take more work, and skin contact if it’s not someone I know well. It’s still part of what I’m designed by nature to do.
Intentionally changing someone’s mind, though . . . that’s hard. That takes work. It used to be the most I could do was shove someone into believing they didn’t want to sit at my table at the coffee shop. Changing someone’s memories, rewiring them enough to provide them with an alternative story of what had happened, that’s beyond the standard cuckoo toolset, and I had always been secretly glad of that fact, because I should have limits. I’m a telepath in a world that wasn’t built for them, and I’m way too aware that my species trends toward the horrifyingly destructive. Cuckoos aren’t friends, or neighbors, or cousins. We’re the hunger that consumes everything in our paths, and we should have limits.
Only the Covenant of St. George doesn’t care about our limits. They care about making sure only humans, and only the right humans, are in control of this world. Verity, her siblings, our entire family, we’re on the wrong side of the fight as far as the Covenant is concerned. They’d kill me or Artie or my parents on sight for the crime of not being human. They tried to kill Verity for the crime of caring about what happened to us.
Of course, they would have taken her away first. They’d been planning to haul her off to England, where all our secrets could be spilled, and used to wipe the Prices, Bakers, and Harringtons off the face of the planet. There hadn’t been any choice. I’m not mad at her for what happened to me, because she didn’t ask me to do it, and there hadn’t been any other way. I’ve spent the last five years clawing my way back to lucidity and going over what happened that night over and over again, and there wasn’t any other way.
The Covenant operatives who’d come for Verity had been vulnerable. They didn’t have the right kind of charms to keep me out of their heads, and so I plunged myself into them like the predator my nature wants me to be. I ripped and I ransacked and I rewrote until they only remembered what I wanted them to remember. They thought Dominic was dead. They thought Verity was an actress he’d hired to impersonate a member of the Price family. My people were safe. The Covenant no longer knew they existed, and they were safe.
That was the thought I had carried down with me into the dark, as I felt something in my mind rip loose of its moorings and crumble into nothingness. My people were safe. I might not survive, I might never see them again, but they were safe. I had done it. I had been better than my nature wanted me to be.
I’m selfish enough to say that I don’t know for sure whether I’d have done what I did if I’d realized what the consequences would be. Changing those memories had strained something in my brain, something connected to my telepathy. Since it wasn’t like we could exactly take me to the hospital for an MRI, I’ve spent the last five years putting myself back together one tiny piece at a time, living with my parents in Ohio, leaning on Alex and his fiancée, Shelby, as I tried to figure out who I was and who I wanted to be and how to reconcile the difference between the two.
Five years lost. It’s hard to even think about it. The airport was the first time I’d been outside unsupervised since my injury, and here I was trying to cross the country on my own—go big or go home, I guess.
I think whoever said that really, really underestimated how much I wanted to go home.
I finished the last few swallows of my milkshake in one long gulp, gathered up my trash, and stood. It was time to get myself on an airplane. It was time to figure out whether I could really, truly do this.
Please, I thought, let me really, truly be able to do this.
Please.
Two
“A lie’s a lie, even when it’s wearing Sunday clothes. That doesn’t mean a lie is necessarily the wrong choice. Just that you shouldn’t pretend it’s something that it’s not.”
—Alice Healy
Heading for the customer service desk of a major airline
THE THREE WOMEN BEHIND the customer service desk were all doing their best to look alert, engaged, and available,