“Hi, Sarah,” I said.
She kept her eyes fixed on the table as she mumbled something I couldn’t understand. A brief pressure at my temples informed me that she was trying to make contact. I was once again grateful for the anti-telepathy charm Grandma insisted I keep on me until Sarah’s recovery was finished. Sarah no longer remembered enough about her own strength to watch her volume, and I didn’t need another migraine from her screaming inside my head.
“Here you go, sweetheart,” said Grandma, placing a biscuit on Sarah’s plate. It was liberally smeared with ketchup. Sarah didn’t react. Sighing, Grandma kissed the top of her head. “Just eat when you feel like it, Sarah. That’s all we need from you right now.” She took her own seat, shoulders slightly slumped.
I know Sarah did what she did of her own free will. I know Verity didn’t ask to be captured by the Covenant. But sometimes, when I saw my grandmother looking so defeated, I just wanted to scream at both of them for having been so careless.
Instead, I stuck my fork in my shepherd’s pie, and asked, “Have either of you heard anything about lindworms in Ohio?”
“Not in a long time,” said Grandpa. “Why?”
I smiled, trying to make the expression seem sincere. Maybe I couldn’t make Sarah better or figure out how to balance my duties and my social life, but I could do this. I could be there for my family, and I could help them remember that they weren’t alone, no matter how bad things got. “Dee and I went out into the swamp to gather fricken samples today . . .” I began.
This was dinner with my family. Everything else could wait a little while.
Three
“Our relationship with the mice is . . . complicated. Just remember that being a god doesn’t actually give you any authority and you’ll be fine.”
—Kevin Price
A nice, if borrowed, bedroom in an only moderately creepy suburban home in Columbus, Ohio
A MADDENED CHORUS OF exultations greeted me when I opened the bedroom door. It increased in volume when the congregation caught sight of the tray I was balancing on my left arm. “HAIL! HAIL! HAIL THE ARRIVAL OF THE DINNER!” Crow, who was curled up in the cat bed on top of the wardrobe, croaked his amusement at the scene. At least, I hoped it was amusement. The last thing I wanted was a war between my resident griffin and my splinter colony of Aeslin mice.
Yes, mice: talking, intelligent mice that worship the Price men as gods—which is a very long story that no one seems to fully understand, not even those of us in the pantheon. There’s a reason Crow is the closest thing to a cat that anyone in my family has ever had.
The rodent rejoicing continued as I stepped into the room and closed the door behind myself, and they reached a fever pitch when I raised my right hand to signal that I was about to speak. There were only thirty mice in my splinter of the family colony, but thirty mice can make a hell of a lot of noise when they feel so inclined, and Aeslin mice anticipating their dinner are always so inclined.
“Quiet, please,” I requested.
The mice quieted down, ever obedient to the dictates of their gods. They sat back on their haunches and wrapped their tails around their hind legs, fixing their glittering black eyes firmly on me as they waited for me to proclaim some pearls of godly wisdom. That, or feed them. To the Aeslin mice, those concepts were basically one and the same.
“I will need three assistants to help me sort feathers tonight, and three more to help articulate fricken skeletons this coming weekend,” I said. “The colony will be paid for the labor in cheese and cake. Is this acceptable?”
Judging by the wild cheering that overtook the Aeslin, it was acceptable. I waited for them to calm down before I said, “This is for science. Science rules will be in effect during the work.”
“Science rules” was dealing-with-the-Aeslin shorthand for “no rejoicing, no dropping what you’re working on to race off and join a spontaneous parade in honor of the Violent Priestess, no asking complex theological questions when you’re supposed to be focusing on your job.” It was sort of amazing sometimes, how many rules we needed to keep ourselves sane.
The announcement of science rules was greeted in a rather more subdued fashion. The mice exchanged looks before turning as one to the colony’s High Priestess. She was distinguished from the others by her slightly more elaborate attire—a cloak of glossy black feathers harvested from Crow during molting season—and her posture, which was straight and proud, even when facing one of her personal gods. She cocked her small gray head to the side, thoughtfully. Then she nodded.
“It Shall Be So,” she intoned, stressing each word so that it sounded like it had been individually capitalized.
That was the cue the mice needed to resume their rejoicing, shouting, “HAIL!” and “ALL GLORY TO THE SCIENCE RULES OF SCIENCE!” I smiled gratefully at the High Priestess as I set the tray on the floor. I barely had time to grab Crow’s dish of meat scraps and liver before the colony swarmed over the food, their exultations reaching a fever pitch. Only the High Priestess remained aloof, sitting calmly on the floor near the bed as she watched her people accost the food. They didn’t eat it. Instead they picked up the plates, working in teams of five, and began toting them toward the closet. The dishes would reappear in the morning, neatly stacked and ready for me to take back down to the kitchen.
I walked over and put Crow’s dish on top of the wardrobe, next to his bed. He stood, stretching languidly, and I gave him a quick scratch behind the ears before he began gulping down his food. At that point, interfering with him might have caused me to lose a finger.
The mice had managed to disappear by the time I finished feeding Crow—all save the High Priestess, who was still sitting patiently, waiting for my attention. I pulled out the desk chair and sat, putting myself closer to her level without doing her the disrespect of kneeling. Aeslin hate to see their gods humble themselves. “Hail,” I said, leaning forward with my elbows on my knees. “What’s going on?”
“Hail to the God of Scales and Silence,” squeaked the High Priestess. “We have done as you bid us do, and have kept Eyes Upon the younger Heartless One.”
“Thank you very much for watching Sarah for me.” Aeslin mice have their own unique approach to the language. I was the God of Scales and Silence—largely, I think, because I liked snakes and didn’t talk as much as my sisters—and Grandma and Sarah were the Heartless Ones. It was a biologically accurate label, if somewhat insensitive-sounding: cuckoos don’t have hearts. They have decentralized circulatory systems, and thick, clear fluid that’s basically biological antifreeze where most bipeds would have blood. The mice weren’t trying to be cruel. Aeslin mice very rarely are.
“It is our pleasure to serve,” said the High Priestess. She wiped her paw across her whiskers in a gesture that I had come to learn meant she was upset. “Holiness, I must speak to you frankly. I apologize if my words offend.”
“It’s okay. Say whatever you need to say.”
“The younger Heartless One . . .” The High Priestess hesitated before saying, in a profoundly troubled tone, “She is Not Well, Holiness. I do not know that she will ever become Well. I fear for your safety, and for the safety of the colony, in her presence. The Heartless Ones . . . when they are Unwell, they can destroy so very much, so very quickly. We should not be here. You should not be here. We have Faith, Holiness, but there is Faith, and then there is Common Sense. Sometimes the one must take precedence over the other.”
I blinked. The Aeslin mice are smart. Sometimes it can be easy to forget that, with the way they carry on, but they’d never have survived long enough to hook up with the family if they weren’t capable of taking care of themselves. Finally, I said, “I understand your concerns. I can’t leave my family. I wouldn’t . . . if I were the kind of man who abandoned his family when they needed him, I wouldn’t be worthy of calling myself a God of the colony.”
“We understand, but we are still afraid,” said the High Priestess.
“I understan
d the feeling,” I said. “Is everyone wearing the charms we made for them?” Getting anti-telepathy charms for an entire colony of Aeslin mice hadn’t been cheap, and I hadn’t regretted it for a moment. The last thing we needed was for Sarah to accidentally mind-control the colony in her sleep.
The High Priestess nodded. “We have done as you have Commanded.”
“Good. Sarah is unwell. She became unwell helping Verity—the Arboreal Priestess—to protect the family. I can’t refuse to do as much as she did to keep us all safe. Now. What did you see?”
The High Priestess preened her whiskers before saying, “The younger Heartless One engaged in an argument with nothing. We thought at first that she was speaking with her mind, and echoing with her voice, but the elder Heartless One entered and bid her quiet and calm. The elder set the younger a task, to chase the numbers they call ‘prime’ as far as she could.”
“And?”
“And she began to cry and said there were no numbers.” The look the High Priestess gave me was frankly terrified. Disney had never animated such fear in the eyes of a mouse. “We have never heard tell of a Heartless One losing the numbers. It Bodes Ill.”
I winced. I couldn’t help myself. Cuckoos have a racial obsession with math. No one knows why, but every cuckoo we’ve ever encountered has been easily distracted by numbers. Sarah had been in New York with Verity in part because she wanted an excuse to audit some math classes at the colleges there. Sarah lived for her math classes. If she couldn’t do something as simple as reciting primes . . .
She was still family. And family doesn’t leave family behind. “I promise you, if it looks like we’re in any danger because of Sarah, I’ll get us out of here. You have my word. But for right now, we have to stay. I thank you for your report. There will be extra cake tomorrow night to show my gratitude.”
The High Priestess sighed. “You are your father’s son,” she said quietly. “I am glad to know that, even as I fear for your safety, and ours as well. I shall send your assistants to you anon, Holiness.”
“Thank you,” I said again, and offered her a small half-bow. The High Priestess bowed back, with all the formality of a clergywoman addressing her deity, before scurrying away, vanishing into the closet with the others. I looked at the closet door for a moment. Then I turned to the desk and opened my laptop. There was work to be done before morning, and my report wasn’t going to write itself.
The official version of my trip to the swamp had already been written and submitted to zoo management. Now it was time to write the version that would go into the family record. Crow settled back into his cat bed, his head hanging over the edge of the wardrobe so that he could watch my every move. I ignored him. Years of living with Antimony looking over my shoulder has left me essentially immune to suspicious glares. He’d long since forgiven me for leaving him at home alone after our excursion to the swamp—all I had to do was give him his dinner and everything was wonderful again—but now he was angry because I wouldn’t let him have the frickens I was planning to dissect.
The dissection itself took about two hours, and is better left to the imagination. If you’ve ever seen a frog dissected in a high school science class, you know the basics: the details are mostly squishy and unpleasant, even to the scientifically-minded. I had to write up my notes after that, which took longer than expected, largely because I was tired enough to be continually distracted by my research materials. First I had to list the species of fricken we had found still living in Ohio (assuming we hadn’t collected and killed the last individuals; it would be bad form for me to render a cryptid extinct in the process of studying it). That meant digging through the field guide to verify my identifications. Mom used to say, not quite joking, that if I touched a field guide, you’d need to send a search party to get me out again. She wasn’t wrong.
After the fricken count was done, I had to write up the encounter with the lindworm, and that meant another trip through the field guide, with a supplementary jaunt into the local bestiary to be sure there really was no confirmed record of a native lindworm species. The one we’d seen in the swamp didn’t quite match the description of any known lindworm, although it was close enough to be a relative. There was a good chance that we’d just discovered an entirely new species.
“I love science,” I said, and saved the file.
It only took a few minutes to write up a cover letter describing the situation, attach the report, and mail everything off to my parents. I sent a second copy to the printer. I’d give it to the Aeslin, for safety’s sake. There is no better backup system in this world than a colony of Aeslin mice. They may demand to be paid in cheese and cake, but once they know something, they know it forever.
With all that done, I checked on Crow—now soundly asleep—and sprinkled some baby bloodworms into the terrarium with my poison dart frickens, which goggled their brightly colored eyes and flared their brightly colored crests in a threat display that was as adorable as it was serious. The neon-tinted little amphibians were incredibly deadly.
“Yes, you’re terrifying,” I said to the frickens, who ignored me, already engaged in pursuing their dinner. I walked to the closet, where I stopped, cleared my throat, and said, “The Time of Science is upon us.”
Live with Aeslin long enough, you learn how to pronounce capitals. It makes things easier. There was a rustling from inside the closet, and then three sleek-furred young temple novices appeared around the edges of the door, whiskers forward and ears up.
“We Are Ready!” they squeaked in joyous unison.
“Great,” I said. “Let’s sort some feathers.”
Aeslin mice excel at small, repetitive jobs that contain an element of ritual. Sorting fricken feathers by species, type, age of specimen, and whether or not they showed signs of fungal infection was fiddly enough and required enough very precise steps that the Aeslin couldn’t have been happier. I barely had anything to do once the three of them got involved. That was exactly what I’d been hoping for. I picked up the field guide, sat back in my chair, and started reading.
According to the historical records, there were fifteen subspecies of fricken that could potentially appear in this region of Ohio. Five were considered common, six more were uncommon, and four were rare bordering on “may not be native, but we caught one once, and that means we need to make a record of it.” My family has never been what you’d call “restrained” when it comes to maintaining the regional field guides. With good reason. A lot of the smaller, apparently harmless cryptids, like the frickens, can be used as a general barometer of an area’s well-being. If they’re dying by the dozens, you probably have a problem. It’s best to find that out from the little things, rather than learning it from, say, a unicorn attack.
(Unicorns like virgins. That part is true. But being liked by a unicorn is actually not very good for your health, and being disliked by a unicorn is even worse. Unicorns are deadly to things and people that they decide not to like. We’d have a shoot-on-sight order if they weren’t so vital to maintaining a healthy water table. Nature enjoys a good practical joke every now and then.)
That was the historical record. Based on the recorded sightings from my fieldwork, my dissection results, and the slowly growing piles of feathers, there were currently nineteen subspecies of fricken living in the swamps of Columbus, Ohio.
“Well, hell,” I said, staring at the heaps of feathers.
Things exist for a reason. Nature doesn’t mess around with things that don’t have a purpose. Sometimes those things come into competition. Sometimes they edge each other out. Invasive species have been transforming the world in their own image for as long as animals have been capable of moving from one place to another. Humanity has hastened the process, since we’re the first animals to build airplanes and container ships, but we didn’t start it, and it won’t stop when we’re gone.
If the number of frickens in Ohio was going up, they had to be filling a niche that was previously occupied by something e
lse. My money was on the frogs. That was the whole purpose of this study: to prove that the native frogs were being replaced by either an increase in the native frickens, or by an influx of frickens from elsewhere. Not the most exciting stuff in the world, I know, but it was ecologically important, especially if we wanted to continue keeping the frickens from being revealed to the world.
I yawned and reached for my laptop. I needed to make some more notes.
I woke up with my cheek on the keyboard, having already filled several hundred pages with random characters. I sat up, wiping the drool from my cheek. My back ached. I stood, straightening as I turned toward my bed. Then, before I could stop myself, I let out a short, sharp scream, which ended only when I clapped my hand over my mouth. Hopefully, that hadn’t been enough to wake my grandparents.
Sarah was sitting cross-legged on my bed.
She was wearing a white nightgown, and had a red ribbon tied in her hair, making her look like a Tim Burton horror movie reimagining of Snow White. She cocked her head when she saw me looking at her, but there was no trace of actual comprehension in her wide blue eyes. She just kept staring at me.
“Sarah?” I lowered my hand, wishing I could stop my heart from pounding against my ribs. “What are you doing here? This isn’t your room.”
“The moon doesn’t approve of the screaming in the cornfield,” she said. She sounded entirely reasonable, as long as I ignored the fact that she was talking like a book of Mad Libs. “Have you seen the Queen of Hearts today? Does she have the treacle tarts?”
“Sarah, you’re scaring me. Do I need to go get Grandma?”