“I’ll just go update the others,” I said, and opened my door, unbuckling my belt as I swung my legs out of the car and slid from my seat into the crisp autumn air.
We’d been driving for four days, not quite solid, making worse time than we would have if we hadn’t been constantly distracted by the world, and if James had ever been outside the small town where he’d been born. America is a lot bigger than New Gravesend, Maine, and he was seeing it for the first time. If anyone had been primed to actually want to buy tickets to every roadside attraction in existence, it was him.
For the most part, I didn’t begrudge him our winding, weaving track across the country. As I’d expected, on our second day on the road, we had run into someone who’d been hunting for a car exactly like Cylia’s avocado-colored monstrosity for years. He’d been happy to trade us for our new-old travel trailer, which was actual retro, and not something new designed to look like it wasn’t. It was both surprisingly light and surprisingly palatial, with beds for four, a small kitchenette, and a bathroom. He’d thrown in all the accoutrements, and fifteen hundred dollars, all to sweeten the deal. I had no idea what could make a man want the world’s ugliest muscle car that badly, but I was glad he had. It made things a lot easier on the rest of us.
It meant that James was doing the bulk of the driving since he didn’t entirely trust Cylia with his car, and I didn’t drive. Sam did, but he was enjoying the chance to lounge around the trailer in full fūri form, rather than forcing himself to look human while he was behind the wheel. Fern didn’t drive at all, which made sense. When you belong to a species whose response to being threatened involves shedding most of your personal density, driving isn’t the safest activity.
I walked around to the trailer and stepped up onto the bumper, banging three times on the door before swinging it open and letting myself inside. “Knock three times” isn’t the best signal I’ve ever come up with, but since I’ve been riding in the car with James to keep him from stopping at every fruit stand in the Midwest, I didn’t want to institute anything that would slow down getting to the bathroom when we did stop.
Sam was sitting on the trailer’s narrow couch, not having bothered to shift back to artificial humanity. I bumped the door shut with my hip, struggling not to smile sappily at him. I didn’t really succeed.
Sam Taylor is the best accident I’ve ever had. His grandmother, Emery Spenser, is the current owner of the Spenser and Smith Family Carnival, which happened to have been the location of my assignment with the Covenant of St. George, a global organization of monster hunters that would have absolutely loathed every single person on our little road trip of the damned. Most of them would have only considered me and James to actually be people; we’re sorcerers, but that doesn’t actually expel us from the human race, even if I might sometimes wish it did. Fern’s a sylph, Cylia’s a jink, and Sam’s a fūri, although his grandmother’s a human. By all reports, his mother was, too. Fūri are one of the rare cryptid types to be actually genetically compatible with humans. It’s like how sometimes lions and tigers can breed, even though they’re very different species.
Sam’s default form is sort of “hot monkey guy,” although his simian features aren’t as pronounced as that implies. His hair is more like fur—dark, dark brown tipped in a slightly lighter shade; his ears are large and rounded, and his hands and feet are equally dexterous and larger than those of a human man. Most noticeable is his long, prehensile tail, which is strong enough for him to swing from, even when he’s carrying me. Which happens fairly often. He has more muscle density than a human man of similar height and weight, developed and honed by years spent on the flying trapeze. He hates shoes, bananas, and spending too much time around humans. He loves sweatpants, boring English classics, and me.
That last one has been the hardest for me to adjust to. I was always voted the least likely of my generation to fall in love or settle down—and