Page 28 of Imaginary Numbers

“There was no sign of the vehicle or the driver. They really must have hit you and then kept on going. Elsie said you didn’t get any warning before the accident?”

“No, none.” I shook my head. “They came out of nowhere. I should have heard the driver’s thoughts, even if they were drunk or drugged—I should have had something to tell me what was about to happen. The fact that I didn’t hear anything before the impact means they must have been being masked somehow. An anti-telepathy charm, maybe—although that wouldn’t be very safe, since wearing one of those is like shutting myself in a lead box—or the other cuckoo was the one driving, and she was pulling herself way, way back.”

“The other cuckoo wasn’t driving,” said Jane. “She wasn’t even in the car.”

I blinked. “How do you know?”

“Because we found her body.”

Aunt Jane drove the sort of solid, sensible, mid-sized minivan beloved by soccer moms and field biologists the world over. She could pack literally hundreds of pounds of specimens into that thing, concealing them all in brightly colored plastic tubs labeled things like “PTA supplies” and “recycling.” I’ve seen her get pulled over, produce a plate of fresh peppermint brownies seemingly out of thin air, and charm the police into waving her on her way. She calls it her “weaponized white woman” routine, and it’s a calculated ruse she’s taken everywhere from cryptid extraction runs to political protests, where she spends a lot of time putting herself between the authorities and anyone she deems to be more vulnerable. Which is everyone.

Mom once said that everybody on the Price side of the family has a savior complex bred into their bones. Aunt Jane got it, too. She just does a better job than some of making it look accidental.

We stood around the open back hatch of the minivan, staring in silence at the body of the cuckoo from the airport. It had been concealed behind the first row of totes, tucked safely away from prying eyes. Now . . .

In life, she’d been a threat. As a shadow in Artie’s mind, she’d been an enemy. Now, here and real and dead and gone, she just looked . . . small.

“I guess we know what you’d look like as a corpse,” said Elsie, in a strangled voice. “I don’t like it.”

“I don’t like it either,” I said. The sutures Evie had put into the wound on my forehead were close and tight and mostly covered by my bangs, but they still ached. It didn’t matter that they weren’t going to leave a scar. That didn’t take the pain away.

“I’m going to go check on Artie,” Elsie said, and fled.

The cuckoo didn’t have any visible injuries. Her limbs were straight, and her face was undamaged. I could see why Jane was so sure that she hadn’t been in the other vehicle. With as badly as Artie’s car had been smashed in, there was no way the passengers in the truck had gotten away without at least a few bumps and bruises. Cuckoos may not have the pretty colors humans do, but there should have been scratches, scrapes—something. Not just this pristine nothingness.

A trickle of what looked like snot was dried on her upper lip and crusted around both nostrils. I leaned closer. There was a faint blue undertone to the film. Not mucus, then: blood.

As if she were the telepath, not me, Evie leaned forward and pried one of the cuckoo’s eyes open. “Look at this,” she said.

We looked.

Cuckoos have blue eyes. It’s one of the few places where we have any variation in our appearances, because when I say “blue” I mean any one of a dozen shades. This one’s eyes had been a few shades lighter than mine, more ice than morning sky. They still were . . . but her pupils had contracted to pinpricks of black against the blue, and the edges of her irises were foggy, like they’d frosted over, or been burned.

“What the hell happened here?” asked Kevin.

“I think she had the cuckoo equivalent of an aneurysm, is what happened,” said Jane. She looked straight at me as she asked, “Is there anything you want to tell us?”

My Aunt Jane loves me. I sometimes think she doesn’t want to, but there’s no questioning her affection. I’m part of her family. More importantly, I’m her reclusive son’s best friend. And none of that matters, because she grew up surrounded by people who not only knew what cuckoos were, they knew precisely why we shouldn’t be—couldn’t be—trusted. We’re natural predators who prefer the simplicity of a hunt where everyone involved is sapient. We destroy things for fun. She wasn’t the Price sibling who’d married a cuckoo’s daughter and been forced to admit that maybe there was more to us than a knife in the dark and a mind twisting inward on itself. She could love and fear and hate me all at the same time.

It was sort of a relief, though. At least now I knew why she was wearing an anti-telepathy charm, and why Uncle Ted was doing the same thing. She must have insisted, choosing the possibility of offending me over the chance that I’d come back from my convalescence somehow wrong.

“I already told Evie everything,” I said. “The cuckoo attacked me at the airport. I fought back. I thought I got away. She must have followed me to the warehouse, where Artie picked me up, and decided that she deserved a little revenge. We were on our way here when a truck hit us from the side.” I hesitated before going on. She was going to find out eventually. Better that she hear it from me. “She could tell that Artie was important to me, so she put a psychic snare in his head to keep him from waking up. When I realized what she’d done, I went into his mindscape and defused it. He woke up.”

There: factual, straightforward, and unlikely to make me seem even less trustworthy to my justifiably paranoid aunt.

Jane turned toward the cuckoo again, studying her. Finally, she said, “If this were a human body, I could tell how long she’d been dead by checking her blood coagulation and degree of rigor. But she’s not stiffening the way I expect her to, and it’s impossible to tell how the blood is pooling. When do you think she died?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I didn’t feel anything connecting her to Artie when I went into his head. Defusing her trap shouldn’t have done anything to her.”

“What if it wasn’t defusing the trap that killed her?”

Jane turned toward Evie when she spoke. I didn’t move. Evie wasn’t wearing an anti-telepathy charm; I could pick up her meaning just as well while I was looking at the cuckoo.

She looked so small. She had been a terrifying threat, and now she was so small, and she was never going to threaten anyone again. What in the world could have possessed her to follow me so far from the airport? Cuckoos are territorial, but that doesn’t normally make them stupid.

“Explain,” said Jane.

“Sarah got hurt when she modified the memories of the Covenant operatives who were threatening Verity and Dominic,” said Evie.