Page 27 of Backpacking through Bedlam

“Yeah, I’ve got a girl who can make the run for you, as long as you tip well. How long are you planning to stay?”

“Maybe you’re not listening to me,” I said. “We’re back. We’re staying. For good.”

“‘We’ being you and the mice?”

“No.” She was the first person I was going to tell with words, the first person who’d known him before everything went to hell. This call had been essential, and had felt like a good idea when I made it, but suddenly my tongue was dry as cotton in my mouth, and the next words fought me, refusing to come without a fight. “We being me, Thomas, and the stray Thomas picked up along the way. Her name’s Sally and she’s human, but she’s essentially his adopted daughter and the mice have already deified her.”

Cynthia gasped, the sound short and sharp. I could hear her fingers tighten around the receiver, the plastic groaning under the force of her grasp. “You found him? Alice, you found Thomas? You brought him home?”

“That, or I found a doppelganger so good that he could fool me completely.” Wouldn’t that be a fun turn of events, given how concerned he’d been about me being an imposter? But no. He knew too much. He knew me. He was the real deal.

Cynthia made a weird choking sound that I realized after a moment was laughter. Oddly strained, but laughter all the same. “You ridiculous . . . Okay. So you found him, he’s alive, and you’re at the Parrish Place, yeah?”

“Three people,” I repeated. “No dietary restrictions I know of. Oh, and if whoever you send to the grocery store could grab us a sheet cake, the mice are sort of worked up right now, and they’d really appreciate it.”

“Are you sure you’re not a doppelganger? Alice Price, offering store-bought cake?”

“I’m going to need to clean this kitchen to the bolts before I feel like I can bake here, and that’s not happening until I’ve had half a dozen showers,” I said. “The mice can deal with substandard baked goods for a few days.”

“Got it. Oh, and Alice?”

“Yeah?”

“Welcome home.”

She was laughing again as she hung up, sounding like she was teetering on the very edge of hysteria. I looked at the phone, thinking about all the other calls I needed to make, all the big, important, inescapable calls . . . and then I set the receiver gently back in the cradle. Only one of those calls needed to happen tonight, and it wasn’t going to involve a phone. In fact, I’d probably take the phone off the hook before I made it, to keep everyone else who was immediately going to try checking in from getting through.

Of course, that might trigger a panic and cause all of them to descend on Buckley before I was ready, but would that be worse than putting off talking to the one other person who’d been there since the beginning? I didn’t know. Why did everything have to be so complicated all of a sudden?

I closed the fridge, resting my forehead against the cool metal. For fifty years, my life had been incredibly simple. Go: search: fail: heal: repeat. I’d been following a very straightforward set of commands, searching for a man who might or might not be out there to find, letting the situation provide whatever complications I was going to need to deal with. And now we were back in the real world, where things were complex and tangled and didn’t follow straight, predictable lines. Two kids, six grandkids, two ghosts, and an unknown number of allies, most of whom wouldn’t have been born yet when Thomas disappeared, but who knew me well enough to want to check in. Once they learned we were here, things were going to get very complicated for a while.

But this was what I’d wanted. This was what I’d been searching for. And exhausted and overwhelmed as I was right now, I wouldn’t change a thing, because he was home. With me, in Buckley. We were both still ourselves, bar a little—or a lot—of trauma, and some telepathic tinkering with my head that we might never have all the details on. We were home.

That would have to make up for everything else.

I straightened, pushed my hair away from my face with both hands, and put on a sunny smile before heading back to the living room. Sally was still sitting on the floor. Thomas was still apparently unconscious on the couch. I walked over to the armchair I’d been seated in before, shooed two tailypo out of it, and settled again. They hopped down to the floor, then back into the chair, where they curled in my lap. That was fine. That was normal, surreal as that might seem.

The tailypo are not in any way domesticated; they’re wild animals that have decided to den in a human house, mostly because decades ago, I managed to trick Thomas into playing animal hospital for an injured one, and they’re smart enough to remember when they’ve got a good thing going. They know what they want and they know what they like, and they’re reasonably well behaved as long as you don’t try to make them do anything they really don’t want to do. Like stay out of my lap.

“Cynthia’s going to send someone by with dinner, and she’s got someone else who’s going to go by the grocery store for us tomorrow morning, meaning we’ll be able to cook and keep ourselves alive while we recover enough to want to deal with the locals.”

“Are the locals that bad?”

“Eh.” I wobbled a hand in midair. “Typical small-town stuff. Everyone knows everybody else, and even though I’m officially a local, I’ve been scarce enough since I assumed this particular identity that people have questions. There’s going to be an adjustment period, and that’s why it’s so important for us to have our stories straight before we start interacting with them. Whoever Cyn sends with the groceries will be a cryptid. Dragon princess, probably, since she usually has a few of them on staff, or a gorgon, or someone else who can pass for human long enough to do the shopping. Species doesn’t matter. What matters is that everyone on her staff knows my deal, they know Thomas’s deal, even if he’s an urban legend more than a person to them, and they won’t ask any really stupid questions, or try to catch us out in logical contradictions that make us sound like we’re secretly international jewel thieves or something.”

“We provide . . . leverage,” said Sally, in the ponderous tone of someone who was quoting something. Then she cackled, clearly delighted with herself.

I blinked slowly. “Okay, whatever that means. Anyway, food soon, house tour when Thomas is awake, then showers.”

“And in the meantime, you can tell me who the players are.”

I raised an eyebrow. “The players?”

“You keep mentioning people like you think I’m not joining this show in the middle of the season. Like this Cynthia who’s bringing us dinner. You said she’s a ‘Huldrafolk’? What the hell is a Huldrafolk? What’s a dragon princess, for that matter? Cryptids are things like Nessie and the Mothman, not things that go down to the Hannaford’s to buy milk and eggs.”

“Guessing that’s a grocery store, and um, wow. You’ve been cool enough about everything, and I found you in a weird murder dimension, that I guess I forgot you wouldn’t have grown up with all this stuff. You want me to start at the beginning?”

Sally nodded vigorously. “Please.”