Chapter 5
Five
“Breaking things is easy. A child can do it. Putting things back together, now, that’s harder than most people can imagine.”
—Frances Brown
Buckley Township, Michigan, the dining room of the Old Parrish Place
SAM AND I SAT ON one side of the dining room table, his tail looped around my left ankle like a tether keeping me from leaping up and throwing myself into danger.
Both of us were tense, a state that wasn’t aided by the fact that as soon as we’d gotten upstairs, Alice had gone for her revolvers and Thomas had gone to his study for some books.
I tilted my head back, looking up at the ceiling.
“This is going to be bad, isn’t it?”
I glanced at Sam. “What makes you say that?”
“I dunno. I’ve been hanging around with your family for a while now, and when people start looking for weapons and research materials, that means things are about to get messy and probably start sucking.” Sam made a dour face. “I was enjoying our little summer vacation.”
I bumped my shoulder against his. “You mean you were enjoying harassing every living thing in the Galway Woods.”
“Hey, your grandmother said the forest liked me. I figure I should go on little play dates with it to make sure it keeps liking me.”
“You are so weird.”
He grinned. “Takes one to know one.”
“I am not weird.”
“You agreed to marry me. That’s weird.”
I rolled my eyes. “You do not get to play that card.”
“Watch me.”
We were bantering to distract ourselves from the elephant in the room: two of my cousins had apparently been abducted by cosplaying cuckoos, and they knew Sarah’s teleportation trick.
I didn’t know whether we were looking at two separate groups or one coherent hive, but either way, things were likely to get very unpleasant before they settled down again.
A little silliness now would spare us at least a little stress once things got started.
Alice came striding back into the room, an old-fashioned gun belt riding low on her hips and a knife strapped to her left bicep.
She was pretty set in her ways, and if she looked more gunslinger than modern mercenary, well, she could still kick the asses of most of the mercenaries I’d met.
Fifty years of practice will do that for a person.
“Sam, you’re sort of optional here,” she said, bluntly. “You can stay in Michigan and keep an eye on the house and Sarah’s spider.”
I groaned. “I forgot about Greg.”
“How do you forget about a spider the size of a grizzly bear?” asked Sam. “He’s roaming around in the woods. Half the horrible things I’ve brought to show you, I only found because he flushed them out. I saw him take down a peryton this morning. Just jumped up and snatched it right out of the air.”
I whistled. “Wow. I wish I could have seen that.”
Sam made a sour face. “No, you don’t. Peryton are gross-looking enough without having pieces ripped off by a giant spider.”
“Fair enough.” Peryton are part of the vast class of cryptids that are best described as “not deer.” Oh, they have hooves and antlers and the basic body plan of a deer, but all the not-deer are somehow wrong.
Peryton, for example, don’t have skin as such.
They have a thick layer of gelatinous mucus that keeps their organs in place and helps to prevent their musculature from being covered in a layer of dust and grime, but it’s not the same.
They look like they’ve been flensed. Nasty pieces of work.
Sometimes I wonder what the hell evolution was thinking.
And then I remember that evolution isn’t known for thinking at all.
It’s not even selecting for the most successful forms, no matter what third-grade biology classes will try to tell you: it’s selecting for “Can it make it to adulthood and live long enough to reproduce?” Everything after that is gravy in evolution’s eyes.
“Well?” asked Alice.
Sam turned, blinking at her. “Well, what?”
“Well, will you stay here and keep an eye on the spider?”
He leaned back in his chair, eyeing her unhappily. “See, I sort of feel like you’re trying to get me to agree to something by starting in the middle. Where is everybody going that I wouldn’t be going? What is the plan here?”
Alice didn’t answer immediately, looking over her shoulder instead, like she was hoping help was going to arrive. When help didn’t seem to be forthcoming, she turned back to the two of us and sighed heavily.
“The clothing Elsie described, and that your friend Mark alluded to—”
“He’s not my friend,” I muttered.
“—matches descriptions of Johrlar cultural attire,” she continued, ignoring my interjection.
“It sounds like both Artie and Sarah were collected by representatives from the cuckoos’s home dimension.
Which would mean we’re not dealing with cuckoos at all, except for Sarah herself.
We’re dealing with Johrlac, and that changes the situation considerably. ”
“How so?” I asked.
“Well, for one thing, much as it pains me to say this, we can’t just go in guns blazing to get our people back. We don’t want to offend an entire dimension, and depending on what’s going on, they may not comprehend why we’d think they’d done anything wrong.”
“Even if they have some stupid cuckoo law that lets them kidnap Sarah without feeling like the bad guys, that doesn’t give them a right to put their hands on Arthur!”
“Actually, I think it does,” said Thomas, walking into the room with a hefty cloth-bound book in his hands.
He put it down on the table, already open to a diagram of a female cuckoo wearing a jumpsuit like the one Elsie described.
She could have been a sketch of Sarah, except for an odd vacancy in the eyes: her face was entirely blank, no animation or emotion.
Part of that was probably the fact that it was a black-and-white sketch, but it felt intentional, somehow.
He tapped the picture, very lightly. “Black, yellow, and red. The eusocial judiciary caste of Johrlar. For them to bring a judge to collect Arthur, they must have already determined to their satisfaction that he was not a person under their laws.”
“The fuck you say?”
“The Johrlac don’t consider telepathic constructs ‘people,’ even when they’ve been given ownership of an individual body. They’re more on the level of ‘horrifying perversions of the natural order.’”
“And what do the Johrlac do with these ‘perversions’?” I asked.
Alice looked at me levelly. “They unmake them,” she said. “Which is why the three of us are leaving for Johrlar as soon as possible. We need to get there before it’s too late for us to bring him back.”
“And Sarah?” I asked.
“None of our records mention cuckoos achieving the queen instar,” said Thomas. “Now, we know that’s because normally, when a cuckoo reaches queen, she destroys the world she’s standing on in order to transport her people to the next dimension in the chain.”
I eyed the book in his hands, hungrily. “You know, these records would have been useful when we were fighting the cuckoo hive that tried to kill us all in the process of forcing Sarah’s final instar.”
“Sadly, they weren’t available until I returned home and wrote down what I’d learned during my exile, along with what Alice had learned in her travels,” said Thomas.
“I had bits and pieces. After encounters with multiple Johrlac and people who knew them, we’ve been able to put together an almost-coherent map of their society. ”
“The Johrlac took away the equations that can force the queen instar before they banished the cuckoos,” said Alice. She turned, picking up a small leather bag from the buffet against the wall. “Sam, you asked where we’re going. Now you know. Last chance: want to stay here and mind the house?”
“You mean, do I want to let you take my fiancée, who has disappeared on me twice now because she didn’t think I needed to be there, to another dimension, filled with super-powerful, super-alien telepaths who are already planning to take her cousin apart, while I stay here and wait for you to bring her back in one piece?
Lady, I know you’ve been out of touch for a while, but if you think I’m going to go along with that, you’re absolutely out of your gun-loving, banana-shit mind. ”
“So that’s a no, then,” said Alice mildly. She shook out the bag over the table, and a handful of pendants on woven leather cords fell out. They were sturdier-looking than our usual anti-telepathy charms, their glass centers surrounded by a woven lattice of silver bars.
“These belonged to my grandfather,” she said.
“He designed and made them shortly after my parents encountered their first cuckoo. You could say the technology was in its infancy then; we didn’t know how powerful the charms would need to be to offer us a measure of protection.
This batch overshot the necessary by a country mile. ”
“The blood family of Frances Healy is naturally resistant to the mental influence of the cuckoos,” said Thomas, picking up a charm and sliding it over his head. “I, unfortunately, am not the blood family of Frances Healy.”
“Hey!” said Alice. “You were already cradle-robbing with me. No need to make it kissing cousins at the same time. Only reason I was okay with Sarah and Artie is because they’re not actually related. They’re not even members of the same species.”
“Neither are we,” said Sam. He took a charm, studying it carefully before he put it on.
“You’re half-human, dear,” said Alice. “That’s close enough for this family.”
“If you say so,” he grumbled.
“Take a charm,” said Alice, following her own advice even as she looked at me sternly.
“I know we’re resistant to cuckoo telepathy, but Johrlac are like cuckoos on steroids.
They know what they can do, and they know how to do it.
You need protection if you’re coming with us, and we want you with us.
These are your cousins. You should have a part in saving them. ”