Chapter 4
Four
ANTIMONY
“Most people’s parents take the grandkids to an amusement park and come back with too many stuffed toys. Mine come back with extra kids.”
—Evelyn Baker
Buckley Township, Michigan, in a field on the edge of the Galway Woods
SAM WAS SOMEWHERE IN THE trees, having the absolute time of his life.
Occasionally he emerged to show me something terrible that he’d found scuttling around in the underbrush, and after I had sufficiently admired it, with as much ooh-ing and ahh-ing as I could manage, he would swing away again, off to find some new living nightmare that had arisen in the paradise of horrors my paternal grandparents called their home.
Half the things he brought out, proud as a cat with a dead rat to present to its owner, were species I had believed extinct since before I was born.
But they’d survived here, in Buckley Township, Michigan, where the town motto should really have been “If you see something, no you didn’t.
Shut your fucking mouth before someone hears you.
” Or possibly the simpler “Snitches get stitches.”
After several hours of show-and-tell, Sam had brought me half the horrors the forest had to offer, and I had managed to burn a perfect circle in the grass approximately ten feet across, controlling the fire so completely that not a single piece of greenery outside my planned design had been so much as scorched.
According to Grandpa Thomas, making fucked-up charcoal crop circles was an essential step in learning to properly control my fire.
He’d be out in a little while to check my work, and until he came, I was supposed to keep reburning the ground I’d already burnt, reducing the cinders to ashes, reducing the ashes to finer and finer powder, until it looked like a volcano had erupted in an incredibly localized manner.
That was an interesting idea. If I reached deep down, beyond my own fire, would I be able to reach the magma slumbering beneath the surface of the world? How deep did the fire—and the magic—really go?
Grandpa might know. When it comes to sorcery, I tend to assume Grandpa knows basically everything there is to know.
Like his wife, my Grandma Alice, he doesn’t look that much older than my parents, but he’s closer to his hundredth birthday than he is to his eightieth.
Magic can do weird things to aging, on top of everything else it makes weirder than it really needs to be.
Grandpa is also the source of the sorcery in our family line.
Unlike most forms of magic, sorcery seems to have a fairly strong genetic component, and our family didn’t do sorcerers until he went and married in.
Thanks, Grandpa. Or thanks, Grandma, I guess, since by all reports, she’s the one who pursued him like a prize worth winning.
Sam popped out of the woods again, this time holding something that looked like a leech two feet long and equipped with a lamprey’s mouth. It writhed in his hands, trying to latch on to his arm. “Annie! Look what I found!”
“That’s a bloodworm, sweetheart,” I called back. “Let me guess: it was sleeping in the mud and you decided it needed to go for a little field trip in order to understand why sleeping in the mud is the best thing in the whole world?”
“Something like that,” he said, and beamed at me, lips firmly closed.
Sam Taylor is a lot of things. Funny, loyal, protective, incredibly slow to warm to strangers, probably the love of my life, and oh, right, essentially a giant monkey.
His father was a yōkai therianthrope from a species called fūri, and Sam inherited more from him than a great ass and a fondness for high places. Yeah. I’m engaged to a monkey.
He’s more Kingdom of the Apes than Curious George, or we’d never have hooked up in the first place, but being with Sam means being cool with a guy who has a tail unless he’s making a concerted effort to not have a tail—which is most of the time when we’re not dealing with the wider human population—and who really, really doesn’t like it when people show their teeth as they smile.
It’s all worth it, though. And it’s not like my family has ever been all that hung up on “human” as a requirement for a partner. Sam loves me, and that’s enough.
So anyway. I’m Annie Price—short for “Antimony,” and no, my parents weren’t hippies; they were working from one of the last predictions made by my missing Aunt Laura, who told them either I or my cousin Elsie would need to disappear under a name that was and wasn’t our own.
So we both got reversible names. I’m Antimony Timpani, and she’s Elsinore Norelle.
Not sure how that helped when I did have to go undercover, but hell, maybe the Covenant sorcerers know some tricks ours don’t.
Sorcerers: right. Elemental magic-users who interact with the living pneuma of the world to do what they do, generally each attuned to a single element.
I’m a pyromancer, which means I manipulate flame and heat and my magic tries to boil me alive if I piss it off.
My adopted brother, James, is a cryomancer, manipulating ice and cold and yeah, you can say ice isn’t an element if you want, but to that I say, take it up with the anima mundi.
They get the final word on whether something counts as elemental or not, since they’re the living soul of the world.
My grandfather, as I mentioned before, was the first sorcerer in our family, and the rest of us get it from him.
But he was missing for a long time, meaning we were never properly trained.
I was spending the summer in Michigan while he worked to fix that, at least sufficiently that we wouldn’t have to worry about me losing my temper at my own wedding and burning the ceremony and guests to cinders.
While I was in Michigan, my grandparents’ adopted daughter, Sally, was staying in my room in Oregon and spending time with James, who was her best friend before he was my brother.
Never let it be said that my family has passed up an opportunity to be deeply confusing.
We’d trade places at the end of the summer, with Sally and James coming back to Michigan while Sam and I went home.
Grandpa would start training James the way he’d been training me, and we’d all get better at not hurting people by mistake.
And that assumed the world would keep leaving us alone for six months, which was probably optimistic verging on unrealistic of me. The world never leaves us alone for that long.
Still grinning, Sam bounced back into the woods with his horrible new friend, vanishing into the trees just as my phone began ringing.
It had been long enough since my last attempt at burning the ashes down even further that my hands were relatively cool; I pulled my phone out of my back pocket and swiped up to answer.
“Hello?”
“Antimony?” The voice on the other end was male, harried, and only faintly familiar.
“Who is this?”
My phone number isn’t a state secret or anything, but it’s not something I share very often, either. If a stranger had it, I might have a serious problem.
“It’s—” The speaker paused to cough. “It’s Mark.
Mark Wilson. Your awful family threatened to dissect me or something when we first met.
We went to another dimension together, and we didn’t get eaten by giant spiders while we were there, although I sort of feel like we should have been.
I helped you murder most of the members of my species on this planet. I’ve been in a coma for—”
“Mark? You’re awake?” It was my turn to pause. “How did you get this number?”
“Really? That’s what you want to focus on? How I got your phone number? Not why I’m calling you, or when did I wake up, or anything that matters? You people really are terrible.”
“Sorry, sorry. I’m glad you’re awake. I hope you’re okay. Why are you calling me, and how did you get this number?”
“I got this number because Sarah thought it at some point, and it’s a number. I can’t not memorize numbers, even if I hadn’t had good reason to want to be able to contact you if I needed to. Which I had and have. You’re one of the only members of your asshole family worth talking to.”
I couldn’t fully blame Mark for his opinion on most of us. He’d sort of come crashing into the middle of a crisis, and hadn’t seen us at our best. Unless by “best,” you mean “acting most like characters from a really weird Addams Family knockoff.”
“Right, okay,” I said. “What’s up? If you’re awake, I’d expect you to be on the first plane to Cici by now.”
“I will be, as soon as I’m cleared to leave the hospital. But I’m calling about Sarah.”
I stiffened. “What about her?”
“She was here when I woke up. I was getting there on my own, and then she did some sort of deep-mind telepathic connection thing and helped me to the surface. It was a bit of a shock, waking up after eight years in a coma, and I screamed. A lot.”
“I mean, I’d probably scream too.”
Sam popped back out of the woods, shooting me a puzzled look as he saw that I was on the phone. I gestured for him to hold on a second, trying to focus on Mark.
“I don’t mean vocally.”
“Oh, you screamed in your head?” I hesitated. “Look, I don’t know if this is a rude question or what, but the last time I checked in on you, there was something funky going on with your brain, and Dr. Morrow thought you might be going through another instar. Did you…?”
“Oh my fucking God, have these assholes never heard of HIPAA? Did they just go around giving my private medical information to anyone who showed an interest in the freakshow?”
“No. Just those of us who were there for the initial injury, and might have something to contribute that could help with your recovery.”
Mark huffed. “I guess I can allow it.”
“Cool, thanks. Back to the instar…?”
“Yes. Yes, I went through two additional instars, and am now on the same level of cuckoo maturity as Sarah. Happy?”