beginning. Ingrid’s too soft on the little freak.”
“Don’t call Sarah a freak,” I said. It was a wild guess, but it was better than focusing on the real bombshell:
There was at least one more cuckoo, maybe two. No one else would be giving this woman orders. I mean, they could try, but she wouldn’t listen. Cuckoos aren’t big on following other people’s plans.
“Why not?” asked Heloise. “I thought you were into cryptid rights, ‘live life out loud,’ all that hipster Etsy bullshit. She’s a freak. She’s in her third instar now, and we only need her to molt one more time and she’ll be able to crack this world open like an egg. That’s not normal. That’s the sort of thing only a freak can do.”
Instar. The word was starting to take on an ominous cast, like it was the key to a secret I had never been meant to hear. “She’s not a freak,” I said. “I don’t know what an instar is or why you’re so afraid of it, but she’s not a freak.”
Heloise dug the barrel of the gun harder into my back, forcing me forward. “I’m not afraid of some sheltered little princess who doesn’t know what it means to be a Johrlac,” she spat. “Don’t even say that.”
“Whatever.” The grass was slippery. It would be easy to fake a fall . . . but then what? I had lost my handgun. I still had a knife with me, and a weighted sap in my left pocket. Neither of them was going to be enough to stop a cuckoo with a gun and the sorcerer she had in her thrall. Maybe more importantly, neither of them was going to make her give me Sarah back.
There had been four people in the barn before Elsie went to talk to them. Of the four, three were resistant to cuckoo influence, Mom and Uncle Kevin because of biology, Aunt Evie because of long exposure. Dad was the only one really at risk, and while he could dial his pheromones up to try to affect Aunt Evie, she was smart and knew how to protect herself from an incubus. No one in their right mind gets turned on by the smell of formalin and rot, both of which she had available to her in convenient pre-jarred form out in the barn.
One gunshot meant one person had gone down. Dad wouldn’t have thought to start out by grabbing a gun—it wasn’t the way he preferred to fight, when he had to fight at all—and that meant he was probably the one who’d been shot. I was remarkably okay with that. Lilu heal quickly, and none of the people in the barn would have been shooting to kill.
It probably says something weird about my family that “I bet my mother shot my father in the leg” was a comforting thought, but I’m a Price. Weird is sort of what we do.
“I’m not afraid of her,” insisted Heloise, voice getting higher and shriller. “Jimmy, make him stop.”
“With pleasure.” James flicked me in the side of the head. The flash of cold was immediate and intense enough to leave me with a ringing headache.
I winced. “Dude, what the hell?”
“I froze your eardrum,” he said. “Don’t make me do something worse.”
I rubbed the side of my head, slanting a sidelong glare in his direction. “When this is over and you’re yourself again, I’m going to tell the mice you want them to sing you to sleep every night for a month.”
“I am myself,” he said, scowling at me. “Hel understands me. She appreciates me for the scholar that I am, and not because she feels sorry for me. She’s going to help me find Sally and bring her home.”
“Sure she is,” I said, still rubbing the side of my head. “How did you meet her again?” I half-expected Heloise to break in and make us stop talking. Only half. Cuckoos are notoriously arrogant and convinced that their weird mind games are unwinnable by anyone but the cuckoos themselves. As long as we were talking about Heloise, she probably wasn’t going to interrupt.
“We went to elementary school together,” said James. “Me, her, and Sally.”
“Sally. Your best friend. The one the crossroads took.”
“Yes.”
“If Heloise was there, why did Sally go to the crossroads alone to get taken? Shouldn’t Heloise have stepped in and made her do something else?”
“That’s enough of that.” Heloise withdrew the gun from my back long enough to rap me lightly on the crown