enemy that could get inside their heads. Anti-telepathy charms are the solution against one cuckoo, acting alone or trying to defend their territory. They wouldn’t hold the line against a group of them. They would just make the enemy harder to see coming.
My family had protected me after New York. It was my turn to protect them. I looked the cuckoo in the eye and nodded, once, before I turned and started for the door next to the gate.
Tucking the family compound away in the forest had been a good way to control traffic in and out. It hadn’t eliminated the need for things like getting the hell away from your family, hence the occasional doors set into the fence. Without them, my cousins—Verity especially—would have been forever setting off the motion detectors along the top as they climbed their way to freedom. Sure, freedom looked like an evergreen forest in the middle of nowhere, but it was still freedom.
Or it had been. I keyed in the gate code, which I’d lifted from Kevin’s mind without even thinking about it, and stepped out of the supposed safety of the yard into the dangerous darkness of the woods. It didn’t feel like freedom anymore. It felt like walking into a trap.
The cuckoo nodded approvingly. “Come with me,” he said, then turned and led me deeper into the trees.
Lacking any real choice, I followed.
* * *
We walked until the compound lights dwindled to nothing behind us. Only then did Mark produce a flashlight and click it on, directing its watery beam toward the ground.
“Sorry to make you come all this way, but, well, we both know things would have gotten really ugly back there if we’d parked any closer,” he said. He sounded almost jovial, like we were old friends going for a walk, and not virtual strangers in the middle of an abduction. “We’ll be at the RV soon.”
“An RV?” I couldn’t quite keep the disbelief out of my tone. “You brought an RV?”
“Had to,” he said. “We don’t squish well, not even when we have a good reason to be working together. It’s a really nice one, too. Modern. There’s even a bathroom it’s not physically painful to use. Amelia and David took a few recreational trips back there while the bedroom was occupied. He’s pretty mad at you, by the way.”
“For what?” I asked. “All I did was hit her with my backpack.”
“I didn’t say it was logical, just that it was there,” said Mark. “Amelia saw you first. That meant she got the duty and the honor of triggering your next metamorphosis. Unfortunately, she couldn’t exactly survive something like that. She died like she lived. Pissed off at the entire world and willing to do whatever she could to destroy it. Honestly, I think David’s mostly angry because he knows that if their positions had been reversed, Amelia would be perfectly happy to have him gone, if it meant you were progressing to your next instar.”
I stopped walking. Mark continued for a few more feet before turning to look at me, projecting polite confusion.
“We’re not there yet,” he said. “Like I said, we have to keep walking.”
“You keep using this word, ‘instar,’” I said. “What the hell does it mean?”
“Can’t you take the definition from me?” he asked. “You should be able to reach out and snatch it from my mind. If you can’t, that’s not my problem.”
“That’s not how I do things,” I said.
“That’s not how humans do things,” he said. “You, though, Sarah Zellaby? That’s exactly how you do things. You act like you have some moral high ground because you only hunt people you’ve decided somehow deserve it, but you’re just like the rest of us. You take. You take, and you take, and you take, and you don’t give anything back. You can’t help yourself. If you could, you’d be useless to us. You want to know what an instar is? Take it.”
I stared at him, feeling my eyes burn as they went white. How dare he talk to me like that, like I was doing something wrong by trying to be careful. Even more, how dare he remind me of what I already knew and wanted to forget about. There were no questions left in my mind, only anger, and the brush of the wind against my cheeks as I focused on him, trying to punch my way through his mental barriers and claim what I needed to know.