a little skeptical of Thomas’s hope that telling them more about the cuckoos would accomplish what he thought it would, or that it was necessary enough to risk drawing their attention. My grandfather had believed the cuckoos had been around for centuries, maybe since the dawn of human history, preying on us, setting up their unnecessarily elaborate murder plans and taking out whole communities, all while staying undetected, thanks to being psychic assholes who could literally write themselves out of people’s memories. We might never have known they existed, if not for my mother being somehow naturally resistant to their powers. We still didn’t know why that was, or whether I had inherited any of her natural resistance.
Thomas had been being practical by telling the Covenant what little we’d managed to learn about the cuckoos since my grandfather’s death. He’d been trying to protect our family when he did it, but he’d also been trying to keep humanity safer in a world where most of the other true monsters had already been destroyed. Now that attempt was coming back to bite us all.
According to Laura, a Covenant operative had come to the house the week before, a woman named Veronica Bell, who had claimed to be a distant cousin of Thomas’s mother, and asked to speak with him. When Laura had told her Thomas wasn’t available, she had switched her attention to the children, specifically Kevin, who had come up to show her the fricken he’d caught behind the house. Mrs. Bell had apparently cooed at him, told him he was a very clever boy to already be destroying monstrous things, and tried to take him away with her, telling Laura it was for the best for the boy to be with civilized family.
Laura had disagreed, vigorously, and managed to expel Mrs. Bell from the house by way of the wards she’d constructed since my departure. Umbramancer work can be remarkably delicate, when they have time to set it up, and she’d been given two years.
If the Covenant had moved faster, the story might have unfolded differently. “The only thing I can figure is that they didn’t want to come for Kevin until he was old enough to be useful to them,” she said, bluntly. “Useful, and toilet-trained. Can’t imagine taking a toddler in diapers on a transatlantic flight would be very fun for anybody.”
“And they definitely came for Kevin? Not to talk to Thomas about the cuckoos?”
“If they’d come a year ago, maybe. Now? I think they’d be willing to take Jane, but they came for one of the children.” Laura had looked at me levelly. “That Bell woman said that as it was clear Thomas was not going to come back and do his duty by the family name, someone else would have to come and continue the name. Oh, and unlock the Price assets for ‘proper’ use.”
“I swear, I’d sign those accounts over myself if I had the authority, and let the Covenant choke on it,” I’d muttered. “How’s Cynthia?”
“The Angel’s locked down, has been since Bell came to town. According to Mary, she’s got a whole team with her. A dozen Covenant operatives, all of them ready to close in. I don’t know what they’re waiting for.”
“I do, if you were able to push their lead agent out of the house. They know we have some sort of extra-natural protection in place, and that means they also know they won’t be able to just stroll inside. They’re preparing for a show of force. If you asked me to lay a wager, I’d say they’ve been waiting for either me or Thomas or both to put in an appearance, so they could take us out and be sure we wouldn’t follow them. They’re going to have to answer your refusal with violence. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“None of this makes sense.” Laura looked at me with impotent fury. “It’s been two years, Alice. Have you even found a way out of this dimension?”
“Not yet. But I’m getting closer. The answer’s out there. If I can just get hold of Naga, I’m sure he’ll be able to help me. I’m sorry.” I met her eyes without flinching, because I really wasn’t sorry. After everything we’d been through, everything I’d put and was putting my family through, I wasn’t actually sorry. “It’s going to be a little longer.”
“Well, I can’t stay here any longer.” She narrowed her own eyes, looking for all the world like she wanted to stare me down. “I’m happy to keep watching the kids as long as you need me to, Ally, but I can’t keep doing it in Buckley. I’ve been in one place for too long already. The ghosts are starting to find me. I need to get back to the carnival.”
As an umbramancer, Laura was even more exposed to haunting than an ordinary road witch. Routewitches and ambulomancers have their share of fans among the dead, but it’s the umbramancers who get the brunt of their attention. Why does it work that way? Hell if I know. I just know it does, and Laura had been trying to dodge the dead for as long as I had known her, which had made summers fun when we were kids and my best friend and my babysitter were effectively at war with one another. It had taken Laura years to be even a little bit comfortable with Mary, and Mary didn’t mean any harm. Random ghosts were likely to be less friendly.
“You’re ready to go home, then?”
She nodded. “It’s time. I can take any of the mice who want to go with me, so they don’t lose track of the kids, but . . . we won’t be here when you come looking, Alice. After you find Thomas, you’ll have to find us.”
I think there was a choice in that moment. A chance to say “no, I’m done, I’m tired of wild-goose chases, I want my children and my family and I’ll come to the carnival with you, my mother started there, let me end there.” And I won’t look back now and pretend not to have been tempted. I was tired. I was more than tired; I was defeated. The endless futility of my search for answers was beating me down, and I didn’t know how much more I had in me. That moment was a turning point. It was an opportunity to turn my back on what I was becoming and choose what I had always meant to be.
I bit my lip. I opened my mouth to answer. I never got the chance. The Covenant strike team that had surrounded the house after their lookouts saw me go inside opened fire.
Why that exact moment? I didn’t know, and I still don’t. I can recount the past, but I can’t guess why things happened, only explain how they did. Laura and I were in the living room; Jane was in the kitchen. Kevin was upstairs, although I didn’t know that, and maybe that’s the answer to what I would have said if I’d actually had a chance to reply to Laura’s offer. I was home with my children, yet I hadn’t asked about my son at all. I hadn’t asked if he was okay, or whether I could see him. I was physically there, but I was still very far away, and I wasn’t coming back any time soon.
The first bullet went through the front window, shattering it cleanly. The tailypo woke up, chittering in surprise as they jumped off the bookshelf and huddled under the coffee table, removing themselves from the line of fire. I pulled the gun from inside my jacket, snapping, “Get the kids,” to Laura.
She nodded and ran for the stairs, racing up them as the second bullet came through the window. I dropped to a crouch, working my way over to peer outside.
There was a ring of people surrounding the house. It looked like there were about fifteen of them, which would have been an insultingly low number if it hadn’t been such a relief. I was a terrible mother. I wasn’t pretending to be anything else. That didn’t mean I wanted somebody shooting at me and my kids. Especially not some Covenant asshole who had probably figured out a way to make their bullets hurt extra just so they could make the traitors suffer.
At the center of the line was a tall, whipcord-thin woman with devastatingly sharp cheekbones. It was absolutely believable that she was related to Thomas; they looked similar enough for me to see it. She smiled when the curtain twitched, motioning for the shooters around her to stand down before cupping her hands around her mouth.
“Mrs. Price!” she called. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced. I’m your husband’s aunt, Veronica Bell, and I’m here to collect my nephew.”
I was pretty sure “nephew” wasn’t the term for what Kevin was to her, but like hell was she getting anywhere near him. I grimaced and shot out the window on the other side of the room, hoping to give her the wrong idea about my current location.
She shook her head, expression turning disappointed. “Oh, Mrs. Price. I thought better of you.”
That made one of us. We were isolated enough that no one was going to come to see what was going on out here; if the neighbors heard the gunfire, they’d assume someone was taking a few deer out of season, and leave it at that. You don’t live long in Buckley if you’re overly curious about things that don’t concern you, like people shooting up the house of the town outcasts.
Staying low, I crossed the room to the kitchen doorway, where I lay down on the floor and hissed, “I call for counsel.”
“Here, Priestess,” said a small, shaky voice from behind a crack in the baseboard. It was rare for an Aeslin mouse to be so subdued, or so obviously afraid. “How may we Serve?”
“I need twenty volunteers,” I said, a plan coming together with blazing rapidity. It was stupid. It was quite possibly suicidal. It was going to give Laura and the kids the time to get away from here. “They will be lauded and honored above all others in my service—but they have to be volunteers, and they need to realize they may not be coming back. No novices who think this is how they earn their vestments, you understand?”
“Yes, Priestess,” said the mouse, and went silent, save for the skittering sound that meant it was moving away from me, into the walls.
I stayed where I was. I was still there when a small foot nudged my shoulder, and I tilted my head back to meet the guileless blue eyes of my daughter.
“Where’s Andy?” she asked, sounding almost bored.
“Andy?—oh, Auntie.”
“Andy,” she repeated, now annoyed. “Where?”
“She’s upstairs, sweetpea,” I said. “We’re playing the floor game now. Want to play the floor game with me?”
She gave me a mistrustful look. “Cookie.”
Oh, for . . .“You can have a cookie after we play,” I said, almost desperately. “You can have two cookies.”
This seemed to satisfy her. She sat down next to my head, barely missing my ear. “Good.”
That was when the shooting started again.
This time, they didn’t stop with blowing out the front window. This time, they kept going until the air smelled like cordite and my ears were ringing so loudly that I could barely hear Jane wailing. I rolled over. She was uninjured but terrified, clinging to the leg of a nearby chair. She had gone for the chair, and not for me, when she was afraid. That should probably have hurt my feelings. In the moment, it felt like a blessing, since it meant I wouldn’t need to peel her off of me before I could react.
“Laura?” I called. “Are you okay?”
“They’re shooting for adults, not kids,” she called down the stairs. “They’re not aiming low. So I’m fine as long as I don’t try to come down the stairs and they aren’t actually inside the house.”
“I think they want to be sure we’re incapacitated before they come in.”
“That sounds like a nice way of saying ‘dead.’ Tell me you have a plan.”
“I have a plan.”
“Tell me you have a plan like you’re not lying.”
“I have a plan.” Something skittered inside the wall. I rolled over, putting my hand in front of the hole in the baseboard. “I’m ready for you.”
The mice started running out of the hole and up my arm, one after the other, until I had the requested twenty volunteers on my chest and shoulders, watching me with tiny, earnest eyes. I explained what I wanted them to do, and they listened as intently as they could until I was done. Then they ran away, as I rolled over and began to crab-crawl away from the still-wailing Jane, heading for the back door.
The mice were faster than I was. I was almost there when one jumped onto my shoulder and squeaked, “Sixteen Enemies surround the Home, Priestess!”
“Good,” I said. Sixteen was too many, but sixteen, I could handle. Sixteen meant my count hadn’t been that badly off. “How many are outside the back door?”
“Two.”
“Better.” I pushed myself into a low crouch and walked to the door without straightening. Pressing myself to the wall, I eased the door open and peered out.
Two Covenant agents stood in the field behind the house, a good fifteen feet from the door, their attention turned toward the front yard, where Veronica was probably giving further instructions. I eased the door closed again.
“You know what to do?” I asked the mouse.
It nodded. “Yes, Priestess.”
“Then tell the others it’s time.”
The mouse was gone in a flash, racing for the living room. I stayed where I was, one hand on the doorknob, and listened as shouting began outside the house. Not just shouting: familiar shouting.
Two things everyone who spends any time around the Aeslin mice quickly learns: they can be louder than should be physically possible, and they never forget anything they hear. That includes accents. If you know where someone is from, but not what they actually sound like, a yelling Aeslin mouse can do a remarkably good job of impersonating them.
The mice ran for the bushes, getting under cover, and began to shout from all sides, some in Thomas’s perfect Penton pronunciation, others in Grandpa’s softer Scots-border accent, or Grandma’s Cornwall. They set up an incredible cacophony, and the Covenant answered with gunfire, all directed of it at the bushes.
The Covenant was so focused on the noise that the two out back didn’t notice when I opened the door all the way, or when I stepped onto the porch. I shot them, one after the other, and retreated back inside. Jane was still wailing. I looked frantically around, finally spotting the cookie jar on a counter. Scurrying across the kitchen, I grabbed it and took out a handful of cookies, shoving one into her mouth and handing her the others.
She chewed, eyes very wide and bright with tears.
“I need you to play the quiet game now,” I said, voice low and probably unnervingly intense for someone as small as she was. She stared at me, and didn’t stop eating her cookie.
That would have to be good enough. The Covenant was still shooting outside, although none of them were currently shooting at the house, which was a start. I stepped out of the kitchen, hissing, “Laura, come on,” toward the stairs.
“What did you do?” she asked, finally descending, arms full of Kevin. He wailed when he saw me, reaching for me with open hands. I gave him the rest of the cookies and he slumped against Laura, looking puzzled.
“The mice are providing a distraction,” I said. “The back door’s clear. You can take the kids and run for the Galway. It doesn’t mind you. If it doesn’t already know Jane, it should. I bet it’s going to love her. It loves all the Healy girls.”
“Our things . . . ?”
“After the Covenant’s sure they’ve killed us all, you can come back for them.” I gestured toward the door. “Between your wards and Thomas’s, I’m pretty sure they can’t burn the place down, even if they try. They may get through the front door, but they won’t get much further. The traps Thomas left will see to that.”
Laura looked at me for a long moment, silent and solemn. Then she nodded, turned, and scooped Jane off the floor before she ran out the back door with the children in her arms, not looking back.
The gunfire from the front of the house continued. I wanted to reload and start shooting. I didn’t dare. If I killed them all, the Covenant would just send more; that was how they operated. I needed them to believe they’d won, somehow. I needed them to go away and give up.
Walking back into the living room, I slumped onto the couch, letting my head loll. “Mary, if you’ve ever cared about me, I could really use you right about now,” I said.
“This is a fine pickle,” said my babysitter, the cushion next to me sinking under the weight of her as she settled on the couch. “How are you getting out of it?”
“Covenant knows I’m here,” I said. “They know the kids are here. I think they know Laura’s here. So they’re expecting two women and two children. I know you can carry dead things through the lands of the dead. Can you get me some corpses?”
Mary paused. “You want me to raid the local morgue?” she asked, finally, sounding horrified and intrigued.
“I don’t care if it’s local. Local might not be for the best. I need bodies, Mary, bodies that won’t be missed and won’t be identified. And I need the Covenant to think they gunned us all down when they attacked the house, so I need them before they realize they’ve been tricked.”
Mary disappeared. I closed my eyes. Either she was coming back with the bodies or she wasn’t, and if she wasn’t, this wasn’t going to work. The gunfire outside was starting to taper off, and I was starting to think it might be curtains for me when she popped back in, one arm wrapped around the ribs of a blonde woman with a bullet hole in the middle of her forehead. She didn’t look anything like me, but if someone didn’t know me, she might have been enough to fool them, especially because of the whole “corpse” thing. As a general rule, living people don’t like looking closely at corpses.
Mary shoved her toward me and vanished as the woman fell limply to the floor, cold and dead and nameless. I looked at her and wished I could feel anything beyond faint relief.
Mary reappeared with a dark-haired woman who could pass for Laura, and who had been shot through the throat, and then again with two children, both riddled with bullet holes. Them, I couldn’t look at directly. Them, I had to turn my eyes away from. Them, she didn’t drop, but settled on the far end of the couch.
Then she turned to me, eyes cold. “Never ask me to do anything like that again,” she said, voice like a crypt door slamming closed.
“The crossroads didn’t—”
“The crossroads can go hang,” she snapped. “This protects you and it protects the babies you abandoned, so the crossroads can’t stop me, but don’t you ever, ever ask me to steal bodies for you again. The fact that I can doesn’t mean I should. Do you understand?”
It was so rare for Mary to be truly mad at me—usually it was the other way around—that for a moment, all I could do was blink at her. Then I nodded and stood, pulling a knife from inside my shirt. She frowned.
“What are you doing?”
“That’s the one thing we don’t have: blood splatter. These people weren’t killed here.” I ran the knife down the side of my arm, careful to avoid the major veins, and swung around, holding my arm up so the blood splashed out in a wide arc. Some of it splattered against Mary, bright against her pale skin, before it fell through her and hit the floor. She blinked at me.
“I can’t decide whether that’s clever or self-destructive,” she said.
“It won’t hold up to any real forensic analysis, but it has to be good enough either way.” I glanced to the kitchen. “I need to go. Can you stick around and haunt the place, make sure they don’t stay here too long or get past the living room?”
“For now,” said Mary, and vanished.
That would do: I wasn’t getting anything better. I turned and ran, trusting the wards would hold, that the blood would be enough, that the lie would be believed. It was a thin hope, pinned on a flimsy deception. We would have to get lucky a dozen times for it to work.
But getting lucky is sort of the basis of my life, and if I couldn’t count on that, what could I count on? So I ran, away from the house, toward the woods that had always been my sanctuary. I was still bleeding; I’d leave a trail the Covenant could follow, if they had dogs or tracking spells. I couldn’t go looking for Laura and the kids; I’d only put them in danger. So when I hit the edge of the woods, I paused, looking in all directions, and then took off along the tree line, away from the Red Angel, heading for the deeper woods.
I’d ran for what felt like the better part of an hour—long enough for the bleeding to slow and stop as the wound on my arm clotted over, although it still threatened to start bleeding again if I moved it too much—before the ground turned marshy underfoot, and I realized I’d gotten turned around somewhere in the trees. I was coming up on the lakeside, well away from the Red Angel but still very close to the water.
The trees thinned ahead of me, giving way to a clearing dominated by a decrepit old barn that looked like it hadn’t been occupied in decades. I slowed and angled toward it, intending to take shelter and give myself a chance to catch my breath. Cover could only benefit me if I was being potentially pursued by hostile Covenant assassins.
The barn door wasn’t locked. It creaked ominously as I pushed it open, the wood swollen with moisture and smelling of damp rot. Inside, the farming equipment had long been removed or scavenged. Good thing, too, since this wasn’t good farming land. Why had someone bothered to build a barn all the way out here?
Maybe out here hadn’t been “all the way” when they did it. The Galway didn’t move as much as some forests, being made up largely of slow-growing trees, but it did move, and given time, it would reclaim whatever was taken from it. Someone could have logged enough space to start a small farm, thinking they’d grow it into a larger one, and found themselves unable to handle the distance from Buckley proper, abandoning the land when they realized how hard it was going to be to be so isolated. Maybe there was a house the same age as the barn a little deeper into the trees. Given how far I’d traveled and how close I was to the swamp, maybe it was the house I’d found after the jackalope census, the one that basically belonged to the swamp hags now.
Whatever the reason, the barn was here, solid and still stable, even if it was rotting, and the walls were intact enough to provide cover for as long as I wanted to rest. I could wait until the sun went down. The Covenant people wouldn’t be able to navigate the woods after dark the way I could, and by that point Laura would be well away from here with the kids.
I’d be safe until then.
With that thought firmly in mind, I started walking across the barn, heading for a mound of half-rotten straw on the other side. If it wasn’t full of rats, it would be someplace to sit for a while.
I was almost there when the floor gave way beneath me with a rotten cracking sound and dumped me into the darkness.
The impact of the fall knocked me out cold. I came to in the basement of the barn with a ringing head and only the faintest traces of sunset filtering through the hole above me. I’d been unconscious for hours, and getting out of the hole was going to be a challenge, especially since it wasn’t like I’d stopped to grab a flashlight when I fled the house.
“Fuck,” I muttered, pushing to my feet. The wood around the edge of the hole was as rotten as the rest; jumping and pulling myself up wasn’t going to work. Well, if there was a basement, there had to be a door somewhere. I turned to start looking for it, and kicked a piece of wood. The clatter it made as it rolled across the floor caught my attention. I looked down.
I was in the middle of a summoning circle. One that I recognized, if only vaguely. I froze, trying to sort through the fragments of memory clouding my mind. They came with the distant taste of chocolate, for some reason, and the feeling of having escaped some terrible trap. I blinked, still trying to make them come together, until, with a snap, they all fell into place.
Of course. This was where I’d been taken when the snake cultists kidnapped me as a sacrifice to the god they were intending to summon, the god who had turned out to be my adopted Uncle Naga. Which meant . . .
I squinted through the gloom. This summoning circle had been drawn specifically to reach Naga’s dimension. He’d been able to come through several times since then, opening the doorways himself, but every time I’d contacted him, it had been with the aid of either Thomas or Laura’s mother, my Aunt Juniper. I didn’t have the magic to do it on my own.
These cultists somehow had.
I pulled a knife without even really thinking about it, reopening the wound in my arm and bleeding onto the circle. Rather than wiping the ancient lines away, it seemed to feed them. They swelled and strengthened, beginning to glow, and I cut myself again, releasing even more blood.
Blood loss is not good for humans, and I was starting to feel dizzy by the time the glow in the lines brightened to the point where I could actually see the filthy basement around me. I sank to the floor, bowing my head.
“Naga, I don’t know if you can hear me, but they summoned you this way once, and I’m hoping I can use it to reach you again,” I said. My tongue felt heavy in my mouth. “It’s Alice. I’m alone and I’m scared, and the crossroads took Thomas. Please. I have to find him. I have to bring him home. I’ll do anything you ask me to. Please, if you can hear me, please come and get me. Please, I have to find my husband so I can put my family back together. Our children need their father. Please.”
I closed my eyes, and passed out before my head hit the ground.