Page 9 of Magic for Nothing

“Not seeing how that’s any better when the Covenant comes calling,” I said.

“Thomas was the last of his line. He thought the Price name would die with him.” Alice’s smile was bitter as she released me. “They probably have a picture of him in their files somewhere—those bastards never let go of anything—but there’s no ‘Price look,’ not the way there’s a ‘Carew look.’ You could walk past a strike team on the street and they wouldn’t stop looking for the Price they’d heard was in the area.”

I stared at her, slow horror uncurling in my chest as I realized what she was getting at.

It’s true: I don’t look like any of the other women in my family. They’re all dainty, petite blondes, and I’m a tall brunette with the sort of ass that comes from spending years working on your lower body strength. Technically, I suppose my tits are proportional, but since I’m bigger, so are they. Even my face doesn’t match up with theirs. They tend toward these sweet pixie bone structures, while my cheekbones could be used to slice bread. When I was little, I used to think I’d been adopted, or maybe rescued from a swarm of ghouls after they’d devoured my real parents.

I’d say I was an imaginative child, but when your family outings consist of “okay, kids, try to find your way out of these woods without being eaten by a bear,” sometimes the thought of having a different, better, less murderous family gets really damn tempting.

“Thanks to Dominic, we know the location of three Covenant recruiting facilities in the United Kingdom,” said Aunt Jane, looking up from her map. “None of them will take you without a strong background and a referral, but those are easy enough to arrange. The referral doesn’t even have to come from a standing member. They’re so wedded to their ‘knights errant’ self-image that if you show up and say an old man told you to go there to fulfill your destiny, they’ll take it.”

I gaped at her before turning to gape at the rest of my family. Gaping seemed like the only real answer. If they were going to have to identify my body by my dental records, I was going to make sure they all got a good look at my teeth.

Mom looked apologetic but unwavering. Artie just looked miserable. Being in this room had to be causing him physical pain. Dad wouldn’t meet my eyes.

I started getting angry.

“So wait, you got your heir and your spare, and they’re both doing a dandy job of lining up the next generation, since Verity’s married and Alex is about to be, so I’m extraneous to needs? Is that what’s going on here?”

“Antimony,” said my father sharply.

“No, Dad, don’t you ‘Antimony’ me! Unless I’m reading the situation completely wrong, your response to Verity fucking up on national television is going to be sending me—your other daughter—to the Covenant of St. George to get killed by the professional assholes we ran away from a hundred fucking years ago. Well, you can—”

“Antimony.”

It was rare enough for him to take that sort of tone with me that I stopped, giving him a wide-eyed, wounded look.

Dad shook his head. “You’re not wrong, Annie. We’re asking if you’ll help us infiltrate the Covenant of St. George. And sadly, you’re our only option. Elsie looks too much like a Carew, and Arthur is still trying to get his abilities under control. We’d talked about sending Sarah—”

Artie’s head snapped up, eyes narrowing as he suddenly engaged with the conversation in a whole new way. Whenever the discussion of sending Sarah had taken place, Artie had not been a part of it.

“—but she isn’t strong enough yet, and she’s not as equipped to take care of herself as you are. We know you can get in and get out with the lowest odds of getting hurt. You always say we don’t take you seriously enough, that we treat you like a child. Well, Annie, this is us taking you seriously. This is us treating you like an adult. You are the only one who stands a chance of finding out what we need to know to keep this family safe—to keep this continent safe.” My father looked at me solemnly. “We need to know what they know. We need to know what they’re planning. That means we need someone on the inside, someone they won’t spot on sight.”

“Someone who isn’t one blood test away from being revealed as nonhuman and hence suitable for extermination,” said Elsie.

She’d known. When she came to pick me up from the warehouse, she’d already known what they wanted me to do. It was oddly difficult not to see that as a betrayal. She was my cousin and my friend. She was supposed to be on my side.

“You could’ve asked before you started making plans that involved sending me to my doom,” I muttered.

“We’re asking now,” said my mother. She moved to stand next to Dad. “Annie, will you do this? For the sake of our family, for the sake of our community, will you do this?”

The only person who hadn’t said anything was my Uncle Ted. I turned to him. “What do you think I should do?”

He shrugged. “Annie, I’m the only person in this room with no human blood at all. These people have been treating my kind like vermin for centuries. I’ve lost relatives to their European field teams. I want to see them dead. All of them. I don’t say that when your sister’s home, because I know she loves her husband, and I’m sorry, Mrs. Price-Healy, but it’s how I feel.”

“No offense taken,” said Alice.

“They’re monsters. They call us monsters, but that’s because they’ve never looked in a mirror. Do I want to leave you alone with them? No. But do I need, all the way down to my bones, to know what’s going on? Whether I should be grabbing my family and running as far as I possibly can? Yeah. So I’m sorry, baby girl, but I’m on board with this idea. We need a miracle. Maybe it’s you.”

I looked at him silently for a long moment before turning to my parents and saying, in a subdued voice, “Yeah. I’ll do it. I’ll go to the Covenant for you.”

Silence fell over the room. The mice didn’t cheer. Some things, apparently, were too serious even for that.

Swell.

The conversation continued for more than two hours, my parents updating their map and whiteboard while Aunt Jane took notes and Grandma Alice contributed everything she’d ever been able to glean about the Covenant of St. George. Most of it was corroborated by the information we had from Dominic. The Covenant is made of traditionalists, which is another way of saying that they’re set in their ways. If something isn’t broken, they don’t go out of their way to fix it.

Fascinatingly, being traditionalists working off of a centuries-old model doesn’t make them sexists. The Covenant of St. George has been recruiting women since the Middle Ages, apparently recognizing that sometimes the most effective warriors are the ones no one would see coming. My gender wasn’t going to be an impediment. My background, on the other hand, was.