Humans are fragile. If one is going to be in the business of cultivating them, one must also accept that they will occasionally need to be replaced--and that the good ones should be kept for as long as possible, to make those replacements less frequent.
The linens smelled of lavender. I put my teacup down on the bedside table, crawled beneath the covers, and closed my eyes. Sleep would do more than simply restore my body. It would consolidate my hold on Barb, and through her, on her neighbors. It would make this my home, and not simply a house I happened to occupy, until I was prepared to move along.
Sleep came swiftly. It always does, when things are going well.
My species came from a world far from this one, across the gulf of a dozen dimensions, each with their own delights and dangers to offer. I was born on earth, as were all the cuckoos of my generation, and the generation before us, going back to our arrival in this world some five hundred years ago. We had exhausted the world that had been sheltering us, sucking it dry and denuding it of entertainments. A change had been necessary. A change will almost always do us good. So a hive had come together, and working together, had lifted up a queen and used her to do what queens do best. They had used her to find us something new to devour.
Our shatter point had formed in Qingyang in China. I sometimes wish I could have been there. Thousands died, humans and yokai alike, as they tried to beat back the waves of what must have seemed like an alien invasion--not quite right, but not quite wrong, either. They couldn't win, of course. We're unstoppable, when we want to be. When the dust settled, the rift was closed, and the cuckoos were masters of a new world.
Really, if we could work together with one another, we would have devoured this place centuries ago. That's the secret. That's the gift evolution gave us, and through us, gave to everyone else. We hate each other so completely that we can't stand to keep one another company. That means it takes us time to eat our bright new hives from the inside out. Our hatred for one another is the way we get the time to breathe . . . and when we have time, everyone else has time. Even if it's only borrowed. We grant you all a stay of execution every time we decline to get along.
In a world of mammals, a single cuckoo might as well be all-powerful. We can go where we want, do what we want, take what we want, and few humans will ever realize they've been manipulated, much less become aware of our presence. We can eat a swath across a continent, and it's only by looking at the seemingly senseless crimes in our wake that anyone will ever know that we were there.
Which isn't to say that we're malicious. All we do is exploit what's available to us. Does a human who makes their dog work for its supper consider themselves malicious? Do they feel like terrible people because they enjoy a good piece of steak on occasion? No. They recognize themselves as the higher creature, and they use the lesser as they see fit. We simply do the same.
We simply do it to them.
One day, when we finish draining this place dry, we'll move on to something new, something fat and slow and unwary, like this world was before we came. We'll close the door behind us, and we'll set the sky on fire, because who would want to live in a world after we've taken everything good it had to offer? Really, if anything should prove that we're not monsters, it's that. We're willing to put the sick dog down, rather than walking away and calling it "mercy."
Mercy is for people who don't understand what it is to balance the equation and let the numbers speak for themselves.
I woke at sunset, in a room filled with warm amber light, warm and bright. I sat up, yawning languidly as I stretched the kinks out of my shoulders. Barb had clearly replaced her mattress within the last year: my back felt better than it had in days. I added another number to the "stay here awhile" column.
Some of my kind believe in planning, making elaborate itineraries and schedules, moving around the world according to a checklist. To be fair, they tend to have a great deal of fun, and better yet, they do very well at avoiding accidental encounters with our own kind. Knowing exactly when you're going to be somewhere makes it easier to hang out the KEEP AWAY sign.
But planning creates patterns, and patterns are how human hunters find us, the bastards. We may be an invasive species, but that doesn't mean we don't serve a purpose in the ecosystem. This world welcomed us during a time when it was bleeding predators, slaughtered by careless humans who didn't understand what they were doing. There have to be checks and balances, or else the equation of the world falls apart. Just look at what humanity's doing, now that it doesn't have anything bigger to keep it from spreading like a plague across the planet. They didn't learn anything from killing the dragons and the manticores and the sirens.
We keep the planet from collapsing under the weight of its own occupants, and how do those occupants repay us? By hunting us when they have the opportunity, because we're "unnatural" and "cruel" and all those other things that could just as easily be said about the human race. Really, it's only fair for us to play with them a little before we destroy them. They've earned it. Unquestionably, they've earned it.
The doorbell rang. I stopped mid-stretch. Barb wouldn't answer the door, not when she believed herself to be a guest in my home. I don't like humans who take initiative.
Indeed, a few seconds later, I heard footsteps on the stairs. Barb crept close to the partially open door before asking, sotto voce, "Eliza? Are you awake?"
I considered chastising her for risking waking me, and decided against it. She had company, and whoever it was hadn't been close to me long enough for my telepathy to begin revising their memories of this house. Under the circumstances, she'd done the right thing.
"The doorbell woke me," I said. I didn't have to work to sound irritated. "Please answer it, and let whoever's there know that I'll be down in a moment."
Barb looked surprised. "You don't want me to get rid of them?"
"Oh, no." I smiled as I emerged from the room. "Let's say hello."
Whoever this was didn't live here, or they wouldn't have rung the bell, and they weren't expected, or Barb would have remembered that they were coming and would assume they were here for both of us. My victims can justify almost anything within the framework of the world I construct for them. The fact that she'd come to wake me instead told me that this was a surprise for both of us.
I don't like surprises. They're messy. I slipped my shoes back on and smoothed my hair down with my fingers, aware that both humans would think I was the most beautiful thing they'd ever seen regardless of what I actually looked like.
Really, humans are so suggestible that they're lucky it was us who found them, and not something with a bigger appetite and a smaller sense of humor. We do a great deal of damage within our limited spheres, but the key word there is "limited." We are small equations moving the sum of humanity toward balance.
I could feel the second mind when I was halfway down the stairs. It was a human male, unreasonably excited, broadcasting his enthusiasm like glitter in the air. Barb was radiating confusion. Whoever this was, it was a stranger to her as well as to me. But there was no malicious intent in his thoughts: this was no hunter come looking for a cuckoo to kill.
I reached the bottom of the stairs and walked down the short hall to the living room. Our "guest" was standing just inside the door, wearing a high-collared coat that should have had him roasting in this heat. He turned toward the sound of my footsteps, and his thoughts exploded into relief and delight.
"Victoria," he said. "I knew it was you. I just knew it."
I froze.
Humans have a great deal of variety in their physical appearance: necessary, when recognition is visual, and not blessedly mental. It's all very messy as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately, because their recognition is purely based on what they see, they find cuckoos to be virtually indistinguishable from one another. I'd stumbled into another cuckoo's hunting grounds, and now I had one of her . . . victims? Servants? Not lovers: his delight was elemental and light, not mired down with physical desir
e. It didn't matter. Whoever he was, he'd spent enough time around this "Victoria" to reek of her now that I was looking for the signs of her interference.
Working around another cuckoo's changes is difficult and time-consuming, and not something to be done without preparation. I needed him gone.
"I'm sorry," I said stiffly. "You have the wrong house."
"No, I don't," he said. "Victoria, come on. It's me."
He wanted so badly for this Victoria to know who he was, to recognize him and accept him back into her life. The wanting was enough to put a crack in the walls she had constructed around him, leaving me an opening. Not enough to modify, sadly, but enough to learn. I shaped my mind into a needle and darted through the opening before his mental shielding--surprisingly good, for a human--recognized the danger and slammed closed again.
There she was. Victoria. A cuckoo in a long skirt, with a butterfly clip in her hair. She was on her knees in front of a cardboard box, flipping through its contents as she laughed at something the man had said to her. Laughing. We're excellent liars--nature designed us to be the best--but the sound in his memory was sincere. She sounded happy. She sounded entertained.
I stared at him, too perplexed by what I was seeing in his memory to know how to respond. He stepped around Barb and threw his arms around my shoulders, pulling me into a human-style embrace.
"I knew it was you," he said. "I just knew it. God, Victoria, where have you been?"
Arguing with him would be harder and more time-consuming than changing my name. I pulled away, already smiling sweetly, noting as I did that he had managed to hug me without touching my bare skin, damn the luck. The kind of revisions I'd been doing on Barb were easy, even from a distance, and didn't require any conscious effort on my part. The longer she spent around me, the more I would rewire her to my liking. If I decided to remain in this house until I got tired of it, I'd leave her drained dry and unable to function without me, too wedded to the version of reality I had spun for her to know what to do when it disappeared.
Conscious adjustments are harder. Cuckoos evolved to be ambush predators, not hunters. On the rare occasions where we make skin contact with our prey, however, it gets easier. If he'd touched me, or if the collar of his coat hadn't blocked me from touching him, I could have blasted this "Victoria" right out of his head, and harvested her location from his memory in the process.
Only room for one cuckoo in a city, even one the size of Burbank. If she was here, she had to go.
"Oh, around," I said. "I go by 'Eliza' now. It sounds better, don't you think?"
Confusion and displeasure surrounded him. "No," he said. "It's not your name, and it doesn't sound better. Did something happen? Did those people you were always worried about catch up with you? God, Victoria, we would have helped."
Now there was a "we"? This kept getting worse. I must have been radiating distress, because Barb--dear Barb, who would die for me if she felt it was necessary--was suddenly beside me, every inch of her screaming caution at our unwanted visitor. He took a step back, startled. Good. The more distance between us, the better.
I wanted skin contact, so I could learn what he knew, and I wanted him to stay away from me. It was a contradiction: most things are. I angled my body, putting Barb between us. If things got worse, she could intervene. She would intervene. She had already been my loyal friend, and now that I was scared and filling the room with that fear, she loved me enough to die for me. That's how things work.
"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.
The stranger's eyes darted to Barb. "Is she one of them?" he asked. "Is she keeping you here against your will? Victoria--"
"Her name is Eliza," snarled Barb.
"Eliza, then," said the man. "It's me. It's Jesse. If something is wrong, you can tell me. I want to help you. I've missed you. We've all missed you."
"Barb?" I whispered.
She nodded, and then she moved.
Humans, by and large, are aware that they're fragile things. They're also smart, an attribute which has served them incredibly well when it comes to dominating their environment, but which turns against them when they're dealing with a predator that works best against smart things. Every ounce of Barb's intelligence was mine to use, and I was twisting it into a tangled mass of protective instinct and utter terror.
Better yet, because they're so fragile, humans have taken steps to make themselves better prepared to fight for their own survival. Barb moved like a striking snake, the side of her hand lashing toward the stranger's throat, and I knew that she'd undergone some of the quaint "self-defense" training so popular with human females.
The stranger dodged. Barb kept pressing forward, and he kept dodging. The concern and confusion that had been rolling off of him was abruptly gone, replaced by a chilly satisfaction that required no translation. I took a step back.
"You're all Victoria to me," said the man, and pulled what looked like a pellet gun from his pocket. He pulled the trigger. There was a soft puffing sound like air being pushed out of a balloon, and Barb stopped fighting. She went still, her face losing its incomprehensible animation, before slumping to the floor, leaving me alone with the stranger.
The chilly satisfaction he exuded was somehow shallow, like there was an artificial floor to his emotions. I took another step back. The satisfaction spiked, deepening into something terrible. I tried to push against it, and found nothing I could grab onto. His thoughts were shielded from me. I couldn't touch his mind.
With Barb unconscious, I couldn't access her memory of a back door--I didn't know how to get out of here. I was trapped.
"She'll be fine," he said. "Not that you care."
He was right: I didn't. If Barb was dead, I could still keep her house, still take advantage of the things she'd left behind. The banks would come eventually--damned humans and their computerized systems for every little thing--but until then, whatever she'd had would be mine, without the added complication of having Barb herself fawning over me every time I turned around.
But Barb wasn't dead. Her mind was still sparking under a thick layer of cottony haze. She might even wake up eventually.
Not fast enough to help me. I needed to stall.
"Who are you?" I demanded. "Why are you here?"
"Because, Victoria, I've been looking for you." He dropped his pellet gun and pulled another from inside his jacket, aiming it squarely at me. His hands were shaking slightly. The shallow pool of his satisfaction deepened again, for an instant, and I saw the way out, if I was quick enough to take it. He wanted to talk. He could have shot me already, if he'd wanted to, but he wanted to talk more than he wanted to see me dead, because he wanted me to understand.
That was his mistake. That was his smartness getting in the way.
"My name's not Victoria," I whispered.
"But you look like her," he said. "You sound like her. You take over the minds of innocent people like her." He nudged Barb's fallen body with his foot. "How long has this one known you? An hour? A day? How long does she think she's known you?"
"We met this afternoon."
"Uh-huh. This is her house, isn't it? You just decided to take it over."
I didn't say anything. It was clear that he knew more about me--about us--than was safe, and I wanted him to reveal exactly how much that was. Answering his questions would allow him to shut down his mind, taking in information without handing any back to me. Forcing him to answer those questions for himself would make him think about what he was saying. I could learn from that.
"Of course you did," he said, disgust coating his words. "That's what you do. You take. You're monsters."
"How did you find me?"
"I pay someone. To watch the traffic cameras for women who look like you."
He thought we were an all-female species. Not uncommon. We have so little physical variation within genders that sometimes people assume we're even more like earth wasps than we actually are. He could have missed a dozen male cuckoo
s while waiting for a shot at me.
"This 'Victoria' hurt you," I said. "That's funny. The memory you showed me was a warm one. I wouldn't expect you to feel so warm about someone who'd hurt you."
"I bought that memory from a witch who'd seen one of your kind at a comic-book convention," he said. "I've never met that Victoria in my life. I'd kill her if I could. But the memory loves her."
"Charming." He was willing to modify his own mind to be a better hunter. That was . . . not good. Humans are so picky about what goes into their heads. They feel like thought can be pure only if it originates with them. That's why they hate us so much. Well, that and our tendency to kill them when it suits us.
Something inside me snapped closed, a circuit I was barely aware of completing itself. The math of the moment said that he was a threat to the hive, with his new technique for hunting us. We might be scattered, we might hate each other's company with a hot passion we rarely felt for anything else, but the continuation of the species was more important than any individual. I took a breath, broadcasting alarm as loudly as I could on all the frequencies my mind knew how to reach. I might die here. I hated that thought. I didn't want the world to exist beyond me. But the cuckoos, the Johrlac . . .
We would endure. No matter what happened, we would endure.
"It got me close to you." He trained the gun more firmly on my chest. "I won't show you Victoria. She'd like that. She'd enjoy knowing she was remembered. So I won't give her the satisfaction. Do you know what's in this gun?"
He was thinking of Halloween, children in masks running down the sidewalk with pillowcases clutched in their hands. It didn't make any sense. I didn't answer him.
"Victoria was my first love."
Of course she was. Humans were almost as infatuated with the idea of love as they were with the idea of their thoughts being their own. I didn't move.
"She said she'd stay with me forever."