“For you, Alice, always,” she said. “All we’ve got in the kitchen right now is chicken. That work for everybody?”
“I’m not a vegetarian,” said Sam.
“I like chicken,” chirped Fern.
Grandma looked at Fern and Cylia like she had just figured out that they were with me—which, if she was having a bad day and hadn’t been expecting me to walk in on her, she might not have. She cocked her head slightly to the side.
“Sylph and . . . ?”
“Jink,” said Cylia, turning her attention toward our little group. “Annie and I played roller derby together.”
“And you didn’t bend her luck toward yourself?”
“No, ma’am. Manipulating luck when you have a dozen women on roller skates whipping around a track is a good way to get somebody killed, and I’m not that kind of girl.”
Grandma nodded, looking pleased. “You’ve got a good group here, Annie,” she said.
“Wait until you meet James.”
“He eat chicken?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“Then he’ll fit right in. Come on. We can sit out back.”
“I’d rather stay inside if you don’t mind,” said Sam, gesturing to himself with one long-fingered hand. “It’s uncomfortable to play human for too long, and it’s harder when I’m trying to eat. It’s like trying to hold in a sneeze and swallow at the same time.”
“If you need privacy, there’s the old pool room,” said Cynthia. “As long as you don’t mind some cobwebs.”
“We’re good with spiders,” I said. Sam’s tail squeezed my ankle, acknowledgment of what was essentially an inside joke. The first hint he’d had that I wasn’t just some greenstick girl with no idea about the cryptid world had come when we’d been forced to fight a Jorōgumo—sort of a spider-centaur without arms—to make her stop killing people who just wanted to enjoy the carnival.
Normal people get meet-cutes. I get crime scene cleanup. But I’m used to it, and I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if the world decided it didn’t want to work this way.
“All right,” said Grandma. “Everybody grab your drink.”
* * *
Cynthia hadn’t been kidding about the cobwebs. The “old pool room” clearly got its name from the three pool tables that took up most of the floor space. What remained of their velvet was scratched and torn, making them useless as playing surfaces, although they still did an excellent job of getting in the way. It might as well have been called the “spider storage room.” Fern immediately squeaked in delight and launched herself into the air, spinning as she rose into the cobweb-choked rafters.
Grandma and I stared at her, briefly united in our positions as the only humans in the room.
“Well, she’s going to get a little dusty,” said Grandma.
“No bet,” I said, and touched the tip of my index finger to a strand of webbing, which promptly burnt away in a flash of light and crumbled into ash. “I can’t do the whole room; I’d burn the place down.”
“No need,” she said. “Cynthia must be keeping a thousand pounds of cobweb for a reason. I can’t imagine what it might be, but it’s the only reason I can think of for a health code violation of this magnitude.”
“It’s delicious,” said Cynthia, walking into the room with a Tupperware pan filled with raw chicken and what smelled like barbeque sauce. “So are the spiders.”
“Are you on a diet?” asked Sam, using his tail to swipe the cobwebs out of his hair. “Because I can’t think of any scenario that results in this many spiders where you aren’t on a diet.”
Cynthia laughed and continued onward to the back door, nudging it open with her foot and stepping out onto the back deck. Cylia followed her. The door banged shut, cutting off the sound of their laughter as they got away from our weird family drama.
Given that Fern was still up in the rafters, I was starting to feel a little bit abandoned by my friends.
“Does your boyfriend not understand sexual reproduction?” Grandma pulled a chair out from the nearest table, kicked it twice to scare off any resident spiders, and whipped it around so she could sit on it. Backward. Of course. If anyone’s going to get an emo teen for a grandmother, it’s going to be me.
That’s not fair. I love my grandmother very much, even if I sometimes worry about her stabbing me because I look too much like someone who’s been dead for decades. It’s not her fault that she’s forgotten how to age. At least, I