“I think all families have their similarities,” said Shelby. “Gabby’s a little less, well, willing to play along than your sister. I don’t think she’s going to give up opera in favor of coming back to the family business. And Raina wasn’t always so unpleasant to strangers. She doesn’t trust people she doesn’t know. Hasn’t done since we lost Jack.”
There it was. “Your brother?”
“Yeah. Raina was his favorite, you know? He and I weren’t close—too similar in some ways, we always wound up wanting to kill each other, and that’s no good for anyone—but the two of them were like ticks on a sheep. Where he went, so did she, always. She holds herself responsible for what happened with him.”
“How? Cuckoos can get to anyone. That’s part of what makes them so dangerous.”
“You know that, and I know that, and even your family knows that. Raina knows on some level, I suppose, but most of her just knows that Jack stopped calling, and stopped answering her email, and she didn’t sound the alarm. I don’t think we could have saved him at that point—it wasn’t really possible by then, you know? He was too far gone when he cut contact—but that’s not going to help her forgive herself.”
“No, it’s not.” I kissed Shelby’s forehead. “I’m sorry. I can’t imagine losing a sibling.” Except that was a lie. I had imagined it, over and over, for my entire life. The idea of the loss lasting after I woke up . . . that was the terrifying part.
“Done is done, you know? Jack was a good guy. I think you’d have liked him. I know he’d have liked you. He was going to take over for Dad someday. Now he’s gone, and the crown falls to me, and I don’t want it.” She sighed again, deeper this time, and nestled herself close. “Need to get some sleep now. It’s going to be a busy day tomorrow.”
“I was sleeping fine before you came in and woke me up, you know,” I protested. It was too late: her eyes were shut, and she had relaxed in that way that meant she wasn’t going to be talking anymore tonight. She couldn’t actually go to sleep instantly, but had learned to fake it at some point. It was probably a natural consequence of sharing a bedroom with two younger sisters.
For a little while, I just lay there and listened to her breathing. Then I closed my own eyes again, and let sleep come back to me.
“You’re both going to get murdered, and it’s going to be horribly messy.” The proclamation was made with incredible good cheer—“chirpy, treacle-y, Sleeping Beauty talks to the woodland creatures” levels of good cheer. I pried my eyes open and peered into the faintly bleary distance. Shelby was still asleep, her head tucked under one of the pillows and her right arm slung across my waist. That meant the tall blonde blur couldn’t be her.
It hadn’t sounded quite like her mother, and so I took a guess. “Gabrielle?”
“Oh, you are good. Yes, this is Gabby, I’m here because you’re about ten minutes short of sleeping through breakfast, and I volunteered to be the one who came looking because it would give you half a chance in hell of Dad not finding out Shelby had switched rooms in the night. If Raina saw you like this, it’d be game over.”
“You’re very kind.” I reached over Shelby and fumbled on the bedside table until I found my glasses and pushed them on, squinting as my focus adjusted. “We’ll be down in a minute.” This was the second time one of the Tanner sisters had been able to sneak up on me while I was sleeping. I was starting to give serious thought to belling the door.
Gabby dimpled at me. “It’s all part of the service. You’re a lot more cute than you looked under that stuffy academic shirt, aren’t you? I’m starting to see what Shelly finds so appealing.”
“I will end you,” said Shelby, voice muffled by the pillow.
“Love you, too,” said Gabby, and fled the room before sororicide could become a genuine threat.
Shelby groaned and pushed herself up onto her elbows, shooting a halfhearted glare in my direction. “Whose idea was it to come back to Australia again? Because at the moment, I’m inclined to blame you.”
“They’re your family,” I said. “You’re the one who asked if I would help them.”
“Right. Damn.” She stood, stretched, and began recovering her clothes from the floor. “I need to duck down the hall to get something suitable for the breakfast table. You going to be all right on your own?”
“I think I can manage getting dressed and walking down the stairs,” I said.
Shelby grinned. “I’m never sure with you.” She stepped into her shorts, pulled her shirt on over her head, and then she was gone, out the door and on the way to her room.
I took more time getting dressed, although I didn’t linger over anything beyond getting my weapons secured inside my clothing. The mice hadn’t made an appearance by the time I had my shirt buttoned and my shoes tied. I glanced around nervously, half expecting to see a mouse head on the floor under the edge of the bed. The wildlife of Australia was nothing to fuck around with. Neither were the Aeslin mice.
If any of them had met an unfortunate end, it wasn’t apparent from the contents of my room. I shook my head, grabbed my jacket off the door, and left the room.
As before, the smell of food greeted me when I reached the head of the stairs. This time, it was accompanied by voices, clear and loud and close. I followed them to the kitchen, where I found the Tanners—minus Shelby, who was still getting dressed—sitting around the kitchen table, passing a platter of ham and another of fried eggs around. Only Gabby looked up when I entered, and her quick, sly smile confirmed that she hadn’t informed her parents about my sleeping arrangements of the night before. For whatever reason, she was keeping that part between us . . . for now.
“Oh, hey, you’re not dead.” Raina raked her eyes along the length of my body before passing judgment: “You still look kind of dead. Maybe you need to sleep more. Sixteen hours out of the last twenty-four isn’t excessive, if you’re a housecat. Are you a housecat?”
“Good morning, Alex,” said Charlotte, apparently deciding that ignoring her middle daughter was the better part of valor. “How did you sleep?”
“Very well, thank you,” I said, following her lead. “I’m not adjusted to local time yet, but I think I’ll be there before much longer.”
“Good,” said Riley. Unlike his wife and daughter, he didn’t sound chatty: he sounded like a man who’d been waiting to get down to business for the better part of an hour, and was ready to go. “Grab a roll and some ham, and let’s get out of here. I have Cooper standing by at the medical station. We’ve cleared the whole thing for your use.”
I nodded. “All right.” I had been expecting something like this, although to be honest, I had been hoping it would happen on the other side of several cups of coffee.
“Here’s a fun fact for you: one in three wildlife rescue stations in this part of the country is run either wholly or in part by the Society,” said Charlotte, her eyes on her husband. “Come on, Riley, let the boy have a decent breakfast before you set him to brewing magic potions to save us from the werewolves.”
“Oh,” I said, unable to come up with a more intelligent response. The thought of having that sort of resources at our disposal was staggering. Most of the time, we had to make do with whatever the local cryptids had set up for themselves, or visit helpful veterinarians who had seen one too many immature lindworms presented as “iguanas” to remain in denial over the cryptid world. Then I paused. “Wait, what is it you’re expecting me to do?”
“You said you could brew the stuff to keep us safe from the werewolves,” said Riley. “So you’re going to do that. You’re going to keep us safe from the werewolves.”
“I also said that it’s not a vaccine, and it’s potentially fatal,” I protested. “It’s an after-the-fact treatment, and while I’m more than happy to mix some up as a last resort, it isn’t going to keep you ‘safe from werewolves,’ and it needs to be made fresh because it doesn’
t keep for more than three or four days. If I made enough to treat the whole Society, I’d blow through all the supplies I brought with me from the States and then some, and it would all be bad inside of the week. Small batches are the only way to make this work.”
“How small?” Riley seemed suddenly more tightly wound, like something I had said had caused the string that ran through the center of his body to contract, drawing him inward. It was unnerving, like watching a snake coil in preparation for striking. “Could you treat a dozen people without endangering your precious supplies?”
I tensed. If that was the number of new infections he was expecting within the next week, the situation was even worse than I had suspected. “A dozen I could do,” I said, fighting to keep my tone level. “It would also be useful to start stockpiling more supplies, just in case they’re needed. They hopefully won’t be, but again, I was limited by the carrying capacity of my luggage.”
“Good,” he said. “We’re going to the med station, and you’re mixing up enough to offer the treatment to every Society member who’s been exposed. Am I clear?”
Oh. “Yes,” I said. “I’ll be ready in a minute.” The people who had been bitten before I got to Australia were on the cusp of crossing the line from “may still be saved” into “lost forever.” The treatment could work right up until the first transformation, theoretically, but we had no confirmed instances of it working after fourteen days.
I hated to make them wait even a moment, but I knew enough about fieldwork to know that if I didn’t eat now, I might not get the opportunity to eat again before dinner—if then. I’d been on a manticore hunt once that had resulted in skipping four meals in a row. Not because we wanted to; because the manticore was chasing us, and we couldn’t stop to build a fire.
(Grandma Alice always said being in the field should be treated like going to war: eat when you can, sleep when you can, never put your gun down, and never get drunker than the people around you. Grandma Alice was more than a little bit paranoid. Sadly for me, she was also more than a little bit right.)
Riley stood next to my chair, not speaking, and watched as I ate breakfast. Shelby joined us while I was still shoveling eggs into my face. She took one look at her father, sighed, and said, “Mum, slap me together a sandwich, will you? I need to go get my knives.”
“All right, honey,” said Charlotte.
“Can you grab my go bag?” I asked. “It’s the big brown one.” I didn’t like asking her to carry my things when I was sitting and enjoying breakfast with her family, but Charlotte didn’t seem inclined to make me a sandwich, and Shelby was already going upstairs.
“Shall do, lazy boy,” said Shelby, and made her retreat.
I had finished eating by the time Shelby returned, now with Flora riding on her shoulder. The little garrinna had her tail linked around Shelby’s neck, providing the leverage she needed to stay upright. Riley turned and walked toward the door without a word. Shelby got her egg-and-ham sandwich from her mother, and the two of us followed him out to the car.
The medical station was a thirty-minute drive from the house, down a series of successively smaller roads, all of which Riley drove along like he was challenging the God of Car Crashes and Automotive Fatalities to do something about it. Shelby sat in the front with him, Flora shrieking challenges at birds in nearby trees as we went rocketing by, and I bounced around in the backseat despite my seat belt, grabbing onto anything I could to try and stabilize myself. By the time we pulled up in front of the small white-walled building that was our destination, I was beginning to seriously rethink my views on carsickness.
Cooper was already outside, leaning against the wall next to the door with his hands shoved into his pockets and a vaguely disinterested look on his face. A black dog with high, pointed ears was sitting calmly beside him. Cooper’s expression didn’t change as we piled out of the car. Flora shrieked at the dog. The dog barked twice at the garrinna, a high, piercing sound that didn’t hold any real threat, but would definitely have served to alert Cooper if Flora had been sneaking up on him. The garrinna took off from Shelby’s shoulder and flew to a nearby tree, still shrieking.
“Sometimes I feel like I never left home,” I muttered.
“What’s that?” asked Shelby.
“Nothing,” I said. Louder, I continued, “Morning, Cooper. Good to see you again.”
“I go where Riley tells me to,” he said, by way of greeting.
“Cooper’s a vet tech,” said Riley, brushing past me as he went to unlock the building door. “He’s going to watch everything you do. See if we can’t figure out how to replicate the process when you’re not around.” His tone was challenging, like he expected me to protest and claim the tincture as some sort of family secret.
If he’d been hoping for a fight, I was going to disappoint him. “That sounds like an excellent plan to me,” I said, adjusting my glasses. “What are you and Shelby going to do?”
“Area patrol,” said Shelby, sounding almost obscenely pleased about the idea. “Going to poke through the local brush, make sure nothing unpleasant has decided to set up camp. You know, the usual sort of work.”
I blinked, looking at her. She was wearing what I thought of as her zoo clothes: a tan shirt and khaki shorts, with thick white socks under thicker brown leather boots. It was great attire for showing off with tigers in a controlled environment, but for the Australian brush, I’d been expecting something a little more platemail-esque. “Really?”
“Really.” She darted forward, pressing a kiss against my cheek. Riley looked over his shoulder at us and scowled. “I promise I’ll be fine. The boots’ll keep anything from taking a chomp out of me, and if I run up against something that’s aiming above the knees, clothes wouldn’t have saved me anyhow.”
“That’s encouraging,” I said dryly.
“Buck up, Alex. If I die, they’ll probably deport you. So either way, the outcome is in your favor.”
Shelby was still laughing at her own joke—and my stricken face—when her father shoved the door open and turned to stalk back to where we were standing. “How long is your little alchemy lesson going to take?”
“I don’t really know,” I said. “The stuff is delicate. It could be as little as an hour. It could take as long as three hours. It all depends on whether I get it right on my first attempt.”
“Get it right,” said Riley. “Shelly, you’re with me.” He kept walking, moving onward into the dense underbrush on the other side of the narrow dirt track masquerading as a road. Shelby shrugged and hurried after him, giving me a “what can you do?” look over her shoulder. The brush rustled as it swallowed them whole, and I was alone with Cooper, his silently watchful dog, and Shelby’s garrinna, which was still giving off intermittent shrieks, just in case we’d forgotten she was there.
“I can’t imagine why they’re on the verge of extinction,” I said, turning from the garrinna to Cooper, who hadn’t moved since we arrived.
He didn’t smile. “They’re noisy because we’ve taught them to be that way,” he said. “They’re too bright colored to hide, so the ones that survived the hunters long enough to breed are the ones that got early notice when danger was coming. Hence the screams. In another few generations, it could be they’ll never stop.”
“Er.” My sense of humor has never been the most refined, but I wasn’t accustomed to being shut down quite that efficiently for something that hadn’t been that offensive. “I’m sorry. I think I’m still jet lagged. I keep sticking my foot in it.”
Cooper seemed to thaw slightly: while he didn’t smile, his stone-faced expression was a little less unyielding. Under the circumstances, I’d take it. “You’re in a bit of a hard place, all things considered. No one’s ever been willing to take a run at one of the Tanner girls before. Between Riley and Jack, it was always pretty damn clear that they were off-limits. When Shelly sent home word that she
was seeing someone, Riley came close to hitting the roof. Doesn’t help that it’s her, either. Daddy’s girl isn’t supposed to fall for anybody else.”
I knew from my conversations with Shelby when we first started dating that I wasn’t her first serious boyfriend—far from it. She’d dated more than I had, mostly while she was away at school. That apparently didn’t jibe with Riley’s understanding of his own daughter. I decided it wasn’t my place to bring up things she might not want finding their way back to her parents, and just shrugged. “He has three daughters. Maybe he needs to get used to the idea that they’re going to date eventually.”
“He was better about it before Jack died and made Shelby her father’s heir,” said Cooper. “People get protective of the things they love once they realize those things can be lost.”
“Yeah. I know.” The conversation was getting uncomfortable, and I felt very exposed having it in the middle of the road. I walked past him, into the medical station. As I had expected, Cooper followed me, shutting the door behind himself.
It was a small room, more of a glorified shed than anything else, but every inch of space had been used to the best of its abilities by whomever had overseen the conversion of the original structure into a fully equipped veterinary office. Shelves lined the walls, glass-fronted and stocked with common medicines, first aid supplies, and what looked like a surgical kit. An operating table was pushed up against one counter, where it could be moved as necessary, and there was a small wet station, complete with sink and what looked like a chemical shower.
“Water runs from a tank, not a pipe, so only use what you need,” said Cooper, moving to raise the shades on the two small windows. “We have it refilled after people need to use this facility, but that’s not going to be any help if your hands need washing and you’ve already sent all the wash water off down the drain.”
“Good to know.” I hoisted my go bag onto the operating table and began carefully unpacking it. I could have moved faster, but I wanted to be sure none of the seals had been broken and none of the potentially hazardous materials had managed to mix together. Piece by piece, the results of a thousand years of scientific progress and folk medicine appeared on the gleaming stainless steel.