on the chore chart, and an offer of a new identity if I wanted to actually become a Price, rather than carrying my father’s name around with me all the time. I’m still mulling that last one over. It’s tempting.”
“Family is always tempting,” I agreed. My laptop screen bloomed to beautiful electric life, finishing its bootup cycle flawlessly. I relaxed further. “So you’re a sorcerer, too, huh? That’s fun. Do you and Annie set stuff on fire together?”
“I’m better at freezing things.”
I cocked my head. “Freezing them as in making them stop moving, or freezing them as in making them cold?”
“To be fair, I’ve discovered that when I make things cold enough, they usually stop moving.” James wiggled his fingers at me. “I can make things very cold, very quickly. Annie says I’m a menace. Annie set her own hair on fire last week, entirely by accident.”
“Annie was setting pit-traps for her siblings when she was six; Annie doesn’t get to talk,” I said.
James laughed, apparently surprised. “I’ll be honest: you’re nothing like I expected you to be.”
“You had expectations?” It was weird to think he already knew about me, when I’d never heard a word about him. I wanted to ask him to take his anti-telepathy charm off, to make this conversation slightly more normal for me. I needed to know what he was feeling, and to hear the wisps of thought that would reach me even without physical contact. Instead, I tucked my hands into my lap, where I wouldn’t be so much as tempted to reach for his protection.
James was too new and too unaccustomed to cuckoos and most of all, too not a Price. He didn’t have Fran’s immunity. I would rewire his brain without meaning to, and he’d be the brother I’d never wanted inside of the evening. That wouldn’t be fair to him, or to Annie, who had actually gone to the trouble of adopting him and bringing him home.
“They told me you were this amazing mathematician, and a little shy, and totally in love with your cousin Artie—which, to be fair, seems to have been true, so I assume the rest is also pretty accurate,” said James. “Annie said you weren’t human, but she didn’t go into a lot of detail, not the way she did tonight. I’m assuming she didn’t want to prejudice me against you.”
“We’ve had problems with that before,” I said. “Mom says that when Kevin and Evie got married, Grandma Alice actually tried to break up the wedding. I don’t mean ‘disrupt’—although she did that, too—I mean break. She didn’t like cuckoos, which is understandable. We’re hard to like.” She still didn’t like most cuckoos or trust them as far as she could throw them. As a species, we’re dangerous.
The last few hours had been a perfect demonstration of that. I shivered at the thought of how close Artie had come to slipping into an actual coma. We weren’t medically set up for that, and there weren’t any cryptid-friendly hospitals within a day’s drive. He could have died because of what that cuckoo had done to his brain.
And what about what this cuckoo had done to his brain? No matter how much he liked to lean on Fran’s vaunted resistance to our influence, I’d been inside his mindscape and making changes while he was unconscious and unable to fight me. Our cousins and his sister had been saying we were being stupid about each other for years, sure. He’d never been willing to make a move before. He’d never even implied that he might want to. Had I changed his mind in the process of freeing him from the other cuckoo’s influence?
Was I just as bad as she was?
“Is something wrong?” asked James.
I blinked, shaking my head a little as I tried to focus on him. “What?”
“You zoned out for a moment there.”
“Oh.” I gave my head another small shake. “I’m sorry. It’s been a really long day, and I’m not used to being around this many people anymore. I’ve been pretty isolated while I was recovering from my injuries.”
“Which you got saving Antimony’s older sister from the Covenant of St. George,” said James.
I nodded.
“That was fairly brave of you, to hear the story. I’ll admit, I always thought you were another magic-user, and that your spell had gone somehow wrong. ‘Actual, literal superhero’ never occurred to me.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “Annie and Verity are way better superheroes than I am. They actually work for what they can do.