small. It was terrifying. “I thought you were going to leave me.”
“I’m right here,” I said, and awkwardly patted her hair. “I haven’t gone anywhere.”
She pulled back, letting go so she could look at me, and offered me a wan smile. I’m sure mine was just as bad, because we both knew the terrible truth behind my answer: one day, one of us was going to leave. One day, one of us was going to wind up in a situation we couldn’t bluff or bully our way through, and we were going to become one more entry in the litany of the dead that the Aeslin mice recited twice a year, on the summer and winter solstices. That’s what it means to be a Price. We fight. We do our best to win. But eventually, inevitably, we lose.
Sam was still standing behind me, silent and awkward as he watched his girlfriend’s cousins try to comfort one another, and it was hard to swallow the urge to turn around and tell him to run for the hills as fast as he possibly could. Annie loved him and he loved her and if there’s one thing that every Price child learns before we graduate from high school, it’s that love is never enough. Grandma Alice loves Grandpa Thomas, has for more than fifty years, and what did that get her? An endless search through parallel dimensions for a man she can’t let herself admit is dead. And she’s the lucky one. At least she can pretend to have hope. For the rest of us, hope is something that dies quick and messy on the battlefield.
Sarah was fighting her own battle right now, trapped in the white nothingness of her own mind, and there was nothing that any of us could do to help her, and there was nothing that I could do to save her. All we could do was wait . . . and hope that she found a way to win.
I remembered the bleakness in her eyes right before she’d thrust me from her mindscape. Assuming that had been real, and not just a weirdly specific hallucination, I wasn’t as certain as I wanted to be that she was going to come out on top. The cuckoo equations were eating her alive.
Gingerly, I pushed Elsie away from me and climbed to my feet, relieved when my legs didn’t take the opportunity to collapse out from under me. The world spun a little before settling down. Elsie watched me, wary, waiting for the moment when I’d fall.
“You were out for more than half the drive,” she said.
“It didn’t feel that long,” I said. “Come on. Let’s get inside. I’m sure we’re about to be yelled at.”
“I’m not.” Her expression was grim as she stood and brushed the grass off her knees. “Normally, sure, but normally, we haven’t come racing back with a cuckoo in a coma and word of a whole hive behind us. This is war. Lectures about our malfeasance can wait until later.”
“This is a swell family that I’ve decided to attach myself to,” said Sam. “Totally normal. Way better than the carnie life.”
“You said it, not me,” said Elsie, and started for the house, leaving the two of us with no real choice but to follow.
Mom, Aunt Evie, and Uncle Kevin were all in the living room. Dad, Annie, and James were nowhere to be seen. Neither was Sarah. They had probably taken her upstairs to her room, where she could hopefully sleep without fear of the cuckoos finding her. That didn’t make her absence any less distressing.
Mom surged to her feet as soon as she saw us appear in the kitchen doorway, almost knocking Uncle Kevin over in her rush to reach us and wrap her arms around our shoulders, crushing Elsie and me both against her for one long, desperate moment. Then she released us and shoved us backward at the same time. I bumped into Sam. Elsie hit the counter.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Mom snarled. For a moment, I could see why so many cryptids considered her one of the more terrifying members of the family. She mostly doesn’t do field work—that whole “not wanting to wind up dead” thing she has going on, which honestly, I agree with—but when she does, she has absolutely no chill. Aunt Evie will try to empathize. Uncle Kevin will try to negotiate. Mom will just stab first and ask questions never.