their one true love.”
“That’s good,” I said uneasily.
“The indents on the side were definitely made by a truck—it’s not that I don’t believe you, Sarah, it’s just that it’s important to verify that sort of thing directly, to be sure we haven’t missed anything.”
I nodded. “Of course.”
“There was no sign of the vehicle or the driver. They really must have hit you and then kept on going. Elsie said you didn’t get any warning before the accident?”
“No, none.” I shook my head. “They came out of nowhere. I should have heard the driver’s thoughts, even if they were drunk or drugged—I should have had something to tell me what was about to happen. The fact that I didn’t hear anything before the impact means they must have been being masked somehow. An anti-telepathy charm, maybe—although that wouldn’t be very safe, since wearing one of those is like shutting myself in a lead box—or the other cuckoo was the one driving, and she was pulling herself way, way back.”
“The other cuckoo wasn’t driving,” said Jane. “She wasn’t even in the car.”
I blinked. “How do you know?”
“Because we found her body.”
* * *
Aunt Jane drove the sort of solid, sensible, mid-sized minivan beloved by soccer moms and field biologists the world over. She could pack literally hundreds of pounds of specimens into that thing, concealing them all in brightly colored plastic tubs labeled things like “PTA supplies” and “recycling.” I’ve seen her get pulled over, produce a plate of fresh peppermint brownies seemingly out of thin air, and charm the police into waving her on her way. She calls it her “weaponized white woman” routine, and it’s a calculated ruse she’s taken everywhere from cryptid extraction runs to political protests, where she spends a lot of time putting herself between the authorities and anyone she deems to be more vulnerable. Which is everyone.
Mom once said that everybody on the Price side of the family has a savior complex bred into their bones. Aunt Jane got it, too. She just does a better job than some of making it look accidental.
We stood around the open back hatch of the minivan, staring in silence at the body of the cuckoo from the airport. It had been concealed behind the first row of totes, tucked safely away from prying eyes. Now . . .
In life, she’d been a threat. As a shadow in Artie’s mind, she’d been an enemy. Now, here and real and dead and gone, she just looked . . . small.
“I guess we know what you’d look like as a corpse,” said Elsie, in a strangled voice. “I don’t like it.”
“I don’t like it either,” I said. The sutures Evie had put into the wound on my forehead were close and tight and mostly covered by my bangs, but they still ached. It didn’t matter that they weren’t going to leave a scar. That didn’t take the pain away.
“I’m going to go check on Artie,” Elsie said, and fled.
The cuckoo didn’t have any visible injuries. Her limbs were straight, and her face was undamaged. I could see why Jane was so sure that she hadn’t been in the other vehicle. With as badly as Artie’s car had been smashed in, there was no way the passengers in the truck had gotten away without at least a few bumps and bruises. Cuckoos may not have the pretty colors humans do, but there should have been scratches, scrapes—something. Not just this pristine nothingness.
A trickle of what looked like snot was dried on her upper lip and crusted around both nostrils. I leaned closer. There was a faint blue undertone to the film. Not mucus, then: blood.
As if she were the telepath, not me, Evie leaned forward and pried one of the cuckoo’s eyes open. “Look at this,” she said.
We looked.
Cuckoos have blue eyes. It’s one of the few places where we have any variation in our appearances, because when I say “blue” I mean any one of a dozen shades. This one’s eyes had been a few shades lighter than mine, more ice than morning sky. They still were . . . but her pupils had contracted to pinpricks of black against the blue, and the edges of her irises were foggy, like they’d frosted over, or been burned.
“What the hell happened here?” asked Kevin.
“I think she had the cuckoo equivalent of an aneurysm, is what happened,” said Jane. She looked straight at me as she asked, “Is there anything you want to tell