Imaginary Numbers

by Seanan McGuire

  Slowly, Artie blinked. “You mean you came here on your own?”

  I nodded.

  “How?”

  “I flew.” Bit by bit, I explained the day I’d had, starting with saying goodbye to Mom outside of security. I mentioned my suspicion that a cuckoo had been hunting in the Cleveland Airport, but I didn’t mention the cuckoo I’d actually seen here in Portland. That needed to wait until I saw Evie. She’d know what to do, and her resistance to Johrlac influence was almost as good as a born Price’s, thanks to growing up in a house with Mom. Long exposure leads to increased resistance to the negative aspects of cuckoo influence, along with the easier telepathy. I guess it’s a balance thing. Otherwise, cuckoos would just keep their favorite humans with them always, malleable and obedient and open books.

  By the time I finished, Annie and Elsie had given up on giving us space and drifted over to join us, forming a rough little circle between the bleachers and the doors. Annie looked at Artie, looked pointedly at the open space between us, and rolled her eyes.

  “All right, since it looks like the big reunion is over, we should probably go tell the rest of the family that it’s time to throw a welcome home party for Sarah,” she said. “Elsie, you have room in your car for one more?”

  “I can give Sarah a ride,” said Artie.

  “Did you offer?” asked Annie. “Because dude, if I were you and this were Sam, I would already have been in the car and driving away as fast as I could.”

  “You don’t know how to drive,” said Elsie.

  “My point stands,” said Annie.

  “Sarah and I aren’t . . . like that,” objected Artie, cheeks flushing. His thoughts turned into a tangled mess before shutting off entirely once again, blocked by the defensive action of his own empathic abilities. Full incubi can not only sense the emotions of the people around them, they can influence them, making direct changes to other people’s moods and hence minds.

  I can’t change minds. I can’t even directly change thoughts. I can manipulate memory and insert myself into someone’s emotional landscape, but it’s a lot less of a precision job than Uncle Ted or even Artie can manage. Artie’s empathy had always been mostly receptive and defensive, allowing him to pick up on feelings or block out other psychics, including me. It might even have improved since I’d seen him last. The walls between us certainly felt sturdier.

  “No, of course you’re not,” said Annie, with withering sarcasm. “Sarah, you’re coming back to the compound tonight?”

  “Yeah,” I said, not looking at Artie. “I’m still not stable enough to sleep just anywhere. The room Mom and I set up is going to be best for me.” It had triple-strength anti-telepathy charms worked into the walls, creating a psychic null space that never moved, never varied, and would last as long as the house was standing. I could sleep peacefully there, without worrying about picking up on any dreams I shouldn’t be part of.

  “If she’s going home with you, I want to drive her.” Artie squared his shoulders. His thoughts were still too sealed off to let me understand his expression; it could have meant virtually anything. “I need to come over anyway. Sam borrowed a bunch of my comic books, and I want them back.”

  “Sarah?” asked Elsie. “That okay with you?”

  “Sure,” I said, not looking at Artie. “I’ll see you both at the house.” I turned and walked to the bleachers to retrieve my backpack, waiting for some crack in the shell around Artie to open up and let me know what he was thinking.

  It didn’t happen.

  * * *

  Evie and Uncle Kevin understood the importance and necessity of privacy. In their line of work, having neighbors could mean way too many visits from the police, and they’d always known they wanted to be a safe space for the kind of people they were likely to associate with. Not just family members: other cryptozoologists and researchers, cryptids like me or Artie, and bounty hunters like Grandma Alice. All kinds of folks could be found in the living room on any given day, and that meant having the space and the distance to host them.

  Artie kept his hands on the wheel and his eyes fixed on the road as he drove past the Portland city limits, heading into the deep, dark woods outside. The trees pushed down on us from all sides, swallowing the ambient light, leaving us dependent on the headlights’ glare.

  According to my Aunt Rose, a lot of people die on that road. She ought to know. She died on a similar road more than sixty years ago, and when we’re talking about death, we know to treat her as the expert that she is.

  “This is going to be a long drive if you don’t talk to me,” I said.

  Artie didn’t reply. The shell around his thoughts was like a wall, built solely to keep me out.

  Vexed, I shot a quick arrow of thought at his ramparts. You say you missed me, but this doesn’t feel like missing me.

  “Oh, come on, Sarah,” he snapped. “You know that’s not fair.”

  “So you can hear me.”

  “I can’t help hearing you.” He kept his eyes on the road. I guess it seemed easier than looking at me. “I hear you even when you’re not around. I hear you having opinions on things I’m reading, and I hear you complaining when people talk during movies, since it’s not like you can read the actors’ minds and know what they were trying to say, and I hear you making nasty gagging noises every time I choose chocolate over strawberry. I hear you all the time. But you weren’t hearing me, or you would have called.”

  “I called as much as I could,” I said in a small voice.

  “Then you didn’t hear me, because I needed you to call a lot more than you did.”

  I closed my eyes, sagging in the seat. “Phones are hard. I can hear what you’re saying, but I can’t hear what you mean, and it makes my brain itch. I like text more. Text is always flat. It doesn’t have tone or nuance; it just has what the person on the other side of the keyboard said. I texted you all the time.”

  “I’m sorry the phone made you so uncomfortable, but I needed to hear your voice a lot more often than I did.” Artie abruptly smacked the steering wheel, the sound echoing through the cab. “I thought you were dead, and then I thought you were gone forever, and then I thought . . . I thought you didn’t care about us anymore, because you were never coming back. I thought a lot of things. And you wouldn’t let me see you, and so the thoughts didn’t go away. They didn’t get any better.”

  “Artie.” I opened my eyes and reached for him. If I was touching him, he wouldn’t be able to keep me out. I could finally make him understand why I’d stayed away, and why I’d come back; I could show him, and he’d see, and this would all get better. We’d get better. We’d—

  The truck came out of nowhere, roaring down a side road that was barely more than a logging trail. It slammed into the passenger side of my cousin’s ancient Camaro, sending us spinning out of control. Artie shouted. I screamed. There was a roaring crash as we hit a tree, the front end of the car buckling. Glass filled the air, and for a moment it seemed to stop, shining and spinning in front of us, unable to touch us. Then my head hit the dashboard, and everything was darkness.

  Five

  “Disaster’s not like a rattlesnake: it doesn’t give you any warning before it strikes. It just happens, and you’d better hope to heaven and hell at the same time that you’re not in the path of its glory.”

  —Frances Brown

  Somewhere in the woods outside of Portland, regaining consciousness after a bad accident

  SOMETHING STICKY COVERED MY cheeks and forehead, and there was a sweet, almost floral taste in the air, like someone had been spraying perfume inside the car. I sat up with a groan, feeling the seatbelt dig at my waist. I was going to have bruises in the morning, ghostly webs of broken capillaries that wouldn’t show very clearly from the outside but would sure as hell hurt.

  Everything was dark. I couldn’t even see my own hand when I wave
d it in front of my face. It was possible I’d hit my head hard enough to leave me with a temporary form of traumatic blindness, but it seemed more likely—a lot more likely—that it was just a natural consequence of being in an accident in the middle of the woods at night.

  An accident. I’d forgotten. That seemed impossible as soon as the memory came back, but trauma can do strange and terrible things to the way the brain processes information, and for a moment, I’d forgotten about the truck, the way it had roared out of the darkness, and—

  “Artie!” I reached out frantically, with both my hands and my mind, and sagged in relief as my fingers found his shoulder and my mind found the distant, blurry shadow of his thoughts. Unconsciousness isn’t the same as sleep. A person who’s been knocked cold can sometimes seem to disappear entirely, as good as dead, unless I know exactly where to look—or I’m touching them. To test that theory, I took my hand away from Artie’s shoulder, and winced as his thoughts seemed to wink out in the same instant.

  Okay. He was alive. He was hurt, and he was unconscious, and he was probably bleeding; the floral taste in the air was from his pheromones working overtime to protect him from the presumption of a threat. I needed to get us out of here.

  My backpack was on the floor by my feet. I tried to reach it. The seatbelt pulled me up short, tightened to its absolute limits by the crash. I fumbled for the belt. If I could just get to my bag, if I could get to my phone, I could call Annie. She and Elsie hadn’t been too far ahead of us. They’d be able to double back and help, preferably before some Good Samaritan happened across the crash and decided to call the police.

  Artie was leaking liquid love, and he wasn’t awake enough to control the negative aspects of his influence. I was bleeding something that looked more like antifreeze or spinal fluid than human blood. Any cop who responded to this accident report would get a lot more than they were bargaining for, and they probably wouldn’t enjoy it. We needed to keep this in the family, both literally and figuratively.

  The seatbelt was jammed, presumably also by the accident. I took a deep breath, trying to keep the panic from rising up and overwhelming me. I knew that cars didn’t explode nearly as often in real life as they did in the movies, but something was ticking, and something was dripping, and I wanted to get out of here. I wanted to go home. I wanted—

  I could feel my thoughts getting wild around the edges, slipping through my mental fingers like snakes and slithering toward the endless equations that had kept me company through my convalescence. I stopped and took another deep breath. This is nothing like what happened before, I told myself sternly. Your body is hurt, not your mind. My head ached from its impact with the dashboard, and there was a chance I’d suffered a concussion, but those were injuries to my surface self, not to the strange, obscure structure inside my brain that controlled the parts of me that weren’t a mirror to humanity. I wasn’t going to lose control of my telepathy over this. I wasn’t going to lose myself again.

  The seatbelt came loose with a click. I shook it off like I was fighting all my fears at once, grabbing my backpack and fumbling for my phone. My hands were shaking. They weren’t cut, though; the glass that filled the car around me seemed to have missed me somehow. I remembered the way it had seemed to freeze in midair, not quite touching our skins. Something about that moment . . .

  It was probably the trauma speaking. Glass doesn’t just stop in midair. I forced my hands to steady enough to let me unlock my screen and scrolled through my contacts until I found Annie’s number. I’d never been happier that she didn’t drive.

  She picked up on the third ring. “Tell Artie to stop being a butt or we will double back and get you,” she said. There was laughter in her voice. I could hear Elsie in the background, singing loudly along with some piece of bubblegum pop that I hadn’t been subjected to yet. They sounded so happy. I hated to ruin that for them.

  I hated to die alone in the forest even more.

  “Please,” I croaked. My voice was weaker than I expected it to be. I swallowed, tasting the sweet, almost syrupy tang of my own blood at the back of my throat, and tried again. “Please come back. There’s been an accident. Artie won’t wake up. There’s a lot of blood.” Unspoken was the fact that it didn’t matter which of us was bleeding; it would be bad for a human rescuer either way.

  From Annie’s sharply indrawn breath, she didn’t need any more details than that. “Do you know how far back you are? We’re almost to the house.”

  It was an hour from Portland to the house. We’d been in the woods for less than five minutes when the impact occurred. We must have been unconscious in the car for at least half an hour. Artie was still unconscious. “Way back,” I said. “We were barely in the woods when it happened. Artie won’t wake up. Please. Come get us.”

  “We’ll be there as fast as we can,” said Annie. The line went dead. I pushed back the sudden urge to cry. Artie was hurt and everything was dark, and I was alone.

  At least my phone battery was in pretty good shape. I turned the screen toward Artie, swallowing hard as I braced myself for what I was about to see.

  He was draped over the steering wheel, eyes closed, glasses askew. Blood oozed from a long gash down the side of his cheek, vivid red and sluggish. After a moment’s hesitation, I wiped the blood from my own forehead and held my hand over his wound, letting it drip gently down. Yes, as disgusting as it sounds, but not quite as ridiculous; cuckoo blood is a natural antibiotic agent. It’s harmless to humans and other mammals, and it substantially reduces the chances of infection. He’d have a better shot at recovery without needing heavy drugs or having a scar. And it was something I could do, something that wasn’t just sitting there and waiting for Annie and Elsie to come save us.

  I wiped my sticky hand on my leg before reaching over and gently shaking his shoulder. “Artie? I don’t think we should stay in the car. I think . . . I know the car probably won’t explode, but it’s making weird noises and I don’t like it. So if you could wake up now, that would be great. Okay? Wake up.”

  I brushed my pinkie finger against the blood-tacky skin of his neck, and added, I really need you to wake up now. It’s important. Please, Artie, please.

  There was no response, either verbally or mentally, only the tangled, murky thoughts of the unconscious mind. At least I knew he was alive, even if I couldn’t tell how badly he was hurt, or whether he was going to need medical attention beyond what Evie could provide in her living room. We don’t currently have a cryptid-specific hospital on the West Coast. I’d never considered what a failing that was until just now.

  The car continued to click and groan around me, and I remembered abruptly that we hadn’t been the only vehicle involved in the accident: the truck that slammed into us out of nowhere must have had a driver, even if I’d been too distracted to pick up on their presence until it was too late. I reluctantly pulled my hand away from Artie and reached for the handle of my door. I needed to check on the other driver. And while I was at it, I could get the first aid kit out of the trunk and mop up some of the blood. The less there was in the cabin, the better.

  The door refused to open. I winced. It had taken the brunt of the impact—it was honestly a miracle I hadn’t been killed, and that was something I wasn’t going to think about more than I absolutely had to—and something had bent inside the frame, jamming it in place.

  “This is going to suck,” I said aloud, and twisted in my seat, grabbing the headrest. Glass bit into my hands and knees as I crawled into the back, careful not to kick Artie in the head. He didn’t move or make a sound, still sunk so deeply into unconsciousness that he was unaware of my borderline gymnastics. That was probably a good thing. I wasn’t exactly what I’d call “dignified,” especially not when I overbalanced and toppled onto the seat, landing in a heap of fast food wrappers, empty cans, and junk mail. I wrinkled my nose. Something back here had gone bad enough to smell sort of like death.<
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  “Dammit, Artie,” I mumbled, feeling around in the junk until I found my phone. I held it tight in one hand as I unlocked the rear driver’s-side door with the other. This side of the frame wasn’t bent. The door opened easily, and the cold forest air rushed into the car, striking me across the face, washing everything else away.

  Gingerly, I got out, focusing on my body with every movement, waiting for some sign of additional damage to make itself known. The small cuts in my hands and knees from climbing over the seat stung, and the cut on my forehead throbbed, but that seemed to be it. Artie’s old Camaro had somehow managed to absorb most of the shock, rather than passing it along to its passengers.

  Good old car. This was probably the end of the road for it, at least based on what I’d been able to feel and see by the dim light of my phone. But it had done its best, and Artie had loved it since his sixteenth birthday, when the keys had fallen out of his cereal box. Maybe Aunt Rose would come and carry it onto the ghostroads, where it could keep on driving forever, a shadow among the dead. Artie would like that.

  Thinking about Aunt Rose and Artie at the same time made something ache deep in my gut, a sharp, anatomically unfocused pain, like my whole body was rebelling from the natural continuation of my thoughts. I tried to focus myself, closing my eyes as I stood and allowed my mind to spread out around me, questing for signs that I wasn’t alone. If the other driver was still alive—

  I found nothing sentient. The forest was alight with minds, but all of them were small, simple, the sort of thing that blended into so much background noise when I wasn’t actively looking for it. I found deer, owls, raccoons, tailypo, even a few cautious wolpertingers, but no humans, and no other sapient cryptids. I might as well have been alone in the woods.

  That didn’t mean the other driver was necessarily dead. I couldn’t pick up on Artie’s mind, either, when I wasn’t actively in contact with his skin. I held up my phone, turning in a slow circle as I looked for the truck that had slammed into us.