Chapter 4 #2
“Not particularly.” The idea of a second cuckoo queen running around—or cuckoo king, or whatever—was honestly terrifying. Mark was more social than most cuckoos, and less inclined to kill people for fun, but he was still a cuckoo.
Honestly, I wasn’t all that comfortable with having one cuckoo queen running around.
My parents insisted Sarah and I had always been close, and I had the family photos, birthday cards, and D&D session notes to prove it.
But all of that was gone. I didn’t remember anything about her from before the moment I’d woken up under an orange, alien sky with a cuckoo collapsed on the floor in front of me.
She’d deleted herself from my mind, and if she could do that to someone she claimed to care about, what could she do to everyone else around her?
“That’s fine, I don’t need you happy, just listening.
When I woke up, I screamed mentally, and apparently it was loud.
Loud enough that Dr. Morrow came rushing in and slapped an anti-telepathy charm on me.
Just in time, too, because right after he did, a bunch of cuckoos, like, teleported into the room. ”
Goosebumps broke out all over my arms as I tensed. “What do you mean, a bunch of cuckoos teleported into the room?”
“I mean they weren’t there and then they were there, and there were five of them, all wearing these weird sort of sci-fi jumpsuits, and they told Sarah they were going to hold her accountable for her crimes and grabbed her, and then they disappeared.
I’m not her biggest fan and all, but like, her main crimes have been not blowing up the planet, self-defense, and being a self-destructive asshole.
Not really a great reason to kidnap someone.
Oh, and they said she’d reached ‘the forbidden instar’?
I guess they don’t like cuckoo queens very much.
I don’t know. I’ve notified her family, meaning I called you and it’s your problem now. ”
“What do you mean by that?”
There was a click as the line went dead. I lowered my phone, glaring at it for several seconds, then stuffed it back into my pocket. Cupping my hands around my mouth, I turned toward the forest and shouted:
“Sam! Come over here! We need to go inside!”
Sam, still standing at the edge of the woods, blinked and lifted his eyebrows, giving me a dubious look. “You don’t have to yell, you know. I’m like ten feet away.”
I lowered my hands. “Sorry, but this is an emergency, and I forgot you were there.”
“Right. Time to move.” He jumped, clearing the distance between us in one massive leap that would have been impossible for any less-simian biped, literally sweeping me off my feet as he started running for the house.
He wrapped his tail around my waist, providing a sort of biological seatbelt. I sighed heavily.
“I can run, you know.”
“I’m faster.”
I couldn’t argue with that and he knew it. I was more dangerous in the field, but he was terrifyingly fast when he wanted to be, moving with a speed that seemed impossible even after as many times as I’d seen it.
So he carried me and ran, and I breathed through my nose, fighting to keep the fire out of my hands until we could get to my grandparents and find out if this was as bad as I thought it was. Because I thought it was pretty damn bad.
My family owns two houses in Buckley Township, which is a strange place to have most of our real estate holdings, but makes sense when you consider that Grandma grew up in one of them and Grandpa spent years magically confined to the other.
The house from her side of the family is currently rented out to some really lovely people who have no idea the true owner of their home is back in town.
The house from his side of the family is now the official residence of the Michigan Prices.
Which seems a little bit ridiculous to me, since if the crossroads had confined me to a single building for the better part of a decade, I would have burned the place to the ground before I voluntarily stepped through the doors again.
But he liked his messed-up, possibly possessed house.
Liked the porch swing with its infestation of tailypo, and liked the back steps where my grandmother used to sit when she came to visit him, and he had the right to make bad decisions for himself.
Just as long as none of them led to another disappearance.
Sam bounded up the back steps and set me on my feet, letting go.
“Thanks, hon,” I said, and kissed his cheek before opening the back door and stepping inside.
The kitchen, which hadn’t been renovated since sometime in the nineteen-fifties, was a wonderland of linoleum, outdated appliances, wood-paneled cupboards, and peeling wallpaper that looked remarkably like rotting meat.
Although that last may have had more to do with the house itself than any intentional decorating choices: the house, which had a name—the Old Parrish Place—had been the site of some fairly brutal murders before my grandfather took up residence there, and while our family’s ghosts assure us the place isn’t haunted, it sure as hell acts like it is.
“Grandma?” I called. “Grandpa? Are you around?”
There was no immediate reply, but as I stood there waiting for one, a mouse ran out of a hole in the wall behind the toaster, sitting at attention with its tail wrapped around its hind legs and staring at me with black oildrop eyes.
I turned to the mouse. “Do you know where my grandparents are?”
“The God of Inconvenient Timing is in his basement fastness, doing Great Works of repair and recovery,” said the mouse, voice a little squeaky and high-pitched but perfectly comprehensible.
Aeslin mice can be accused of many things.
Poor diction is not among them. “The Noisy Priestess fights a glorious battle against the laundry, but may soon be defeated, and has stated her Intention to summon you from the Pastures to come and assist with Pinning the Washing onto the Line, for lo, did not the Kindly Priestess once say, ‘Many Hands Make Light Work, and Young Backs Lift Heavy Things’?”
It wasn’t uncommon for the mice to answer simple questions with elaborate aphorisms, but like everyone else in my family, I’d been dealing with them since I was a baby, and knew how to translate mouse into English.
“Thanks!” I said, and hurried for the stairs, leaving Sam and the mouse behind.
Extremely short-form explanation, at risk of derailing the extreme importance of my search: Aeslin mice.
Intelligent, talking cryptid mice who live their lives according to strict and evolving religious rules, usually centered around one or more idols.
In the case of my family’s colony, that means us.
The family. We are their gods, and we take our duties to them very seriously.
Almost as seriously as they take their duties to us.
The laundry room was, conveniently, in the basement, not far from Grandpa’s workshop. I hurtled down the stairs, probably faster than I should have, hanging off the banister with one hand to keep myself from making an even faster descent that ended with a broken neck.
Reaching the basement, I trotted toward the wall that had been erected to block off the back third of the room and create a series of smaller functional spaces. The laundry-room door was open, sending light and steam into the rest of the basement. I stepped into the doorway.
“Grandma, we have a problem,” I said.
She looked up from the basket of laundry she was sorting through, raising both eyebrows. “Is the problem your boyfriend’s genuine inability to unroll his socks before throwing them into the hamper?”
“Sadly, no, and those aren’t Sam’s socks.
Sam doesn’t wear socks. His feet are too big when he’s not pretending to be human, and he really doesn’t like having things between him and the ground.
” He’d tried to explain it to me a few times, and the closest I’d come to understanding was “Imagine wearing oven mitts all the time for a full day, and how clumsy that would make you feel.”
“So they’re…?”
“My socks, and you and Mom now have something else in common,” I said, with a shrug. “I keep forgetting people are going to collect my laundry.”
She looked at me and huffed, affectionately. “Of course you do. Little princess.”
There was no anger in her words, only abiding fondness.
Grandma was too busy looking for Grandpa to be there for most of my life, or most of her children’s lives.
Now that she was home to stay, she took far too much satisfaction in doing basic household tasks.
It felt counter-feminist to me, like she was making herself smaller to give the rest of us the space to expand, but if it made her happy, she had the right to make the choice. Rolled-up socks and all.
“Anyway, Grandma, you got a minute? I think it’s important. It feels important anyway, and I don’t know what to do with it by myself.”
“Sure, sweetie.” She dropped the shirt she was holding back into the basket and walked around the sorting table, leaning against it with her arms crossed and her head tilted slightly to the side. “What’s going on?”
This is my grandmother, the infamous Alice Price-Healy: short, blonde, bright-eyed, and perky in the way of the best children’s librarians.
Well on her way to ninety years old, which you’d never know by looking at her, since she appeared to be no more than thirty, and that only if you were willing to really stretch your estimation of her age.
Tattoos covered the left side of her body, dense and colorful, and only serving to highlight the few stretches of unmarked skin.
Those were where the tattoos she’d already activated and used up had been.