thing. They respect the territorial claims of the unspeakable.”
Grandma had reached the porch. She hopped up the sagging steps, bending to pat something on the porch swing, and turned to wave at the rest of us. “Well, come on!” she called.
We came on.
She had the door unlocked and open by the time we reached her, allowing the distinctive dusty smell of a house that had been sealed off for a while to drift out into the afternoon. A ball of brown-and-black fur chittered at us from the porch swing.
“How cute, a raccoon,” said James.
The “raccoon” stood up, uncurling a tail that was easily three times the length of its body, and chittered again before reaching for him with eerily simian hands.
“Not a raccoon,” corrected James, a faint edge of panic in his voice.
“Tailypo,” I said, reaching down to let it sniff my hand. “The American lemur. They’re almost extinct now.”
“But your grandfather always liked them, and he encouraged a colony to form around the house,” said Grandma, from her place just inside the front door. “Lord love the man, sometimes he made me look like the one with common sense in this relationship.”
“I just met her, and I know that’s terrifying,” muttered Sam. I laughed and elbowed him in the side before taking my hand away from the tailypo and following Grandma inside.
Despite the lingering smell of dust and ancient paper, the house was remarkably clean, with none of the cobwebs that had blazoned the Red Angel. The couch had been turned into a tidy makeshift bed, with two reasonably new-looking pillows under a threadbare patchwork comforter. Grandma’s camping supplies were stacked in the corner, out of the room’s main walkway. She perched on the arm of the couch as the rest of our group filed in, James at the rear with the tailypo at his heels. It chittered at him as it ran for the kitchen, and he jumped.
“Don’t mind them,” said Grandma. “There are two males and three females currently living on the property. They have kits every spring and drive them off as soon as they’re properly weaned. We may wind up with the last viable population of tailypo in the country, and all because my husband didn’t have the heart to say ‘no’ when I brought him an injured animal—or when that animal started courting and showing off how nice its situation was.”
“Will they bite us while we’re sleeping?” asked Fern. “Or touch us with their creepy little hands?”
“They don’t bite; we’ve had plenty of time to reach a compromise on living space here, they and I. Anyone who arrives in the company of a family member is safe and welcome. They don’t bite strangers, either. When local teens decide to dare each other to go into the murder house, the tailypo will make a lot of noise and drive them off, but not by biting. They know that biting tends to summon animal control, and any of their children who’ve been taken away by the dogcatchers don’t come back again.”
“That’s a little smarter than I like my weird woodland creatures to be,” commented Cylia. “Are they people-smart?”
“Not quite,” said Grandma. “But they’re smart enough to know when they’ve got a good thing going, and I’m here rarely enough that they basically own this house most of the time. They have for years.” She smiled wistfully after the tailypo.
“Well, this is all nice and portentful, Annie’s Grandma,” said Sam, sitting down on the floor and shifting into his monkey form at the same time, so that he could wrap his tail around my ankle again. “Are you going to be in Buckley long?”
“Just as long as you kids are,” she said. “I was stopping by between bounties. I’ll go when your car’s fixed.”
That couldn’t have been her original plan—my grandmother’s not an oracle, she can’t see the future—but Healy luck is a real thing. It’s not like jink luck, where they can control the outcomes. It’s more like an extreme form of being prone to coincidence. Sometimes it’s almost unbelievable, but I’ve seen it in operation my whole life, and I believe. It would be hard not to. Dad and Aunt Jane have the same thing, in a slightly less extreme form, and then by the time you get to my generation, it’s just a higher-than-normal tendency to run into cryptids every time we turn around.
I’d give a lot to know what kind of things my great-grandmother Fran’s ancestors got up to behind the woodshed, is