to do that.”
“Maybe she won’t have to,” said Cylia. “That’s a lady with a lot of luck braided all around her. Good and bad mixed together until even I couldn’t pull them apart.”
“Healy family luck is funky,” I said.
“It didn’t look entirely human,” said Cylia.
“Like I said, it’s funky.” I shook my head, all too aware of the weight of the mice clinging to my neck. “She’ll be fine, or she won’t. Either way, I’m not going to be the person who tries to stop her. I like her liking me.”
James was looking increasingly alarmed. I flashed him a narrow smile.
“She’d never hurt me. Once the mice formalize your adoption, she’d never hurt you, either. The colony would never forgive her, and she values their good opinion more than she cares about anything human.”
“Um,” said Sam.
“Anything else intelligent,” I corrected. “Now come on, let’s all find places to sleep here in the big, creepy house.”
* * *
Sam and I wound up upstairs, in a bedroom painted the exact color of raw steak. The bed was big enough for both of us, and there wasn’t much dust; it was fine.
The mice bedded down in the chest at the foot of the mattress. Sam climbed in next to me, looping an arm around my waist and pulling me close. “When are you going to call your folks?” he asked.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll use the phone down at the Red Angel, and I said it in front of the mice. That makes it basically a promise.”
A soft cheer rose from the chest. I rolled my eyes, safe in the knowledge that no one could see it.
“You’re sure your parents aren’t going to be mad?”
“About what? They know why I had to go into hiding. Mork and Mindy will have confirmed everything that happened, and the first rule of the family is that you don’t endanger the family. Save yourself, then save everyone else, and that’s exactly what I did. I followed the rules.”
“I meant about you coming home with a bunch of weirdoes.”
“Cylia and Fern are from Portland. They’re going to go back to their lives, although they’re basically family now—they dropped everything to make sure I was okay, and that’s too big a gesture to forget because the road trip is over. Or do you mean ‘are they going to be mad that I came home with a boyfriend’?” I rolled over, so that we were facing each other in the bed. Sam was looking at me with sincere worry in his eyes. I reached up and ran my fingers through the fur that crowned his cheek. “A boyfriend who isn’t human?”
He nodded silently, biting his lip.
“They’re going to love you, because I love you, and they’re smart enough to know that I don’t give my love away for nothing. I think they’d given up on the idea of me ever falling in love with anything that wasn’t a weapon. They’re going to adore you, and you’d better tread carefully, or the mice will adopt you, too, and once that happens, there’s no getting away from this circus act. All right?”
Sam nodded, still looking unsure, so I leaned forward and kissed him. The mice cheered again, louder this time. I grinned. “Or maybe it’s too late for you already,” I said.
“It’s been too late for me for a long time now,” he said. This time he kissed me, and we didn’t let the cheering of the mice distract us. It had been a long day, after all. We deserved a little time to ourselves.
Fern, Cylia, and James were all asleep downstairs. Tomorrow, we’d be back in a little travel trailer with no privacy, bound for Portland to deliver my grandmother’s mice and face the music for my long absence. Tomorrow, I would call my parents.
But tonight, there was nowhere else in the world I’d rather be.
Price Family Field Guide to the Cryptids of North America
Updated and Expanded Edition
Aeslin mice (Apodemus sapiens). Sapient, rodentlike cryptids which present as near-identical to non-cryptid field mice. Aeslin mice crave religion, and will attach themselves to “divine figures” selected virtually at random when a new colony is created. They possess perfect recall; each colony maintains a detailed oral history going back to its inception. Origins unknown.
Basilisk (Procompsognathus basilisk). Venomous, feathered saurians approximately the size of a large chicken. This would be bad enough, but thanks to a quirk of evolution, the gaze of a basilisk causes petrification, turning living flesh to stone. Basilisks are not native