life and family, unable to keep straight whether something had happened to my sister or her mother. It made our relatively rare family dinners exciting.
“Uh, Annie?” said Sam. “This is your grandmother? How is that possible? She looks younger than you do.” Then he winced, like I was going to pull some stereotypical “girl in a sitcom” routine and get angry at him for telling the truth.
My grandmother was born in 1938, making her fifty-five years older than me. Despite that reality of our family tree, she looked like she was in her early twenties at the absolute most, and probably a few years younger than I was. That made her collection of tattoos, which completely spanned the left side of her body, all the more impressive; if her apparent age had been accurate, she would have needed to start the process when she was still in her teens, and some skilled tattoo artists were probably going to go to prison.
“It’s complicated,” I said. “Yes, this is my grandmother, Alice Price-Healy, originally of Buckley Township, Michigan. Grandma, this is my boyfriend, Sam Taylor. He’s a fūri.”
“I can see that,” said Grandma. “Honestly, him being a fūri is a lot less surprising than him existing at all. When you say ‘boyfriend,’ you mean . . . ?”
“I mean we’re dating.” I reached over and took Sam’s hand. His tail snaked around my ankle a beat later, like me touching him in front of my grandmother was permission for him to touch me back.
“Okay,” said Grandma, and took a swig from her beer. “Well, you’re a brave man, Sam Taylor. I should buy you a drink. Do you want a drink?”
“I asked for a hard cider,” he said. “I think I need a drink at this point, um, Annie’s grandmother. The terrifying, infamous, ex-Covenant monster hunter.”
“That’s a filthy lie,” said Grandma. “I was never a member of the Covenant. They wouldn’t have had me even if I’d wanted to join, on account of how my grandparents were filthy traitors to their cause and my mother was a carnie brat.”
“What a coincidence,” said Sam. “So am I!”
“A filthy traitor or a carnie brat?” asked Grandma.
“We met at his family’s carnival,” I said, desperate to seize control of the conversation back from my grandmother before she could decide that my boyfriend would make a lovely rug. Cynthia slid a bottle of pear cider down the bar. I grabbed it and thrust it at Sam. “He does the flying trapeze. We were partners for a little while before I had to burn the place down so we could get away from the Covenant handlers who thought I was working for them.”
“Oh, you have had a hard time, haven’t you?” Grandma shook her head. “I’m so sorry we sent you into that situation. I should never have agreed to it. But after your sister’s little indiscretion, it seemed like the best way to clear things up . . .”
“You mean after Verity declared war on the Covenant of St. George on live television? That ‘little indiscretion’?” I asked, not quite able to keep the disbelief out of my voice. My family has always downplayed Verity’s errors, leaving me and Alex to clean up her messes. It’s never great when it’s obvious who the family favorite is, and none of us had ever had any question.
“Everyone makes mistakes, Antimony,” said my grandmother. “If we’re lucky, they turn out to be mistakes that we can learn from and talk about later. For example, if you burned down a carnival, you’ve learned a lot about fire since leaving home.”
“Yeah,” I said. “About that.” I extended one hand toward her as balls of flame appeared above my fingertips, each about the size of a marble, ranging in brightness from lambent white to sullen red. “I’ve learned a lot about fire.”
For possibly the first time in my life, I beheld the rare sight of my grandmother struck completely speechless. I lowered my hand. She took another swig from her beer.
“Well, I always wondered when that was going to crop up again,” she said. “You kids hungry?”
“I could eat,” I allowed slowly. “But our friend James is with the car—we’re having mechanical problems—and we told him to meet us here. I’ll have to call him if we’re going somewhere else.”
“Oh, there’s no need for that,” said Grandma. “Cynthia’s always happy to have an excuse to fire up the barbeque, aren’t you, Cynthia?” She twisted around to look at the bartender, who sighed