Pocket Apocalypse
Page 8

“It’s spring in Australia, you know,” I informed Crow, who ignored me. “I’ll get to skip all the really unpleasant parts of autumn and go straight to the unpleasant parts of spring.”
It was a lovely thought. It wasn’t enough to balance out the thought of werewolves.
I drove on.
A surprising number of suburban homes are owned by cryptids, who enjoy the proximity to nature—even if it’s in a tightly controlled and regimented form—and the relative privacy compared to the more densely packed urban environments. A lot of homeowner’s associations have cryptids on their boards, helping to set standardized rules that will make individual homes more difficult to target from a distance. “The monsters live in the beige house” isn’t a very helpful description when half the houses in the neighborhood are beige.
My grandparents are cryptids, and they own their house, and that’s about as far as they’ve managed to get in the “blending in with the neighbors” division. Their house is the only three-story building on the block, towering over its surroundings with the amiable menace of a haunted house from an old Hammer Horror film. The widow’s walk doesn’t help (and no one’s ever been able to explain why they had it installed); neither does the lightning rod on the highest point of the roof, although at least that has an obvious purpose: they use it to periodically resurrect my grandfather. Add in the eight-foot fence with the spikes on top, and it’s no real wonder that the neighborhood kids never come trick-or-treating. They’re probably afraid we’re going to cook and eat them.
Both my grandparents’ cars were parked in the driveway. Good: I didn’t want to go over this more than once if I didn’t have to. I pulled in behind Grandma’s sedan and killed my engine, leaning over to retrieve both Crow and my briefcase from the passenger seat before getting out and heading for the front door.
It was swept open from within before I made it halfway up the walk, revealing the backlit outline of a woman in a knee-length wool skirt, her face obscured by the contrast of light and shadow. Any confusion didn’t last for long, as my cousin Sarah jubilantly declared, “I did calculus today!”
“That’s fantastic,” I said, stepping onto the porch. Sarah moved aside to let me into the house. She was beaming. I couldn’t blame her. “Did Grandma score your workbook?”
“I got an eighty percent!” Sarah’s enthusiasm didn’t dim one bit, even though the score was lower than she was getting when she was nine. For her, even an eighty percent on a calculus worksheet was an incredible improvement.
Sarah was technically my aunt, having been adopted by my grandparents when she was just a kid, but she’d always be “cousin Sarah” to me, and to my siblings. We were just too close in age to think of her as anything else.
I offered her a smile. “I’m really proud of you.”
“I’m proud of me, too,” said Sarah.
She had every right to be. Sarah was a cuckoo—a member of a species of math-obsessed telepathic predators. And cuckoos loved numbers. Arithmetic and higher mathematics were all the same to them: as long as numbers were involved, they were happy, and since a happy cuckoo was a cuckoo who might not be trying to kill you, we encouraged their mathematical pursuits whenever possible.
And then there was Sarah.
It hadn’t been that long ago that she’d been with my sister in Manhattan. Some bad things happened, and Sarah had to choose between using her telepathy in a way she’d never tried to use it before, or letting Verity die—and confirming the ongoing existence of our family to the Covenant of St. George at the same time. She made the choice that would save my sister, and by extension, save us all.
Sarah had always been taught not to use her powers to intentionally change people’s minds. That day, she broke every rule she’d worked so hard to learn, and she rewrote the memories of the Covenant team that was holding Verity. It worked, but it hurt her, in ways that we still didn’t fully understand, and might never be able to make sense of, since “telepath physiology” isn’t a course offering at most medical schools.
For a while, we’d been afraid Sarah would never be herself again. That fear had been gradually put to rest as she recovered. She was putting herself back together a little bit at a time, struggling to extract sanity from the jaws of severe neurological dysfunction. At her worst, she hadn’t even been able to remember her primes. To have her doing calculus again was a blessing.
“Mom’s in the kitchen making dinner, and Dad’s upstairs making himself scarce,” said Sarah, as Crow launched himself from my shoulder and flapped up the stairs to my room. She paused, squinting, and her eyes took on the white-filmed look that meant she was stretching just the barest tendril of telepathy in my direction. “You . . . want to talk to us about koalas?”
“Close,” I said. “I want to talk to everyone about Australia.” When Sarah had first come home from New York, we’d all worn anti-telepathy charms all the time, to lessen the risk that she would slip and hurt somebody, or herself. Now only Shelby still routinely wore a charm, which made sense. She wasn’t family.
The kitchen smelled of tuna fish and cream of mushroom soup, a classic piece of Americana that was rendered only a little incongruous by the fact that it was being baked by my Grandma Angela, the second cuckoo in the family. She looked up when she heard the kitchen door swing open, flashing me a bright smile.
“Welcome home, Alex,” she said. “Dinner should be ready in about twenty minutes. Tuna casserole, sweet rolls, and spaghetti sauce with ginger.”
Cuckoos have a weird obsession with tomatoes and tomato byproducts. The human members of the family have learned to live with it. “Sounds good. Um, I need to talk to you and Grandpa about something. Do you want to do it before or after we eat? Shelby has to feed the tigers tonight, so she’s going to be home late.”
“Before sounds good,” rumbled a deep, almost rocky voice. I turned to see the hulking, scarred form of my grandfather filling the doorway, a friendly smile on his terrible face. “What’s on your mind, Alex?”
I took a deep breath. “Shelby wants me to go to Australia with her. There’s a lycanthropy-w outbreak, and no one there knows how to deal with it.”
“They don’t have lycanthropy in Australia, do they?” asked Grandpa, his smile melting into a frown.