Prologue
“Life is the gift we never asked for, can’t return, and can’t survive without. Treasure it, but never feel like you owe anything to anyone. You don’t.”
—Jane Harrington-Price
Columbus, Ohio
A little over twenty years ago
ANGELA WATCHED THE REARVIEW MIRROR anxiously as Martin pulled the RV onto the final street between them and home.
All four children were asleep again, although they weren’t in a single pile the way they’d been at the start of their trip.
Instead, the siblings were on one side of the RV, collapsed onto the bed in a tangle of arms, legs, and foam-padded boffer swords, while their foundling slept curled alone on the couch, covered by one of the scratchy plaid blankets no one had any recollection of buying, but which seemed to respawn every time they cleaned out the RV, growing in the coat closet like a strange, invasive woolen mold.
Angela didn’t like the arrangement much.
The girl was going to have enough difficulty without isolating herself.
The children were too young—all of them, even Alex, although he would have argued he was the eldest and that made him practically grown-up—to really understand what a cuckoo was, or what they could do.
To them, “cuckoo” meant either the little bird that came out of the clock in cartoons or their beloved maternal grandmother, who made them cookies and put tomato powder on her cereal, and never forgot their birthdays.
It didn’t mean “predator from another dimension.” It didn’t mean danger, or destruction, or having your mind rewritten against your will.
They were going to learn. Angela was sure of that now.
As soon as she called their parents, their education in the dangers of cuckoos was going to begin.
She loved her in-laws. They were good, reasonable people who did their best to treat all intelligent creatures as equals.
They were also humans. And humans could be small-minded and petty in a way that was really only accessible to members of the dominant species.
Evelyn was her daughter, had grown up in her house and only ever known her as a source of comfort and support.
Evelyn had also been there when her new husband’s mother had assaulted Angela for the crime of being a cuckoo, and while she’d intervened, it hadn’t been immediate, and she hadn’t stopped it from happening.
Evelyn was human before she was anything else, and humans knew, on an instinctual level, that cuckoos were monsters.
This little girl wasn’t a monster, not yet.
She was seven years old, newly orphaned, and terrified.
But none of that was going to matter when Kevin and Evie found out she’d been around their children.
She was too young to have any real control over what she could do: her telepathic cries were loud and ceaseless when she was awake.
She would insert herself into the memories of everyone around her without hesitation or finesse, and she wouldn’t even realize she was doing it. It was a matter of survival.
Thanks to Kevin’s family being profoundly weird in a way Angela still didn’t fully understand, all of the kids were remarkably resistant to cuckoo influence, and had been able to reject Sarah’s clumsy instinctive attempts to make them believe she was their sibling, but would their parents be comfortable with that?
Would they be willing to let the children finish out their summer in Ohio, or would they be on the next plane out from Oregon, eager to defend their offspring?
There was so much to worry about, and none of it had been expected when they’d started their drive to Florida.
Martin pulled into the driveway, turning off the engine. “We’re here,” he said needlessly, voice soft to avoid waking the kids. “Think we can unload the inanimate parts of the RV in the morning, just take care of the living right now?”
“I think that would be perfect.”
One upstairs light was on—Drew’s room. He’d never wanted to be defined by his species, and so while he shared the normal bogeyman aversion to bright or direct light, he’d chosen to give up his spot in the basement as soon as he was old enough to express an opinion, preferring thick curtains and a second-floor bedroom when he came back to Ohio during his school breaks.
He liked to open them at night so he could air out the room.
The family wasn’t going to wake him by coming in.
He was naturally nocturnal, and would be up until just before sunrise, when he’d close the curtains and sleep through the brightest part of the day.
Martin looked at it uneasily. “Think we should warn him about our new guest?”
“She’s not a guest, Martin. Sarah will be staying with us for as long as she needs to be here. If she decides that’s forever, we’ll take care of her.”
“Isn’t that kidnapping?”
“It would be, if she were a human child. But she doesn’t have any biological family that’s going to claim her, and she’s just going to adopt herself to anyone with a susceptible mind who comes near her for too long. She needs a home, Martin. We talked about this.”
His expression of discomfort grew. “Yes, but—”
“Yes, but, what? She was a child when we had the conversation the first time, and she’s still a child now.
She needs a home.” Angela glared at her husband, a silent challenge in her eyes.
Sometimes it was easy for her to forget that he’d been human, once, had lived several human lives before he’d died and been put back together by a scientist with more jumper cables than good sense.
Part of him would always be human, would always think like a member of the dominant species.
Part of him, even after the life they’d worked so hard to build together, would never really understand how cruel the world could be to people like her, or like Sarah.
“Still,” he said, stubbornly, “should we warn Drew? I know bogeymen are as susceptible to cuckoo influence as humans are.”
“She’s asleep. Even the most powerful cuckoo in the world can’t rewrite someone’s mind while they’re asleep. I’ll tell him she’s here, and we can give him the choice of whether he wants to meet her or not.”
“Angie…”
“He’s a grown man, Martin, and she’s a little girl. She needs us. Are you going to be the one who lets a little girl down?”
He paused, then sighed, heavily. “Let’s get the kids inside.”
“Thank you.”
Morning broke, and Sarah McNally opened her eyes on an unfamiliar room.
She froze, entire body going rigid. It hurt, having her muscles seize up like that, and she whimpered, just a little.
Normally, that sound would have been enough to alert her mother that something was wrong.
Patricia McNally would have come bustling into the room with hot tea and arnica cream, ready to ease her daughter into the day.
Sarah’s eyes darted to the door, the rest of her still too stiff to move. It didn’t open. Her mother wasn’t going to come.
Because her mother was dead. The memory flooded back with the same suddenness it always did, laced with an acidic agony that burnt her thoughts when she let herself dwell on it for too long.
Her parents were dead. They had gone for a car ride, and then they died, and she’d been at a sleepover at Amy’s house, because she liked Amy and Amy’s dad made the best waffles she’d ever had, so she hadn’t been with them.
She hadn’t been able to say goodbye, and now they were gone forever, and everyone who saw her tried to take her home with them, like she was a lost puppy or something.
And now she’d been kidnapped.
Fighting the urge to curl under the blankets and cry, Sarah forced her locked-up muscles to untense enough to let her sit up in the bed, clutching the covers around herself.
She was wearing a nightgown she didn’t recognize, white flannel with blue flowers, and it was warm and soft and she wanted to like it, but she thought you probably shouldn’t like things kidnappers gave to you.
She slid out of the bed, toes sinking into the soft carpet, and padded soundlessly to the bedroom door.
Testing the knob, she found that it was unlocked and slipped out into the hall, following the sound of voices.
The children she’d met before were laugh-shrieking about something, and the heavy rumble of an adult voice rolled beneath them, tolerant and amused.
If there were children, it was probably safe for her to go there, and she didn’t want to be alone in this scary new place, not when her parents were dead and she didn’t know where her shoes were.
She walked onward, taking note of the smudged wallpaper and the photographs on the walls.
As always, the pictures confused her, a little.
Why did people like to take pictures of other people so much?
It wasn’t like you could tell who you were looking at once there wasn’t a mind behind the face to make it individual.
At least these people had a reasonable number of pictures centered on the places, not the individuals who were there. It was like a travelogue in pieces, spread out across the hallway walls.
Then she reached the kitchen doorway, and stopped dead.
The three kids she’d already met were at the table, along with the two adults from the front seat, and a new man, who was even harder to look at than the children, all of whom were a little fuzzy and hard to see properly.
This man was blurry and smeared, like he was standing in a deep shadow that kept her eyes from focusing.
It made her uncomfortable to look at him too directly.
He turned his face toward her as she stood in the doorway, and the children stopped laughing, conversation dying out as everyone joined the new man in watching her.