Imaginary Numbers

by Seanan McGuire

  “You were super double bonus mad when Alex and his sisters came back from Lowryland with a new cousin as a souvenir, until Mom explained that even if she wasn’t your grandmother, I was going to be your cousin, too; you think it’s unfair that I have such good eyelashes without mascara; you also think it’s unfair that I’d rather do math than let you practice your makeup techniques on me. You once accidentally made chlorine gas in the front hall and we had to try to convince Artie to come out of his basement before he choked to death, all without saying anything that would alert the mice. Not that it mattered, because they tattled on us anyway, and we all got sent to bed without dessert for practicing our chemical weaponry without an adult present. Your favorite color is this weird shade of maroon that you insist is pink even though it isn’t, you like cocoa without marshmallows, partially as a form of self-defense against Annie, and you had a crush on me for like a year when we were teenagers, which we all pretended wasn’t happening.”

  “How can you know all that and still insist Artie isn’t in love with you?” asked Elsie. If I’d had any doubts about her identity, that would have lain them to rest; she and my other cousins had been trying to convince me that Artie had nonfamilial feelings for me basically since we’d all hit puberty. They couldn’t seem to understand that my being a cuckoo made a difference, and so I’d stopped trying to argue with them when the subject came up. There was a hitch in her voice that could have been laughter and could have been the beginning of a sob. Based on the chaotic thoughts sparking in the air around her, as tangled as a ball of yarn, it was probably both. I braced myself. I’d seen that tangle of thoughts before.

  Sure enough, she flung herself at me a second later, locking her arms around my torso and pulling me crushingly close, her chin resting on my left shoulder while her entire body shook with sobs. I stood rigidly still, aware that she didn’t need or want anything else from me. She was reassuring herself that I was really here, really real, and that was all that mattered.

  The tip of a knife pressed against the back of my neck, positioned so that one quick thrust would slide it into the gap between my vertebrae and sever my spinal column. I may not have a heart, but I’m human-cognate enough that slicing through my spine will incapacitate me permanently, if not kill me outright. I closed my eyes and smiled.

  Hi, Annie, I thought. It was better than speaking aloud, since the goal was convincing my cousin I was really myself, and not some other cuckoo playing stupid opportunist. True telepathy—words instead of thoughts and feelings and vague impressions—takes time to come easily. I can do it with someone I’ve just met if I’m willing to push, but there’s a different feel to words that have been shoved through natural resistance. They sound like someone shouting from a long way away. Annie and I had been telepathically attuned to each other for years. To Annie, I should sound like—

  “Oh, my God, Sarah.” She pulled the knife away, and suddenly I was in the middle of a cousin sandwich, Elsie in front of me, Antimony behind me, and I was safe, and I was so close to home that I could almost taste it.

  I was finally almost there.

  Four

  “There’s a special sort of egotism that comes with being a member of the human race. We call compassion, kindness, love, all part of ‘showing humanity.’ That’s not what they are at all. They’re part of being a good person. Humanity barely counts.”

  —Evelyn Baker

  In a semi-abandoned warehouse, sitting on the bleachers, waiting for the last of the derby girls to go home

  ANNIE PASSED ME A bag of air-popped popcorn, rich with the scents of butter and tomato powder. I sniffed appreciatively before shoving a greasy handful into my mouth. It tasted better than anything had any right to taste. I barely chewed before shoving another handful in after the first. My stomach grumbled at how slowly I was going. The food in first class had been tolerable, as airline food went, but the portions had been nothing to get excited about, and I’d had a busy, physically taxing day.

  “I don’t know how you can eat that stuff,” said Annie, settling beside me and bumping her shoulder against mine. She was back in her street clothes, although she was still wearing a Slasher Chicks T-shirt along with her jeans and flannel overshirt. She was radiating a degree of contentment that I’d never felt from her before. Contentment, and something else, like the faintest hint of ashes in the air.

  I gave her a sidelong glance, trying to figure out why she was making the inside of my mind taste like charcoal. “It’s easy,” I said. “I put it in my mouth, then I chew it up, and then I swallow. See?” I shoved more popcorn in my mouth, gave it a few good chomps, and stuck my tongue out at her.

  “Ew, gross.” She shoved me, laughing. “Remind me why I missed you?”

  “I’d rather she tell us why she carries tomato powder in her backpack,” said Elsie. “That’s weird, Sarah. Grade-A weird.”

  “Says the succubus,” I shot back. “I like tomato powder. It tastes the way you feel when you eat chocolate. Since I don’t eat chocolate, I make do.”

  The warehouse seemed much larger, and much quieter, without the rest of the derby girls. Every word we spoke rose into the rafters, becoming a distorted echo of itself. It would have been unnerving, if I hadn’t felt so utterly, blissfully safe. I had my cousins back. I was in Oregon again, and I’d made the trip all by myself. I was healing.

  Thinking of the trip made my smile fade. I needed to tell Evie and Kevin about the cuckoo in the airport, so they could figure out what to do about her. I needed to not tell Annie and Elsie, because Annie would be all for grabbing a field kit and charging straight at the problem. She was the most level-headed of my cousins in many ways, but not when she felt like she might be able to do something to show up her siblings. Having Verity and Alex in different states had probably helped that tendency somewhat—it’s easier to shine on your own when you don’t have anyone to measure yourself against—but I couldn’t count on that.

  Resistant or not, two Price girls wouldn’t be enough to take out a cuckoo, and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stand that static again, not so soon on the heels of the first time. Especially not when she was likely to have an active grudge against me for that whole “hitting her” thing.

  Annie laughed abruptly. I looked at her again. She had her phone out, attention focused on the screen, radiating smug contentment.

  “Something funny?” I asked.

  “It’s her boyfriend,” said Elsie, in that familiar, hectoring tone of hers. “Didn’t anyone tell you? Our Annie’s in love. With a person, not a siege engine. I never thought I’d live to see the day.”

  I blinked. That didn’t seem like a big enough reaction, and so I blinked again, more slowly, before saying, “What?”

  Annie’s cheeks flushed red, a vascular response I’ve sometimes envied. People with visible blood don’t know how lucky they are. “Both of you shut up,” she mumbled.

  “Um, no, not going to shut up, don’t tell me to shut up, and what?” I poked her with my elbow. “I have popcorn, which makes this the perfect time for gossip. You have a boyfriend? As in, a person you’re dating, not a boy who happens to be your friend?”

  “As in a person I’m dating,” said Annie, cheeks still burning. The taste of char grew stronger at the back of my throat. “It’s been a weird few years while you’ve been off recovering. I’m really glad you’re back.”

  “This is so weird,” I said.

  “Hey, Alex is the one who’s having a baby,” objected Annie. “I think I’m still in the normal band for the youngest sibling.”

  Elsie’s phone buzzed. She checked the screen. A sudden burst of smug satisfaction radiated off of her. “I hate to cut this short—”

  “I don’t,” muttered Annie.

  “—but I’m afraid I’m going to have to. Sarah, you might want to wipe the butter off your cheek. It’s red. That’s disgusting. It looks like blo
ody snot.”

  I frowned at her, perplexed.

  The warehouse door banged open. The quality of the air changed, going from the soft hum created by my proximity to Annie and Elsie—two people I’d known for years but had never been particularly physical with—to something louder and more electric, like sparks racing along my skin. I lowered my popcorn, frown becoming an open-mouthed stare.

  “You didn’t,” I accused.

  Elsie shrugged, reaching over to rub her thumb in a quick arc across my cheek, presumably wiping away the smear of butter. “I did,” she said. “I know you. You were going to put it off and put it off and maybe fly back to Ohio without ever telling him you were here. You don’t get to be afraid anymore, Sarah-baby. You scared us too much for that. Now stop fucking around and go tell my brother that you’re back.”

  I shook my head, fighting the urge to pull a psychic blanket over me like a shield. Annie and Elsie wouldn’t lose sight of me if I did that—they were sitting too close, they could see me too clearly—but they weren’t the ones I was trying to hide from. “I’m not ready. You shouldn’t have done this. I’m not . . . I don’t know that I’m better. I’m not ready.”

  “Sarah?”

  Artie’s voice came from somewhere back by the front door, pitched loud enough to reach us without becoming an echoing smear in the aural landscape. He sounded . . . he sounded scared, almost, as scared as I felt. He sounded hopeful, too, and resigned, like he knew, somewhere deep down, that this was a cruel joke. It didn’t matter that his sister had never been the kind to play this sort of prank; it was easier to believe that she had turned suddenly brutally thoughtless than it was to let himself think she was telling the truth.

  I’d been broken, but Artie . . . I’d left Artie alone. I closed my eyes, letting my chin drop toward my chest, and reached for his thoughts.

  They were a whirling maelstrom of fear and hope and anger and blame, almost all of it directed squarely at himself. He shouldn’t have let me go to New York with Verity; he knew I’d gone because I wanted to challenge myself, and he hadn’t been willing to do more things that would be challenging, hadn’t wanted to stray outside the comforts of his familiar basement, where he never needed to worry about running into people who might be affected by his pheromones. He was worried he’d driven me away, and terrified that even if Elsie wasn’t playing a nasty trick for some reason, that I hadn’t called him myself because I didn’t actually want to see him. He thought I was done with him. Artie. The person I would call my best friend without a moment’s hesitation, thought I was done with him.

  Artie, come on, you know better, I thought.

  His response was silent joy and silent sorrow, both blended together. The connection intensified, drawing me deeper whether I wanted to go or not. I could suddenly see again, despite my closed eyes: I was looking at the back of the bleachers, at the shape of three women barely visible through the slats between the rows. He couldn’t quite see us well enough to tell us apart, but he knew we were there.

  And I could see through his eyes. I could still slide myself into his thoughts as easily as sliding a book back onto a shelf, because the connection between us wasn’t broken. Maybe it was a little less stable than it had been before and maybe it wasn’t. I couldn’t tell, and it didn’t matter. I was here now. We were here now. I opened my eyes and stood. Elsie and Annie exchanged a look I couldn’t read and didn’t need to; the air around them crackled with smugness. I ignored them and ran down the bleachers, almost stumbling on the last step. I grabbed one of the rails, using it to whip myself around the corner of the bleachers, out into the open.

  For a moment—only a moment, but long enough—my connection to Artie’s mind was still active, and I saw myself, pale, black-haired girl in yoga pants and an oversized teal sweater that hung to cover my hands and almost obscure my figure. It was designed to keep me from accidentally touching anyone, not to be flattering. That didn’t stop a feeling of intense joy from welling up and filling Artie’s thoughts, almost overwhelming me before it snapped closed, shutting me out.

  Artie has always thought of me as a sister, something I remember all too well from when we were kids and I still thought it was okay for me to read his mind. Cross-species relationships are hard enough even when both participants are mammals. But when he looked at me like that, sometimes I could almost let myself forget how impossible anything more than friendship was for the two of us.

  “Hi,” I said, like none of this was a big deal. Like I came home every day. “I would have called. I just got into town.”

  Artie stared at me, the expression exaggerated enough that I could pick it up even with the distance between us and the limitations in the way my mind interprets human faces. Then he broke into a run. I didn’t move, at first because I was too puzzled to understand what was happening, and then because I didn’t want to. Instead, I braced myself and spread my arms a little wider and let him run right into them.

  According to Annie and Elsie, who look at Artie the way humans do, he’s pretty good looking, for all that he checks a lot of boxes on the “average” side of the sheet: average height, neither fat nor thin, with the build of someone who works out because he has to, not because he wants to. He’s a noncombatant with natural abilities that will mostly keep him safe if he ever winds up in the middle of a fight. Natural abilities, and a really vicious family. He has brown hair and brown eyes and a smile that the minds of everyone around me say is sweet and kind, even if it’s rare.

  He has one of the most soothing minds I’ve ever touched. Spending time with Artie is better than meditating, or napping, or almost anything else. It’s not the only reason I’ve been in love with him since I was a kid, but it certainly doesn’t hurt.

  And now he was holding onto me like he never, ever wanted to let go of me again.

  I pressed my face into his shoulder, breathing in the bright, faintly spicy smell of his skin. It was largely drowned out by the horrifying quantities of body spray he was wearing, as always when he needed to leave his basement. Normally, I wouldn’t have been able to smell it at all. He was usually better about getting even coverage—sometimes spread out across six or seven applications—before he left the house.

  “How many speed laws did you break?” I asked, without lifting my head.

  “All of them,” said Artie, and pulled away.

  Regretfully, I let him go. Our big reunion was over, and odds were good he wouldn’t let me touch him again for days. Being half-incubus means his skin secretes pheromones that can cloud the minds of anyone who might be sexually attracted to him or genetically suited to making adorable part-Lilu babies. Women and gay men, mostly, and his own species, mostly, but not one hundred percent on either of those counts. Family members—blood family—are immune. I’m not blood family, which means I’m not covered in the catch-all immunity, so Artie has been reluctant to touch me ever since puberty first came stalking up and whacked him with its mighty hammer o’ suck.

  I’m not blood family. I’m also not a mammal, strictly speaking; his pheromones don’t work on me, and never have. Even Uncle Ted’s pheromones don’t work on me, and Uncle Ted’s a full incubus, with none of that pesky humanity to get in the way and weaken the effects of his natural weaponry. And Lilu pheromones are a weapon. Incubus, succubus, it doesn’t matter. They attract mates to make breeding easier and less dangerous, and make it possible for them to get in and out without getting hurt. But they evolved in this dimension, not in mine, and their biology doesn’t know how to deal with a Johrlac. We’re a mystery to them.

  Not that this matters to Artie, who figured out fast that touching non-family girls was not okay and filed me in the “not family” bucket shortly thereafter.

  Artie took a big step backward. That still left us in arm’s reach, so he took another one before he lifted his chin and looked at me. That was all. He just . . . looked at me, searching my face like he was
trying to memorize it, like something must have changed while I’d been in Ohio. Finally, he took a deep breath.

  “You didn’t call,” he said.

  “I did,” I objected.

  “You didn’t call enough.”

  “I’m sorry.” I worried the hem of my sweatshirt between my thumb and forefinger, resisting the urge to look away. Eye contact doesn’t make telepathy easier the way skin contact does. It just makes me faintly uncomfortable. “I was . . . for a long time, I wasn’t myself. And then I was scared I still wasn’t myself, but that I’d lost so much I couldn’t actually tell anymore. I’m sorry, I really am. I didn’t mean to worry you.”

  “Didn’t mean to—Sarah, I thought you were never coming back.” Frustration and fear rolled off him in a wave: wordless, formless, and oppressively strong. “I thought I’d lost you forever. You’re my best friend. Do you know how scary that was?”

  “I thought I’d lost me, too.” My voice came out in a whisper. “I know about scary, Artie, because I’ve been scared since the day I got hurt. I thought I was never going to be okay again. I thought I’d broken my own brain so badly that I’d never be able to control myself around people who weren’t wearing anti-telepathy charms. It’s still . . . I’m still not like I was. I pick up more things from people I’m not attuned to. The world is loud, and when I sleep, I wind up walking in dreams that aren’t mine if I don’t set up barriers in the room to keep my thoughts from getting out. I thought I was never going to see any of you again because Mom wouldn’t let you into the house in Ohio unless I told her it was okay, and I wasn’t going to say it was okay until the thought of you feeling sorry for me wasn’t so terrifying that it put me back in my bed for a week. So yes, I know how scary it was. I know how scary all of this was. I’m sorry I didn’t call. Getting myself to Portland without freaking out or hurting myself was the last big test of whether or not I was recovered.”