the way a human girl would, but it still felt weird to be seeing her with a big gash in my cheek. “I think they’re okay. They’re already starting to break down.”
“Good.” She hit the gas harder, accelerating along our sleepy suburban road like she believed speed limits were things that happened to other people. The night blurred around us, and we were on our way, racing against a catastrophe that might not even have happened.
Please, let it not have happened, I thought, and listened to the music, and tried not to be afraid.
* * *
My name is Arthur Harrington-Price. My friends call me “Artie,” which really means my cousins call me Artie, since I haven’t had any flesh-and-blood friends since I hit puberty and got hit with the wrong end of the incubus stick. I’m not devastatingly handsome or suave or capable of talking people into anything I want—which Antimony says is a good thing, since people who can get anything they want just by asking for it tend to turn into supervillains, and she’d hate to have to put me down. She means it, too. My cousin loves me, but she’s ruthless. That’s part of why I trust her. She’d never let me go evil.
Elsie and I come from a mixed marriage, human mother—well, mostly human; everyone seems to think Great-Grandma Fran brought a little something extra to the table, even if whatever it was is so diluted now that we can’t identify it with anything short of full genetic sequencing, and we don’t have the resources for that—and incubus father. Elsie got more of the control and less of the chemistry. I got the reverse. She can usually talk people into things, and she has some skill at dream-walking, wandering through sleeping minds and seeing what they have to offer her. Me, I got biological love potion number nine. When people who might be into me get a whiff, it’s love at first whatever. And that’s not cool. The only people who are immune are the ones who are actually related to me, which I guess proves that nature abhors inbreeding.
So I spend most of my time indoors, in my bedroom, or doused in cheap cologne when I absolutely have to go out somewhere. I read comics and I code and I work at making things easier for my family. I’ve been producing most of our false IDs since I was still in high school, that sort of stuff. It’s something I can do when field work isn’t on the table. And field work is almost never on the table. Lilu have what Uncle Kevin calls a flexible genetic structure, meaning we can reproduce with virtually anything and get children that are more Lilu than whatever their other parent was. It’s a way of guaranteeing the species continues even when we have a tendency to piss off our neighbors and get ourselves burned at the stake. Which is honestly not as much of an overreaction as it seems. We’re sort of bad for people.
Elsie didn’t drive like she cared about other people. Elsie didn’t drive like she cared about us. She hadn’t strayed too far from the speed limit until we were outside city limits, but as soon as she’d been sure we were in the clear, she’d slammed her foot down on the gas and she hadn’t let up once. The K-pop was gone, replaced by a playlist of Broadway songs, none of which had a BPM of less than oh-god-we’re-gonna-die, and she seemed to be trying to match her driving to the music. I held tight to the grip above my door and wondered whether this was some sort of cosmic karma coming to get me for all the times I’d pictured Sarah—not biologically related to me, still technically my cousin—in that bikini she’d worn when we went to the lake house the year before she’d been hurt.
“Can you slow down?” I asked.
“Are you picking up any static?” she shot back, swerving around a corner like she thought she was auditioning for a Fast & Furious reboot.
That stopped me.
Telepaths are normally undetectable, which makes sense, since a telepath you can detect isn’t going to sneak up on you very well, and every kind of telepath we know about is an ambush predator. They hunt by making sure their prey doesn’t know they’re coming until it’s too late. Only it turns out that once a telepath has spent too much time around specific non-telepaths, they start