be looking at Annie and Sam, hands full of ice, ready to attack.
I took another step back. “Sam,” I said quietly. “Run.”
Under other circumstances—if Annie hadn’t been taken by surprise, if we’d been able to fight ice with fire, if the cuckoo hadn’t managed to get her hands on a gun—I knew Sam would have argued with me. He’s not family by blood, but he’s still family, thanks to Annie’s fiat, and he knows better than to leave a man behind if there’s any other choice. Right now, there wasn’t a choice. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him tense, nod, and gather Annie even closer to his chest. Then he leapt into the air.
There’s almost nothing as fast as a fūri who has somewhere to be. I’ve watched Verity—who has reflexes that border on preternaturally sharp—throwing knives at Sam while he was in motion, and she’s never come anywhere near hitting him. When Sam wants to get away, he gets away.
His first leap carried him to the banister, one long arm clutching Annie’s unconscious form. He landed easy, grabbing the rail with both feet and his free hand before he leapt again, this time heading up the stairs to the first landing. The cuckoo swore loudly. James hurled a ball of ice after the fleeing fūri. It missed widely enough to become comic, smashing into the wall between two framed family portraits. One of them fell to the ground and shattered.
I didn’t move. The cuckoo still aiming her stolen gun at me made that an easy decision. If she’d been more mammalian . . . for the first time, I found myself wishing that my pheromones could affect a cuckoo. If she’d shot me, I could have swayed her completely over to my side.
Telepathy versus chemically-induced attraction, round one, fight. The cuckoo stood, eyes narrow, gun still aimed at me.
“Jimmy, grab his gun,” she said. “He’s a Price. They always have guns.”
“You know you hate being called ‘Jimmy,’ James,” I said. “If she was whatever she wants you to think she is—your sister or your girlfriend or your confessor or whatever—she wouldn’t keep calling you that.”
“I don’t like you calling me Jimmy,” said James, stepping up to me and grabbing the handgun off my belt. The temperature dropped again as he got closer. The cuckoo didn’t seem to notice. Having antifreeze for blood comes with an annoying degree of cold resistance.
James sneered at me as he tossed my gun on the couch and stepped back toward the cuckoo, slipping an arm around her waist and pulling her closer to him. Her aim never wavered. “I don’t like you calling me anything,” he continued. “Hel, are you sure we need to take him with us? You could shoot him right now for what he did to you.”
I wanted to ask what I’d supposedly done to her. For once in my life, I kept my big mouth shut. Whatever lies she was shaping in his mind would only get stronger if I gave her an excuse to make him repeat them out loud. Lies are like that. The more they’re told, the more realistic they tend to become.
Heloise looked briefly disappointed when she realized what I was—or wasn’t—doing. Then she jerked her chin toward the door. “All right, incubus,” she said. “Move.”
“Do I have a choice?” I asked.
“Yeah. I shoot you.”
I moved.
* * *
This is fine, I thought as Heloise marched me across the lawn, the barrel of her stolen gun digging into the skin between my shoulders. Mom will know what to do. It was a little weird that Elsie hadn’t come charging back with the various parents yet, but that was probably because they were busy coming up with some sort of plan for getting the unfamiliar cuckoo out of here. They had to have a coherent failsafe for this sort of thing.
A gun went off in the distance, from the direction of the barn. I stumbled, nearly losing my balance. Heloise laughed, sounding utterly, horrifyingly delighted.
“I know what you were thinking,” she said. “You were thinking what people like you are always thinking. That you had a way out of this. Guess what? You don’t. You’re coming with me, and you’re never going to see your precious family again. You lose. Got that? You lose.”
“You’re so good at this, Hel,” said James admiringly.
I could hear the cuckoo preen behind me. “I know,” she said. “I should have been in charge of this extraction from the