airlines. I settled back to mix ketchup into my milkshake and skim the minds around me, looking for opinions on my options.
I didn’t have luggage, so it didn’t matter that the people three tables over had strong opinions about one airline’s tendency to lose their bags; the fact that they served hot chocolate chip cookies in first class did matter, since chocolate makes my throat itch. Another airline apparently had a reputation for poor customer service. They wouldn’t be rude to me, of course, but I was selecting the people whose minds I’d be trapped in a metal tube with for between four and six hours. No, thank you.
I finished mixing ketchup into my milkshake and went to insert my straw, pausing when I saw a small child staring at me. Facial expressions are hard, but even I can tell when someone’s eyes go wide, and the child was radiating confusion and curiosity. I pointed to my milkshake, trying to look quizzical. The child nodded. I took a sip.
The child’s wave of awe was so vast that it felt like even the non-telepaths around me should have noticed. I grinned a little and went back to studying the departure board. The milkshake looked like strawberry now that it was properly blended; except for the kid, no one was going to realize there was anything odd about it. People in airports are allowed to be weird. They’re liminal spaces. They don’t count the way the real world does.
Case in point: about one in ten of the minds around me wasn’t human. Traveler or airport employee, it didn’t matter. This was a place where people came and went and didn’t stop to make friends, which made it safe for cryptid traffic. None of them seemed to have made any special note of me. That was good. That was part of the test. If I’d been too noticeable, I would have needed to call Mom and tell her I was coming home, that I wasn’t ready. And I wanted to be ready. I needed to be ready.
This had all been going on for too long.
* * *
Five years ago—five years! How had it been five years? How had so much time been able to slip by while I was too lost in the spirals inside my head to pay proper attention?—Verity and I had been in Manhattan. She’d been going out with a Covenant man, working on her dance career, and trying to decide what she wanted to do with her life. I’d been . . .
I’d been doing what I always did. Math. Math, and flirting with my cousin Artie and pretending I wasn’t flirting with my cousin Artie, because he deserves better than me, he honestly does. He deserves a girl who has a heart, and I mean that literally: I don’t have one. Remember that whole “I’m not from around here” thing? Well, whatever weirdo world my kind evolved on, it wasn’t really invested in the idea of a centralized circulatory system. I don’t have a pulse because I don’t have a heart, and if I don’t have a heart, it doesn’t matter how much like a mammal I look from the outside, it doesn’t matter if I have three bones in my inner ear and hair and the ability to lactate. I’m something else, something other, and Artie is human enough to deserve better.
Not like he thinks of me that way, anyway. Artie and his sister, Elsie, are half-Lilu, courtesy of my Uncle Ted, making them an incubus and a succubus, respectively. Elsie likes girls, always has, and has had a long string of significant others, dating all the way back to middle school. Artie . . .
No one’s sure what Artie likes. I think he likes girls, since he avoids them like the plague. I just know he’s too smart to like me. I’m Cousin Sarah, everyday and ordinary and dependable. Or I was, until Verity and I went to Manhattan.
For cuckoos, a lot of things come naturally. I can warp the world to suit my needs without stopping to think twice about it; I know what I need and so the universe delivers. I can disappear in a crowd, pulling the curtain of my own fear up around myself until even people who know I’m there may not notice me. I can read a room, literally, picking up on the little currents of fear and confusion and joy that run through the minds around me. Deeper thoughts