“Sadly, no,” said James. “I would pay almost anything to not be standing here right now. Unfortunately for me, your Aunt Evelyn wants to see you. Downstairs. Now.”
“Why?” I asked. I was having a hard time imagining anything more urgent than what we’d been doing.
“They’ve finished their initial autopsy.” His voice turned grim. “There’s apparently some information she feels you need to have.”
Well. Anything but that.
Ten
“Life happens. So does death. The trick is putting as much time as possible between the two.”
—Mary Dunlavy
Heading for the living room, because that’s way better than making out with the boy you’ve loved since you were just a kid
THE REST OF MY family snapped back into clear psychic focus as soon as I stepped outside the room that had been warded for my use. Their minds were . . . loud, even for them. We’re a boisterous, argumentative lot, and we’re fully capable of violating most noise ordinances in the process of figuring out what we want to do for dinner. This, though—this was something else. All of them were screaming, but only inside their own minds. No sound was coming up the stairs.
That was enough to make me walk faster. James and Artie paced me, Artie radiating a degree of anxiety that nicely mirrored my own. His empathy had to be picking up the disconnect between the waves of anxiety rolling up the stairs and the dead silence that accompanied them.
We were almost to the stairs when Artie reached over and took my hand. His anxiety immediately calmed, and mine dropped in response. We could handle this. Whatever it was, whatever it meant, we could handle it. We didn’t have a choice.
Annie and Sam had joined Elsie on the couch. Evie and Kevin were standing nearby, their heads close together, murmuring to each other. Their thoughts were opaque, veiled in trivial inconsequentialities, which made my anxiety spike again. Everyone in our family knew how to mask their thoughts, if not always their emotions, because Mom and I weren’t the only cuckoos they were likely to encounter on a regular basis. If I could read them, so could the enemy. Better to use me as a means of testing their defenses.
Aunt Jane and Uncle Ted were nowhere to be seen. I reached out automatically, finding the flickering traces of their minds in the barn. They were disposing of the cuckoo’s body, burning the parts that looked too human to be safe to keep around, preserving the rest in specimen jars. I got a flash of the cuckoo’s eyes, floating in a jar of clear fluid that was probably the cuckoo’s own blood, and pulled myself away from them, physically shuddering. Some things are better off unseen. This was one of them.
“I found them,” announced James, heading for the couch, where he took up a position leaning against the arm, next to Annie. “I’m choosing to view this whole experience as a form of familial hazing, to make up for the fact that I spent my foolish teenage years in another time zone. Please, can you be done torturing me soon?”
“Nope,” said Annie, and punched him amiably in the arm.
“About damn time,” said Elsie, radiating smug satisfaction as she looked at my hand, still firmly clasped in Artie’s.
My cheeks warmed with an invisible blush. I squared my shoulders and looked toward Evie and Kevin. “What’s going on?” I asked. “What did you find?”
“Honey, do you want to sit down?” Evie took a step forward, spreading her hands like she was trying to soothe a panicky animal. If I hadn’t already been a little bit freaked out, that gesture would have been enough to do it. “We need to talk to you about what happened. Both of you.”
“I’m not going to be all weird about Sarah because a cuckoo decided to mess with my head,” said Artie. He let go of my hand with a sudden bolt of self-consciousness, like he’d just realized he was still holding it. Which, to be fair, he had.
I couldn’t blame him. The thoughts rolling off Annie and Elsie were curious, amused, and even relieved, all covered by a thin veneer of worry. Evie and Kevin mostly just felt worried. I didn’t want our relationship, whatever it was actually going to be, to become their next topic of dissection.
“I know, dear,” said Evie. “Nothing’s ever going to make you weirder about Sarah.”