Page 28 of Backpacking through Bedlam

“Okay. How much do you know about the Covenant of St. George?”

“You and the boss have both mentioned them, and neither of you likes them much, and you said earlier that they started out by killing dangerous things but moved on to killing things like the tailypo. Explain it like I don’t even know that much. I promise not to get offended by you talking to me like I’m five.”

“Right. Okay, so centuries ago, dragons were fucking things up for people, and—”

“Hold on. Hold on.” Sally held up her one hand, motioning for me to stop. “You’re already assuming something there. Dragons are real?”

“Were real, mostly. They’re not extinct, but they’re so close that a few bad days could take them out. It’s complicated. But once, they had the kind of numbers you really don’t want a massive apex predator to have. Once, they ate people, and burned down houses, and generally made themselves unpopular. So the Covenant formed to make them stop. An organization of monster-hunters dedicated to the idea that humans deserved to survive, and to be safe.” I sighed. “It wasn’t a bad idea in the beginning. They were even pretty cool for their time. They let women join. They didn’t care about race or religion. They just cared that you were human and wanted humanity to endure.”

“So what happened?”

“They won.” I shrugged. “And like any underdog who wins when they didn’t think it was possible, they started getting full of themselves. They decided it wasn’t good enough to protect humanity, they had to eradicate the dragons. Then they had to do the same to anything else they didn’t like or understand, or that they thought might be dangerous. I don’t know when religion came into it—it wasn’t there in the beginning; someone found a way to graft it on later and make it stick—but some clever asshole decided they were going to redefine their mission as wiping out anything that hadn’t been on Noah’s Ark. So if it wasn’t mentioned in the Bible, it was out. With a little creative interpretation, of course, since the Bible mentions unicorns, dragons, and all manner of other things the Covenant decided they had the right to slaughter.”

Sally made a face. “They don’t sound like very nice people.”

“Not so much. Again, maybe they were in the beginning, but once they were on top, they got more and more determined to stay there, and they became more and more willing to kill anything that got in their way. Eventually, they were too good at their own jobs, and they killed so many of the ‘monsters’ that everyone else decided the monsters had never been real in the first place, and the Covenant started losing power. Success drove them underground, and that made them bitter, so they got even more aggressive about hunting down and killing innocent creatures.

“You asked what a cryptid was. Well, technically, a cryptid is any living organism whose existence has yet to be proven by science. So all your neighbors back in the bottle dimension, Helen and Phoebe in Ithaca, everything we saw during our road trip, all cryptids—or they would be if they came here. Since most of them are staying in their home dimensions, they get to be just people there.”

Sally nodded. “So some cryptids are things like the tailypo or the mice, and others are people?”

“Don’t let the mice hear you implying they’re not people; they learned a great lecture on sapience from one of my grandkids, and they can repeat it word for word. Which they will, with great enthusiasm, until they decide you’ve actually listened. We use ‘people’ as a label for anything that can reason for itself. So some people are bipeds, like humans, and some of them look enough like humans that they can hide in plain sight. Some of them are roughly human-shaped, but can’t pass unless they have cover or some sort of a disguise. And some aren’t bipedal at all. Dragons were people. They were just people in positions of power who didn’t see humans as people. And that’s been the problem since the beginning. When someone looks around and decides they get to make that call, things always go bad.”

“Like how the Covenant kills cryptids.”

“Yes.”

“And you know so much about the Covenant because . . . ?”

“My grandparents were members,” I said. “So was Thomas. The Covenant sent him to Buckley to keep an eye on my family, because we were ‘dangerous traitors’ who might decide to share their secrets. As if anyone would believe us.”

Sally blinked. “Your family belonged to the Covenant.”

“Thomas, too, in case you missed that part. And yeah. They were enthusiastic members of the ‘Earth is for humans and humans only, and anything humans don’t like deserves to die’ club, until they weren’t, and then they came here.” I waved a hand, airily. “I’m simplifying, of course. You’ll get the whole story when it won’t be completely overwhelming.”

“Because this isn’t overwhelming?”

“No, this is the short version. My grandparents quit the Covenant because they figured out it was bullshit, left England, moved to the middle of nowhere to raise a family, and that might have been the end of it, except the Covenant is made up of paranoid bastards, and they sent Thomas to spy on us. He showed up when I was sixteen, and he was the most incredible man I’d ever met.” I couldn’t stop my voice from turning a little dreamy at the end.

Sally made a face. “Okay, ew, border of too much information and ‘I don’t want to think about my father figure’s sex life.’”

“You’re gonna meet our kids eventually.”

“Still. You could have adopted.”

I smiled at her. “You’re remarkably weird for someone who’s been through as much as you have.”

“Pot, kettle.”

“Right. So I met Thomas, fell in love with Thomas, convinced myself I would never have a future with Thomas, went into the woods trying to find the thing that killed my grandmother, got bitten by a super-venomous sort-of-snake, nearly died. Thomas, meanwhile, met me, fell in love with me, told himself he wasn’t in love with me because we’d never have a future, then sold himself to the crossroads to save my life. Oh, and then he didn’t tell me he’d done that, the fucker, so I went off to college and didn’t come back for years. We were kind of a disaster. The kind where the authorities sift the ashes and make politely unhappy noises about how there were no survivors.”

Sally looked thoughtfully at Thomas. “He’s different when you’re around. Calmer, somehow. Less like he wants to fight the whole world. He also yells more. I think you’re a disaster, but you’re good for each other at the same time.”

“I hope so, because it’s going to be a while before I let him out of my sight.” I stroked one of the tailypo curled in my lap. “His deal with the crossroads was brutal. It didn’t take him right away. For whatever reason, they decided to play with their food. First he got locked inside the Buckley town limits. Then he got locked inside his house. I know this sounds fake, but it was a different time. We had telephones, and we had the mail, and he had no reliable way of using either one.”

Sally blinked. “How’s that?”

“Telephones used to go through an exchange. You’d dial, and then the operator would connect you to the number you were trying to reach. I think they phased out the humans in most big cities by 1950 or so, but here, they hung on for another decade. I was an unmarried woman ten years his junior, and he was a foreigner who had taken to his home with some unknown illness. If he’d tried to call me, even if my father had allowed me to take the call, the operator would have stayed on the line hoping for some juicy gossip.”