couldn’t pick up simple thoughts the way most of her kind could—it was all out and no in, for her—but if someone really wanted to scream, she could occasionally hear them.
The pain would pass. Even the most powerful telepath in the world didn’t have an infinite broadcast range, and there was no way she was lingering here, not in another cuckoo’s hunting grounds.
Angela was all too aware that she was an aberration among her own kind, a freak of nature. She’d been reminded of that fact every time she’d been forced to interact with another cuckoo. It was a miracle she’d survived—something must have had her mother running scared when it came time to select a nest for her defective offspring, something big enough that she hadn’t noticed when Angela failed to acknowledge her telepathic commands. In a species of people who could bend others to their wills, Angela was weak, and cuckoos didn’t tolerate weakness.
The girl—she thought it was a girl—screaming in her head certainly wasn’t weak. She was loud enough to make Angela’s teeth ache, to make every muscle in her neck lock up in sympathetic agony. They needed to drive faster. They needed to get away from here before the psychic screaming attracted something dangerous.
Please, please help me, wailed the girl, and Angela went cold.
Cuckoos didn’t say “please.”
Oh, they understood the meaning of the word—they heard it often enough. They just didn’t believe in it. “Please” was something victims said. “Please” meant the fun was just beginning. But this girl, this cuckoo-child who sounded no older than Verity, also sounded like she meant it. Like she was in trouble, and terrified, and reaching out in the only way she knew how.
Angela Baker was a defective cuckoo who had spent her entire life running away from the species of her birth, putting as many miles as she possibly could between herself and the rest of her species. Her desire for isolation had landed her in a sleepy neighborhood in Ohio, where no cuckoo could hope to find anything to benefit from, had led her to keep herself even further below the radar than her natural inclination. And now there was a cuckoo girl, a child, screaming for help inside her head, in the place that had always been hers, and hers alone.
She had tried to be a good person. She had tried to rise above the inclinations of her species, to choose the better way. She had tried so hard to put her family above herself, to measure her desires against her needs, to get along with the world. And now there was a child screaming in her skull.
Angela Baker was many things. Cuckoo, accountant, monster . . . mother. Mother, and grandmother, and when she heard a little girl crying, it didn’t matter where they came from or what they were. She needed to comfort them.
Head still pounding, she pulled herself up straight and turned toward the cab of the RV, opening the small door between herself and the driver. Martin was still focused on the road, humming along with a classic rock CD he had slipped into the player as soon as the children had gone down for their nap. He didn’t seem to realize that anything was wrong. Well, of course, he didn’t. He wasn’t a telepath.
Angela tried to speak. Nothing came out. She licked her lips to moisten them, and finally managed to croak, “We need to take a detour.”
Dowsing for a terrified child when the driver couldn’t hear her screams and Angela couldn’t focus enough to be safe to drive was terrifying. She sat in the passenger seat clutching her temples and occasionally whimpering out an instruction, all of which Martin dutifully followed as soon as he was able. Sometimes she wanted him to turn in places where there was no road, following the telepathic signal as the crow flies, rather than as the highway administration drew the maps.
They’d been driving for an hour and half (including one brief stop for McDonalds when the kids woke up and started whining for fries), leaving the highway far behind. They were cruising along a small backroad just outside Roanoke, Virginia, when Angela abruptly sat bolt upright, throwing one arm out and across Martin’s barreled chest, like she thought she could stop the entire RV by pushing the driver deeper into his seat.
“We’re here,” she whispered. Then, louder, she repeated, “We’re here. Stop the RV, Martin! Stop the goddamn RV!”
Profanity was unusual, where Angela was concerned.