My lease was almost up. The Sasquatch whose apartment I’d been using was going to be home soon, which was supposed to be my cue to go back to Oregon (assuming she came back at all, after the message I’d left for her). Mom and Dad would understand that I couldn’t leave while the threat of a purge was hanging over the city—we’ve always done fieldwork in emergency situations, and the Covenant was the next best thing to a natural disaster as far as most cryptids were concerned. But what was going to happen after that?
I came to Manhattan to prove that I could make it as a professional ballroom dancer. Only things didn’t exactly work out that way. I hadn’t managed to win a single major competition; the times I’d placed, it had always been local, and the prize money I’d received barely paid for the cost of my registration. It didn’t touch my costumes, or the hours of studio time I had to beg, borrow, and steal whenever I could. Most people in my tier of the profession supplemented their income teaching classes, but I couldn’t even do that anymore. Trying to be a cocktail waitress and a cryptozoologist took up too much time. Quit bussing tables and I couldn’t afford to eat. Quit taking care of cryptids . . .
If I quit taking care of cryptids, I wouldn’t even know who I was anymore. I pulled a throwing knife out of my shirt without thinking about it, flicking it toward the ceiling. It flew in a satisfyingly straight line, embedding itself in the wood with a soft “thunk” sound. The fact that throwing knives into the air while I was on top of an air mattress was maybe not the smartest idea barely even crossed my mind. I was too busy thinking.
I came to New York to dance. The cryptozoology was supposed to be a sideline, something I did to keep my parents happy while I proved that I could have a career if I wanted one. But somewhere along the way, the proportions got reversed. I started spending more and more time with the cryptids who needed my help, and less and less time fighting my way through the cutthroat world of ballroom dance. My partner, James, had to chase me down for rehearsals. If it weren’t for the fact that he was cutting back his own availability while he prepared for chupacabra mating season, he would probably have talked to me about seeing other partners by now. As it was, I was braced for that conversation.
(James was decidedly gay, and extremely devoted to his husband, Dennis, who put up with more than any human married to a goat-sucker could reasonably be expected to endure. But sexual preference didn’t matter during mating season. Chupacabra never raise their young in the presence of both biological parents—something about it increasing the odds of the pups being eaten before they get old enough to become intelligent. The ways of chupacabra biology are strange, and not for me to understand. Yet.)
I was about to lose my apartment, my partner, and my chance at ever having the kind of career I dreamed of when I was a kid. As a professional dancer, I was on the cusp of failing. At the same time, the Covenant of St. George was in my city, I’d been forced to go into hiding to avoid having them find me, and I had no game plan for getting rid of them. As a cryptozoologist, I wasn’t doing much better. All I could really swear to doing correctly was being a member of my family: too pigheaded to know when I was beat, and too contrary to admit when it was time to run away.
I sat up, tucking the knife I’d been about to throw at the ceiling back into my shirt. That was the answer I’d been looking for. It didn’t matter if my dancing career was over, or if I decided to put on a red wig and become Valerie Pryor full time. No matter what, I was a Price girl. And if there’s one thing no Price girl has ever voluntarily done, it’s back down from a fight.
I’d been living alone long enough that it was weird to need to tell people where I was going. I still tracked Mike down and made sure he knew I was heading for Sarah’s before I left the slaughterhouse. He asked when I’d be back. I barely managed to bite back the urge to tell him that I didn’t have a curfew, and stomped up the stairs to the roof.
The night air was cool and smelled like big city, that heady mix of human bodies, cooling pavement, and a thousand clubs and restaurants venting their private atmospheres into the greater ecosystem of the metropolis. A city the size of Manhattan is like a rain forest or a desert: it has its own ecology, its own secrets, and its own dangers—its own predators.
Good thing that I was one of them.
It didn’t take long for me to reach Sarah’s hotel, even with the necessary detours and slowdowns created by the variable architecture of Manhattan. I maintained a dead run all the way, burning off the barest edge of my frustration.
The Port Hope was the lowest building on its part of the block, being only five stories high. That was useful for my purposes, especially since Sarah was staying on the top floor. I couldn’t jump straight from the roof of the high-rise next to it, so I got out a climbing hook and lowered myself one floor at a time, pausing on the narrow brick lips that marked the base of each new floor to adjust my rope. Once I had a good grip, I’d start down again.
When I finally reached the floor slightly above the roof of the Port Hope, I unhooked the rope and jumped. I hit the roof as gracefully as can be expected for a human girl leaping six feet straight down. The best landings only happen when there’s no one there to see them. (Paradoxically, the same is true for the worst ones. If you’re going to break an ankle or something, you’re probably going to do it when there’s no one around to hear you shouting for help.) I held my crouch for a few seconds, indulging my paranoia as I waited to see whether I’d been followed. No one appeared. I straightened, and walked to the roof door.
It was locked. Naturally. But the faint static that told me I was in the presence of a telepath who knew me was crackling at the back of my mind—Sarah was home. I paused to center myself, trying to clear my head of any useless thoughts. Sarah? Are you there?
Very? Her answer was tinted with a strong feeling of confusion, like she couldn’t figure out where my thoughts were coming from. Understanding—her understanding—washed over me a split second before she added, What are you doing on the roof? How did you even get up there?
I jumped, I replied. Can you come and let me in? The door is locked, and this place is low enough that the only other way for me to get out of here involves rappelling down the side of the hotel. Which wasn’t something I was opposed to under normal circumstances, but it might lead to some awkward questions, especially since I’d be going inside right after I reached the sidewalk.
I’ll be right there, thought Sarah firmly. The feeling of connection died, although the static remained. “Telepath here” is a signal she can’t stop sending, no matter how hard she tries. Much as I love her, I actually find that a little bit reassuring. It proves there’s one thing the cuckoos can’t control, and given how many advantages they have, I appreciate knowing that they’re not perfect.
I’d been waiting on the roof for less than five minutes when the door swung open, revealing Sarah. She was in her usual “I am a normal college student” attire: orange sweater, jeans, and scuffed-up white sneakers. Sarah is a natural Daphne, designed by nature to be boy-bait, but you’d never know it from the way she dresses. I think she’d rather be a Velma. Sadly, nature didn’t give her a vote in the matter.
“You were supposed to call,” Sarah chided me, as she stepped out of the way to let me into the stairwell. “There are these things called doors that normal people use.”
“I’m using a door right now,” I protested, half-laughing.
“Yeah, because I had to let you off the roof,” Sarah shot back.
“And you did a fabulous job of it,” I said, patting her shoulder before I started down the stairs. “I seem to remember a promise of room service.”
“Room service and not freaking out,” Sarah agreed. “Also, Artie may call at some point. He wants to talk to you—and no,” she put her hands up, “I don’t know why, it may be for something totally unrelated.”
“Well, yes. But I think it’s a little more likely that he wants to yell
at me, don’t you?”
“Probably,” Sarah agreed.
We were still laughing when I opened the door at the bottom of the stairs, stepped out, and found myself nose-to-nose with Margaret Healy. I’d never seen her up close before. I didn’t need to, because there was no one else she could have been. This woman was family.
Her hair was the same shade of chestnut-verging-on-red as my sister Antimony’s. She still had it pulled it into a ponytail, showing the cheekbones we had inherited from our mutual ancestors. Her eyes were a clear shade of hazel—Antimony’s eyes are blue, like mine—but aside from that, Margaret could have been mistaken for my sister.
She blinked at me. I blinked at her. Sarah, still laughing, crowded up behind me. “Why are you just standing he—oh.” Her laughter died like a switch had been flipped, replaced by a look of utter bafflement. “Oh. Hello.” Verity, I didn’t know you had company. Why can’t I see her?
There was no sign in her voice that she recognized Margaret as a Healy. That, sadly, made sense: cuckoos recognize people by thought, not by appearance. To her, all humans look essentially the same. She can tell races, genders, hair colors, and that’s about it.
“Hello,” said Margaret. Her accent was British. She looked past us to the stairs. “Is the roof of this hotel a hopping night spot, then?”
“No, we’re just stargazers,” I said, taking hold of Sarah’s arm and tugging her with me as I stepped out of the stairwell, into the hall. I kept my eyes on Margaret, and kept a smile plastered across my face. If Sarah couldn’t “see” her, she must have been wearing some sort of telepathy blocker. Not a good sign. “I wanted to show Sandy here the Pleiades.”
Sarah looked even more confused but nodded enthusiastically, saying, “They were shiny.”
I shot her a sharp look. I didn’t need to bother. Margaret was nodding in time with Sarah. There was a faintly glazed look in her eyes. Sarah was freaking out in her own quiet way, and that meant that her natural camouflage was kicking in. Anti-telepathy charm or not, it’s hard to counter a cuckoo who’s actively putting the whammy on you, and Sarah’s survival depended on Margaret accepting her as a natural part of the setting.
It seemed to be working, thank God. If Sarah said she’d been looking at stars well, then, she must have been looking at stars. My backpack was large enough to hold a telescope. The story made total sense.
“Is there anyone else up there?” asked Margaret.
“No,” I said.
“Then I think I’ll give these stars a look myself. Thank you for letting me know they were good tonight.” Margaret stepped into the stairwell, closing the door behind her, and Sarah and I were alone.
I made a small squeaking noise in the back of my throat and started towing Sarah down the hall toward her room.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“No talking,” I said. “This is walking time, not talking time.”
Sarah, wisely, shut up until we reached her suite, where she unlocked the door and let us both inside. I followed her inside. Then I shut the door, locked the deadbolt, and resisted the urge—barely—to shove a chair under the knob. Sarah watched this whole process, her bewildered expression deepening.
“Verity, who was that woman? Why couldn’t I see her properly?”
“That was Margaret Healy.” What was she doing at the Port Hope? There are hundreds of hotels in Manhattan, maybe even thousands. So why would the Covenant pick this one? They weren’t going to be interested in the math museum. So why—
Unless someone told them I might be here. Someone like Dominic De Luca, who had been to the Port Hope before, and who had been around Sarah often enough that he might have been able to remember the location, even if he forgot why it was important. I felt myself go cold. Here, then: this was what I’d been waiting for. He’d betrayed us. He was the enemy. I didn’t have to feel conflicted anymore.
So why didn’t that help?
“The brunette?” asked Sarah, gaping. “She’s a Healy?”
“Yeah.” If I could recognize Margaret as a relative, it was only a matter of time before she was going to start thinking that I looked oddly familiar. Like a picture she’d seen once in a history book, next to a paragraph titled “Traitor.”
“But . . . but what’s she doing?”
“I don’t know, Sarah. Probably assessing the roof for tactical defense purposes.” Which meant—assuming she had any training at all, which she must, or they wouldn’t have sent her—that Margaret was going to notice the scuffs in the gravel that marked the place where I’d hit the roof from above. She’d be able to read those marks like a hunter reading a deer’s tracks in the wood. Something humanoid had jumped from the next building over; it had recovered without injury; it had gotten off the roof somehow. And she’d encountered two women coming out of the stairwell.
Sarah’s cuckoo camouflage might slow Margaret down for a little while, make her second-guess what she was thinking and try to come up with other reasons for us to have been up there, but that couldn’t work forever. Cuckoos work best when they stay near their targets, and we’d moved away from Margaret as quickly as we could. Factor in Margaret’s anti-telepathy charm, and I had no idea how long she’d be confused.
“What do we do now?”
“Get your things. We’re getting you out of here.”
Sarah’s eyes widened. “But I just got here.”
“She saw me!” I didn’t realize I was going to shout until it was too late to stop myself. Sarah took a step back. She didn’t actually go pale—her blood isn’t red, and her biology doesn’t support things like blanching or blushing—but she may as well have; her expression told me how frightened she was. I didn’t stop. “Even if she forgets about you, she saw me, she’s going to know that there’s something wrong here! You know how badly the Covenant wants to get their hands on a cuckoo. Do you want it to be you, Sarah? Because I don’t!”
“Verity, you’re scaring me,” she whispered.
“I don’t care! You should be scared! We have to leave, Sarah, and we have to leave now, or we’re not going to be leaving at all.”
Sarah stared at me for a long moment. Then, in a small, tight voice, she said, “I’ll go pack.” She wheeled and stomped off toward her room. It was more fear than anger. I didn’t care either way. As long as I got her out of here . . .
The idea of what might happen if I didn’t was unthinkable, and so I did my best not to think it.
The existence of the cuckoos wasn’t proven until my great-grandfather went to Colorado to look into the movement of a local hive of Apraxis wasps. Before that, there had been rumors, but never any hard proof. One of the last communications my grandfather sent to the Covenant before cutting off all ties was a letter describing everything we knew about the cuckoos. Warning people about them was more important than hiding information from the Covenant. That’s how dangerous we thought they were, and how dangerous we still think they are.
According to our contacts in Europe, the Covenant has been trying to get their hands on a cuckoo for research purposes ever since. It’s one of those things that causes a lot of ethical debate at home, since we have a shoot on sight order on most cuckoos, but they’re still sapient beings. They deserve better than the Covenant’s idea of “study.” If Margaret figured out who I was, and what Sarah was, she could kill two birds with one stone—take out a member of the traitorous branch of the family tree, and finally get a cuckoo they could take apart at their leisure. They’d just need to keep her unconscious. Cuckoos can only scramble your head when they’re awake.
All the discussions I’d had about the danger of staying in New York had included warnings about keeping Sarah safe, and endless reassurances that of course I wouldn’t let anything happen to her; of course she would be fine. She was a cuckoo. What was going to hurt her?
What, if not a Healy in the same hotel, wi
th the potential to recognize her for what she was? Dad used to joke about Healy family luck, how sometimes it was good and sometimes it was bad, but it was always interesting. Margaret Healy clearly had that kind of luck, and she had it in spades.
Sarah emerged from her bedroom with a small suitcase in one hand and an overstuffed backpack in the other. “Let me get my laptops and my homework from the table, and we can go,” she said. She didn’t sound happy. I didn’t blame her. We’d been planning a relaxing evening, out of the line of fire. Having the fight follow me to her door was never the idea. “Where are we going?”
“You can stay with the rest of us.” The dragons weren’t going to be thrilled about me turning their old Nest into the new Grand Central Station, but with as much as we were paying them, they could cope.
“Oh, goody. Slumber party of the damned.” Sarah started for the dining room. (One thing about her taste in hotel rooms: she never gets anything smaller than a suite, and she’s never had a suite smaller than a good apartment. It seems extravagant, and maybe it is, a little, but it’s really one more precaution against having her brain come melting out of her ears in the middle of the night. Living as a telepath in a non-telepathic society was definitely not all wine and roses.)
Someone knocked on the door. We both turned.
“Did you order room service before I got here?” I asked, instinctively dropping to a whisper. I realized only after I spoke that I probably should have done it telepathically.