was—and still himself. I hadn’t accidentally erased his mind when I’d used him as a way to increase my processing power. I wasn’t a monster after all. I wanted to punch the air and scream. I still couldn’t move.
Well, that was awkward. If I wasn’t dead, I wanted to be able to move. I tried to focus on my body, looking for some sign that it was still there.
I’d never met a cuckoo ghost. Did cuckoos haunt their own bodies when they died, since they were so far away from the dimension that they came from? Was I going to be stuck haunting my corpse? I didn’t want to haunt my corpse. I wanted to wake up. I wanted to tell Artie I was okay. I wanted to put my arms around him and press my face against his neck and let him hold me up until I stopped shaking.
“If she’s dead, I don’t want her in here. Dead things stink. We can’t have her attracting predators.”
Artie again, but . . . but he was talking about me. How could he say something like that while he was talking about me? We were supposed to be a team. He was supposed to be on my side, even if it meant he was siding with a corpse.
“If she’s not dead, she may know where the hell we are. She was the one leading their stupid ritual. James, grab her chin.”
A hand grasped my head and tilted it upward as Annie stopped speaking. The fingers were cold. James.
The next fingers to touch me were anything but cold. They stroked my cheek, almost hot enough to burn.
Then Annie pulled back and slapped me.
I gasped, opening my eyes. A momentary triumph lanced through me—I could open my eyes. I had eyes to open. I wasn’t dead after all. And then I saw the faces surrounding me, and my triumph died, replaced by confused terror.
Annie, James, Artie, and Mark had formed a loose semicircle in front of the chair where I was sitting. I didn’t even need to check to know that I was tied in place. There was no other way I could have stayed upright—and family protocols are very clear. When you have someone captive and you want them to stay that way, you damn well tie them up. We were in some kind of classroom. There was a window behind them. Through it, I could see several more buildings I recognized from the campus . . .
And a slice of sky the color of ripe cantaloupe, sweet and golden and utterly alien. As if to drive that point home, what looked like a centipede the length of a train undulated through it, legs waving like cilia or rudders to keep it aloft. I stared, too stunned to say anything.
“Well?”
Annie’s tone was harsh, cold—unforgiving. I turned to face her, eyes wide and shocked.
I couldn’t read her face. I didn’t need to. The wariness and distrust were radiating off her like the heat from her fingers.
“What did you do, cuckoo?” she demanded. “Where are we?”
“Oh,” I said, faintly. “Crap.”
Read on for a brand-new InCryptid novella by Seanan McGuire:
FOLLOW THE LADY
“Once you make the carnival your home, you’ll always belong there. The boneyard remembers your stride. The midway remembers the sound of your laughter. Once a carnie, always a carnie.”
—Frances Brown
Passing through Michigan, just crossing the borders into Buckley Township, crammed into the back of a retro travel trailer hitched to a car that’s working well above its weight class
WE WERE BARELY OVER the boundary into Buckley when James’ car began making a horrifying rattling noise, as if the engine had abruptly been replaced by one of those old-fashioned rock tumblers, the kind they sell to elementary schools to teach kids that pebbles can be beautiful. He yelped and pulled over to the side of the road, taking his feet away from the pedals and leaning back in his seat like he was afraid the car was getting ready to explode.
“Is that a good noise?” I asked, half-hopefully.
Slowly, he swiveled around to stare at me like I had just asked the stupidest question in the world’s long history of stupid questions. “No,” he said, in a tone that made it clear he wasn’t humoring me, the way he sometimes did when he tripped over one of my rich veins of unexpected ignorance. “That is a very, very bad noise. That is a noise that means, potentially, we’re not going to be leaving here for