Imaginary Numbers

by McGuire, Seanan

  Carnivals and traveling shows have long been a haven for cryptids who could almost pass as human, but who had needs, attributes, or abilities that would inevitably unmask them to the locals. By hiding behind the mask of the sideshow or pretending to be skilled human athletes, they could keep themselves from becoming targets. They could live happy, functional lives without anyone becoming the wiser. That’s the principle by which the Campbell Family Carnival has always operated. I spent my summers there when I was a kid, falling in love with the flying trapeze and setting snares for my cousins, who took too long to learn to respect my need for personal space. Sending me to Spenser and Smith had seemed like the best possible choice.

  Maybe it wasn’t for the Covenant, but it was for me. I had found the woman responsible for the murders, a carnival performer named Umeko who had discovered her own true nature as a Jorōgumo relatively late in life, and with no other members of her species around to help her. The transition hadn’t been easy. She’d started assaulting, and then eating, people who caught her eye, drawing the Covenant’s attention and resulting in my assignment to the show.

  Sam had been the first person to find me skulking around the carnival boneyard, and he hadn’t liked me being there. Growing up a cryptid in an insular, largely human community left him with a deeply ingrained distrust of strangers, and he’d known almost from the beginning that I was lying to him. Chalk it up to his naturally suspicious nature and move on. I did.

  Despite his suspicions, I’d managed to play along for long enough that he’d realized I was smart, funny, and reasonably unflappable, and he’d asked me on a date. I’d already known he was a fūri by that point, thankfully. I don’t think our burgeoning relationship would have survived if he’d learned that I was working for the Covenant before I’d known that he wasn’t human. But it had, and he’d left his family and the carnival behind to follow me to Florida when the situation forced me to go into hiding for the sake of everyone I’d ever cared about—him included.

  Sometimes being a cryptozoologist is even more complicated than it ought to be. Because, see, my family hates the Covenant like nobody’s business. We’re mostly human, apart from some of my cousins, and my mother’s adoptive parents. And sure, I’m a sorcerer, but I get that from my Grandpa Thomas, who was a full-fledged member of the Covenant before he turned on them, so you’d think they’d be used to it. Nope. Magic is “unnatural,” so in their eyes, I’m little better than a cryptid myself. Probably worse, since I’m voluntarily banging one, and that makes me a traitor to the human race.

  Treachery has amazing abs. I’m just saying.

  “Where are Cylia and Fern?” I asked, looking around the small space. The trailer, despite being split into the “living area,” “sleeping area,” bathroom, and kitchenette, is slightly smaller than my bedroom back in Oregon. There wasn’t a lot of space to hide.

  “They’re taking a nap,” said Sam, gesturing toward the closed curtain across the sleeping area. “Are we at another fruit stand?”

  “No. The car made a really terrible noise, and James is upset, and we’re not moving anymore, and where are you going?”

  Sam was standing, reaching for the jacket he had thrown carelessly across the arm of the couch. “I know a few things about engines, thanks to all the maintenance I had to do back at the carnival. I can probably help him out. Where are we?”

  “Michigan.”

  He wrinkled his nose. “Why are we in Michigan? I thought we were cutting down toward Ohio to shave off a few hours.”

  “My family’s originally from Michigan,” I said. “We still have a house here.”

  He perked up. “Great! Maybe we can take real showers before the smell in here gets strong enough to owe us gas money.” He grabbed his shoes from the floor and started for the back door, pulling them on and shifting into his human form at the same time as he walked. Unlike a normal person, he was coordinated enough to do all three things without tripping and falling on his face. Oh, the joys of dating a man who breaks all human laws of athletic grace.

  The genuine joys, under most circumstances. He wasn’t being unreasonable. He just didn’t understand what he was getting into, doing essentially anything in Buckley.

  My grandparents met there, when the Covenant sent my grandfather to spy on my great-grandparents. He was a sorcerer, too, so I guess in some ways, his relationship with my Grandma Alice was a nice mirror of my relationship with Sam. He eventually quit the Covenant in order to marry her, but not until after he’d been tricked into making a bargain with the crossroads. Just thinking about them was enough to steal the remnants of my good humor. Sure, they’re dead, and they’re going to stay that way if the anima mundi has anything to say about it, but they did a lot of damage to my family while they were still around.

  We lost Grandpa. Not to death, which would have been understandable and ordinary and something we might have been able to collectively get over. No, I mean we lost him, through a hole in the wall of the world that swallowed him down in the middle of the night while Grandma Alice was pregnant with my Aunt Jane, whose impending arrival was the only thing that prevented Grandma from immediately jumping into the hole and going after him. As soon as she’d recovered from labor, she’d dumped both her children on our Aunt Laura, yet another in the string of aunts, uncles, and cousins who aren’t actually biologically related to us.

  Dad and Aunt Jane grew up essentially as wards of the Campbell Family Carnival, and I know that Aunt Jane at least still considers the carnies more her family than her own mother. Grandma has never been able to regain ground with her biological children, even though all us grandkids love her desperately. So in a way, the crossroads cost us both of them.

  Buckley Township, Michigan, is one of those places that gets talked about in hushed tones whenever there’s a census, a place where people die young and weirdly. If it wasn’t rural and reasonably poor, it would probably be empty by now—or maybe not. People can become surprisingly attached to their homes and don’t want to leave them for what they view as silly reasons. “Silly” can mean everything from “bank foreclosure” to “rabid jackalopes ate the neighbors, and now they’re coming for us.” So Buckley endures, even if it doesn’t precisely thrive, and while new people don’t often move to town, the ones who already live there don’t leave, and neither do their children. If those children die at a rate slightly higher than the national average, well, their deaths are almost always accidental.

  Aunt Mary died in Buckley. So did Aunt Rose. So did all my Grandma Alice’s biological relatives. She’s the last branch of her original family tree, and the existence of some distaff cousins with the Covenant in England won’t unbury all the bodies in Buckley.

  Somewhat clumsily, I said, “The house isn’t the sort of place where people generally go to get naked. Not unless they’re local teens doing it on a dare. It’s sort of, potentially, I don’t know, well, evil.”

  Sam’s eyes widened. “How is a house evil? Is it haunted? Because I thought you had a pretty good relationship with your dead aunts.”

  “No. If anything, it’s the opposite of haunted. Ghosts don’t go there if they have any choice in the matter. Aunt Rose won’t even cross the threshold. Aunt Mary will sometimes, but it makes her really sad, so we try not to ask her to do that. She knew my grandfather.” They were friends, even though they didn’t meet until after she was already dead—which means there’s a very good chance she was the one who handled the crossroads bargain that eventually claimed him. The crossroads were cruel that way. It’s a damn good thing that they’re gone and won’t have the opportunity to be cruel to anyone else.

  “It was your grandfather’s house?” Sam stopped in front of the back door, folding his arms and frowning. All his attention was focused on me, to the point that he didn’t notice when the curtain behind him twitched aside.

  I nodded. “The Covenant bought it for him when they assigned him t
o Buckley Township to keep an eye on my grandmother and her family. There were four of them when he arrived in Michigan: Grandma, her father, and his parents. Three generations crammed into one big farmhouse. We still own that one, too, but we rent it out to a nice human family, and they don’t like it when we show up without warning them first. I guess they’re afraid of being evicted.”

  “Or possibly being shot,” said Cylia, voice still groggy with the remnants of her nap. She slid off the top bunk and dropped down to the trailer floor. “We’ve stopped.”

  “The engine did an awful thing, and James thinks it might be dead,” I said. “Sam was just going out to see whether he could grease monkey his way to a solution.” I stopped and grimaced. “Sam, I’m sorry, that wasn’t an intentional pun, it just sort of . . . slipped out.”

  “Uh-huh. See if I wash my hands after replacing the transmission.” Sam finally opened the back door and stepped outside.

  “You will. You hate being dirty even more than I do,” I called back before he could close the door.

  The last thing I heard from the outside was his scoff. Then the door slammed shut, and I turned back to Cylia.

  “You didn’t tell us to be on the lookout for a bad luck event,” I said.

  “Because we weren’t in debt,” she countered. “Sometimes things just happen, even when you’re traveling with a jink.”

  Cylia Mackie looks perfectly human: tall, blonde, and slender, with cheekbones that could cut glass and freckles on her nose. It’s parallel evolution. She’s a primate, sure, but her species branched from humanity a long damn time ago. Jinks can sense, see, and manipulate luck, treating it like a pool they use to manipulate the probability of the world around them. Smart jinks, like Cylia, try to keep things as balanced as possible, only spending their good luck when they have enough that the backlash won’t be immediate and fatal. Her husband, Tav, died when he got the balance wrong, suffering a massive heart attack right in front of her.

  Having Cylia along on our trip had been a godsend so far. Because of her, we’d been able to acquire our precious travel trailer, avoid speed traps, and not get food poisoning from the gas station sushi. All little pieces of good luck that could have happened to anyone, but which had consistently been happening to us since we left Maine.

  Of course, that could easily mean that we were due for something catastrophic. Breaking down in Buckley certainly qualified.

  “This isn’t on me,” she said. “If we’d had this much bad luck attached to us, I would have warned you. I wouldn’t have done anything to prevent it, but I wouldn’t have let it be a surprise, either.” She folded her arms and glowered at me. “Antimony Price, I thought we were past the point of mistrusting each other without a damn good reason.”

  “Sorry, Cylia,” I said, shamefaced. She was right. After facing down the evil cabal controlling one of the country’s biggest theme parks and going toe-to-toe with the crossroads, we had reached a point where trusting each other needed to be the default, and not some sort of aberration. “It just came out of nowhere.”

  “And you’re used to me controlling the luck, I got it,” said Cylia. She turned back to the sleeping nook, tugging the curtains open wider until the light from the rest of the trailer penetrated the artificial gloom. “Fern! Wakey-wakey!”

  A small, sleepy sound of protest came from the darkest corner of the bed right before a dainty hand shot out, grabbed the curtain, and yanked it shut again. Cylia laughed. I grinned.

  The fifth member of our little expedition, Fern, is a sylph, capable of controlling her personal density to such a degree that she can either float or punch holes in insufficiently solid floors. Despite being a dainty little thing, we’ve clocked her as weighing up to six hundred pounds when she wants to, all thanks to tweaking her own mass. The laws of physics are not invited to a lot of sylph parties, nor would they attend if they were.

  Sylphs are relatively harmless, density parlor tricks notwithstanding. Unlike the fūri and the jinks, they didn’t have any way to defend themselves when the Covenant came calling, and so their population took an even greater hit. I don’t know how many sylphs are left in the world. I don’t think any cryptozoologist does. I’ve learned more about Fern’s species by hanging out with her than I ever could have from book research, and that’s only part of why I have almost no human friends.

  “Fern,” said Cylia, leaning close to the curtain. “Showers, Fern. Hot water. A real kitchen. Pancakes.” She drew the last word out until it turned obscene.

  Fern yanked the curtains open again. “I’m listening,” she said sullenly. Then she blinked. “We’re not moving. Why aren’t we moving? Are we in Oregon already?”

  “We’ve been making good time, but not bullet train time, so no,” I said. “We’re in Michigan right now. Near my old family homestead, in fact, which means we’re also near one of my grandmother’s favorite bars. How do you feel about getting a drink?”

  Fern blinked at me, looking confused. Cylia grinned.

  “Finally, you’re speaking my language,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  According to Sam, the engine had thrown a rod and would need to be replaced. James was distraught and unwilling to take the easy way out, which would have involved abandoning his car in Michigan while we grabbed a new junker off of Craigslist. Not even Cylia’s reassurances that the new car would prove to be remarkably resilient were enough to sway him. His car was one of the only things he had left in the world, and he was holding onto it.

  I could sort of see where he was coming from. During my self-imposed exile from my family, I’d been incredibly protective of the few things I had to call my own. Come to think of it, I still was. I’d just expanded that list to include three cryptids and an untrained sorcerer from Maine. I should learn to pick more portable souvenirs.

  Anyway, James had elected to stay with the car and call the local mechanic while the four of us went down to the Red Angel for a frosty glass of whatever was on tap. He’d get towed to the shop down on Lakeside Drive, and we’d join him there once we were done at the Angel.

  The fact that I knew it was an easy walk, and that we’d have no trouble finding the place, was our first real piece of evidence that maybe breaking down in Buckley had been a better thing than breaking down in some town big enough to have a Motel 6 to call its own.

  I waved to James before turning to lead Cylia, Sam, and Fern across the field between the state highway and Old Orchard Road. I wasn’t a Buckley native by any measure—no one in my generation was—but we’d all been visiting since childhood, and I could get myself to the big landmarks without too much trouble. The old Healy house, which we rented out to keep it from sitting empty and falling into disrepair; the old Parrish place, which Grandma Alice maintained mainly for her own use, and which was too cursed and overrun by tailypo to ever fall apart; the police station; the mechanic; the Red Angel. Maybe taking your kids to see the local bar is weird, but my parents did it anyway, the summer I was twelve years old. It was important. My family has a longstanding relationship with the Red Angel, and they weren’t going to let a little thing like the legal drinking age get in the way.

  “You know I can’t actually drink, right?” asked Sam, stepping over a large rock in the field.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s hard to stay tense when I’m buzzed,” he said, waving a hand to indicate the still apparently human length of his body.

  Most therianthropes—shapeshifting cryptids— default to their human forms and have to concentrate to change out of them. Fūri work the other way around. Sam has described the sensation of holding human form as being like fighting to hold in a sneeze that never quite comes.

  I grinned at him. “You don’t need to worry about that.”

  “Hold up, hold up,” said Cylia, grabbing the back of my shirt and using it to pull herself forward, miraculously n
ot choking me in the process. “Are you telling me that there’s a cryptid bar in this middle-of-nowhere town?”

  “I was hoping to surprise you, but if you really need to know, then yes, I’m telling you precisely that.”

  “Holy crap,” said Cylia, with relish. “I would never have guessed.”

  “Yeah, well, people take privacy seriously out here. Not like they do on the coasts, where there’s enough weirdness in the background radiation of daily life to cover up for a certain amount of slipping.” I reached back and twitched my shirt out of her fingers. She laughed and slung her arm around my shoulders.

  “Anyway, the Red Angel has been here for more than a hundred years, and apart from one tiny little incident where my great-grandmother used a shotgun to knock when she was looking for her daughter, the owners have always been on good terms with my family.”

  We had reached the edge of the field, which gave way to the gravelly, dubiously level surface of Old Orchard Road. I still made a small sound of relief as I stepped onto it, causing Fern to shoot me a surprised look.

  “Do they not believe in asphalt in Buckley?” she asked.

  “Oh, they do, on the roads that are actually inside the town limits, but out here, the rural roads, those are mostly left alone unless they develop bad enough potholes to be legitimately dangerous. And I’d say we have a few more bad rainy seasons before anyone’s willing to call the graveler out this way. It keeps municipal taxes low, and it keeps strangers out.”

  “Not friendly people, your locals?” asked Sam.

  “They’re friendly enough, to the other locals. They’re even reasonably friendly to my siblings and me. Wary, but friendly. Once you come from here, you’re from here forever, and that applies to your descendants. Only Dad and Aunt Jane left when they were little, little kids, and Grandpa was from England, which means some people still think of us as outsiders, while others insist that since Grandma was born here, we’re locals.” I snorted. “She wasn’t even born here. Great-Grandma Fran went into labor while she and Great-Grandpa Jonathan were visiting a town of finfolk out in Maine. Gentling isn’t that far from New Gravesend. We could have gone there to hide if things had turned out poorly.”