“I’ll show you,” she said.
“Good,” I said. “Lead the way.”
The crowd parted to let us through, and the three of us walked on, leaving Hannah and her anger, and Megan and her guilt, behind.
* * *
• • •
The gorgon community wasn’t large enough for the walk to take long: the woman led us to a small trailer with curtains printed in bright geometric patterns and raised garden beds all around the outside, growing tomatoes and strawberries and various wildflowers.
“That’s their window,” she said, pointing. “Billy and Marigold. They were safe in their beds when I went to sleep. When I woke up . . .” She stopped and buried her face in her hands.
Shelby patted her on the shoulder, keeping a careful eye on the woman’s snakes as she did. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “It’s not Megan’s, either. We should make sure to tell her that.”
“How can you tell?” I asked.
“The curtains.”
I blinked, giving the trailer a second look. Then I swore softly under my breath.
“They’re the same in all the windows,” I said.
She nodded.
In a surprising number of nonfamilial kidnapping cases, it’s possible to identify the children’s room from outside. They have cartoon curtains, say, or stuffed animals on the windowsill inside, something that tells kidnappers where to enter the house. When my sisters and I were young, our parents had Mickey Mouse curtains on their bedroom window. The one time someone had tried to come into the house to do us harm, they’d gotten a big surprise, and Mom had gotten a broken orbital ridge. Fun times.
If there was no visual way to know which window to pry open, the kidnappers must have had another way to locate the children. That meant they couldn’t possibly have been the men Megan had seen.
Unless we were going about this the wrong way.
“Start looking for tracks,” I said, to Shelby. “I need to go ask Megan a question, and then I need to go home and pick something up.”
“You’ve got that ‘maybe I know what’s going on’ look,” said Shelby. “Do you?”
“I almost hope not,” I said and turned, breaking into a brisk jog as I went back the way we’d come.
The crowd of gorgons had dispersed somewhat, with people going off to take care of things that couldn’t be avoided any longer. Most of the ones I assumed were parents were still there, looking utterly lost. So was Dee, and her family, thankfully. Hannah had moved off to the side, still glowering.
I trotted up to Megan and stopped. “The men who saw you,” I said without preamble. “How far away, and what exactly did you see?”
“Um,” she said. “About six hours’ drive away. I saw . . . men. Human men, looking through my window.”
“They weren’t just standing in the parking lot and happened to catch a glimpse of you? They were actually looking?”
“Um,” said Megan again. Then she paused, eyes widening. “Yes. Yes! They were looking right at my window. Why would they do that?”
“Because you’re right: they were following you, or at least they were waiting for someone like you. Hannah?” I turned. “I know what happened.”
The gorgon matriarch had a long enough stride that she appeared beside me almost instantly, snakes hissing and tangling around her shoulders in threatening array. “What has the child done?” she demanded.
“Nothing,” I said, forcing myself to meet her eyes. I had never been so grateful for my goggles. “Those men were probably part of a network, staking out all the major approaches to Columbus. There aren’t that many. If you restrict yourself to the highways and the motels that still aren’t part of a major chain, you could do it with twenty.” My family could do it with fourteen. There was no need to go making things worse if I didn’t have to.
“Why?” asked Hannah.
“Because they’ve been casing the community, potentially for months, while they lined up buyers for your kids. We’ve seen this kind of thing before. One of the sylph creches got raided a couple of years ago, and the only way we found the perpetrators was food poisoning at a motel diner.” I half-suspected my dead Aunt Rose of having had a hand in that. Diners are part of her domain, and she doesn’t like people who mess with cryptid kids.
None of us do. Children suffer the sins of their parents, and they shouldn’t have to. They should be allowed at least a little time to be innocent, before they realize they’ve been born into an endless, slow-motion war.
Dee put a hand over her mouth, looking suddenly sick to her stomach. “Buyers?” she asked. “What do you mean, buyers?”
“I mean they weren’t hunters, or there would be a lot more broken glass, and this wasn’t some spur-of-the-moment smash and grab. They knew where the children were, they knew which ones they wanted, and they knew how to spot a gorgon. They probably made Megan as soon as she stepped into the lobby.” I looked from face to face. “Megan may have accelerated their timeline slightly by coming home, but you can’t blame her for that. You were being hunted.”
“Poachers,” said Frank grimly.
I nodded. “Yeah. Poachers.” I turned to fully face Hannah. “I need your permission to do something you aren’t going to like, and I need it right now, because we don’t have a lot of time to waste.”
She frowned. “What do you want to do?”
“My cousin Sarah is a Johrlac. I assume you know what those are?”
Hannah’s frown deepened until it became a scowl. “If you believe yourself family to one of those monsters, I should kill you where you stand.”
“Sarah’s different. She’s not like the rest of her kind. What she is, however, is a telepath.” A fragile one, who was afraid to leave the house. What I was proposing would put her in danger. She could hurt herself again.
And it didn’t matter. With as many moving parts as this plan must have had, we could be looking at dozens of buyers, scattered all over the continent. If we didn’t find these children before they were separated, they were going to disappear forever. There are lots of things an unethical “owner” can do with a gorgon. They could be hunted for sport, or simply shot point-blank to make an “exotic” meal for some unethical fucker. They could have their fangs pulled to turn them into manageable domestics or be beaten into becoming killers and enforcers.
We had to save them. Sarah would understand.
I hoped.
“So?” said Hannah.
“So she’s better than a bloodhound, and these people won’t have bothered to invest in anti-telepathy charms. That sort of work is expensive, and there’s no need for it when you’re only planning to attack the local gorgons. If they’re in these woods with your kids, Sarah will be able to find them. I need your permission to bring her here, and your word that you won’t attack her.”
“It’s my job to keep these people safe,” said Hannah.
“Keep them safe by letting my cousin in,” I replied.
Hannah stared at me. I looked patiently back. She broke eye contact first.
“Fine,” she said sullenly.
“Great, thanks. Megan?” I looked toward the younger gorgon. “You’re with me. I’m going to need someone to navigate me through the confusion charms, and Sarah’s going to want a look at those men you saw.”
Megan blanched, but she stepped up to join me. I started to move toward the car. Dee grabbed my arm.
“Take care of my little girl,” she said.
“I will,” I said. “Take care of Shelby until I get back.”
Dee nodded and let go.
Together, Megan and I walked away.
* * *
• • •
Megan sat rigid and silent in the passenger seat until we were almost to the house. Then, in a small voice, she said, “I thought you’d be taller.”
&n
bsp; “I get that a lot.”
“It’s just that your sister’s as tall as you are.”
“Yeah, well, she got the good genes in the fam—” I stopped mid-sentence, slamming my foot automatically down on the brakes. The car came skidding to a stop. Fortunately, no one was behind us: that could have ended very badly for everyone involved.
I twisted in my seat to stare at Megan. She stared back, face framed by the long brown sweep of her wig. She could have passed for a terrified human girl in that moment.
Terrified. Right. She didn’t know me, and it’s not polite to scare your allies. I forced myself to take a deep breath, and said, “I have two sisters. Which one do you mean?” She couldn’t mean Verity, Verity’s short. Verity barely comes up to my chin. But she couldn’t mean Antimony, either, because no one knew where Antimony was.
“Um,” said Megan. “I mean Annie.”
I stared at her for a few seconds before returning my attention to the road and starting the car moving forward again. Having something to distract me might keep me from shaking her until she either told me where my sister was, or the snakes atop her head decided to bite me.
“I see,” I said. My voice was impressively neutral to my own ears. “Because she’s been missing for a while now, and we’re all really worried about her. Is there any chance you could tell me where she is?”
“No. I mean, I’m sorry. But I can’t tell you because I don’t know.”
Of course she didn’t. Annie did better in her basic survival training than any of us. I was never intending to go into fieldwork, and Verity has never really mastered the idea of “subtle.” Wherever Megan had seen my sister, there was no chance that she was still there.
“Where was she?” I asked.
“Lowryland.”
I somehow managed not to hit the brakes again. Of course. Of course. It made terrible, awful, perfect sense. Annie was on the run from the Covenant. The Covenant may hate magic in all its forms, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t willing to bend it to their own ends when the need arises. She had trained with them. Blood, sweat, and tears, those are all things that can be used to make a tracking charm, if you have the proper training.
Running to Lowryland would have confused any spells the Covenant tried to use to find her, because the sheer density of people meant a hundred false positives and unclear results, until it was impossible to narrow anything down, or even be sure that they were looking in the right place. It was a sideways sort of genius, and I was proud of my baby sister, even as I wished she had the sense to come in from the cold.
We’ve faced the Covenant before. We’ve always won. We always will.
“Do you have any idea where she was going?”
“I wish I did,” said Megan. “She took our roommate and some other people, and she left. I don’t think they knew where they were going.”
So Annie wasn’t alone anymore. That made me feel a little better. No matter how much we train, we’re always better with backup. “Thank you for telling me. It’s going to make our parents feel a lot better to know that she’s all right.”
“I think she’s the sort of person who always winds up all right,” said Megan, a little wryly. “If the world tries to tell her she’s not, she’ll just punch it until it starts playing nice.”
“That sounds like Annie,” I said.
“Can you . . . I mean, I assume eventually she’ll go home,” said Megan. “When she does, can you call my parents and let them know? I worry about her sometimes. I worry about all of them.”
She wasn’t naming names. That was probably a good thing: it’s always best to play your cards close to the chest when you’re not sure of people’s safety. At the moment, however, it was endlessly frustrating. We’ve always known that Annie was alive—Aunt Mary would have told us if she wasn’t—but that’s all we’ve known.
At least this might help my parents sleep a little better.
“I will,” I said. “In the meantime, how much do you know about Johrlac?”
Megan looked at me blankly. “I know we’re going to pick one up, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of them before.”
“You would probably have heard them referred to as ‘cuckoos.’”
Her blank expression melted into horrified comprehension. “They’re killers. Dangerous killers. They’ve wiped out entire communities, and they did it for fun.” A note of bewilderment crept into her voice. “Humans kill because they’re afraid of losing their place at the top of the food chain, but cuckoos kill because they can.”
“Okay, you’re not wrong,” I said. “My cousin Sarah—the woman we’re on our way to get—is a cuckoo, although she prefers the term Johrlac. She says cuckoo is pejorative.” What she would really have preferred was a complete change of species. Since that’s not in the cards—not even with the intervention of the crossroads, who can do a lot of things, but who can’t transform a pseudo-mammalian wasp into a human girl—she makes do with a certain amount of caution with her language. We all have our own ways of coping.
Megan stared at me. “You live with one of them?”
“I do. Shelby and I both do. So does Annie, when she’s at home. It’s not a bad idea to be afraid of cuckoos: most of them are extremely dangerous. Sarah is different. I grew up with her. I trust her with my life.”
“There was a human boy who used to hang out on my favorite NeoPets forum,” said Megan. “His family ran one of those little roadside zoos. He used to post pictures of himself with their bear. He always said she loved him. That she was different. When he stopped posting, I went looking for news articles about the zoo. The bear killed him. Maybe she was different, but she wasn’t different enough.”
I didn’t say anything. Megan wasn’t saying anything new: she was expressing a fear shared by several members of my own family, my Grandma Alice among them. Cuckoos kill. It’s what evolution designed them to do. Grandma Angela may be a CPA, and Sarah may be a math nerd, but they’re both built to be killers, and there’s always the chance that one day, nature will win out over nurture.
Of course, there are people who say the same about my family. We belonged to the Covenant for centuries, after all: we are the descendants of killers who waded through rivers of blood to put humans at the top of the pecking order. An upsettingly large percentage of the cryptid population is waiting for the day when we decide to go back to the old way of doing things.
If I could believe in my family’s ability to walk away from the Covenant, I could believe in Sarah’s ability to walk away from the need to twist the world to her own desires. I had to believe in it, because she was family, too. There are more important things in this world than blood.
“So you’re aware, Sarah knows what most people think of her, and her kind,” I said. “She doesn’t get mad about it, since she knows it’s true, and she’d rather people have some warning. But once she’s in the car, if you look at her and think ‘monster’ too loudly, she’ll probably hear you, and we want her to be willing to help find your colony’s missing kids.”
Megan’s cheeks flushed red as she turned her face toward the window. Maybe I was being a little heavy-handed. Whatever. I was about to ask Sarah to do something I knew she absolutely would not want to do, and it was going to be a lot easier if she didn’t have someone sitting by, waiting to be murdered.
The driveway was still empty when we pulled up in front of the house. My grandparents hadn’t come home yet. That would make this easier, since it meant Grandma couldn’t argue with me about whether or not Sarah was ready to leave the house. It would also make this harder, since Sarah would probably try to say that she couldn’t go out without permission.
“Come on.” I stopped the engine, unbuckled my seatbelt, and opened the door. “No matter what you see, I need you to stay calm and keep your wig on, all right?”
Megan gave me a horrified look. She foll
owed me anyway. I guess the fear of losing the children was stronger than her fear of an ordinary suburban home.
The living room was empty when I unlocked the front door. The distant sound of drumming echoed through the walls, faint enough to be easily mistaken for the thump of a faulty air conditioner. I closed the door before leaning over and rapping shave and a haircut on the nearest retaining wall.
“The sound will carry,” I explained.
“Carry where?” she asked.
In answer, a tiny, cunningly camouflaged door popped open in the wall. The edges had been sanded until they were completely flush with the drywall around them, making it functionally invisible to anyone who didn’t already know it was there.
“HAIL!” cried the mouse who had opened the door. It was dressed in the regalia of the Thoughtful Priestess, also known as my mother, which made sense: apart from the mice who were traveling with me, most members of the resident colony were adherents of her particular subsect of their faith. “HAIL TO THE RETURN OF THE GOD OF SCALES AND SILENCE!”
“Um,” said Megan.
“Hey,” I said, to the mouse. “I need to take Sarah out of the house for a little while. Can I leave a message for Grandma, in case she gets home before we do? She’s going to want to know where we are.” I didn’t insult the mouse by asking if it would remember. Aeslin mice have perfect recall of everything they see or hear. They don’t believe in written records, considering them fragile and fallible: for them, the oral tradition is all.
The mouse puffed out its chest with pride. “I Listen and Repeat!” it squeaked.
“Awesome. Okay. Tell her this: that the God of Scales and Silence has taken the younger Heartless One to the children of Stheno, for their offspring are in danger, and Sarah is needed to bring the young ones safely home. Tell her that the Unpredictable Priestess is also with the children of Stheno. If we do not return by sunrise, we have failed, and more aid is required.”
“It shall be Spoken,” said the mouse, bobbed its head politely to Megan, and withdrew into the hole, pulling the door shut with a soft but definite click.
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