“For fuck’s sake, Jimmy, you need to learn how to stand up for yourself. I won’t always be here to do it for you.”

—Sally Henderson

The kitchen of a large family compound in Portland, Oregon Far too early in the morning for this kind of bullshit

JAMES

The sound of cheering drifted through the heating duct in the floor. It seemed impossibly loud, especially given that I knew the people doing the cheering were no more than a few inches tall. I groaned and rolled over, pulling my pillow down over my head. It didn’t do nearly enough to block the sound. I groaned again. Hopefully they’d get tired soon and go back to whatever it was Aeslin mice did when they weren’t waking me up before seven in the morning.

I am not what most people would call “an early riser.” Other things that I am not include “a morning person” and “very friendly before noon.” Sally used to give me hell for it when we were still young enough to walk to school together; she’d show up all pressed and ready to go, shoes shined and ribbons in her hair, and she’d find me rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, trying to toast my waffles by dropping them into the silverware drawer.

The silverware drawer is not a very effective toaster, in case you’ve ever wondered.

Most mornings I would wind up eating my breakfast still half-frozen as we hurried to beat the bell. It almost turned into a game as we got older: Sally trying to show up earlier and earlier in the hopes of making it through a quarter without any writeups for being tardy, me trying to make sure that no matter what time of the morning she arrived, I’d be in the exact same state of not-ready-yet.

I would have stopped if she’d ever gotten really angry, I swear I would have. She was my only real friend in those days, and the risk of making her throw up her hands and give up on me was something I wasn’t willing to flirt with. Sally could have had a hundred friends if she’d wanted them: she was smart and pretty and good at the sort of social graces that the other kids expected, the little politics of the playground. She also had a vicious temper and a mean right hook, which is probably the only reason I survived school.

Unlike Sally, who learned early that since she was never going to fit in no matter what she did, that it was best not to stand out more than she had to, I was the sort of kid who walked through grade school with an invisible “punch me” sign taped to my back. I was smarter than the majority of our classmates—hell, I was smarter than Sally, but that just made me smart enough not to act superior to her. She was my best friend and my protector, and again, risking that wasn’t something I was particularly interested in.

Everyone else, though . . . everyone else was fair game. I’d been the worst sort of smart kid, the kind who thought they needed to constantly remind everyone around them of how smart they were. I’d been so sure that we were going to find a way to get me out of New Gravesend, to let me go off to college in some far-off city where no one would remember what a jerk I’d been in high school, that I hadn’t bothered to rein in any of my baser impulses.

And then Sally was gone, and everything had fallen apart, and I’d been trapped, friendless, in a town where my father basically ran things, and where an ancient bargain with the crossroads had seemed destined to consign me to a life of forced heterosexuality in order to uphold their promise to my long-dead ancestor: that there would always be a sorcerer in New Gravesend to protect the place.

Not that we’d been doing much protecting. I didn’t even know what my ancestor had been expecting us to protect the town from, and since that was one of the things no one had bothered to write down, I was probably never going to know.

But that was all very long ago and far away, and the mice were still cheering as jubilantly as football fans who’d just been informed that their team was going all the way to the Super Bowl. I groaned again, pulling my head out from under the pillow and glaring at the vent. The temptation to yell down it for them to shut the hell up was strong. It wouldn’t do any good. If the mice knew I was awake, they’d take that as an invitation to swarm my room and try to rope me into whatever ridiculous rodent event they were currently celebrating. I’d fallen afoul of that tendency a few times before I learned better, and I wasn’t making that mistake again.

I grabbed my phone from the nightstand, swiping my finger across the screen to check the time. Not quite eight o’clock. Charming. At least it wasn’t before seven this time, or—horror of horrors—before five. They’d only done that twice so far. The rest of the house tended to rise before I did, but even they had their limits, and rodent choirs at four thirty in the morning exceeded those limits.

Dropping the phone to my pillow, I rolled out of bed, grabbing a pair of sweatpants from the floor and yanking them on. Having my own bedroom was a luxury I hadn’t been fully expecting when a strange girl who set things on fire with the power of her mind had informed me that I was her brother now and we were leaving. To be honest, I didn’t know what I had been expecting, only that I needed to get out of New Gravesend, and I’d just watched her beat the living crap out of the crossroads, which made her my best chance at ever seeing Sally again.

That was four years and a lot of rodent rituals ago, and the idea that I might have considered arguing with her had become literally unthinkable somewhere in the middle of all that. And sure, it was only four years on the calendar, since I’d skipped almost a whole year in the middle by getting myself shunted to a parallel universe that was running according to a different clock, but—

But I was happy here, in Portland. Mice and all.

My name is James Price, originally James Smith. I’m from Maine, and now I live in Oregon, where I’ve been forcibly adopted by a family of professional cryptozoologists. Despite the way that sounds, I came pretty much willingly, and I like it here. My new family, such as it is, is a lot nicer than my old one. My dad was an asshole who hated basically everything about me, and my mother died a long time ago, leaving me alone with him. Here, I get siblings, both legal and honorary, parental figures who don’t entirely suck, and an extended network of cousins and friends.

And the mice, of course. Mustn’t forget about the mice. They certainly won’t allow it.

Rubbing my face with one hand, I fished a sweatshirt out of the hamper and pulled it on, heading for the door. When all else fails, choose breakfast.

I opened the door and found myself confronted with chaos.

My room was on the second floor, along with most of the other bedrooms, and had pretty solid soundproofing in the walls—a necessity when your residents aren’t always human, and sometimes have to deal with some pretty severe nightmares. So apart from the mice, nothing that was going on in the house had managed to reach me before I was ready to get up, and rarely had I been as impressed by that soundproofing as I was just then.

What sounded like everyone in the house was yelling. Not screaming: shouting to be heard above one another. Jane and Annie were the loudest, and I felt a small spark of pride at the fact that my adopted sister could out-shout so much of her family. Out-shouting even the quietest Price is an accomplishment. I could hear Evelyn and Kevin shouting under the two of them, along with Elsie and—more surprisingly—Artie, who didn’t usually come to the house these days. I amended my assumption that everyone in the house was yelling. Sam wasn’t. Sam was, if anything, unusually quiet.

I considered going back into my room, where the only noise I’d have to deal with would be the incessant cheering of the mice. I am not a morning person. I am also not an incurious person, and something that could cause this much chaos while setting the mice off was something I probably needed to know about. I took a deep breath, and started to descend the stairs.

Everybody was in the living room, for values of “everybody” that didn’t include those members of the family who were currently out of the state, or either of the two ghosts who popped in and out according to their own schedules. In addition to the people I’d heard yelling before, and Sam, who I’d assumed would be there if Annie was, Jane’s husband, Ted, was leaning against the wall with a cup of coffee in his hand. He raised it in greeting when I reached the bottom of the stairs, making him the only person to directly acknowledge my arrival.

“Morning, Jim,” he said, voice warm.

I don’t normally like being called Jim—or worse, Jimmy—but it’s different when Ted does it. He manages to make shortening my given name sound like a secret for just the two of us to keep, the sort of innocent private joke that I used to have with my high school teachers. The ones who didn’t resent the way I kept pissing off the rest of the kids.

I drifted toward him, not disrupting the ongoing argument in the slightest. It seemed to be the two households against each other, currently represented by Jane and Annie, who were shouting directly at one another. No chill here. Kevin, who looked like he hadn’t slept in days, was trying to separate them, while Evelyn yelled for the both of them to calm down. Elsie was yelling at Annie for yelling at her mom, and Artie was just yelling random things, like he wanted to be included but wasn’t sure precisely how that was supposed to happen.

He’s been like that since we got home from our impromptu visit to the Dimension of Giant Bugs, bringing a bunch of cuckoo kids and a spider large enough to tell the square-cube law to go fuck itself as involuntary souvenirs. He got hurt right before we made the transit back, and while Sarah did her best to repair him, I’m not sure it worked quite right. I’m not sure it could have.

“What’s going on, Ted?” I asked, looking at the mug in his hand with undisguised avarice.

“Family disagreement,” he said. “There’s more coffee in the kitchen. You’ll need it. When they get like this, they can keep going for hours.”

“Got it, thanks,” I said, and made for the kitchen.

Eventually someone was going to tell me why everyone was angry, and then maybe I could be angry too. In the meantime, there was coffee, and that was even better than inexplicable rage.

ACADIA

When a new Lineage of the Faith is born, the first tier of clergy must be Plucked from other Lines, or recruited from the Novices, many of whom are too young as yet to understand what is being asked of them. When the Precise Priestess did inform us that she had acquired for herself a Brother, who must carry his own Lineage, we were confronted with a question we had not asked since the Well-Groomed Priestess came before us with a new daughter, already old enough that many of her Truths had been lost to Time:

Was he to be Honored as a God, as if he had been with us since the day of his Birth, even as we would honor any other Brother to a Priestess named and known, or was he to be accepted at some lesser level within the pantheon? The Rites for acquiring a God or Priestess through mating were clear. The Rites of Adoption were less so, as they had been utilized only the once, and then only under a degree of threat which we would not care to experience again.

For lo, did the Well-Groomed Priestess not say unto us, “This Is Enid And She Is My Daughter Now, And Should You Choose To Disrespect Her, You Choose Also To Disrespect Me?”

But the Precise Priestess made no such declarations, only gave him unto us and commanded that we should Figure Our Shit Out, as she had Better Things To Do.

I was a dedicated novice then, chosen to serve as a member of her faithful and to recite her litanies into the open spaces of the Future. I, along with four of my number, was Called to serve the new line, for was it not that she had brought him forth, and was it not thus that his senior clergy should come from her ranks? Another four were drawn from the clergy of the Patient Priestess, as the last to be so Welcomed, and the rest from the novices who had been studying to pledge the Well-Groomed Priestess. So we had come together.

We are a new clergy, second only to those who now serve the Calculating Priestess, but newer in many ways, for she has been with us since her childhood, while the Stolen God came before us Already Grown, and so we learn his Mysteries only as he chooses to Share them with us. We may never know all that we desire to know of him, and that is sad, but it will not keep me from serving him with Honor and with Joy.

On the Day of Waffles, I was among those in the kitchen, awaiting his rising, even as the rest of the clergy sang a song of celebration in Honor of the New Mystery which had been in part unveiled to us. I sat near to the Toaster, groomed to Honor the lineage I served, a chunk of coffee cake clutched between my paws, nibbling at my own breakfast while I awaited the God’s arrival.

When at last he came, I sat up as tall as I could, and with rapture, joined the choir of all those so gathered, greeting him as was only right and proper. “HAIL!” we cried, pulling the form of proper address from all we knew to be true, all we had known over our many years in service to the greater Faith.

“HAIL TO THE RISING OF THE STOLEN GOD!”

Wild cheering followed, ritual on the parts of the other clergies, relieved on the part of ours, for we must see his reaction when he was told of the night before, we must see if he could Understand.

He groaned and scrubbed at his face with one hand, setting his hair even farther askew than the night itself had managed. “Not yet, okay? I need at least a cup of coffee before I have to deal with rodent religion.”

“At least” was not a number, but it was the beginnings of a Boundary, and we have had plenty of time to learn the ways of respecting Boundaries. We quieted our cheering, and those who were associated with clergies who took no specific interest in this new Mystery dispersed, carrying their breakfasts into the walls and thence to other parts of the house. The Observers to the Family Fight had already been chosen from among the most senior of the clergies involved, who could be trusted to listen calmly and recite what they had seen and heard without having missed any essential Parts. In seconds, the Stolen God was alone with his own clergy, six of us scattered among the cupboards and counters, all watching him.

He proceeded to the Machine of Coffee and prepared a mug, adding to it Hazelnut Milk and Honey before he wrapped his hands around it and blew upon the surface, then drank. The air grew slightly cooler as he did so. Like our beloved Precise Priestess, he is of the Line of Elements, but unlike her, or the God of Inconvenient Timing, he calls upon the Cold. We serve a mighty god, that he will never burn his lips upon his drink, nor scald his tongue upon his meat!

Leaning against the counter, he looked directly upon me—upon me, a simple member of his clergy—and asked, in a weary voice, “Do you know who threw the fox into the henhouse?”

My first impulse was to say I had no way of knowing, as the family has not kept chickens for food or eggs in many generations. But I have lived alongside them all my days, and am wiser than an untrained novice. Instead, I pushed my whiskers forward and asked, “Human idiom, yes?”

“Yes,” he confirmed, and took another drink of coffee before looking at me more closely. “Acadia, right?”

Like all among the divine, the Stolen God is unable to speak our True Names, for they twist and bedevil the tongues of all large beings. Like the Precise Priestess who brought him before us, he has learned to tell us one from the next, and given us Names he can speak, with our permission, that he might know who he Addresses. It is an honor to be so Named, and I am Proud of the Name he has given me, which he says I share with one of the most beautiful places in the land of Maine, from whence he originally came.

“Yes,” I squeaked, jubilantly. “You are truly Kind and Glorious to have Remembered me!”

“I remember you all the time,” he said, and drank more of his coffee. It must be a magical brew, for it is reserved for the grown among the divinities, and never to be shared with mice, or with children. “Why is there a carnival going on in the vents?”

“Carnival?” I looked at him with polite confusion. “This is not the time of Carnival. We celebrate but one such festival, all apart from the place, which has been home and harbor now to three generations of the divine, and in whose name so many feasts are held.”

He paused. “Actual Carnival? Like the Catholics?”

“I don’t know what a Catholic is, but it is a great celebration, filled with joy and honor,” I said gravely. “It lasts five days—”

“That sounds nice.”

“—which is the time the Kindly Priestess lingered in her bed after her husband, the Cruelest God, struck her about the head and sent her falling to the floor. She never woke. Her child, the Well-Groomed Priestess, smuggled us from the home upon her mother’s death, accepting at once the suit of the God of Hard Work and Sunshine, which she had previously Disdained, for did she not say, ‘Better To Be Wed To A Carew Than Left Here With A Bastard’?” I preened my whiskers, momentarily overcome by the revelation of such a deep mystery. The Stolen God was forbidden none of the teachings, as he would one day take his Place in the Heavens among the very ones we spoke of, but still, to hear him invoke Carnival had been a shocking thing.

From the way he now stared at me, I was not the only one to feel the weight of the mystery I had released into the air. His mouth worked for a moment with no sound issuing forth before he put his coffee gingerly onto the counter and asked, “Are you telling me that . . . wait, wait, I’ve got this one, the Kindly Priestess, that was Elizabeth, wasn’t it? The first member of the family to take care of you?”

He paused then, waiting for my nod.

“Are you telling me that Elizabeth’s husband killed her, and so her daughter grabbed the colony and . . . what, ran to the first man who would have her? And you don’t see anything wrong with that?”

“It is Forbidden to speak against the Teachings,” I said, clutching my tail between my paws.

“So you don’t get to have opinions?”

His distress was feeding into my own. “There are reasons we do not speak of Carnival outside the period of observance,” I said. “I would not Presume . . .”

“Oh, please. Please presume.”

I twisted my tail between my paws, the solidity of it, the warmth, and tried to find the words. He was a God, brought before us by a beloved Priestess, who had seen in him something of the familial even before he was accepted. He had come with her when she was Returned to us, when we had feared she might be Lost Forever. And his place in the Heavens was assured.

I took a deep breath. “The Cruelest God has been cast from the Pantheon,” I said. “Deicide is the greatest of Sins, and we could no more worship one who commits such an Act than we could break entirely with Faith. We do not teach his Mysteries. His clergy has been allowed to go silent, his Teachings forgotten.”

The chapel of his divinity yet stood, rebuilt each time we had moved as a colony, constructed as a reminder that our gods were not, could not be, perfect. True, once he was cast out, he became no longer a god, and had never truly been. But the Kindly Priestess . . . her like would never come again, would not be seen within my lifetime or any other. She was the mother of all we had and all that we were, and she had erred by taking him for her mate, erred even to the point of her own destruction. We could not forget that—we were Aeslin, and Aeslin do not forget. But the chapel was a reminder that once, the greatest in our pantheon had acted in error; once, she had been wrong, and had died for her mistake. For that, and that alone, we would remember him forever.

But his chapel was a place of silence and shame, and no clergy walked there in his honor, and no rituals were recited in his name. Thus is the censure of the Aeslin.

“Then why don’t you call him by his name?”

“Because,” I said, with utter calm. “We have intentionally Forgotten it.”

JAMES

I stared at the mouse, trying to reconcile what I’d been told was true about the colony with what she had just said. She looked utterly calm, no longer twisting her tail between her paws, watching me with unblinking eyes.

I needed more coffee before I could cope with this. Recovering my mug, I took a long, slow drink, then said, “I was told that Aeslin mice never forgot anything.” That had been the first thing Annie said when we reached Portland and my meeting the mice went from a problem for the future to a problem for real damn soon now. Don’t do anything embarrassing in front of the mice, or they will absolutely remember it forever, and probably develop a holiday around it. They seemed to enjoy celebrating people’s worst moments a hell of a lot more than they enjoyed their best ones.

“We do not,” Arcadia confirmed.

“But you just told me that you forgot his name.”

“That is truth.”

“How can both things be true?”

She took a deep breath. “An individual mouse, such as I, a lowly member of the clergy, is unable to forget anything I have experienced or heard spoken. These things are a part of me, indelible and immutable. This is truth. But the colony can choose, in times of great trial, to decree that knowledge be not preserved.”

“Meaning . . . ?”

“Meaning that those who knew the Cruelest God in his life may well have known his single-name, to be spoken from one god or priestess unto another, but they were bid not to pass this knowing on to their children. Those who keep the Mysteries of the Kindly Priestess equally omitted those things which had been deemed Forgotten from their recitations.” She flattened ears and whiskers both, visibly uncomfortable now. “Her catechisms leave out as much of him as they can while still retaining coherence. So it was decreed by our elders. He was Unworthy of our Recollection.”

“Huh.” I took another drink, mulling over what she was saying. It made sense, as much as anything that had to do with a colony of talking, intelligent, highly religious mice ever made sense. I sometimes felt like “sense” as a concept was banned in the Price household.

Speaking of the Prices, they were all still occupied with shouting at each other, leaving me to engage in acts of rodent theology before I’d had remotely enough coffee.

Joy.

“So this forgetting, it’s a big deal among the mice?”

“Yes.” She ran her paws through her whiskers, a gesture I had come to recognize as signaling discomfort with a topic. “A thing that is Forgotten runs the risk of being Lost, and that which is Lost cannot even be grieved. It is the greatest censure we possess, to declare that a thing be Forgotten.”

“What happened to us when the cuckoos came, then—?”

Her head snapped up, eyes suddenly bright with something that verged on religious mania. “The Calculating Priestess acted according to her Nature, and meant no harm, or we would already have cast her from the pantheon and begun the process of Forgetting her. She trespassed against you, my God, and against the divinities of others, in a way that cannot be Forgiven. But she did not damage your clergy, and we exist to remember what you cannot. Nothing was Lost, only moved from one Book to Another.”

“Sounds like you’ve been arguing this a lot, huh?”

“Her clergy fights near-daily with the others so impacted, including your own,” squeaked Arcadia. “We will argue until the matter is settled, however long that may require, and Scripture will be Set.”

“It’s very complicated to be a mouse, huh?”

“Nowhere near so complicated as it is to be a God.”

“I guess I can agree with that. Mice don’t need fake IDs, and mice don’t have to pay taxes.” I finished my cup and reached again for the pot. “You didn’t answer my question, though. Why is everyone throwing a big party, anyway? Annie normally warns me when a major celebration is coming up, and she didn’t say anything last night.”

“Ah!” She clasped her paws in front of her narrow rodent’s chest and tilted her head back in apparent ecstasy, eyes rolling toward the ceiling. I didn’t know enough about ordinary mice to know whether the thin edge of white that appeared at their bottoms was normal or another sign of Aeslin oddity, and I sure wasn’t going to interrupt her rapture to ask. Not when it might be about to get me an actual answer.

“A Miracle has happened in this Kitchen!” she proclaimed, voice as ecstatic as her posture. “For lo, did not the Pilgrim Priestess appear before us, returned from her Endless Voyages, now brought near unto an End!”

“How does an endless voyage end?”

I might as well not have spoken. Her voice had taken on the cant that meant she was reciting scripture, and I could have stripped naked and performed a modern dance routine without disrupting her.

“For in her Company, absent so long, feared Lost, walked the God of Inconvenient Timing! Her Long Quest has Borne Fruit.”

“Wait, what?” I stared at her. She sat back on her haunches, apparently pleased.

I’m a relatively new addition to the family—their first non-romantic adult adoptee in quite some time, assuming they’ve ever had one before—and even I know about Grandma Alice and her endless search for her husband, Thomas, the aforementioned God of Inconvenient Timing. I know more about her as a person than I do about him; she likes grenades, bakes cookies, and apparently comes by the house a couple of times a year under normal circumstances, whatever those are. If normal circumstances exist, I haven’t experienced them since I joined the family. I met her once, when we stopped off in Michigan on our way to Oregon from Maine, and she’d taken off basically as soon as Annie told her what had happened to the crossroads, vanishing into another dimension.

After my own experiences with dimensional travel, which had been less than pleasant, I wasn’t sure there was any possible way the woman could still be considered sane. But that was a conversation for another time. Here and now, I was trying to coax something coherent out of a mouse without triggering another digression into horrifying family history.

I don’t know much about Thomas, but I know two things, absolutely: first, that he made a deal with the crossroads to save Alice’s life, which was why he’d been missing for all this time, and second, that he was a sorcerer. Annie and I had been using his notes on his own powers to train ourselves, if “Here, you try to freeze me while I’m actively trying to set myself on fire” could really be considered training, and not just a really complicated game of Jackass.

If he was back, that could change everything. Everything. And it explained a lot about the yelling people in the other room, since Jane hated her mother, and no one in the current family had really known Thomas. The stories I’d heard, which were confusing, and surprisingly contradictory for a family that externalized and cared for its collective memory, said that he’d been taken while Alice was pregnant with Jane, and Kevin was very young. He probably didn’t have any conscious memories of his father.

So someone who caused chaos just by existing had dropped in to cause chaos on purpose, and now everyone was going to be agitated for the rest of the day. That, plus the return of a previously lost mouse god, explained a lot. I poured more coffee into my mug, doctoring it appropriately before I returned my attention to the mouse.

“Cool. So everyone’s mad because Grandma came home and brought the dead guy who isn’t actually dead. Any chance the shouting inside the vents is going to die down any time soon?”

Gravely, she shook her head.

“That’s what I was afraid of. Anything else I really need to know?”

“They came, they spoke to the God of Decisions Made in Necessity, and they departed again, to finish what Must Be Done.” Acadia ran her paws through her whiskers. “And the Sally opened the freezer and removed Food That Had Been Entailed, and instructed that we should, lo, ‘Tell James Sally Ate His Waffles.’”

I dropped my coffee cup.

ACADIA

The Stolen God stood frozen, his eyes wide and his face pale as he stared at me. His throat pulsed as he swallowed, but he did not otherwise move. The drinking vessel which had been clutched in his hands lay in fragments at his feet, and soon the more daring among the novices would begin to snatch up the shards, to whisk them away as potential holy relics.

My chest wanted to swell with pride, for I was clearly standing on the cusp of a Revelation, some great and holy Mystery about to unfold for my eyes to chart and chronicle. The retention of this moment depended upon my attention. It was a great Honor, and an even greater Responsibility. I had never been the first to witness a Mystery before. To think that I, so young among the priesthood, barely better than a novice, should witness a Mystery!

But I pushed the pride away. The Stolen God might not know us well enough to recognize it for what it was, might see no shame in my reaction, but his eyes were keen and his connections clever: he might realize I was taking Joy in his evident Distress. Such a thing might set him against his own clergy, and a clergy opposed is a clergy excluded. So much could be lost to us if I reacted Poorly.

Still he stood, unmoving, unspeaking, barely seeming even to breathe. The yelling of the family in the next room had changed timbre when the cup smashed to the floor, and footsteps approached us.

“James?” The Precise Priestess appeared in the doorway, a male of her clergy with whom I had once mated riding on her shoulder in place of pride, his paws clutching a long lock of her hair. She looked upon the Stolen God with sisterly concern, as befit their relationship, and I was glad to know them both. “Everything okay in here?”

The Stolen God did not react. The Precise Priestess came farther into the room, eyes going first to the mess on the floor, and then to me, the only mouse close enough and still enough to have been in conversation with the Stolen God when he discovered his Dismay. “You,” she said. “What did you say to him?”

“Nothing that should have Alarmed him so!” I protested. The wrath of the Precise Priestess is a thing to be feared. “Did he not ask, Why Is Everyone Throwing A Big Party, Anyway? And did I not reply with the truth of the day’s events, the Arrival and the Departure of the Pilgrim Priestess and the God of Inconvenient Timing, and the Theft of the Stolen God’s Waffles?”

“What? Waffles? Dad didn’t mention waffles. Tell me about the waffles.”

I ran my paws anxiously through my whiskers. “I was not present. I know only the catechism of the moment, and not the details that may not have been included. Shall I summon one who Witnessed?”

“Please.” She put a hand on the shoulder of the Stolen God, curling her fingers to hold him tight. “Breathe, James. Keep breathing. Whatever’s wrong, we’ll figure it out.”

He made a noise, small and pained, and spun to put his arms around her, holding her tightly. She began to stroke his hair, saying nothing, and watched me.

I did not want to go. This was a Mystery Unfolding, and it was my duty as a member of his clergy to witness it. But I had been given a Command, and I was no senior priest, to deny such a thing. Speed must be my answer. I flattened my ears and bowed my head, and bolted from the counter into the hole that had been cut for us, throwing myself into the maze of tunnels and climbing paths that riddled the walls of the house.

Our colony’s current home was constructed for us at the order of the God of Decisions Made in Necessity, and he did Decree that the walls should be built to Accommodate our needs. Some of the first tunnels were laid by his hands, built into the very structure of the House. Others have been opened since then by our Builders, all guided by the Keeper of the Plan, a senior member of the God’s clergy who reads the runes of the original blueprints and tells us where safety can be found. No colony ever, since the beginning of all records, has had such a safe and glorious system of movement! Why, we can travel from one end of the house to the other in an instant, all unseen!

I ran, and others passed me in the tunnels, and some gestured for me to stop, indicated that they would like to speak with me, but onward I ran, one ear flattened to signal that I followed a Command, and none moved to prevent my passage. When I emerged into the highest point of the house, it was to behold our City, a Metropolis within an Attic, the finest that had ever been in all the world. This time, I did permit my chest to puff with pride, as it always must when a member of the colony beholds our home.

The space, which was vast almost beyond comprehension, would only have been a Very Large Room to human eyes, for they are built at Such a Scale as to demand more resources from the world, and had been divided into the necessary components of a world.

Central were the temples, chapels, and schools, where we could observe the religion which shaped our lives. In the next ring lay the trade schools, for those few not called to the clergy to learn the art of weaving, or stitching, or construction, and the libraries, where all knowledge is recorded, to be sure that a chance loss of a member of the clergy does not mean the more upsetting loss of a piece of the litany. Grief is transitory. When a member of the colony dies, they are lost to us forever, save in the record of their experiences, which remains to keep and comfort us.

Some heretics have suggested, on occasion, that we should rather worship ourselves, for the record is of our doing, the mysteries are of our codification. They are brought to the highest points of the city to behold all that has been given to us, and asked if the colony would exist to worship anyone at all in the absence of our gods. Could the colony alone provide such peace, such prosperity? It could not, and so our worship is not misplaced.

Most who speak such blasphemies recant, once reminded of why we are as we are, why we live as we live. Those who do not are cast forth, and none has ever once returned. The world is a harsh place for something so small and civilized as a mouse.

My moment of awe concluded, I ran forward into the street, heading for the Temple of the Stolen God. It was as yet the newest of our structures, consisting only of the nave, chapel, and sanctuary, but it would grow with time, as our numbers increased and our mysteries grew equally in number. Members of the colony not engaged in their own worships turned to watch me go, and some children chased me along the length of the schoolyard, exclaiming at my raiment, which was still novel enough to excite their interests. I paused long enough to wave to them before ducking into the chapel.

As I had hoped, the rest of the clergy were gathered there, reciting and reviewing our new Mysteries. They stopped upon my arrival, mindful of the place I had been set to hold, and the elder of our priests stepped forward, whiskers a wide fan of respectful interest.

“Initiate,” she said. “What word do you carry?”

Oh, the temptation to recite all that had transpired was heavy and deep in my bones, the urge to share threatening to burst free! But of such strength is an elder one day made, and so I forced it aside, and bowed my head, and said, “Elder. The Precise Priestess has requested the presence of one who witnessed the Theft with their own eyes.”

“One among the undecided has pledged to us in the aftermath of the holy event,” she said, whiskers returning to a neutral place. “He was Overcome with Rapture, and seeks to serve Our God with devotion.”

What a fortunate novice, to have had his path so Cleanly Charted by witnessing a Mystery! I paused to groom my own whiskers, almost overcome with joy for the newest member of our clergy, then returned my eyes to the elder.

“He has been Requested, and I must Oblige,” I said. “Where can he be Found?”

“In the sanctuary, meditating on the night’s events,” she said. “Go, and fetch him forth to glory in the new wisdom of the Stolen God. For is it not said, ‘Annie, I Know This Seemed Like A Good Idea In Idaho, But Are You Sure Your Folks Are In The Market For Another Kid’?”

The rest of the clergy cheered with joy at the repetition of the holy words, and I ran on.

JAMES

I clung to Annie for what felt like years but couldn’t have been all that long, since the people in the living room were still shouting when I finally relaxed my grip and stepped away from her, nearly putting my foot in the still-hot pool of coffee on the floor.

“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what came over me. it’s been an odd morning.” I wasn’t crying. I was dimly, distantly proud of that, even as I suspected it might be shock, and that the tears, when they came, would be cataclysmic.

“You want to tell me what happened?”

My mouth worked for a moment, no sound coming out, and I was suddenly reminded of trying desperately to tell my ninth-grade family life education teacher that her breezy assumption that no one in her class would need information about “deviant homosexual lifestyles” to keep themselves safe and healthy was incorrect, because I was in the room. No sound had come out then, either, and she had eventually put her hand on my shoulder, looked into my eyes, and informed me that God had a plan and would send me the right wife when the time came.

Sally and I had filed the paperwork to start our school’s first GSA the next day, but the feeling of shame had remained, the memory that when it mattered, I had been entirely unable to speak.

The thought of Sally smacking me in the arm and telling me that I was braver than I thought I was snapped me out of my silence, and I moved away from Annie, toward the closet where the cleaning supplies were kept.

“Not really,” I said.

“You’re going to have to tell me eventually, or the mice will do it for you,” she pointed out. No secrets in the Price household, not from the mice, and not from each other. Annie was an impressively terrifying woman, and I sometimes thought the most impressive thing about her was that she’d started setting fires in her sleep and somehow managed to keep her parents from finding out. That, and not the violation of the laws of thermodynamics, was the truly impossible thing about her.

“Maybe.” I opened the closet, pulling out the wet broom—not a mop, and distinguished from the dry broom in that it had a strip of painter’s tape around the handle and was intended for use in cleaning up the inevitable wet messes that needed to be swept up before they could be wiped dry—and a dustpan. It was a soothingly mundane activity. Spills happened all the time. Spills didn’t have anything to do with missing grandparents or impossible girls who couldn’t possibly be here, coincidences like that didn’t happen, not to me, and so the girl who’d been with them, the girl who’d stolen my waffles, she couldn’t be—she couldn’t be—

My hands clenched on the broomstick, so tight that half my knuckles popped and the other half just ached from the tension of it all. Then Annie was there again, easing the broom out of my grasp, pushing me gently backward.

“Maybe you should put some ice on that, killer,” she said. “It’s cool if you don’t want to talk to me yet, even though you have to know I’ll find out eventually, but that doesn’t mean you get to hurt yourself. That’s not allowed.”

“It’s not?”

“Nope.” She began sweeping up the shattered remains of my coffee mug, sloshing most of the coffee into the dustpan alongside the shards of ceramic. “I know you’ve always been an only child, so that has been a little bit of an adjustment for you, but no one gets to hurt my brother but me.”

“Is that how this works?” A thread of amusement was beginning to work its way through my anxiety. Annie was good at that. If distracting people were a viable career, she could probably have pursued a degree.

“Yeah. Your siblings get to torture you, and you get to torture your siblings, but you don’t get to torture yourself.”

“Like you can pick your nose, and you can pick your friends—”

“But you can’t pick your friends’ nose,” she concluded. “Just like that. So stop hurting my brother, before I’m forced to kick your ass.”

“Having siblings is surprisingly violent.”

“Surprising, no, violent, yes.” She finished sweeping up the mess and walked the dustpan over to the wet trash. Back in Maine, we had one trash can, and everything went into it. Convincing my dad that separating out the recycling would have been a good idea had been a nonstarter, and I’d given up the fight long before Annie had rolled into my life.

Here, they not only had separate cans for wet and dry trash, they had two different recycle bins—one for glass and metal, the other for plastic and paper, and sometimes Jane grumbled about how we really needed to split those up and go to four, which would have Evelyn remind her, always with utter politeness, that she had her own kitchen in which she could have a hundred recycle bins if she wanted, while Evelyn’s kitchen needed to retain room for things like “appliances” and “food.” Since no one ever seemed very upset about this argument, I had to assume it had been going on for years and would probably outlive us all.

There were also two bins for scraps, one to go into the compost bin, the other to go into the bloodworm tubs. Bloodworms lived naturally in wet earth, and were usually found in swamps and wetlands, and their blood was like catnip for a wide range of cryptid species. After leaving Buckley, the family had started breeding them for bait purposes, and so they occupied five twenty-seven-gallon tubs in the garage and got all the household meat and dairy leftovers.

Annie had confessed, almost ashamed, that when she was a kid, she used to give the bloodworms ice cream on her birthday, figuring that everyone deserved a treat. “I’d still be doing it, but it turns out bloodworms are lactose intolerant. A few cheese scraps is fine, a whole gallon of ice cream is not. And you do not want to be around a flatulent bloodworm colony.”

She moved to the sink, rinsing the coffee stains off the dustpan and propping it up to dry before tearing off a few paper towels. “Are you feeling any better?”

“I’m trying,” I admitted.

“You ready to tell me what happened?”

“I am not.”

“Okay. Just checking.” She crouched down to wipe the remaining coffee off the floor, keeping an eye on me as she did. “You realize you’re on the countdown before Sam notices I’ve been gone more than five minutes and just ‘happens’ to come wandering in here to check on me.”

“How much longer are you going to put up with that?”

“I don’t know. When it stops being cute and starts being annoying.” She shrugged. “I figure he’s earned a little neurotic hovering, after everything.”

I sighed. “I guess you’re not wrong. It would still be driving me absolutely out of my mind.”

“Yeah, but you grew up with an expectation of privacy. I did not. My childhood prepared me for a traumatized boyfriend who doesn’t like it when I’m in a different room.”

I reached for a fresh mug, making a noncommittal noise. She wasn’t wrong: Sam had been through a lot. We all had, really, but in some ways, Annie and I had gotten off lightly. For us, our little pan-dimensional adventure had been a few days of trauma and screaming, followed by a crash landing back in our home reality. For everyone who hadn’t been with us, well . . .

Some of them had been here in Portland when Sarah ripped a hole in reality and Annie, Artie, and I had followed her through, vanishing in an instant. Others had been elsewhere, either as close as the fence line—Sam—or as far away as Australia—Alex and Shelby. They hadn’t been given an opportunity to react.

We’d reappeared in Iowa, only to vanish again, this time taking an entire college campus with us. That would have been bad enough if time had been running at the same rate between dimensions, if we’d been gone and completely out of contact for a few days—something that really didn’t happen to Prices, since they had phones and allies and their small but reliable network of ghost aunts, who would normally make sure that nothing short of dying would keep a Price from checking in. But no, time couldn’t be that accommodating.

We’d been gone for a few days . . . for us. We’d been gone for a solid year for the rest of the world, meaning that our return to Ames with an entire college campus had been even more dramatic and upsetting than originally anticipated. People had mourned. People had moved on. Construction for several new structures had begun, all of which had been summarily smashed flat when we’d dropped the university on top of them. We’d disrupted a lot of plans rather severely, first by disappearing, later by coming back.

At the time, if you’d asked me, I would have said that Sarah and Artie had an understanding of sorts, one that might not be as formal as “dating” but which definitely encompassed “in some sort of complicated relationship that would have been weird even if it hadn’t been between two nonhuman intelligences.” I’d been tragically single, as always—Sally used to say a boy could tattoo “James Smith, I like your ass, will you take me to the prom?” across his forehead, and I still wouldn’t be sure that he was into me—and Annie had been with Sam. Who hadn’t made the dimensional crossing with us.

He would have been absolutely within his rights to decide that disappearing into an alternate dimension for a year was a really complicated method of breaking up with him. Instead, he’d spent the entire year of our absence working with the rest of the family—dead aunts included—to find a way to bring us home, or at least to confirm that we were still out there somewhere to be found. For that year, everyone in the family had been a little closer to understanding Alice than they normally were, and then we’d come back, battered and bruised and completely unaware of how long it had been for everybody else.

And Sam had been waiting.

Since we’d come home, it had become a rare thing to find Annie in any room without him, apart from the bathroom and the barn we used for our makeshift “sorcery lessons,” and he would usually walk her to both those places. I thought it was cloying and a little invasive. Annie thought it was sweet, or at least she said she thought it was sweet, and not being one of the family telepaths, I had to take her word for it.

“I’d like it if my life had prepared me to have a boyfriend at all,” I said, glumly.

Annie paused. “You’re just trying to distract me from asking more questions about the waffles,” she accused.

“Maybe. Is it working?”

“Yes, but only because you’ve refused to seriously talk about your dating prospects up until this point.” She looked at me levelly. “Dirty pool to bring it up now, James Price. Dirty pool indeed.”

“Any rope when you’re falling.” I shrugged, pouring coffee into my mug. “Besides, it’s not like I have a lot of opportunities to meet people, much less start dating them. There’s the whole ‘Sometimes things freeze solid when I touch them’ aspect—which, I know you and Sam play your kinky little games with heat, and don’t think I wish I didn’t know that, but cold is a lot less sexy when you’re not expecting it—and then there’s the ‘I never go anywhere’ part of things. You moved me cross-country and I don’t know anyone here.”

“As opposed to that bustling social circle you had back in New Gravesend. Pour me one of those.”

“For my sins, I must watch you torture innocent coffee,” I said, and took out a second cup.

“Your sins are many and great,” said Annie, straightening to throw away her paper towels and get the mini marshmallows down from a cabinet.

“This great?”

“Greater. Now please, continue telling me why it’s my fault you can’t get a boyfriend.”

“Well, one, you’re my sister now, and you’re kind of terrifying.” I filled her cup and handed it over, only grimacing a little as she topped it off with a generous serving of mini marshmallows. Her crimes against coffee may never be forgiven. “So there’s that.”

“It’s true, I am skilled in the area of frightening off boys,” she said, grabbing a spoon and giving her coffee a stir. “I did it for myself, pretty consistently, for years. Still not sure what I did differently with Sam.”

“Sam’s not human.”

“Yeah, that probably helped. Our specific flavor of weird flies a little bit better with people who aren’t defaulting to thinking the world both makes sense and belongs to them. Huh. Maybe that’s part of why the boys never wanted to hang around when they saw me coming.” She took a long drink of coffee. “Sounds like they’re starting to wind down out there. You want to tell me what happened before they all come in here looking for something to eat?”

“Not really.” I pushed my hair back with one hand. “I was talking to Acadia—she’s one of the priests who’s least likely to freak out because I’m paying attention to her—and she said that when your grandparents showed up last night, they had someone else with them. Someone she called ‘the Sally.’”

“Oh,” said Annie, eyes widening in apparent understanding.

“And apparently ‘the Sally’ left a message for me.” I sighed. “She said to tell James that Sally took his waffles.”

The mice remaining in the kitchen cheered.

ACADIA

The novice—formerly undecided, now Called—was where I had been told to find him, still draped in the beige and white of the clergy-to-be, with only the first small gleaming beads of his station-to-come affixed to his sleeves and collar. He was bent over the book of the teachings of the Stolen God when I entered, and looked up at the scratching of my claws against the floor. Seeing my raiment, he straightened, flattening his ears and fanning his whiskers in show of respect.

“Priest,” he said, bowing his head. “I am Honored by your Presence.”

“I am told you have come to join our number,” I said, more briskly than I intended, but I was on a mission from the Precise Priestess, and had little time for niceties. “I am told you Witnessed the coming of the Pilgrim Priestess, the God of Inconvenient timing, and the Sally?”

“Yes,” he squeaked, nerves splintering his voice into a shrill crack.

“Fortunate, to Witness such a Moment, such a Mystery!” I exalted. “Now come. The Precise Priestess has asked to speak with one who Witnessed.”

He stepped nervously forward, ears still flattened. “I have never . . . never spoken to the Precise Priestess. I have heard—”

“She is not cruel to the Faithful,” I said, reassuringly. “And was she not the one who went into the Wilderness and returned with the Stolen God, not mate nor child, but sibling stolen from the wide world? She will be kind to you. She wishes only to hear what you have Witnessed, to receive the details of the moment that she might better understand them.”

Still he hesitated.

Hesitation was allowed; only refusal was forbidden. Still, I didn’t want to leave the divine waiting, and so I cajoled, “If we are Swift, and the news we carry is Welcome, there may be Cheese and Cake.”

No Aeslin has ever been born who could resist the allure of cheese and cake. His ears came up and his whiskers relaxed. “It counts as my required time in contemplation if I am attending upon our God, does it not?”

“Of course it does,” I said. “What truer Devotional could there be than serving as His memory of a moment which he was not present to behold with his own eyes? Come. They are waiting for us.”

I ran back the way I had come, and he followed close behind me, the two of us plunging past the senior clergy without pause and out into the streets, paved with buttons and with pennies from the pockets of our divinities, worn smooth and gentle upon the paws of pedestrians. Still we ran without pausing, until we reached the tunnel’s entrance and plunged through, racing down, down, down into the darkness, into the depths of the house.

When we at last emerged into the kitchen, the Stolen God and the Precise Priestess were yet there, awaiting our arrival. The Stolen God had a fresh cup of coffee, which was good; the divinities are calmer, by and large, when they have something to sip at as we speak to them. The Precise Priestess had a cup as well, and the bag of marshmallows was open on the counter. How I yearned to dive into its sugary depths, and how firmly it had been forbidden. So instead, we took up place beside the toaster, and I squeaked for their attention, as the initiate beside me clutched his tail in his hands and tried not to pant with nerves.

“Good, you’re back,” said the Precise Priestess, as the Stolen God went very still beside her. “Is this the one who witnessed?”

“I am,” squeaked the initiate, nerves still shattering his voice. Then he winced, and said, “Your Divinity. I am, Your Divinity. I am sorry, I mean no Offense.”

“Oh, he’s young,” she said, with evident sympathy. “First time talking directly to a member of the family, hey, kid?”

He squeaked wordless affirmation, as she elbowed the Stolen God lightly in the side.

“He’s wearing your colors. This one’s yours.”

The Stolen God looked upon us with interest, focus intent. “Are you new?”

The initiate nodded, silent with awe.

“I can’t pronounce your real name. I’m sorry. If there’s something you’d like to be called, I can absolutely use that name for you, or I can give you one that I can use. Which would you prefer?”

The initiate, whose name I had not bothered to learn in advance of his meeting our mutual God, looked as if he might pass out from the sheer ecstasy of the moment. He stood, quivering, in silence, until I reached over and tweaked his tail, startling him. He flinched away from me, then looked to the God, squeaking a desperate, “Please! If I might have the Gift of a Name, it would be an Honor!”

The Stolen God glanced to the Precise Priestess, as if seeking her counsel. She laughed.

“He’s an initiate,” she said. “Look at that cloak. I bet he was undecided before he saw your waffles get stolen, and now he’s part of your clergy. Initiates are jumpy. They’re not used to speaking directly to the family. Not like a Priest, or even a fully initiated novice. You learn to tell the differences between the tiers. After a while, it’s second nature. Just be gentle with this one. He’s not used to us yet.”

The Stolen God nodded his understanding, then looked again to the initiate. “Your friend there, I called her Acadia, because it’s the prettiest park in the state I’m from,” he said. “I always liked Camden, too. Would you be willing to let me call you Camden when I need to address you directly, or ask the other mice to send you to see me?”

The initiate—Camden—nodded, ears going flat. He hugged himself, and I knew this moment would be replaying in his heart for the rest of his life. So it went, for those who served the divine. We all had our private catechisms, the things which mattered more to us than to the collective memory.

“Nice to meet you, Camden,” said the Stolen God.

“I am Honored,” Camden managed, voice only cracking a little.

“Now that we’re through the pleasantries, can you please tell us what you saw last night?” The Precise Priestess’s words were polite. Her tone was not.

The newly dubbed Camden picked up on her intonation as easily as I did. He twisted his tail between his paws as he looked to the Stolen God, took a breath, and began his recitation:

“It was two hours and seventeen minutes past the Striking of Midnight when a Hole did Open in the Membrane of the World, and Three Humans did Appear . . .”

JAMES

Sally.

The little mouse in the virtually unornamented cloak had described Sally so perfectly that a police sketch artist could probably have drawn her. He had described her, and when he’d shifted his stance to repeat the words she’d spoken—actually spoken, in this house, in this kitchen, while I’d been asleep less than fifty feet away—he’d managed to look like her, despite being a mouse and not a human being. He sounded like her.

Sally was alive. My Sally was alive, and somehow, she’d ended up with Annie’s grandparents, and they were planning to come back here, and when they did, we’d be together again. Me and Sally, the way it was supposed to be, without New Gravesend to pen us in and tie us to an endless succession of parental expectations and molds we were never going to fit. Sally.

Camden had finished speaking and looked at us expectantly as he said, “And thus is the Mystery Revealed.”

A general cheer went up from all the other mice in the room, who had quieted to pay attention to his story. Annie smiled at him.

“That was very well told, and we thank you,” she said. “The Stolen God is a bit overcome right now, by the return of his friend, but he’ll thank you too, when he’s able.”

I nodded vigorously. The lump in my throat was so large that I could barely swallow, much less speak. The mice, Camden and Acadia both, continued to look at me with wide, expectant eyes. I glanced at Annie. If they were expecting some great show of gratitude or wise proclamation, they were going to be waiting for a while.

She met my eye and winked, then set her coffee down on the counter. “A story so well told deserves a reward,” she said. “Who wants cheese and cake?”

I would have sworn there were fewer than two dozen mice in the kitchen. The cheer they sent up was still loud enough to border on deafening, and continued as she turned to open the fridge and extracted half a sheet cake from the top shelf. “This was meant to be tonight’s celebration,” she said, removing the foil. “I’ll have to get someone to drive me to the store before dinner. But they’ve earned it.”

She set the cake on the counter next to her coffee. The mice watched, ears and whiskers vibrating with eagerness, still cheering. She didn’t pull out a knife. Instead, she opened a drawer and removed a Tupperware container of pre-cut cheese cubes. “Gouda and cheddar today,” she announced, popping off the lid and putting the container down next to the cake. Then she retrieved her coffee and stepped back.

“Go for it,” she said.

The mice descended. Not just the mice that had already been in the kitchen: more boiled out of the holes in the walls and up the sides of the counter, appearing like magic from every crack and cranny. I swallowed, and found that I could speak, as long as I didn’t try to talk about Sally.

“How many mice are there?” I asked.

“No one knows for sure,” said Annie. “A few hundred, at the very least. Not enough of them. Their whole population is in this house, or as good as. If we ever stopped taking care of the colony, they’d go extinct inside of a decade.”

“It’s not easy out there for a mouse.”

“No, it’s not.” She looked at me. “You ready to go join the fight already in progress in the living room?”

“Not sure what I have to fight about, but I know I don’t particularly want to be alone right now, so I may as well.”

Annie took my arm and led me with her out of the kitchen, leaving the mice and their ceremonial feast behind. I knew that the next person to go in there would find the cake tray and the Tupperware both spotlessly clean, although they’d still wash the Tupperware before they put it back into the rotation. The mice were tidy. The dishes still had to be done.

Sam was waiting in the hall between the living room and kitchen, trying to look casual about it. Annie smiled at him as we passed, toasting him with her coffee mug. He looked at her arm linked through mine, grumbled something about humans needing more hands, and turned to follow us to the living room.

“Not everyone’s lucky enough to have a prehensile tail, asshole,” said Annie.

Sam laughed, and this was normal, this was right, this was what my life was like now. This was what the world was supposed to be. Add Sally and it would be . . . perfect. It would be perfect. And maybe that was why I felt like I was going to cry, throw up, and have a panic attack, all at the same time. Guys like me don’t get perfect. We never have. We get sorcery we don’t know how to use and fathers who pay the bills but don’t know how to deal with us, and mothers who die too soon.

If Sally was coming back, something else was going to leave me. That was just the way things worked. There was no way anything else was going to happen. And maybe that made sense. Maybe things had been too good for too long. Even with the year missing in the middle, because that had been a kind of perfect, too—a year for any trail my father might have tried to follow, if he’d decided to care enough, to go cold, a year for “James Price” to replace “James Smith” in all the official databases, even a year for the two versions of me to age apart. James Price was physically a year younger than James Smith would have been, if he’d still existed.

We stepped into the suddenly silent living room, and I stopped wallowing in my thoughts to blink at the somewhat bewildering sight of all four senior Prices staring at us. Elsie and Artie had taken a seat on one of the couches off to the side, a full cushion open between them, so that there was no risk they might accidentally touch each other. They’d been like that since Artie got out of the hospital, keeping their distance, never making contact. It was odd, but it was such a small oddity that it barely stood out against everything else.

Annie nodded briskly to her parents and pulled me with her over to one of the other couches, where she pushed me down before perching on the arm. Sam hesitated for a moment, looking put out that she hadn’t left the arm for him, then hopped smoothly onto the back of the couch and wrapped his tail around her waist. She squeaked, less surprise than acknowledgement, and shifted her position enough to lean against his legs.

If they weren’t so sickeningly cute, it would be very easy to hate their little codependency floor show. As it was, I still considered hatred occasionally, usually right after someone reminded me that I had no idea how to get a date in Portland, or anywhere else.

“Why are all the mice celebrating?” asked Kevin, finally.

“Oh, I gave them their cheese and cake early, as thanks for sending one of the initiates down to tell us everything about what happened last night.” Annie made that statement sound perfectly reasonable, even though we all knew it wasn’t. She took a slurping drink of coffee, punctuating her reply.

“I was there,” said Kevin. “I could have answered any questions.”

“You were kinda busy, Dad, and you couldn’t have, because what we were asking about wasn’t important enough to you.”

Kevin looked confused for a moment. Then he glanced at me, and his expression cleared. “The girl who took Jimmy’s waffles,” he said.

“Sally,” said Annie. “But yes. Sally took James’s waffles without asking, and you know he has a thing about people touching his food—”

“Which doesn’t make a lot of sense, since you’ve said he was an only child when you found him,” interjected Evie.

“—but not everything makes sense, and he’s allowed to want us to keep our hands off of his waffles,” Annie continued. “We were asking about her. One of James’s priests went to fetch an initiate who’d witnessed the whole thing and get them to give us all the details before they could be codified into proper ritual.”

“Smart,” said Kevin. “Did you find out what you needed to know?”

Annie turned to face me, and raised an eyebrow. “I think we did,” she said, and stopped, clearly waiting.

I swallowed. If ever there was a time when I needed to be brave enough to speak up in front of the entire waiting family, this was it. I looked down at my coffee. If I couldn’t choose the coward’s way out in silence, I’d do it by finding something else to focus on.

“I can’t be absolutely sure without seeing her myself, but based on what she did while she was here, and what the mice had to say about her, the woman in the kitchen with . . .” I hesitated, stumbling over what I was supposed to call them. They weren’t my grandparents yet, even by adoption; I figured they got the choice to decide what I was to them when they came home for good. “. . . with Annie’s grandparents was my friend Sally from New Gravesend.”

“Wait, wait,” said Elsie. “You mean the one who got swallowed by the crossroads?”

“That would be the one,” said Annie cheerfully, when it had become clear that I wasn’t going to answer. “Guess she wound up wherever it is they’ve been keeping Grandpa.”

“That’s great news!” Elsie paused. “Isn’t that great news? James?”

“Sally was my friend when I didn’t have anybody else,” I said, still looking at my coffee. “She was the only person who didn’t think there was something wrong with me because I liked to turn in my homework on time, or because I listened to our teachers, or because I solved puzzles for fun. And then we got older, and she didn’t freak out when I started freezing things, or get upset when I told her I liked boys.”

Sally in the sunlight slanting through the windows of our crappy little cardboard fort, three refrigerator boxes and a bunch of plywood we’d stolen from behind a dumpster, laughing and saying, “Well, at least one of us does,” after I’d made the biggest and most terrifying admission of my life so far. Then she’d punched me in the shoulder and told me not to worry so much, I was stuck with her until one or both of us was dead and gone.

Sally in the dress she’d worn when her parents not-so-subtly convinced me to invite her to prom. She’d been fine with it, since none of the girls in our class had been willing to face the social consequences of going stag, or with another girl, even though we weren’t going to be the only people attending as friends. I’d been planning to go by myself—the cost of attending as a single male wasn’t the same as the cost of attending as a single female, socially speaking—and spending time with Sally had never been a hardship. Plus it pissed my dad off. He hated that my best friend was a girl. He hated the fact that she wasn’t white even more. And most of all, he hated the fact that because police chief was an elected position, he couldn’t be open about why he hated her so much.

Sally in the library, cheeks red with anger, telling me to get over myself and stop acting like I didn’t have any options, telling me to start planning for my future like I was going to have one, telling me again and again that she was going to get me out of our shitty little town. She’d been reading my mother’s journals, and she was absolutely sure she’d figured out a way to fix everything.

And I’d let her. Recollection turned to acid in my throat, scarring and charring me as I struggled to swallow it. Annie’s hand settled on my shoulder, pressing down firmly enough to let me know that she’d seen my expression turn.

“Hey,” she said, voice soft. “You know that wasn’t your fault. None of this is your fault.”

I took one hand off my mug to reach up and clutch her fingers.

On the other side of the room, Elsie made a scoffing noise. “Are you seriously sitting there telling him it’s not his fault he’s gay, like there’s something wrong with being gay? Because there’s nothing wrong with being gay.”

“No, I’m sitting here telling him it’s not his fault that his best friend tried to go to the crossroads on his behalf and got herself cold-cased into another dimension,” said Annie, rather more hotly. “You know me better than that, Els.”

“Sorry,” said Elsie. “But you know how it sounded.”

“Fuck you,” said Annie, tone turning pleasant.

“Girls,” said Jane, a sharp edge to the word. It was what I thought of as her Mom voice, and it made me ache a little. My own mother had died before I’d been old enough to remember what it sounded like when she used that tone on me. “Stop picking on each other.”

“Sorry, Mom,” said Elsie. “You’ve just got us all on edge with your yelling.”

“You’d be yelling too, if people were acting like your least favorite person in the world suddenly coming back was a good thing,” said Jane. “You should have called us immediately, Kev. We should all have been involved in the decision to tell them they were allowed to come back here.”

“This isn’t your house, Jane,” said Kevin. It was clear that this was ground they’d been over before, probably several times since the fight started. “It would have been inappropriate of me to extend the hospitality of your house, but this isn’t your house. You don’t live here.”

“You’ve always said this house was open to me, if I ever needed to come home.”

“If,” said Kevin. “In the future. You don’t live here now.”

“And I never will, if that woman is going to be here. It’s her or it’s me. You can’t have us both.”

“At least your mom’s alive.”

Everyone turned to look at me with wide, startled eyes, and I realized that I had been the one to speak. Oops. I finally raised my head, finishing my coffee in one long drink before setting the mug on the coffee table and shrugging Annie’s hand off my shoulder. Jane narrowed her eyes.

“You don’t know the history there,” she said. “You don’t know what she did. I have every right to be angry.”

“I think I know the history as well as your own kids do, with maybe a little less opinion coloring the facts,” I said. “I’ve had access to the same histories, and the same clergy. Your mother was pregnant when the crossroads took your father, and she did exactly what I would expect any member of this family to do: she took off looking for him as soon as you were born and stable enough to survive without her.”

“She left us,” said Jane. “No one else in this family has ever run out on our children, and it’s insulting that you think we would.”

I looked at her calmly. “She left because she thought she could fix everything if she just did it on her own. I’ve watched Annie do the same thing. I watched Artie do it, too.”

“And look what it cost him!” Jane waved her hands, indicating Artie.

He was staring at the ceiling, seeming to ignore the whole conversation, like it was no more relevant to him than the shadows in the corner of the room. He’d snap out of it in a minute and return to the present day, but those stretches of absence were getting more and more common, and no one was quite sure what they meant. I suspected that the brute-force reprogramming job Sarah had done to restore his memory and a facsimile of his original personality was starting to break down, but with Sarah in New York pretending she didn’t know any of us, that was hard to prove one way or the other.

“Everything,” said Kevin. “It cost him everything, because that’s what it always costs when we have to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of someone else. I know you’re mad at Mom, Janey. You have every right to be. But being mad at her doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t get to have a relationship with her if that’s what we want to do.”

“How can you forgive her after what she did?”

“I didn’t say I had forgiven her,” said Kevin. “Maybe it’s because I was old enough to miss Dad when he was taken from us, but I’ve always been able to understand why she did what she did, even if I wanted her to be with us more than I wanted her to be looking for him. Aunt Laura was the best not-a-mom I could have asked for. She took great care of us, and I loved growing up in the carnival. So did you, you know.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Then what is the point, Jane?”

“She left us! We were her children, and she left us. She could have decided to stay. I told Ted on our honeymoon that if we ever had kids, I’d stay with them before following him into some unknown dimension.”

“That’s true,” said Ted. “She did. Killed the mood a bit. Here she is, wearing this piece of red lace that I can’t in good conscience call a garment—a scrap, maybe, if I’m feeling generous—and kneeling over me, telling me that if I ever get into the kind of trouble that people don’t usually bounce back from, she won’t come to save me.”

“Dad!” objected Elsie.

“What? Child, you’re Lilu, and you exist. You have to be aware that your parents have had sex.”

Artie made a vague humming sound. We all looked at him.

“But fair enough,” allowed Ted. “No more unwanted details, all right?”

“Thank you,” said Elsie.

“Yes, thank you,” said Jane.

“You started it,” said Ted.

I stood. This had all the hallmarks of an argument that had been going on since before I was born, and would probably continue until long after I was gone. Annie watched me go but didn’t shift from her place on the arm of the couch.

“I’m going to my room,” I announced, before anyone could ask or offer to go with me. “I’ll see you all at lunch.”

And with that, I proceeded up the stairs.

ACADIA

Oh! What glory, what delight, what rare and unbelievable honor! To witness not only a Mystery, but a Revelation! I joined the swarm around the cheese, grabbing a portion for the elder priests, twice the size of what I would have been allowed for myself, and showed my teeth to the one novice who attempted to dispute my claim. She backed away, head bowed in submission, and I fled for the hole behind the toaster, cheese clutched close, Camden following behind with the cake he had secured while I was elsewhere.

The senior among the priesthood do not leave the temples often, are needed to see to the spiritual health and journeys of their congregations, and so it is the first duty of the juniors among our ranks to bring them what we are offered, and ensure that when the colony feasts, they feast with us.

The run should have seemed longer, with my front paws burdened so. Those whose sole duty it is to gather for the priests often wear clever packs which allow them to run properly while also carrying far more than I could carry on my own. But I was so full of elation that I ran with twice the speed, and close behind me, Camden did the same.

I might never learn his original name now. Those of us fortunate enough to serve divinities who see fit to name us in their Honor often forsake the names we bore before as too much useless weight to carry. What need for the mouse I was, when I could be Acadia now, in service to the Stolen God?

The Polychromatic Priestess worries, sometimes, that we subsume our own desires to the divinities and forget the strength of our own nonhuman intelligence. We have tried to make her understand that we forget nothing unless we do so with intention, and even then, we save the shadows, enough so that no one should go seeking a mystery where none exists. We serve because it is the Aeslin way. We choose the paths we follow, the divinities we cry to, and should we desire another way, another life, there is always the path of schism.

True, none who walk it return to the colony, for the world is large and we are small, but nothing binds us here save our own custom and culture, and our personal desires. So let me be Acadia, and let him be Camden, and let us find joy in our service to creatures vast enough and powerful enough to protect us. One day we would have mates and families, if we so desired them, and they would be safe because of the world we built for them.

What else could we possibly desire?

We reached the attic and emerged into the revel which always accompanied an offering of cheese and cake, the fastest of the scouts already delivering packets of precious communion to the schools and hospitals, for the very young and very old to enjoy. I have heard them, the gods, making light of the speed with which we strip the plates, the voraciousness with which we address the offerings. For lo, did the Thoughtful Priestess not say, It’s All Right To Slow Down, I Swear We’re Not Going To Stop Feeding You? And she was correct, for when any of us eats alone, we do so at our own pace, feasting and fulfilling our needs without rushing. When something is intended for the colony, however, we must act quickly, and as one.

It is an act of Service, and we are made better for performing it.

Together, Camden and I ran along the streets, past the celebrating throngs, past the children with their frosting-dipped whiskers and paws full of cheese crumbs, until we reached the chapel and ran inside.

The elder priest who had set me onto Camden’s trail was yet there, head bowed in contemplation, and looked up as we entered, taking quick measure of the prizes in our paws. “You have gathered well,” she said, and I preened under her approval. “But have you remembered to gather for yourselves?”

Camden and I looked at one another in shock. In our excitement at having been the cause of an offering—the first such made in the name of the Stolen God, for his adoption feast did not count—we had gathered only our duty to the temple, and not a morsel to hold back.

“No, Elder,” I squeaked. “We have been Fed on the Regard of the Divine, and sought to fill your belly before our own.”

“You are Young,” she said, not approvingly—not disapprovingly, either, but with a sort of recognition that told me we were not among the first to make this error, nor would we be the last. “Hunger is a constant companion, but not yet a Burden. It will weigh you down more heavily as you age, as the heat runs from your limbs and all that remains is the burning ember of your faith. Do not feed me.”

“Elder?”

“Do not,” she repeated. “I will go to the central chapel, and eat with all the others among the clergy who have no novices dedicated to caring for them—I am an Elder, but not so old as all of that, and I have the Humility to eat at a communal table.”

We both stared at her. She fanned her whiskers forward and spread her paws.

“Go to the sanctuary, and share a holy meal between the two of you, in honor of this good day, which followed such a momentous and glorious night. Come to know each other better, for it seems the two of you will be building blocks of the clergy that is to come.”

Camden and I exchanged a look. It is not uncommon for the elders to encourage mating within the junior members of the clergy, to bring forth the next generation of the faithful. So long as she did not explicitly order us to breed, however, she had asked no more of us than was her right as our elder, and obedience is a well-honed instinct in those of us who have survived this long.

“We thank you for your generosity, Elder,” I said, and bowed, and the two of us scampered for the sanctuary with our burdens.

Once there, Camden spread his cake out across the table provided for just such meals, and I did the same with my cheese. “We have just met,” he said, somewhat uncomfortably.

“Yes,” I said. “I do not wish to mate with you.”

He relaxed. I could find no insult in that, for I would have done the same had the conversation provided me the same assurance. “Nor I with you.”

“Perhaps when we know each other better?”

Best to know now if he had a sweetheart in another liturgical line, that I could ask the Elder to leave us from her plans for theocratic expansion.

“Perhaps,” he agreed. “Yesterday, I was not sure I would ever be Called. I am not prepared to be Called and Mated in a single day’s time!”

“I can see that. I am the eldest of nineteen. My parents are sworn to the service of the Thoughtful Priestess, and are ranked among the elders in her service. They thought I would follow their path, or perhaps swear myself to the Arboreal Priestess.” I shuddered. “I have never cared for heights. Neither of them would have been suitable for me to dedicate my life to.”

Camden laughed. “Parents see ideals in place of individuals at times. My parents serve the God of Scales and Silence.”

“And you did not swear to him directly?”

“No. As you see no appeal in heights, I find no comfort in creatures which may eat me and I am not allowed to defend myself against. But I felt no strong Calling to any other clergy, and so have lingered among the undecided far longer than my peers. They all pledged seasons ago, and have settled well into the places that were Meant for them, while I stand barely at a beginning. There has been no time for courtships, nor to consider pups. How could I provide for them, without a priest’s portion?”

“There are places outside the church,” I said.

“To hunt and gather and craft is no shame nor sin, save in the eyes of my parents, who would cast me from our family line for remaining Uncalled when they raised me better than that,” he said, some bitterness in his voice.

I worried my lip between my teeth. “You will be well suited to the service of the Stolen God,” I said, finally. “For lo, did he not say, ‘I Was Never Going To Be The Man My Father Wanted, So I May As Well Be Someone I Actually Like’? Here, you can be whomever you desire. If you would like to be a spiritual guide to the mice who build our places of worship, you can. Or if you would prefer to teach the paths of the faith to the pups who come to us in search of knowledge, you can do that as well. We will not demand any single path of you, nor will any pups you have be required to follow the outlines of a life that they do not desire.”

Camden’s whiskers drooped as he seated himself at the table. “You tempt me so. Are you a true priest, or a phantom sent to lure me astray?”

“I believe myself a priest, for I have been schooled in the ways of the Precise Priestess, and completed my liturgical training before I was Called to serve the Stolen God,” I said. “She would not care either for the idea that we serve her out of anything but true desire. Your faith is strong. Your calling may be weak, but there will always be a place for you here.”

“Then sit, and celebrate the feast with me.”

“I am honored,” I said, and sat.

The ritual thus completed, we looked at each other and then at the food, with pleasure. We had believed ourselves to be gathering for an elder, and so had taken the choicest morsels, the tenderest flakes of cheese, the thickest swipes of frosting. It seemed near to a sin that we should enjoy these things ourselves, but as we had been ordered to do so by an elder, it was not a sin. It was a sacrament.

Conversation died as we filled our bellies with the blessings of the divine. When we were finished, every crumb consumed, conversation rose from the grave as Camden said, haltingly, “I think I have found my faith. I think I can serve here, as is expected of me, as my family line would desire.”

“Then the halls of the Stolen God are fortunate to have you,” I said, serenely.

“How are you sure in your place?”

“I completed my liturgical training, as I have already told you, in the name of the Precise Priestess. I was not with her when she stole our current God from his original dwelling place, as none of us were,” and that gap in the histories would ache and burn for my entire generation and well beyond it. We had her accounting, and the accountings of the Stolen God and the Large Monkey Man, but as today has well illustrated, sometimes the accountings of divinities forsake details of true importance. There would always be pieces missing from her story, and from his, and should the Large Monkey Man one day ascend to godhood, as many among the clergy expected, from his as well. “I had long awaited her return, and when at last it came, I found that she had become Strange to me in her long absence. But the new god by her side . . .”

I trailed off, searching for the words, the taste of frosting in my mouth, the comforting weight of a successful meal in my stomach. Finally, I sighed. “The new god looked as lost as I felt in those moments. Everything was new to him. We were overwhelming in our joys, as we have not been to one among the divine in many, many years. He was strange and different, and he was Family, so decreed in absence of the colony, deified already. He needed clergy. I cannot say I was Called, but I can absolutely say I was Swayed. My faith never faded, merely changed allegiances. I have no regrets. The Stolen God has named me, and knows me on sight. In his service, I can thrive. I will be an elder someday, and my future pups will grow well fed and knowing that they have a place in the clergy of their choice. It is a great gift I will give to them.”

Camden nodded. “You think the elders would not object if I wanted to leave the clergy and become a carpenter?”

“Do you believe in the divinity of the family?”

“Yes,” he said, without hesitation. “They did not create the Aeslin, or the world, but they have made a safe haven for us in a place that does not privilege our lives. They have cared for us and protected us when they could easily have sent us out into the wilds to wander and die as have the splinter colonies. They give us far more than we could ever give to them, and so they must be gods, for only the gods could be so infallible in their grace and generosity.”

“Then if you truly believe, why would the elders see fit to question the form of your devotion? The priesthood is not for every mouse. It is a difficult life, full of study and of necessary, unending dangers. Only the hunters risk a failure to return home with any more frequency, and for them, the rewards are tangible and clear.” Those hunters who fell in the act of leaving the safety of house and colony to acquire fresh meat for our tables and delicacies beyond those provided by the gods died knowing that their families would be well provisioned until the end of their children’s generation. It was the price of their form of service, and one which the colony paid gladly.

Priests were almost as likely to die, especially those who had served well enough to become favored of the gods themselves, and their families suffered more for their absence. Oh, it was claimed that the family of a fallen priest would still receive the honors due to them as family of a living clergy member, but it was more often the case that they were forgotten, bit by bit, pushed to the side of the congregation until another could be provided to replace the fallen one.

“I like to work with my paws,” admitted Camden, voice quiet.

“You serve the church by serving the church,” I said. “Build our walls tall and beautiful, or set the panes of stained glass that will one day be needed to tell all who venture here that this is a place of worship and value, or plant the seeds, stitch the raiments, tend the pups. Even become a calligrapher and transcribe the holy words as they are spoken, only do so with faith and with joy. The gods do not ask more of us than we are suited to provide.”

Camden bowed his head and flattened his whiskers in clear thought. I held my silence and let him have his moment. They teach us early, in our schooling for the priesthood, that epiphany can no more be rushed or compelled than a mystery can: when we see one approaching, it is our duty to sit back and allow it to approach, to give it the space it will require to thrive, and not force the moment. I could see his epiphany tugging at the edges of his ears, like a pup insistent for a treat or a trip to the park between lessons. He would turn his thoughts toward it, or he would not, and that was his decision, not anything of mine.

Finally, after the silence had grown longer than anyone outside the Aeslin would have believed possible for one of our kind, he raised his head and looked at me, eyes clear and bright.

“If I may chart any course I desire without shaming my family or my line of worship, then I shall be a priest,” he said. “I will learn the catechisms and the liturgical recitations, and I will take my vows with honor, pride, and belief. This is where I am meant.”

“Then I shall be your peer, your confidant and your companion, and your student when the arc of our time together is correct,” I said, making no effort to hide the jubilation in my heart. “We shall grow in faith and fellowship together, and we will craft of this church a fine place of worship worthy of any pantheon the world has ever known. All we ever needed was to be sure.”

“I witnessed a Mystery unfolding last night,” said Camden, with what sounded like new awe in his voice, as if he had just realized the importance of the moment. If he had still been grappling, even a little, with the question of his future in the clergy, perhaps that was the case. Perhaps he hadn’t been certain it was a true Mystery until this very instant. Oh, what joy, to see him fulfilled so! What joy, what blessing!

“You did,” I agreed. “Would you care to recite it for me?”

“You have already heard the recitation this day.”

“Yes, but for my own benefit, and I did not Witness with my own eyes. I would very much like to hear it again. Properly.”

Camden rose, clearing his throat, and assumed a neutral position, not yet speaking for any of the gods in specific. That would come as the recitation unfolded.

All would be revealed.

Taking a deep breath, he began: “It was two hours and seventeen minutes past the Striking of Midnight when a Hole did Open in the Membrane of the World, and Three Humans did Appear . . .”

JAMES

No one followed me to my room. I didn’t know whether to be relieved about that or annoyed that they’d let me go off to be miserable alone. I settled for flinging myself onto the bed and staring dolefully up at the ceiling, which was painted a cheery shade of dandelion yellow which Elsie assured me was soothing and promoted good sleep. And hell, maybe she was right. I’d definitely been sleeping better in Portland than I ever had in New Gravesend. I mostly attributed that to the absence of my father, but maybe it was the bedroom paint job. Hard to tell without moving to one of the other open rooms, and I liked this one, mice in the vents and all.

Not that the mice were making any noise at the moment. Their grand celebration seemed to have finally drawn to a close, or maybe been short-circuited by the early offering of cheese and cake; the room was quiet except for the soft buzz of the air purifier in the corner, which had been annoying at first but now provided a soothing white noise that I probably wouldn’t have been able to sleep without. This was my space. This was my home, and these people were my family, and they were going to keep me forever, because honestly, I was pretty sure they were all too scared of Annie to tell her otherwise. Also, she beat the crap out of the crossroads. If she wanted to come back from her time-travel roadtrip adventure with a talking monkey boyfriend and a queer new brother, okay. They could be fine with that.

And they were fine with that, was the weird thing. Kevin had invited me into his study shortly after Annie brought me home, when I’d still been carrying myself like a possibly unwanted guest, and asked if I wanted to help him shelve his books for a few hours. No “I hope I’m not imposing,” no “You’re a guest but,” just “Annie gets bored easily and Alex has been off in Ohio for a while now, things are getting out of hand, can you help me out?” It was like he’d figured out just by watching me that I was an old-books-and-library-sciences kind of person.

I’d agreed, too intimidated by Antimony’s father and all too aware of his ability to kick me out when I was across the country from everything I’d ever known, with no way to get back to New Gravesend. And would I even have tried to go back if he’d said it had been nice, but my welcome was worn out and I had to leave? I hadn’t known then, half-frozen with fear and still trying to put books back where they belonged. I still didn’t know now.

New Gravesend was behind me. James Smith didn’t exist anymore. I wasn’t sure whether he was legally dead or whether he’d been written out of the world through some aggressive trick of computer wizardry—normally I want to know everything, but in this specific situation, it seemed better not to ask—but I did know that his life didn’t fit me anymore. The thought of trying to put it back on was like trying to wiggle into the jeans I’d worn in fifth grade: comfortable once, worn thin in the places where I’d needed them to be, but now much too small, and better left for someone else. That wasn’t my life. This was my life.

That day, in Kevin’s study, was the first time I’d realized I actually wanted to stay. I wasn’t just being swept up in the chaotic energy that Annie seemed to radiate around herself: I wasn’t playing along out of fear that she’d set me on fire if I stopped. I was so unused to the feeling of people wanting me, and so accustomed to being constantly tensed against judgment or discovery, that relaxation had felt like exhaustion for a long time. I’d frozen in the middle of putting a book onto the shelf, staring off into space until a chuckle broke my fugue, and I turned to see Kevin watching me.

“It’s all right, son,” he’d said, voice surprisingly kind. Maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise. Everything I’d experienced so far told me that he was more likely to be kind than cruel. But in the moment, it had been an utter shock. I’d frozen again, unable to respond, unable to turn any farther.

“Let me guess.” He plucked the book from my nerveless fingers and turned it over to check the spine before sliding it onto the shelf, exactly where it belonged. “You think we’re tolerating you until Annie—who is not what I would call a model of dependability and reliability and consistency—gets tired of you and we throw you out on your icy backside. Is that about right?”

It had almost been a relief, to hear it put so plainly, to have my fears out in the open air, where they could hurt me but not surprise me. They didn’t have that power anymore, not once they were out in the open for everyone to see.

Somehow, I had managed to nod. I still hadn’t been able to speak, and the temperature in the room had begun inching steadily downward. Kevin would notice soon. He had to notice, and then he’d lose his temper, just like my father did every time I did something “unnatural” or that he didn’t like—

“You look at your ID recently?” When I still hadn’t moved or said anything, Kevin had sighed, and smiled, and said, “Tells me you’re a Price. We took you in—or, in Annie’s case, just plain took you. You’re ours now. You may not have been born to this bloodline, but you belong to it whether you like it or not. You’re worried about us getting tired of you. What you should be worried about is us forgetting that you haven’t always been here and expecting more of you than you’re willing to give. We’re never making you leave, James. This family is weird and loud and messy and imperfect and yours, and you belong here, and we’re not letting you go unless that’s really what you want. So breathe, and stop freezing the room while I can still feel my toes.”

He had finally taken his hand off my shoulder then, and we’d spent the rest of the afternoon shelving books, and while he’d never be my father, I thought I might be able to think of him as a dad eventually. I’d never quite had one of those before.

It was a good memory. I revisited it often, and somewhere in the middle of revisiting it this time, it slid seamlessly into a dream, becoming gold-tinted and hazy, then filled with singing flowers and butterflies the size of dinner plates, which flitted from place to place, humming the whole time. I watched them, afraid to reach out, since I knew the touch of my hands would freeze their wings in an instant. Better for all of us to hang back, watching the scene without changing it.

Someone knocking lightly but insistently on my bedroom door dragged me out of the dream, and I opened my eyes on a room now filled with afternoon light. I had, apparently, slept all the way through the morning. Well, that was just great. So much for being productive today. I sat up, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand.

The knocking continued. “Ugh,” I said. “Annie, come in.”

“How’d you know it was me?” She opened the door and stuck her head around the edge, eyeing me critically. “You look like hell.”

“Anyone else would have realized I wasn’t answering for a reason and gone away to let me sleep.”

“You wouldn’t know what to do with yourself if I suddenly developed manners.” She came into the room, sitting down on the foot of my bed. “Brrr, it’s like an icebox in here. Bad dreams?”

“Confusing ones.”

“Why are you so upset? I thought you’d be relieved to know that Sally isn’t dead.”

“I am! I am . . . I just . . . What if she doesn’t like me anymore? For a long time, she was the only person who liked me at all, and then she went away, and what if she’s back and she doesn’t want me?” I knew how pathetic I sounded, but I couldn’t seem to stop. “What if she blames me for whatever happened to her? What if she hates me now?”

“Then she’s a lot less intelligent than you’ve always painted her to be, and to hell with her,” said Annie bluntly. “She wants to be awful to my brother, she can eat a sack of live leeches and choke.”

“Annie!”

“What? You care about her, so I’m willing to give her a shot, but I love you. You’re my brother. I’m not going to sit back and let her hurt you, and I’m not going to let you worry yourself sick about whether she’s going to want to, either. Whatever’s coming is coming, whether you worry about it or not. You’ve always said Sally was smart and tough and loyal. So try to believe that she still is. The mice said Grandma and the others would be coming back. You just try to be in the best shape you can be for when they get here.”

I looked at her. She shrugged. I leaned over and hugged her, fiercely.

“Hey,” she said. “What’s that for?”

“You helped me solve the mystery of where my waffles went and why the mice were making so much noise,” I said, letting her go. “And you’re my sister. For that, you get a hug.”

I didn’t have waffles, and I didn’t have Sally, yet, but I had a home and a family and a place to call my own.

That was maybe even better.