“Shh, Sarah, shh.” He closed the distance between us in three long steps, putting his arms around me and gathering me close to him. It was a human gesture, and not one I was entirely comfortable with, but I let myself be gathered, pressing my face against his chest and sobbing. At least there was a layer of fabric between his skin and mine. He stroked my hair with one hand. “You need to calm down, okay? Can you do that for me? Because if Verity’s out of the picture, we have to figure out what we’re going to do, and I need you to be with me for that. So let it out, and let yourself calm down.”
How can you say that? I demanded, my throat too full of tears—and snot, since mucus production is one of the biological traits that cuckoos are “lucky” enough to share with the human race—for me to speak.
Mike didn’t respond. He just kept stroking my hair. Slowly, I realized that he hadn’t heard me. I can only communicate telepathically with people I’m attuned to, and that requires spending a certain amount of time in my physical company. Uncle Mike and I only saw each other at holidays, if then, and I usually spent Christmas and Thanksgiving hiding in my room, if we were in Columbus, or hiding in Artie’s room, if we were in Portland. Without Verity, there was no one left who could hear me when I didn’t remember to talk out loud.
Swallowing to try and clear some of the stickiness from my throat, I pushed away from Mike and said, “Verity’s not out of the picture, okay? She’s just missing. I don’t know how, or why, but she’s not out of the picture. She’s not gone. Don’t you let yourself think that she is, not for an instant, or I swear, I will make you regret it.”
“I’m not saying she’s dead, Sarah, but if you can’t find her, and you hurt before she disappeared, there’s a pretty good chance that she’s not in fighting shape right now. We’re going to need to find her, and you’ve been here a lot longer than I have. So what do we do?”
The word “panic” rose to the tip of my tongue. I swallowed it, and said, “We need to call the Freakshow. Kitty will know if anyone saw anything.”
“Bogeymen aren’t always happy to share information. Kitty had a relationship with Verity. What makes you sure that she’ll talk to us?”
He was already referring to Verity in the past tense. I didn’t think he even realized he was doing it. I swallowed again, this time to stop myself from screaming, and said, “Kitty’s relationship with Verity is why she’ll talk to us. Kitty and Verity have an understanding, and Kitty and I know each other.” Calling us friends would have been too much of a stretch, but “allies by necessity” was a pretty accurate description.
Kitty would want Verity to be okay. If there was any way for her to help us out, she would.
“Okay,” said Uncle Mike. “So you go call the Freakshow.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Check the defenses, make sure there’s a lot of traps set, and change anything Verity would have known how to get around.” His tone was apologetic, and his words were accompanied by a wave of sorrow and determination so emotionally loud that I could have picked it up from a complete stranger. “We gotta assume she’s compromised, kiddo, and that means we batten down the hatches and we get ready for the siege to begin. Now get Kitty on the phone, and find out if there’s anything she can do to help us get Verity back. You’re the one who comes closest to knowing what happened to her, and I’ve got work to do.”
With that, he turned and walked out of the room, leaving me standing alone, staring after him, with absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do. No; that wasn’t true. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and started scrolling through my contacts. I would call the Freakshow. Kitty would know what to do. Someone would know what to do, because I didn’t have a clue.
* * *
“You’ve reached the Freakshow,” said the bored, half-attentive voice of Angel, the bar’s only human bartender. “We’re closed right now, but if you’d like to come see us tomorrow night, we’d be happy to make all your dreams come true.” It might have been easier to believe her if she hadn’t punctuated her words with the sound of gum being noisily snapped.
“Angel, this is Sarah Zellaby, Verity’s cousin. Is Kitty available?”
“Who?” Angel’s tone changed over the course of that single syllable, going from distracted to fully focused on the phone. “You’re the blue-eyed girl, right? The one that comes in with Very some nights.” I could practically hear her thoughts rearranging themselves, making me important to her. My telepathy doesn’t work at a distance, but Angel had been in my sphere of influence before. Cuckoo tricks can linger. “Is everything okay?”
“Not really, no,” I said. “Is Kitty available?”
“Yeah, yeah. Hang on.” There was a soft scraping sound as she cupped her hand over the receiver. She may as well not have bothered; I heard her clearly when she shouted, “Hey, Carol! Tell Kitty she’s got a priority call on line two!” The scrape repeated as Angel took her hand away. Then she said, in a more reasonable tone, “She should be with you in a second. Sorry about the wait.”
“It’s okay.” I started walking in a circle around the card table, trying to calm myself down. It wasn’t working very well. I tried another tactic: “You’re still working? Even with the . . . even with everything that’s going on?”
“I like it here,” said Angel. “The Covenant of St. Stupid isn’t going to chase me off a job I actually enjoy just because they’ve decided to get judgmental about my coworkers. Kitty said I could have the time off without penalty, no problem, and I told her I’d rather stick with my friends. Some assholes want to come in here and start hacking, I’ll be right there with my pepper spray.”
A nervous giggle welled up in my throat. “That’s a really good attitude. Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me. It’s the right thing to do.”
There was a clunking noise, followed by Kitty saying, “Thanks, Angel. You can hang up now.”
“Anytime, Kitty. Sarah, hope everything gets better for you. You sound stressed.” A click, and a change in the quality of the sound over the line, told me that Angel had hung up on her end.
“Hello?” I said.
“Sarah Zellaby,” said Kitty. Her voice seemed to come from next to me, rather than through the phone. That’s a classic bogeyman trick. They can throw their voices anywhere they can hear—which includes the other end of telephone lines. Just one more way nature and technology combine to make the world a creepier place. “Verity’s little adopted cousin with the big blue eyes and the clear antifreeze for blood. What brings a cuckoo like yourself to my virtual door?”
Humans have only known about cuckoos for a few generations. The bogeymen have known for centuries and, surprise surprise, they don’t like us much. That’s something they have in common with every other sapient species in the known world. “It’s Verity,” I said. “I can’t find her.”
There was a pause. Knowing what cuckoos were meant that Kitty also understood what we could do. “I’m listening,” she said.
I gave her the same explanation I’d given Uncle Mike, dwelling a little longer on the static, and the way it had gone away completely when the pain did. I finished by saying, “I’m scared. I think something terrible may have happened to her.”
“Before we start jumping at sunbeams, let me ask you this: is there any chance you’re having the cuckoo equivalent of a muscle cramp or something? Maybe you can’t feel her because you’ve got a problem, not because she’s not there.”
“I can feel everyone else in the building.” Everyone except the older Madhura—Verity said his name was Rochak—but his thoughts had been hidden before Verity disappeared. Bringing him into this would just confuse things. “Besides, this isn’t the sort of silence I get when someone blocks me out. I mean, it is. But that never starts with pain. I’ve never felt anything like that before.”
Kitty made a small, frustrated sound. “Which means, if I believe you, that the damn Covenant probably got her. Fuck. Do you think they killed her quick, or did the
y take her prisoner so they could torture her first?”
My breath caught in my chest, wedging there like a stone. I struggled to force it out, trying to get my voice back. Finally I said, “How can you even ask me that?”
“Look, Sarah. For you she’s family; I get that, I really do, and it sucks that you’re the one making this call, almost as much as it sucks that I’m the one taking it. But if she’s dead, she’s dead, and I have living people to worry about. If the Covenant knows what Verity knows, they can clean this city out. You follow me? Nobody’s safe if they’re torturing her—and don’t try telling me that she won’t break. Given enough time, and enough knives, everybody breaks. It’s just a matter of finding out how hard you have to push.” Kitty spoke with a soft assurance that whispered of experiences I’d never had, and never wanted to have. I found myself wondering which end of the knife she’d been on. I realized just as quickly that I really didn’t want to know. That sort of thing was Verity’s territory, and she was welcome to it.
Kitty listened to the silence for a few seconds. Then she sighed. “Look, Sarah . . . if they took her prisoner, that sucks for us, because we don’t know what she’s going to tell them. We have to be prepared for the worst. But it could be awesome for her.”
“How is being taken prisoner by the Covenant awesome for anybody?” I asked.
“People usually keep their prisoners alive for at least a little while before they kill them. If she’s been taken prisoner, there’s a chance that you can get her back.”
“But how am I supposed to—”
“I’m sorry, Sarah. I really am. I know she’s your cousin, and I know you love her. I owe her a lot. I wish it hadn’t gone down like this. But you’re the one who has to worry about getting her back. I’m the one who gets to worry about getting my people through this alive. Good luck.”
Kitty hung up after that. She didn’t say good-bye. There wouldn’t have been any point.
* * *
Mike and Istas were in the main room when I emerged. The Madhura I could detect was still in the kitchen; I assumed the older Madhura was there with him. Having someone in the building that I couldn’t “hear” made me profoundly uncomfortable. I was used to people being hard or even impossible to read. Them being invisible was something entirely different. It was like when—
I stopped where I was, eyes going wide. Uncle Mike looked away from the deadfall he’d been arranging over one of the windows—Istas was holding the rope that supported the deadfall’s weight with one hand, like it was negligible to her—and frowned at me. “Sarah?” he asked. “What did Kitty say?”
“That charm.” I started briskly toward the table where Verity had dumped Margaret Healy’s possessions. Midway there, I broke into a run. When I reached it, I started rummaging frantically through the knives, ammo packs, and things I didn’t know the uses of. “Where is it? Why can’t I find it?!”
“Hey. Hey! What are you trying to find?” Uncle Mike’s hand settled on my shoulder. His thumb grazed the skin above my collarbone. As always, the skin-to-skin contact did what it would normally take months of close contact to do: his mind snapped into sharp relief, a picture seen through a window blind that I could open if I needed to. Touching people does that for me, especially when it happens repeatedly in a short period of time. It’s why I try to avoid it whenever I can when I’m not dealing with people I’m already attuned to.
Uncle Mike was petrified. He knew Verity was dead. Not because he had some fact that I was missing; just because he’d been in situations like this one before, and he knew the odds had been against us from the start. Should never have let her go out alone, no matter what she was used to, he was thinking, blame and self-loathing dripping off every thought/word and sense/impression. This is my fault. How am I going to tell Kevin that I let his baby girl go out and get herself killed? Hell, how am I going to tell Evelyn? She’ll never be able to look me in the eye again. This is all—
I shrugged his hand off, breaking the endless loop of his thoughts before it could drag me even further down. If he wanted to put on a brave face and pretend that he thought everything was going to be okay, I’d let him. As long as I made sure not to touch him again, it might even make me feel better.
“The charm. The one the Covenant uses to block telepathy.” I looked up at him. “Margaret was a hole when we met her. She wasn’t a human, she wasn’t an individual, she was a hole. When Verity put the thing on to test it, she was a hole, too. She vanished completely from any sort of nonvisual spectrum.”
Uncle Mike nodded slowly. “So you’re thinking that, if she’s wearing one of those things, that might explain her disappearing the way she did?”
“I’ve never been attuned to someone who died, but I can’t imagine it’s as easy as ‘ow that hurts oh I’m gone.’” I stood up a little straighter, trying to ignore the waves of curiosity emanating from Istas. At least she hadn’t come over. That probably had something to do with the rope she was still holding, and the desire not to drop Uncle Mike’s deadfall on the slaughterhouse floor. “She’s not dead. She’s just missing.”
“So can you track holes?”
“No. I can follow dead spots, maybe, if I see people with my eyes who don’t appear to my mind, but . . .” I shrugged helplessly. “There are two Madhura in the building. I only know that because I’ve seen them both. If the one I can’t read decides to leave, I won’t know about it. He’ll just be gone, and I’ll have no idea.”
“Your ability to observe the minds of others seems exceedingly limited in scope,” commented Istas. She switched the rope to her other hand. “Of what use are you?”
“I’m really, really good at calculating how much I need to leave for a tip when I eat out, even if I never pay for my actual meals,” I said flatly.
“So what you’re saying is that you won’t know you’ve found someone you can’t read until you see them with your eyes,” said Uncle Mike. “Okay. That’s not as convenient as it could be, but it’s something. You saw Margaret, right?”
“She forced her way into my hotel room.”
“Could you describe her well enough for the mice to draw her?”
I bit the inside of my cheek to keep myself from saying something I’d regret later. Then, carefully, I said, “My eyes don’t work that way. Or, well. I guess they do, since I see on a human wavelength, but that’s not how I process visual information. There’s no way I could describe her.”
Cuckoos can see—we’re not blind, and I’m glad, since that would make answering my email really hard—but our brains aren’t wired to register the same things that human brains are. We don’t need to recognize individuals by their faces when we can recognize them by their thoughts, the unique mixture of ideas and emotions that make them who they are. All those shows about mistaken identity and identical twins or cousins are lost on me, because to my eyes, pretty much everyone looks cosmetically alike, and it’s totally impossible to mistake anyone for anyone else. Oh, hair and eye and skin colors differ, but faces? They’re just faces. It’s what’s behind them that’s unique.
Uncle Mike nodded again. “If that won’t work, we’ll have to think of something else. What did Kitty have to say?”
“She’s afraid the people who have Verity will torture her and get her to reveal secrets regarding our plans and whereabouts,” said Istas, sounding bored. Mike and I both turned to face her. She shrugged. “It is a logical concern. The current situation presents great potential for mayhem, and very little for a peaceful resolution.” This said, she yawned broadly, displaying teeth that were twice the size of the human norm. The laconic waves of thought drifting off her were almost entirely focused on the idea of destroying things.
“I’m not going to just sit around waiting for Verity to die,” I said hotly. “I don’t care if she’s being tortured. If she’s alive, we have to find her.”
“We have a duty to the cryptids of this city,” said Mike.
I scowled at him. “I am a cryptid
of this city, remember? And I have a duty to my family. We can’t call them and tell them that she’s been—” I paused. Duty. Family. “Wait a second. I think I have an idea.”
“What?”
“The dragons. Females are basically indistinguishable from human women. We know Dominic didn’t tell the Covenant about the dragons—if he had, they’d have come long before this, and they’d definitely have sent more than three operatives—so that means the Covenant won’t be treating every blonde woman they see as a potential threat.”
“So you want to what, use the dragons as spies? Sarah, they’re not going to go for that. Dragons are only interested in personal gain.”
“That was before they had a male, and before they owed Verity for making sure they were there when he woke up.” I smiled thinly. “They’re going to pay what they owe, and they’re going to pay it now.”
“Oh, good,” said Istas, letting go of the rope. “This will almost certainly afford opportunity for carnage.”
The deadfall made a horrible crunching noise when it hit the floor.
Seventeen
“There were advantages to growing up with a cold-blooded telepath for a mother. The ability to lie about why I was out past curfew was not among them.”
—Evelyn Baker
The sewers below Manhattan, heading for the lair of the only known male dragon left in the world
AFTER SOME PERFUNCTORY ARGUING—Uncle Mike knew I wouldn’t listen, I knew he wasn’t really trying to convince me to stay, we both knew he had to make the effort if he was going to live with himself—I was allowed to grab a city spelunking kit from Verity’s supplies and head for the nearest concealed manhole. I left the weapons behind, taking only a flashlight, some rope, and a backpack full of assorted individually wrapped snacks. There’s almost nothing that lives in a sewer that will attack a cuckoo who looks like she’s just passing through. There’s defense of your territory, and then there’s being suicidal.
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