My Aunt Jane loves me. I sometimes think she doesn’t want to, but there’s no questioning her affection. I’m part of her family. More importantly, I’m her reclusive son’s best friend. And none of that matters, because she grew up surrounded by people who not only knew what cuckoos were, they knew precisely why we shouldn’t be—couldn’t be—trusted. We’re natural predators who prefer the simplicity of a hunt where everyone involved is sapient. We destroy things for fun. She wasn’t the Price sibling who’d married a cuckoo’s daughter and been forced to admit that maybe there was more to us than a knife in the dark and a mind twisting inward on itself. She could love and fear and hate me all at the same time.
It was sort of a relief, though. At least now I knew why she was wearing an anti-telepathy charm, and why Uncle Ted was doing the same thing. She must have insisted, choosing the possibility of offending me over the chance that I’d come back from my convalescence somehow wrong.
“I already told Evie everything,” I said. “The cuckoo attacked me at the airport. I fought back. I thought I got away. She must have followed me to the warehouse, where Artie picked me up, and decided that she deserved a little revenge. We were on our way here when a truck hit us from the side.” I hesitated before going on. She was going to find out eventually. Better that she hear it from me. “She could tell that Artie was important to me, so she put a psychic snare in his head to keep him from waking up. When I realized what she’d done, I went into his mindscape and defused it. He woke up.”
There: factual, straightforward, and unlikely to make me seem even less trustworthy to my justifiably paranoid aunt.
Jane turned toward the cuckoo again, studying her. Finally, she said, “If this were a human body, I could tell how long she’d been dead by checking her blood coagulation and degree of rigor. But she’s not stiffening the way I expect her to, and it’s impossible to tell how the blood is pooling. When do you think she died?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I didn’t feel anything connecting her to Artie when I went into his head. Defusing her trap shouldn’t have done anything to her.”
“What if it wasn’t defusing the trap that killed her?”
Jane turned toward Evie when she spoke. I didn’t move. Evie wasn’t wearing an anti-telepathy charm; I could pick up her meaning just as well while I was looking at the cuckoo.
She looked so small. She had been a terrifying threat, and now she was so small, and she was never going to threaten anyone again. What in the world could have possessed her to follow me so far from the airport? Cuckoos are territorial, but that doesn’t normally make them stupid.
“Explain,” said Jane.
“Sarah got hurt when she modified the memories of the Covenant operatives who were threatening Verity and Dominic,” said Evie.
“Thanks for that, by the way,” said Kevin.
“No worries,” I said, leaning closer to the cuckoo. The distant, faintly acidic scent of cuckoo blood tickled my nose and made me want to sneeze. There was a film of blue-tinged blood crusted around her ears as well as above her mouth. She’d bled out fast and catastrophically. Given the damage to her eyes, I was willing to bet that if we’d taken swabs, we would have found more blood in the soft tissues around them. Her death had probably been relatively painless, because it hadn’t given her time for anything else.
“According to our mother, the physical signs of injury included bleeding from the eyes and nose, hypoxia, and temporary clouding of the irises,” Evie continued.
I snapped around, staring at my sister. “What?” Mom had never told me about the damage to my irises. My eyes had always looked perfectly normal to me.
But that wasn’t entirely true, was it? During the first few months, when I’d walked in a cloud of hazy disorientation, the whole world had been cloudy around the edges. I’d attributed it to my bruised brain. What if some of it had been due to other physical causes?
How many things about my own health had my parents concealed for my own good?
“Mom thought they might be cataracts at first, until she realized they were receding as you got better,” said Evie, apologetic discomfort rolling off her in waves. “The damage to the eyes seems to