the math, waiting for the moment when it all comes together and she wakes up with the knowledge like an egg waiting to hatch inside her mind.”
“Meaning if we stay quiet, they won’t realize we’re here,” I said slowly.
“Bingo.”
“What’s to stop you from telling them? We’re outnumbered.”
“There aren’t enough bullets in the world,” Antimony muttered.
“Nothing,” said Mark. “If I want to betray you, I’ll betray you, and you won’t be able to stop me. So I guess this is the part where you either trust me or don’t. If you trust me, we go get your cousin. If you don’t . . .” He let his voice trail off.
His meaning was still perfectly clear. “If we don’t, we lose her,” I said. I unbuckled my seatbelt. “Fuck this.”
The sound of the car door opening was incredibly loud in the eerily silent neighborhood. A few cuckoos looked our way, only to look away again immediately afterward. We weren’t people to them. We didn’t matter.
Mark waited until we were all out of the car before starting toward the house. We fell into step behind him, forming a short, terrified line. My palms were sweating. I wiped them on my jeans. I’d never wished my pheromones were more effective before, but in that moment, I did. If I’d been able to affect cuckoos, I wouldn’t have needed to worry about a thing. I could have just wiped off my cologne and waltzed right into the middle of things, demanding they all love me, knowing that I would be obeyed.
Normally, I would have flinched away from that thought. If consent matters where the body is involved, how much more important is it when it comes to the mind? Normally, I wasn’t walking into a cuckoo hive to retrieve my cousin, who I—who I was coming to hate calling “cousin” more and more, because it implied a blood relationship that wasn’t there, and I had finally allowed myself to admit, to myself and everybody else, that I was completely in love with her.
The cuckoos didn’t move as we approached, or as Mark began leading us through the invisible maze formed by the placement of their bodies. We couldn’t walk in a straight line without bumping into them, but he seemed to know where to put his feet, or at least how to avoid overly attracting their attention. He walked and we followed, swallowing the sound of our own breathing, doing whatever we had to in order to go unnoticed.
Sam was so tense that he’d shifted back into human form, walking barefoot through the grass. Flames flickered around Annie’s fingers, brief and bright and fading out as quickly as they appeared. Only Elsie looked perfectly relaxed, as calm as if she’d been waiting for a sale down at the Sephora. She was also the closest to Mark. I looked a little closer. There was a knife in her hand. If he betrayed us, she was planning to take him down before he could enjoy the fruits of his betrayal. It wouldn’t be enough to save us, but it would be better than nothing.
I appreciate my sister. She can seem like a massive flake, but she’s pragmatic as all hell when she needs to be. People get hung up on the sparkly nails and the neon hair and forget that she’s still a Price. We all are.
I stood up a little straighter as I walked. Yes, we were marching into a cuckoo hive, and yes, there was every chance that one or more of us would die tonight, but we were Prices. This was what we were born to do.
Mark reached the door without incident. He turned to look at the rest of us, pressing one finger to his lips in an exaggerated sign for silence. Then he pushed it open and stepped inside. We followed, still in our straight line, until I pulled the door gently shut behind me. It wouldn’t stop the cuckoos on the lawn from pouring into the house if they got the signal—it would barely even slow them down—but every little bit helps when you’re going up against telepathic killers from another dimension.
Sometimes my life is more like an X-Men comic than I want it to be.
The house had been built along a much more predictable floor plan than the Price compound: the front door deposited us in a little atrium attached to the front hallway, with pegs for our coats and a rack for any muddy shoes. There was a pair