“He is not present.” The voice came from behind me. I whirled to find Istas standing less than two feet away, her head cocked to the side, a quizzical expression in her dark brown eyes. She was wearing her hair loose for once, hanging around her round face in heavy black waves, and had a bright blue feather fascinator clipped above one ear. She was probably the most stylish waheela in the world, for certain values of “stylish.”
She was still a waheela. I took a step back. “Personal space, Istas, remember? We’ve talked about this.”
“My apologies.” She also took a step back, creating an acceptable bubble of emptiness between us. Istas was a coworker, a friend, and someone I was perfectly happy to share a converted slaughterhouse with. Sometimes, she was also a giant, man-eating wolf-bear from the primal heart of humanity’s nightmares. I like her a lot, but having her stand too close can still remind my reptile hindbrain that part of her will always view me as prey. “Your not-relation and Ryan are currently not present.”
“Where are they? I have news.”
“They said we required provisions, and Ryan wanted to inform Kitty that we would be accessible via telephone only for the duration of the crisis.” Istas suddenly smiled, showing teeth that were too sharp to be entirely human. “I am very pleased that we will be staying here. It makes Ryan feel better, and increases the potential for carnage.”
“Oh, trust me, the potential for carnage is very high right now,” I muttered. Then I paused, an unpleasant thought striking me. “Uh, Istas? Not to be indelicate or anything, but what is it that you, you know, eat?”
“I can eat all types of human food, although I am very fond of pizza and chicken wings. They’re crunchy.”
“Oh, good—” I began.
But Istas wasn’t done. “I am also fond of alley cats, small dogs, and urban rodents. I make an excellent rat casserole. Ryan says I am a natural.” Istas perked up. “Would you like me to prepare dinner?”
“No,” I said, wincing. “But there are some people I think you need to meet before we do anything else.”
* * *
Freed from the confines of their front hall closet, the Aeslin mice had been busy. Their raiding parties had returned with several dead rats and a coatl—a feathered snake four feet long. It was probably a tohil, one of the smaller, less venomous varieties of feathered serpent, judging by the color of its plumage. The mice had been in the process of skinning the thing when Istas and I arrived, and I didn’t feel like interrupting dinner preparations to find out.
It was funny, in a way. If Dominic had killed the coatl, I would have lectured him for days about harming cryptid wildlife that wasn’t dangerous to the human population. But the coatl was one of the natural predators of the Aeslin mice, and if they wanted to eat it before it could eat them, I wasn’t going to hold it against them.
The entire colony stopped their preparations for the moving feast when Istas and I walked into the office, and a sea of tiny heads turned in our direction, tiny black eyes glittering in the overhead light. More heads poked out of the walls and the converted Barbie house—which was now surrounded, I saw, with smaller lean-tos and half-built ceremonial buildings. This wasn’t just a feast. It was a barn raising, Aeslin style.
All the more reason for me to get this taken care of quickly. “Hello, colony,” I said.
“HAIL!” replied the mice, with one voice. Istas jumped.
“Verity . . .” She stepped closer to me. This time, I didn’t remind her about personal space. “There are mice.”
“Yes. I don’t want you to eat them, so it seemed to me that introductions were in order.”
She gave me a sidelong look, expression clearly implying that I might well be insane. I’d been seeing that face since I was old enough to get sent home from kindergarten for telling fibs. (To their credit, my parents had grounded me, not for telling fibs—I hadn’t—but for being stupid enough to tell my teacher about the time my grandmother shot the Boob Fairy with a load of buckshot. All my teacher heard was that things were taken care of. And they were. I became a much better liar after that.)
“The mice are talking,” said Istas patiently, in case I had somehow failed to notice.
“True,” I agreed. “Colony, this is Istas.”
“HAIL ISTAS!” declared the mice.
Istas jumped again. Then she turned and glared at me, like this was all an elaborate trick that I was staging for her benefit. “Make them stop talking,” she demanded.
“I can’t. No one can. If I had that power, my sex life would be a lot less complicated.” I decided to take mercy on her—always show mercy to the apex predators when possible—and cleared my throat before saying, “In the interests of maintaining local harmony, I invoke Conversation for Cake.”
The mice cheered once before going eerily silent. Istas stepped closer still, until I could feel the heat of her skin. I managed not to step away.
A small figure appeared on one of the wooden paths winding around the former Barbie Dream House. It made its slow way up to the very top of the structure, leaning heavily on its staff with every step. I didn’t offer to help. The High Priest was proud. If he wasn’t, he would already have stepped down, letting a younger, more enthusiastic mouse take his place. I wouldn’t shame him by acting like he couldn’t make the walk on his own.
When he reached the top of the house, he stopped, coiling his tail tightly around his feet as he turned to face us. He kept hold of his kitten bone staff, letting it support his weight. His whiskers were forward, signaling his curiosity. “What do you wish, O Priestess?” he squeaked.
“Hello, my friend,” I said. I indicated Istas. “This is Istas, of the waheela. She’ll be staying with us here while we take care of things. I wanted her to meet the colony.”
“Before there could be Bad Decisions,” said the High Priest. He bowed to Istas. “Milady Carnivore. Welcome to our Home.”
The other mice took this as an invitation to cheer. The High Priest silenced them all with a stern glare, and one rap of his kitten bone staff against the roof. He might be old, but he still ruled his people with an iron paw.
Istas, meanwhile, was looking at him with unabashed curiosity. “You are talking mice,” she said. “Mice are not meant to talk.”
“Yet talk we do,” said the High Priest. “Truly, you are wise, to approach such a complicated theological question on your very first introduction.” He rapped his staff again. This time it was a cue, and the colony’s cheering went unabated.
“They’re hyper-religious,” I explained to Istas, quietly. “They worship my family.”
“Oh,” said Istas, looking puzzled. She looked at the High Priest. “If you worship her, what do you do with me?”
“We ask that you do not eat us, Milady Carnivore, and offer to share the spoils of our hunt with you,” said the High Priest. “We will feast well this night, on rat and bat and feathered snake.”
“I would like that,” said Istas. “Do you always talk?”
“Sadly,” I muttered.
The High Priest pressed his whiskers forward. “You are truly a lover of complex theological debate,” he said, sounding delighted. “We will enjoy your company.”
“As long as that company doesn’t involve eating my family’s mice,” I said, to get us back on message. “Istas, please don’t eat my mice. They’re very important to me, and besides, it’s rude to eat anything you’ve been introduced to.”
Istas pondered this for a moment before she said, “I will not eat any mouse that speaks to me, or that is caught within this room.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“May I stay here and partake of the dead rats which they have offered me?”
I grimaced. “Maybe.” I looked to the High Priest. “Istas is not human, and does not share my dietary restrictions. If she dines with you, will you make this a religious ritual? Because I won’t eat rat for you, no matter how important you think it is.”
The High Priest slicked his ea
rs back in evident amusement. “No, Priestess,” he said. “This will be the Feast of the Waheela With Religious Questions, and will be celebrated only when a waheela is present to dine with us.”
“In that case, yes, Istas, you can stay and eat dead rats with the mice.”
Istas beamed, evidently delighted. “Perhaps I can help with the gutting.”
General cheers, and the sound of Istas’ laughter, followed me out of the room. Sometimes my life really is indescribably weird.
* * *
With Mike and Ryan off getting supplies and Istas eating dinner with the mice, there wasn’t much that I could do with myself. I went to the office I’d claimed as a temporary bedroom and finished unpacking my weapons, lining them up along the walls until I stopped feeling quite so transitory. A Price girl can live anywhere as long as she has her boots, her knives, and her guns. That’s a lesson we picked up from my great-grandmother, Frances Healy, but near as I can tell, it’s been true for every generation of our family since the dawn of time. Our last name may have changed, but our essential nature has always remained the same.
Even I could only spend so much time fussing with the placement of ammo boxes and throwing knives. Once that was over, it was time to turn to the much less pleasant of my planned chores: making some calls.
Not every cryptid has a telephone, or wants one, but all smart urban cryptids are plugged into the local gossip network. The bogeys and the dragons knew about the impending purge. That was a start; between them, they had connections to two thirds of the city’s cryptid population. With a few calls, I was able to tip off the harpies—for the aerial cryptids—and the nixies—for the aquatic ones. I couldn’t reach any of the gorgons in my contact list, but hopefully between Carol and Joe, they’d hear what was coming.
(There are three species of gorgon. Carol could warn the lesser gorgons. Joe could warn the Pliny’s gorgons. No one was going to warn the greater gorgons, but then again, greater gorgons are generally what you’re warning people about. They’d be okay if the Covenant was armed with anything short of a tactical nuke.)
Once I was out of numbers and tired of being screamed at by people who were convinced that this was my fault, I went out into the main room and spent another twenty minutes placing dart boards around the area, hanging them off support beams and at odd angles on the walls. They’d work for target practice in a pinch, and this was not the time to let myself start getting sloppy.
The slaughterhouse didn’t have many windows. The windows it did have were narrow things set high to the ceiling, where even the most industrious burglar—or assassin—would have to really work for the kill. Even so, I found myself wishing Antimony were there. Not to stay; this situation was too dangerous to wish on my little sister, no matter how many times she’d tied me up when we were kids. I just wanted her around long enough to set trip wires and alarms on all the unexpected entrances. She had an eye for that sort of thing.
Without her, I was going to have to improvise. So improvise I did, scaling bits of exposed pipe and doorframes to place mason jars full of nails in front of every window I could possibly reach, and a few I probably should have left alone, since a fall at that angle could have left me with broken bones—or worse. (It seems to be an immutable fact of nature that any time you move into an empty building, no matter how recently it was vacated or how thoroughly it was cleaned, you’ll find roughly a dozen forgotten glass jars in cabinets and closets. No one knows why. It’s a mystery that may never be solved.)
I was trying to figure out what to do with myself next when my phone rang. I jumped before checking the readout—it was a blocked number, which meant Sarah—and answering. “Hello?”
“I thought you were going to turn the Internet on.” Sarah sounded peevish. “You haven’t checked in, you haven’t been online, and I was starting to worry.”
I sighed. “Mom put you up to this, didn’t she?”
“Your father, actually, but it’s still true. I hadn’t heard from you, the Covenant’s in town, I was worried. Then I thought, ‘Wait, there are these magical pocket telepathy machines that we all carry,’ and I dialed your phone. Ta-da.” The last was delivered, not with a flourish, but in a dust-dry deadpan.
“You’re a real comedian, Sarah.” I produced a throwing knife from inside my shirt and flicked it at the nearest dart board. It hit a little left of center. “What’s really on your mind?”
“How did it go with Dominic?”
My second throw went wild as her words forced me to finally think about what I’d been trying to avoid thinking about. I hate circuitous logic. Closing my eyes, I said, “Good and bad.”
“Good how?”
“He loves me.”
Sarah paused. “That’s good, right?”
“I just said it was good.”
“Do you love him?”
“That is a large and complicated question, affected by a great many outside factors, most of which are beyond my control.”
“Gosh.” She sounded almost impressed. Then: “That’s pretty much bullshit. I mean, even I can tell that’s pretty much bullshit, and I have the relationship sense of a wombat.”
“You just have biology issues. Your own species is made up entirely of sociopathic assholes, and Artie doesn’t know what to do with a girl who actually likes him, rather than just liking his pheromones.”
Sarah sighed deeply. “Tell me about it. Dominic loves you? Like, he said he loves you? In those words?”
“He told me he loved me, right before he told me to run, because he wouldn’t be able to protect me if the Covenant came back. Oh, and it gets better.”
“How does it get better than that?”
“There are three Covenant representatives in town. I should call Dad to get him to run dossiers on them.” That would mean telling him who they were, and that would mean telling him that we were up against family. “Two of them, I didn’t recognize their names. They’re not from any Covenant family I know.”
“Uh-huh,” said Sarah slowly. “Why do I get the feeling that behind door number three is something that’s going to explain your sudden radio silence?”
“The third is Margaret Healy.”
There was a long moment of awed silence before Sarah said, “Wow. When you decide to get into a bad situation, you don’t mess around, like, at all. Your boyfriend, who loves you, is totally hanging out with your evil cousin.”
“She’s not necessarily evil. Just misguided.”
“I’m on her magical hunter ‘kill it on sight’ list, so I think I get to call her evil if I want to,” Sarah countered.
I sighed, but I didn’t argue. She had a point.
According to the family record, there was a time when the Healys were the pride of the Covenant of St. George. They were faithful, they were devout, they bred like rabbits, and once they were aimed at a target, they killed without hesitation. They were the perfect monster hunting assassins. Dozens of my ancestors were canonized in the annals of the Covenant, heroes and heroines of the war they fought on mankind’s behalf.
They were demonized at the same time, recorded as monsters in the history of the world’s cryptids. There are two sides to every story, and history is a story like any other.
It wasn’t until my maternal great-great-grandfather came along that any of the Healys questioned the party line—and when they decided to start asking questions, they did it the way the Healys had been doing things for centuries: enthusiastically, and with suicidal levels of commitment.
It’s funny, but I sometimes wonder what the hell Great-Great-Grandpa Alexander was thinking. Every other defector we know of was motivated by something, love or death or a great epiphany in the field that changed everything. Great-Great-Grandpa did some research. That was all. He was trying to learn better ways to kill monsters, and what he found was something entirely different. He researched further, and when he didn’t like the things he found, he did more research. And then he not only threw away everything he’d ever
worked for, he convinced my great-great-grandmother to do the same thing. We may be the only people in history to defect from their religious order not over a point of faith, but over footnotes.
Great-Great-Grandpa was able to convince his wife to leave the Covenant with him, but he couldn’t convince his parents, or his siblings, or his cousins. The Healys in America were never more than a tiny group of exiles, one that eventually changed its name; there are no Healys anymore, just Prices and Harringtons. The Healys in Europe, on the other hand, are legion, and they hated us right up until they stopped believing we existed. We were the ones who besmirched the family name. We were the ones who had to pay.
Sarah’s voice brought me out of the family history and back into the present. “You realize this means they suspect you’re here.”
“What?” I shook my head vigorously, not caring that she couldn’t see me. “Dominic didn’t tell them. If he had, they would have taken me already.”
“He didn’t tell them, but they suspect something. The Healys haven’t been in the Covenant’s good graces since the defection. So why would they send one on this kind of mission, unless they wanted her to look for signs that the family was still around?”
“You sure do know how to make a girl feel safe,” I muttered.
“Feeling safe isn’t what matters right now. Staying alive is.” I heard something beep behind her. “That’s my alarm. I need to get to class—do you want to come by my hotel tonight? We can talk about what to do next, order too much room service, and try not to freak out.”
“It’s a date,” I said, and hung up. It was time to give in to the inevitable. It was time to call my father.
* * *
The less said about my call home, the better. By the end of it, I knew that the Brandts were an old Covenant family from Wales, and were mostly men of action, which meant that I didn’t need to worry about Peter hatching any clever plans against me. The Bullards were more recent additions to the fight, having signed up shortly before the Healys left. We didn’t have much data—most of what we did have came in with Grandpa Thomas, who referred to Darren and Cassandra Bullard as “right twats.” Somehow, I didn’t find that encouraging.
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