Page 72 of Imaginary Numbers

“I made a deal with the crossroads to save Sam before I’d even admitted I was in love with him,” she said. “Grandma Alice must be so proud of her disgustingly dominant genes.”

“Shut up,” I said, voice sharp. “I’d do the same thing for you.”

“Sure you would,” she said. “Now expose yourself to the possibility of psychic attack so you can be sure she’s safe.”

Elsie laughed, high and sharp and bitter. I glared at the back of her neck.

Then I reached into my shirt and pulled the anti-telepathy charm over my head, dropping it to the seat between my legs, where it wouldn’t count as “in contact” and block me from Sarah’s mind.

The change in the car’s atmosphere was immediate and intense. The hum of Sarah’s psychic presence crashed against me like a wave against the shore, louder and more present than it had ever been before. I gasped, almost forgetting how to breathe in the face of its weight, which bore down on me, crushing me into the seat. I could still see the rest of the car. Sam was watching me with obvious concern; Annie and Elsie were sneaking glances at me in the rearview mirror as they tried not to get too distracted to stop their respective tasks. Both surveillance and driving take a certain amount of attention, after all, especially when you’re driving like you have special permission to ignore any rules of the road that you don’t like. The trees rushed by outside the car, dark and barely distinguished in the glow of our headlights, and none of that mattered, because it was all so far away. It was all beyond us.

Sarah’s skin was pressed against mine where I was holding her up. I had time to realize that might not be a good thing—to realize that even though it had been my intention to give her the anti-telepathy charm, to keep the other cuckoos from following the giant mental signal flare that was her mind right now, I wasn’t moving. I was just sitting there, the charm between my legs, not moving.

Move, I thought, and didn’t move.

Oh, crap, I thought, and the world went white.

Twenty

“No matter how much we study, train, and prepare, there will always be situations we weren’t ready for. That’s the nature of reality. It’s sort of neat, when it isn’t trying to chew your face off.”

—Kevin Price

Someplace that probably isn’t safe for incubi or other living things

EVERYTHING WAS WHITE.

I turned slowly, trying to get my bearings in the infinite brightness. There were no walls, no floor, no ceiling: only the featureless sterility of a blank page, waiting to be transformed into something comprehensible by the addition of basic physical forces.

I cupped my hands around my mouth. “Hello?” I shouted. There was no echo. My words barely seemed to travel past my lips, like even sound was being swallowed by this terrible new landscape.

Panic seemed like a good idea. Panic often seems like a good idea. Unfortunately, experience has shown that panic is virtually never a good idea, and if it is, it’s because you’re already about to die, so why waste time on staying calm? I forced myself to take a deep, slow breath, in through my nose and out through my mouth. The panic receded a bit. I did it again. Then I paused, panic forgotten in the face of a new oddity. I breathed into my cupped hand and sniffed.

Nothing.

Most of the time, Lilu pheromones are virtually undetectable, which makes sense: if people could smell us coming, they’d do a much better job of avoiding us, and hunters like the Covenant of St. George would probably have eradicated us centuries ago. They get stronger when we’re nervous—and I was definitely nervous. That’s part of why I wear so much crappy cologne, and why Elsie has an addiction to small artisanal perfume companies. The Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab has saved a lot of people from becoming embarrassingly enamored of my succubus sister.

When our pheromones are detectable, they smell vaguely sweet and woody, like crushed aconite flowers mixed with sugar. And when I breathed into my hand, I couldn’t smell them at all. There was nothing, not even the chemical tang of the cologne I use to smother them. I might as well have been a baseline human. Which was something I’d dreamed about my entire life but wasn’t something I’d really been hoping would happen during an attempted rescue.

Something was wrong.

“As if the big white room didn’t tell you that part,” I muttered, and started walking. It wasn’t necessarily the right thing to do, but it was something to do, and that made it better than standing around waiting for the invisible floor to drop out from under my feet and send me plummeting into the void. I am not a big fan of plummeting. If I had to commit to a position, I’d probably have to say that I was anti-plummeting.

I kept walking, and a smudge appeared on the horizon. Appeared with the horizon; until there was something to break up the infinite whiteness of it all, there couldn’t really be said to be a horizon. It needed something to define it. I started walking faster.

The smudge began to take geometric shape. It was a half-circle of blackboards, pushed together like a soundstage from a movie about mathematicians trying to save the world. There was a figure there, standing in the middle of the broken ring. I was too far away to make out details, but I could see that they were wearing an ankle-length skirt and a virtually shapeless sweater, the sort of thing that was more warm than fashionable, that would protect the wearer from notice.

I broke into a run.

The closer I got, the more details I could see. The figure became a woman became a cuckoo became Sarah, chalk smudges on her nose and chin, lips drawn down in the so-familiar, so-beloved expression of pensive contemplation that she’d been wearing since we were kids sitting and coloring at the same table.

(Well, I’d been coloring. She’d been doing calculus in crayon, and when we’d finished, Aunt Evelyn had pronounced us both to be amazing artists and hung our projects side-by-side on the refrigerator.)

“Sarah!” I sped up. I wasn’t winded at all, which was, like the lack of my pheromones, probably a bad sign. There was a decent chance I was dead, and this was the afterlife, although if that was the case, my Aunt Mary had way underplayed how much eternity sucked.

Sarah didn’t turn. She kept writing figures on the chalkboard, moving at a steady, unhurried pace, like she had all the time in the world. Which was probably true—if we were dead.

Maybe this was the cuckoo afterlife, and I’d been pulled into it because I’d been touching Sarah when—what? When the other cuckoos caught up with us and forced Elsie to crash the car? But that didn’t make sense. Not only had Elsie still been wearing her anti-telepathy charm, but if Mark had been telling the truth—about anything—the cuckoos were going to want Sarah back. She was their key to escaping this world and this dimension and moving on to someplace that wasn’t prepared for them. Which meant Sarah wasn’t dead. Which meant I wasn’t dead.