“Wait,” I said. They stopped, looking at me. “What’s . . . what’s going to happen to her now?”
“She swore by the Ocean Lady that no harm would come to you while you were in her company,” said Rose. “Maybe she shouldn’t have done that. What comes next is of her own creation.”
Emily was screaming when the three of them disappeared, leaving the rest of us to stare silently at the place where they had been.
Megan spoke first.
“Fuck this,” she said. “I’m going back to the hospital and finish my residency.”
Epilogue
“Well, hell. Now what?”
–Enid Healy
A shitty company apartment five miles outside of Lakeland, Florida
Three days later
“YOU’RE SURE YOU WON’T change your mind?” asked Sophie.
I looked at the keys in the palm of my hand. They were little and rusty, worn smooth by dozens of hands. They were mine. They were Melody West’s. The door they unlocked was small and safe and far from the Covenant of St. George, and while I had lived behind it, I had been small and safe, too.
“I’m sure,” I said, and held them out to her with a quick, sad smile. “Better not ask again. People will think you’re showing favoritism.”
“I can’t show favoritism,” she said. “You don’t work here anymore.” Then, making no effort at all to hide her tears, she reached out and pulled me into a hug.
I let her. She’d earned it. And as I hugged her back, I couldn’t help feeling like I’d earned it a little bit, too.
When we pulled away from each other, Sophie kept my hands and said, seriously, “You promise me you’re not going back to him. You promise.”
“I do,” I said. Not turning, I gestured to the car waiting by the sidewalk, avocado green and already packed with the strangest road trip buddies I would ever have. Fern was perched on the roof, light as a feather. Cylia was standing next to the driver’s side door, waiting for me. Sam . . .
Sam was on the sidewalk, and I knew that if I turned, he’d be smiling, glad to go anywhere with me, as long as I didn’t send him away again.
Sophie glanced over my shoulder, and she saw that smile. I know she did, because she squeezed my hands, leaned in a little closer, and said, “I like this one. Take care of him.”
“I will,” I said.
Then she let me go, and I turned, and walked away.
Colin and Joshua were officially missing. I didn’t know what happened to their weird statues, and I didn’t want to. The disaster in Deep-Down had accomplished the unthinkable, closing all of Lowryland for a week while a full safety review was conducted and the rides were repaired. It was probably costing the company millions in lost revenue and bad publicity. Guess without the cabal redistributing things, their luck had finally run out. That was okay. If Lowry Entertainment could survive the dry spell, their luck would rebalance, and they’d endure. There’s always room in the world for a little more magic.
There was room in me for a lot more magic. The fire in my fingers was officially gone, ceded to the crossroads as collateral against whatever they were going to ask for. I was willing to wait to find out what that was. Mary was right about one thing: whatever the crossroads asked of me was probably going to be more than I was willing to pay.
Only probably. As I looked at Sam, standing there, waiting for me, alive, I was fairly sure that there was no price I wouldn’t have been willing to pay for the opportunity to be here.
“Got everything?” he asked.
I hefted my backpack. “Everything worth taking,” I said.
“Got any idea where we’re going?”
“Cylia’s driving,” I said. “She’ll get us where we need to be.”
“And on that note, get in, losers,” said Cylia. “I want to be in South Carolina before morning.”
“What’s in South Carolina?” asked Fern.
Cylia grinned. “I have no idea, but it’s on the way to Maine.”
Fern slid off the roof and into the front passenger seat, leaving me to fold myself into the backseat with Sam. Cylia turned the air-conditioning on. Sam squirmed into a hoodie that would have been way too warm to wear outside, and as soon as the hood was up, I felt his tail wrap around my ankle. Fern was happily singing along to some piece of crossover pop country fluff, and as I let my head droop to rest against Sam’s shoulder and closed my eyes, I knew one thing for certain:
Wherever we went next, I was better off in the company of friends.
The road rolled by under our wheels, and I drifted slowly off to sleep, finally safe, finally secure, and finally a little bit closer to home.
Read on for a brand-new Aeslin Mice novella by Seanan McGuire:
THE RECITATION OF THE MOST HOLY AND HARROWING PILGRIMAGE OF MINDY AND ALSO MORK
“Remember who we were. Remember who we are. Remember that one day, all of this will change. The gods provide. All else is up to us.”
—from the Aeslin litany of Faiths Forsaken and Yet to Come.
The parking garage of the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport
Two weeks and three days after the departure of the Precise Priestess, may her blades fly ever true
* * *
SAM
Sam looked at the mice standing proudly naked on his palm, and wondered what the hell Annie had been thinking, telling him to bring them here. They were so small. They could speak English and pick locks. They were distressingly adept at both stealing and figuring out the password on his phone, enough so that he’d had to disable in-app purchases in Candy Crush. But they were still mice, and they were still so small.
“You’re sure about this,” he said. “If you wanted to stay with me and Grandma, you could. We’re going to be wintering in Indiana, in one of the permanent boneyards. I could put out some calls, find someone we can trust who could get you to the Campbells—”
“Peace,” squeaked the smaller of the two mice. It was sleek and brown and getting fat a little faster than Sam thought mice were supposed to get fat, even with the way they kept sneaking into the cheese supply. He was pretty sure there were going to be more mice soon, and oh, God, was he sending a pregnant mouse off to get stepped on by some TSA asshole?
Annie was going to kill him.
“Peace,” repeated the mouse. “We have made Pilgrimages before. They are a rare honor. We will be Tested as so few of our generation have been, and when we are Triumphant, none among the colony will question the Sincerity of my mate, nor the provenance of the New Rituals we carry.”
Sam rubbed his forehead with his free hand and tried to figure out when his life had gone quite this far sideways. It was probably Annie’s fault. Everything seemed to be, anymore. “How do you decide which words to capitalize when you’re talking? It’s weird. I’m not sure there’s a grammar for that.”
The two mice exchanged a long-suffering look. Apparently, he wasn’t the first to ask. The smaller one—Mindy—pushed her whiskers forward, and said, “If you were of the colony, you would understand.”
“If I were of the colony, I’d be too small to carry you.”
“Balance is inevitable, even when it is Undesired,” said Mindy. She stepped forward, putting a paw on the pad of his thumb. It was probably meant to be a reassuring gesture. All it did was drive home the difference in their sizes.
They were going to die. Annie’s mice were going to die, and Annie was probably going to die, and with his luck, she wasn’t going to take after her dead aunt. She’d just be gone, forever, and he’d never get to tell her he was sorry.
“We will be Careful,” said Mindy solemnly. “We will be Cautious. We will be all the things one must be when undertaking a Holy Mission. We must. The colony needs to know what only we can say, and the Lost Ones must be brought home.”
“Does that include Annie?”
The question escaped him before he could think better of it.
Mindy pushed her whiskers forward again: the Aeslin answer to a smile. “The Precise Priestess is not Lost. She is merely Missing. When she returns to us, in glory, we will be rewarded for our Faith. Now put us down. We have very far to go.”
Reluctantly, Sam bent and placed his hand against the cool concrete. The mice scampered from his palm, heading for the nearest drainpipe. In a few seconds, they would be gone.
“Wait!” he cried.
The mice stopped, looking back over their shoulders at him.
Feeling awkward, feeling confined by his artificially human skin and wishing he had a tail that he could twine around his ankles, Sam asked, “How can you be so sure that she’s okay?”
“We believe in her,” said Mindy. “You should do the same.”
Then they were gone, leaving Sam to search for any unnecessary capital letters in their parting statement. He couldn’t find them.
Shoulders slumped, he started for the car. Better not to hang out here any longer than he had to. Going to jail would probably interfere with his “track your missing girlfriend across the country whether she wants you to or not” plans for the weekend.
Five dollars to pay for parking and he was gone, heading back to the carnival, leaving the mice behind. Hopefully their gods would help them, because if they got killed, Annie was going to have his head.
Although at least then, he’d know where she was.
Head filled with dark thoughts of missing girlfriends and Covenant strike teams, Sam Taylor drove on.
* * *
MINDY
Humans do not often consider the scale of their works. They might take more care to block access to them, if they did. Or they might not. Who can know the thoughts of humankind? Not us, who merely scamper around the fringes, cleaving to our gods and hoping for enlightenment. Not even such as the Heartless Ones, who pluck thoughts from the air as we pluck berries from the vine, can fully understand the thinking of the humans. And so:
The drainpipe which had been left exposed in the parking garage was not blocked or barred in any way. It provided a clear highway for such ordinary mice and rats as might wish entrance to the good things inside the airport, and we kept our wits about us, my mate and I, as we raced along its length with our whiskers bristled and our teeth ready. We ran bereft of all adornment, that any who saw us might take us for those same ordinary mice, and I felt a small pang of regret for the many good things we had been forced to leave with Samuel Taylor, suitor to the Precise Priestess, whose godhood was not yet guaranteed, but which could safely now be assumed.
He would make a fine, strong god, and a fine, strong protector for the Precise Priestess. She would do well, so long as she was standing by his side. Our Priestesses are rarely in need of rescue, but neither are they frequently willing to accept help from outside the bounds of family. It is an understandable form of self-restriction—few who are not family have ever proven themselves to be worth trusting—but we would rather they had aid.
My mate, the one the Precise Priestess referred to as “Mork,” ran by my side. He moved carefully, staying close enough that I could feel his presence, not so close that he could hamper or hinder me. Of the two of us, he was the one more inclined to agree with Samuel Taylor, who thought we should have remained hidden and safe until they could find a way to reunite us with the kin of our gods.
Mork had been too long among the halls of the unbelievers, born and raised in exile, paying each day for the sins of his parents and forbearers. The ways of true faith were as yet unfamiliar to him. I could run in certainty, knowing the gods would claim and keep me, knowing that if I should fall, they would be waiting to raise me up into the heavens. He had yet to behold the divinity of any save for the Precise Priestess herself. In her absence, his faith was flagging.
It would be a problem, if our journey lasted too long. Aeslin have faith. It is what distinguishes us from all other creatures of the forest and field, what allows us to endure in the face of all adversity. We are rational creatures: we know our faith is not always, in and of itself, rational. But when we are threatened, when we are called upon to do things no ordinary mouse could do, we hold to that faith to bolster us up.
There is a litany, recited in secret, when the family who watches over us and is watched over in turn is sleeping and unaware. We remember the faiths we have forsaken, the beliefs we have left behind in our quest to survive. We remember the old gods, the fallen gods, the blasphemous and broken gods. We remember who we were, before we came to the good safety of the Kindly Priestess and her descendants. We must, for to forget would be to become less than Aeslin, and more—and worse—to lose the gratitude we must each bear, each and every day, for the gods who keep us now.
We love them. We believe in them. We will die for them and consider our brief lives well-spent, if only it makes them smile for a moment in our memory. We do what we must do, and we have no regrets. Those of us who are lost in service are never truly lost. They await us in the Halls of Heaven.
Mork, though . . . if his faith was wavering, I did not know whether death would carry him to those Halls, or whether he would find the holy light of some other object, some other ideal. I could not let myself be swayed from my devotion, not even for the father of the pups stirring in my belly. If he lost the way, he would be lost to me, and to his descendants, for all of time.
I stopped. Mork stopped with me, ears flat, eyes pleading.
“We must run,” he said. “There may be predators here.”
“I smell no such things, nor poisons, nor other dangers,” I said. “I must pray.”
Our names are things of scent and gesture, intended to be exchanged during catechism and ritual without disruption of the rites at hand. As I must recite this, I shall use the names given to us by the Precise Priestess, for they are meant to be spoken aloud, as part and parcel to the moment.
Mork wrung his paws and twitched his tail and said, “Prayer can wait. We must run.”
“The running will go better and more smoothly if you pray with me.” I looked at him gravely, hoping he would see the necessity in my actions. “Please. Let us remain united in our faith.”
His faith was weaker than mine, more frayed, and yet he was Aeslin: the lure of veneration was more than he could resist. He nodded, whiskers bristling.
“We will pray,” he said. “But we will pray quickly.”
“Yes,” I agreed, and bowed my head, and began: “When first the Precise Priestess was brought before us, She was red of cheek and furious of voice, and those who had been pledged into Her service before even Her mother, the Thoughtful Priestess, knew of her approach rejoiced, for they had a new Priestess to serve in glory—”
Mork echoed what words he could, and we huddled together in the drain that would lead us into the airport, and we had so far yet to go, with only our faith to protect us.
* * *
SAM
The first thing Sam saw when he reached the motel currently serving as a temporary home to the carnival folks was almost enough to make him turn around and keep on driving, choosing discretion as the better part of valor:
His grandmother, Emery Spenser, standing in front of the ice machine with her arms folded and a sour expression on her face. There was no way she could have known when he was going to get back, especially since he hadn’t exactly told her he was going. Which meant she’d been standing there for a while. Maybe for hours.
Which meant he was a dead man.
“At least I know there’s life after death,” he muttered, pulling into the first open spot. He was pretty sure Annie wouldn’t want to fool around once he was a dead aunt. But he knew Mary could touch stuff, so maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. It wasn’t like he had a choice, seeing as how his grandmother was about to murder him.
He was tired. The scrape on his f
orehead where the bullet had bounced off still hurt, and maybe it was vain of him, but every time it ached, he worried about whether it was going to scar, which just seemed to make it ache more. He’d been holding it together and human-looking for hours, and all he wanted to do was go to his room, relax, and take a shower long enough to qualify as a drought risk. Was that so much to ask?
Apparently. Because the second he stopped the engine his grandmother came stalking toward him, shoulders set and hands clenched in a way he knew meant trouble. Well, maybe she’d just call him “Samuel” instead of Sam, and—
“Samuel,” she said, through gritted teeth. “Coleridge. Taylor.”
She was using his middle name. He was screwed. “Uh, hi, Grandma,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. At least being yelled at would make it easier to stay tense and hence human. “How’s things?”
“You disappeared,” she spat. “I thought you were dead. Where the hell have you been?”
“Gosh.” He took an exaggerated look at the parking lot around them. Why was he spending so much time in parking lots? It wasn’t fair. Not even a little bit. “This sure is a big, exposed, public place. We should totally discuss family business here.”
Emery narrowed her eyes. “You think I won’t raise my voice to you in private, young man?”
“No, Grandma, I know you’ll raise your voice to me in private, but at least in private, I’ll feel comfortable raising my voice back.” There had been a few incidents, when he was younger, times when his anger had outweighed his ability to focus on the small flexion that kept him looking like a human being and not like a fūri.