Page 39 of Backpacking through Bedlam

“Have you been reading futures?”

“You know I wouldn’t tell you if I had.” Laura’s voice had been almost chiding. “That monstrosity you call an employer would interfere if they thought Alice was going to succeed, and you’d try even harder to keep her here if you thought she was going to fail. Alice needs this. If she doesn’t at least try to bring him home, she won’t be Alice anymore. I’d rather she be Alice and far away than something broken and fading in the corner, but here. You remember Jonathan.”

“I do,” Mary had admitted. “You don’t think she would . . . ?”

“I don’t know. Did you think he would?”

I had withdrawn then, reassured and stung in equal measure. Reassured because Laura understood why I had to go; stung because the woman who’d been my best friend since we were both children thought I could turn as cruel and brittle as my father if I didn’t get my way. Was she wrong? Not necessarily. But that doesn’t mean I’d wanted her to think it.

And then it had been a new day, and I’d agreed to go into Thomas’s office to make sure our affairs were in order. After finding the letters, I went upstairs and dressed for the field, denim and flannel and sturdy boots, before coming downstairs, kissing Jane on the cheek and giving Laura a hug, and announcing, “I have to go into town. Thomas left some letters I really ought to mail, and I think I’m going to go check on a possible routewitch that Cynthia flagged for me.”

Laura stepped back and looked at me gravely for a long moment before she nodded, and said, “I didn’t think you’d make it this long. I love you, Ally. Try to remember that, and try to come home to us.”

“I always do,” I said, and the finality of the click the door made when I closed it behind me only sounded a little bit like my father hissing “liar.”

That routewitch was a bust, but he knew the address of a cunning woman who directed me to a coven of would-be snake cultists who’d never managed to summon anything larger than a headache, and even that lead went away when I pointed out that they might be better off conducting their rituals in a space with slightly better ventilation. I was in Tennessee by then, and Rose found me shivering outside a diner, trying to decide between spending my last two dollars on bus fare or breakfast.

For a moment, she almost looked disappointed. Then she said, in that slippery way of hers, that someone named Apple wanted to see me, and so I needed to get into the next car she flagged down.

Apple turned out to be the Queen of the North American Routewitches, which was not a thing I’d even known existed before she sat down with me at a truck stop table, a plate of pancakes in front of her and a whole gang of bikers arrayed behind her, ready to defend her honor if I tried to present any sort of threat. She was yet another eternal teenage girl—between her, Rose, and Mary, I was starting to feel like being allowed to finish puberty was something unusual—dainty and dark-haired, with the practiced smile of a lifetime politician. She was older than she looked. I could tell that even before she opened her mouth, and she spoke with the voice of someone much older and wearier.

“The answers you’re looking for won’t be found among my routewitches, or at the crossroads, Alice Price,” she said. “You should still be able to find some, if you look hard enough. My Lady says the way is open, for the careless and the clever, and I think She means you. But you’ll have to be quick and you’ll have to be unrelenting, and you need to leave my routewitches alone. They can’t help you. It’s time for you to go home. Everything you’re looking for is there, in the last place you expected to find it. You have your own problems knocking on the door, and if you don’t handle them, they’re going to handle the rest of us.”

Disagreeing with her seemed like a terrible idea. After our meeting-slash-interrogation was over, she instructed one of her bikers to drive me back to Buckley, and he agreed without hesitation, loading me into the sidecar of his motorcycle and taking off down the highway as the sun was beginning to rise. It would have been picturesque, if it hadn’t felt so much like a failure.

And then I was standing on my own front porch, and somehow it had been more than two years since the last time I’d been there, and when I rang the doorbell, Laura answered, flour in her hair and cake batter on her cheek, and stared at me for a long moment before she said, “It’s about time,” burst into tears, and pulled me into an embrace that seemed to last forever.

It didn’t, of course. It only lasted until a toddler with big blue eyes and curly white-blonde hair pulled into pigtails on either side of her head came up and grabbed Laura’s leg, shoving herself neatly between us. I let go immediately, stepping back and looking down, and Laura took that opportunity to scoop Jane off the floor and hold her up so I could see her, so she could see me.

“Look, Janey!” she cooed. “It’s Mama!”

“Hi,” said Jane, voice a little-girl lisp. Then, hopefully, “Andy, cookie?”

“Just don’t tell the mice,” said Laura, and set her down again. “Go wait in the kitchen, sweetheart. We’ll be right there.”

Content with this, Jane turned and toddled off, not saying anything more. It wasn’t much of a reunion, and it wasn’t until much later that I realized how little I felt, seeing my daughter for the first time in over two years.

I started to step back. Laura grabbed my wrist before I could go anywhere. “No, you don’t,” she said, and dragged me inside.

Everything looked exactly the same, and everything was different. Thomas’s books were still all over the living room, and a pair of tailypo were curled atop the tallest bookshelf, their tails balled around themselves until they looked like plush dolls. Kevin’s toys were strewn across the floor, along with some brightly colored pieces I didn’t recognize but which I assumed belonged to Jane. She looked good. Healthy, well-fed, not traumatized at all by my absence. That was a good thing.

Laura waited until we were away from the door before she turned and asked, “So, are you here because of the Covenant, or because you’re ready to come home?”

“Am I here because of what?”

Her face fell. “Oh,” she said. “I see.”

Then she explained, and I saw too.

Those letters I sent had notified the world that Thomas was gone, and warned his allies we might need a little extra help. That was good. But they had also informed the Covenant about a threat to humanity large enough to make a happily exiled former member reopen contact. Honestly, I’d been a little skeptical of Thomas’s hope that telling them more about the cuckoos would accomplish what he thought it would, or that it was necessary enough to risk drawing their attention. My grandfather had believed the cuckoos had been around for centuries, maybe since the dawn of human history, preying on us, setting up their unnecessarily elaborate murder plans and taking out whole communities, all while staying undetected, thanks to being psychic assholes who could literally write themselves out of people’s memories. We might never have known they existed, if not for my mother being somehow naturally resistant to their powers. We still didn’t know why that was, or whether I had inherited any of her natural resistance.

Thomas had been being practical by telling the Covenant what little we’d managed to learn about the cuckoos since my grandfather’s death. He’d been trying to protect our family when he did it, but he’d also been trying to keep humanity safer in a world where most of the other true monsters had already been destroyed. Now that attempt was coming back to bite us all.

According to Laura, a Covenant operative had come to the house the week before, a woman named Veronica Bell, who had claimed to be a distant cousin of Thomas’s mother, and asked to speak with him. When Laura had told her Thomas wasn’t available, she had switched her attention to the children, specifically Kevin, who had come up to show her the fricken he’d caught behind the house. Mrs. Bell had apparently cooed at him, told him he was a very clever boy to already be destroying monstrous things, and tried to take him away with her, telling Laura it was for the best for the boy to be with civilized family.

Laura had disagreed, vigorously, and managed to expel Mrs. Bell from the house by way of the wards she’d constructed since my departure. Umbramancer work can be remarkably delicate, when they have time to set it up, and she’d been given two years.

If the Covenant had moved faster, the story might have unfolded differently. “The only thing I can figure is that they didn’t want to come for Kevin until he was old enough to be useful to them,” she said, bluntly. “Useful, and toilet-trained. Can’t imagine taking a toddler in diapers on a transatlantic flight would be very fun for anybody.”