that would have been a blush, if I’d had the capillary response to fuel it.
Annie simply nodded. “He is. I found him in a cardboard box labeled ‘free to good home,’ and decided I was going to keep him. He has his own room now and everything.”
“I wish that were less accurate,” muttered James.
Their trio was starting to make more sense now. I offered Annie a wan smile and waved a hand toward the stairs. “I’m going to go find Artie.”
“Good luck with that,” said Elsie. “I’ve looked everywhere. The jerk is hiding.”
“Yeah, but I know he didn’t leave the house—I would have heard him go—and I can’t hear him now, which means there’s only one place he can be.” I started across the room. “I’ll be back down as soon as we’ve hammered this out.”
“Good luck,” called Annie.
I waved vaguely over my shoulder rather than looking back and kept walking.
My family is remarkably effective in the field. We have to be. Hesitate when there’s a Covenant operative or a hungry lindworm in front of you and there’s a good chance you’re going to wind up dead. Not cool. But this means that we’re also incredibly relaxed and disorganized when we don’t have to keep it together. When we relax, we relax, becoming as difficult to herd as a clowder of cats. If I’d stayed to finish saying goodbye, I would have found myself caught in an endless loop of just one more thing, until something important enough to break the cycle happened. Bedtime is an eternal trial.
At least James and Sam had their anti-telepathy charms now. Annie must have explained why they were necessary. Neither of them had seemed afraid of me, but with their minds sealed off, how could I tell?
Sometimes coming from a predatory species really sucks.
A constellation of smaller minds came into focus as I climbed the stairs. They were too small to project very far, although each of them was fully sapient, as complex as any human. Some of them were blurry: we’d never met before. Others were bright, crisp and clear, elders of the colony who knew exactly who I was and would be thrilled to see me home. I took a deep breath, steeling myself. Then I kept climbing.
“HAIL! HAIL THE RETURN OF THE HEARTLESS ONE!”
Aeslin mice are small, but when that many of them shout in tandem, they’re capable of making a hell of a lot of noise. There were at least a hundred mice spread out across the second-floor landing, perched on the bookshelves and clinging to the banister. I stopped, blinking at them. About a third of the gathering wore the colors of Verity’s clergy, bedecked with more feathers than any mouse had any business wearing. The rest were a mixture of the active family liturgies, including a few I didn’t recognize. That made a certain amount of sense. Dominic, Shelby, now Sam and James . . . we’d had a few new additions to the family since the last time I’d been home in Oregon.
“Hello,” I said.
The mice cheered.
Aeslin mice are evolutionary mimics. They look like ordinary field mice, save for slightly larger heads and slightly more developed hands—two attributes most people would never be in a position to notice. They nest like mice, breed like mice, and happily infest the walls of human habitations, again, like mice. It’s just that they do all this while practicing a complicated, functionally inborn religion. Aeslin need to believe in something. Anything. Our family colony believes in, well, the family. We are, and have always been, their objects of worship.
No pressure. I mean, “these adorable, cartoony creatures love and trust you, and believe that you have the power to keep them safe when their species is otherwise functionally extinct” is a perfectly normal situation, right?
“Long have we Awaited your Return,” intoned one of the older mice, stepping to the front of the group. He used a long kitten-bone staff to hold himself upright. From the twinges of pain that laced through his thoughts, I could tell that bipedal locomotion was no longer as easy for him as it had been when he’d been younger. “Hail to the Heartless One! Hail to the Savior of the Arboreal Priestess!”
“Of course I saved her,” I said. “Verity’s my family. I had to.”
“We understand,” said the priest gravely. I frowned. He wasn’t wearing nearly enough feathers. “We also understand that we have been Unfair to you.”
That didn’t make any sense, but he meant it. All the