deep, slow breath, in through my nose and out through my mouth. The panic receded a bit. I did it again. Then I paused, panic forgotten in the face of a new oddity. I breathed into my cupped hand and sniffed.
Nothing.
Most of the time, Lilu pheromones are virtually undetectable, which makes sense: if people could smell us coming, they’d do a much better job of avoiding us, and hunters like the Covenant of St. George would probably have eradicated us centuries ago. They get stronger when we’re nervous—and I was definitely nervous. That’s part of why I wear so much crappy cologne, and why Elsie has an addiction to small artisanal perfume companies. The Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab has saved a lot of people from becoming embarrassingly enamored of my succubus sister.
When our pheromones are detectable, they smell vaguely sweet and woody, like crushed aconite flowers mixed with sugar. And when I breathed into my hand, I couldn’t smell them at all. There was nothing, not even the chemical tang of the cologne I use to smother them. I might as well have been a baseline human. Which was something I’d dreamed about my entire life but wasn’t something I’d really been hoping would happen during an attempted rescue.
Something was wrong.
“As if the big white room didn’t tell you that part,” I muttered, and started walking. It wasn’t necessarily the right thing to do, but it was something to do, and that made it better than standing around waiting for the invisible floor to drop out from under my feet and send me plummeting into the void. I am not a big fan of plummeting. If I had to commit to a position, I’d probably have to say that I was anti-plummeting.
I kept walking, and a smudge appeared on the horizon. Appeared with the horizon; until there was something to break up the infinite whiteness of it all, there couldn’t really be said to be a horizon. It needed something to define it. I started walking faster.
The smudge began to take geometric shape. It was a half-circle of blackboards, pushed together like a soundstage from a movie about mathematicians trying to save the world. There was a figure there, standing in the middle of the broken ring. I was too far away to make out details, but I could see that they were wearing an ankle-length skirt and a virtually shapeless sweater, the sort of thing that was more warm than fashionable, that would protect the wearer from notice.
I broke into a run.
The closer I got, the more details I could see. The figure became a woman became a cuckoo became Sarah, chalk smudges on her nose and chin, lips drawn down in the so-familiar, so-beloved expression of pensive contemplation that she’d been wearing since we were kids sitting and coloring at the same table.
(Well, I’d been coloring. She’d been doing calculus in crayon, and when we’d finished, Aunt Evelyn had pronounced us both to be amazing artists and hung our projects side-by-side on the refrigerator.)
“Sarah!” I sped up. I wasn’t winded at all, which was, like the lack of my pheromones, probably a bad sign. There was a decent chance I was dead, and this was the afterlife, although if that was the case, my Aunt Mary had way underplayed how much eternity sucked.
Sarah didn’t turn. She kept writing figures on the chalkboard, moving at a steady, unhurried pace, like she had all the time in the world. Which was probably true—if we were dead.
Maybe this was the cuckoo afterlife, and I’d been pulled into it because I’d been touching Sarah when—what? When the other cuckoos caught up with us and forced Elsie to crash the car? But that didn’t make sense. Not only had Elsie still been wearing her anti-telepathy charm, but if Mark had been telling the truth—about anything—the cuckoos were going to want Sarah back. She was their key to escaping this world and this dimension and moving on to someplace that wasn’t prepared for them. Which meant Sarah wasn’t dead. Which meant I wasn’t dead.
It was a bit of a relief to realize that this probably wasn’t the afterlife. I know several ghosts personally—I have two dead aunts who I love a lot—but that doesn’t mean I want to bite the big one before I see the next season of Doctor Who. But if we weren’t dead . . .
“Uh, Sarah? Are we inside your head right now? Because I don’t think I’m supposed to