Page 57 of Backpacking through Bedlam

“Gosh, I never thought a death wish would be genetic,” she said. “So you’re doing support. Why does that mean you can’t give us a head count?”

“Because we’ve been limited in what we can learn while still keeping off their radar, which is still our primary concern. Dominic and I were here the last time the Covenant showed up, and Sarah hurt herself pretty badly putting the whammy on their field team to make them think we were dead,” she said bluntly. “Part of it involved convincing them I wasn’t really a Price, I was some sort of hired impersonator. I damaged that false memory when I went and fought a Titanoboa on live television. They may have been having flashes of knowing things were wrong before they even got here, because one of the first things they did when they arrived was start rooting out cuckoo nests, since they knew, on some level, that mind control was a danger.”

“So?” I prompted.

“So if any of them see us clearly enough to make a solid ID, that mental block may collapse completely,” said Verity. “Meaning Sarah would have hurt herself for nothing, and they’d know they didn’t just have another traitor on their hands, they had one who was working with one or more cuckoos. Right now, they think Dominic’s dead. They’re running protocols and processes he knows, and he can warn people when the Covenant is likely to be moving into their area. They find out he’s alive . . .”

“They find out he’s alive and they change everything,” I concluded grimly. “Good reason.”

“Plus right now, they’re not profiling random blonde humans and attacking the ones who fit on the theory that they might be me,” added Verity. “Based on what Dominic and Antimony know about their tech, we think they’re using some sort of heat scanner to pick out nonhumans when they’re looking for targets. Honestly, if we had half their tools for detecting cryptids, outreach would be so much easier. But right now, you can walk down the street and you’ll be fine. If they figure out Dominic is alive and I’m the woman who was with him when he ‘died,’ too many innocent people could be at risk. We’re minimizing casualties.”

“Where’s Sarah?” I asked abruptly.

“This time of day, probably Starbucks,” said Verity. “She goes for coffee in the afternoon. She’s the only one of us who can be absolutely sure of being safe. The Covenant still hasn’t figured out how to track cuckoos, especially not if they’re following human rules of behavior. They can carry anti-telepathy charms, but those can’t help them differentiate cuckoos from humans with similar coloration, and New York has plenty of pale, dark-haired people.”

“Their heat scanners don’t find cuckoos?”

“Cuckoos run about eight degrees cooler than the average human. Most nonhuman bipeds run six to twelve degrees higher. At least for right now, the Covenant is looking for the hot people—and even if they weren’t, their odds of finding a single cuckoo in the city would be less than one in a million. Most of the cuckoos in North America vanished a little over five years ago, when they tried to open a dimensional door and skip town. They didn’t survive the process. Sarah may be the last cuckoo left in New York, and for once, that’s not because of anything the Covenant did. So she gets the occasional break from being shut up in here with all the local minds she’s actively attuned to, and we get coffee delivered once a day.” Verity shrugged broadly. “It helps. Not enough, but . . . it helps.”

“Right,” I said.

“The dragons are focused on protecting the Nest, the bogeymen are focused on trying to batten down the hatches and hold the sewers, and all the other cryptid communities are doing their best to close their doors against the outside world. So we’re not getting a lot of reports from the locals about the Covenant’s movements. We know they’re actively hunting all the time; they’ve caught a lot of the solitaries, and they keep patrolling every night, looking for anything ‘deviant.’ We’ve confirmed the existence of at least three field teams. There may be a fourth, or it may be members of the other three coming together in their off time to enjoy their favorite hobby, wrecking the lives of innocent cryptids.”

“So that’s what, twenty people?”

“Somewhere around that.” Verity looked at me, letting me glimpse the naked fear in her eyes. “If you’re thinking ‘Twenty’s easy, I carry twenty knives all the time,’ stop. They’re dangerous, Grandma. They travel in groups, they’re trained killers, and they’re cruel. They don’t fight fair. They don’t particularly care about collateral damage, as long as they can kill the people they think of as monsters. Most of the city doesn’t know we’re at war. Sure. That’s how the Covenant works. They move in the shadows, they pretend ignorance is bliss and what you don’t know can’t hurt you, and they kill, and they kill, and they keep killing, because as long as they keep their heads down while they’re doing it, people just write the deaths off as background noise!

“You haven’t been here, Grandma, you haven’t tried to comfort the people who’ve just lost spouses, or parents, or children. You haven’t watched people trying to cope with the deaths of their loved ones when no one else seems to care. We may not have tanks rolling down Broadway, but this is war, and it only ends when the Covenant can say nothing inhuman is left alive in Manhattan. And when they do that, they start heading out into other places, to cleanse those, too! There’s at least twenty of them, we don’t know all their names, we don’t know most of their faces, but they’re here, and they’re killing people, and we need them to stop. I need them to stop. And I need you to figure out how you’re going to make that happen, because my people are pretty damn tired of dying.”

She took a deep breath before turning toward the door. “I’ll let you get settled in. Come out when you’re ready. Istas will show you around the warehouse and make sure you know the escape routes and house rules. Sally, it’s nice to meet you. Grandma, it’s nice to see you again. Grandpa . . .” She hesitated, apparently not sure what she was supposed to say. The silence stretched like a piece of chewing gum, getting longer and longer and more and more fragile. Finally, she shook her head, and said, “I’m glad you’re not dead after all. And I’m glad all of you are here. Really. We need the hands.”

Then she was gone, leaving us alone in a situation that was very big, very complex, and very not designed to be handled by my usual brute-force methodology. Which explained why it was grinding her down the way it clearly was. Of all my descendants, Verity was the most like me in temperament. A problem she couldn’t punch into submission was a bit outside her comfort zone.

It wasn’t much closer to my own comfort zone. Thomas was fifty years out of time, Sally knew nothing about the cryptid world, and I was joining a fight where knives and hitting weren’t likely to be the solution.

Wasn’t this going to be fun.

I sat heavily on the edge of the bed, which sank a bit beneath me, revealing its origins as a piece of camping gear hastily press-ganged into service as bedroom furniture, and bent forward, dropping my head into my hands.

The bed rose as someone sat down next to me, and Thomas put a hand on the small of my back.

“I feel rather as if I’ve just been dropped into the middle of a theatrical production with no program and no notes on what happened during the first two acts,” he said, sounding surprisingly unruffled.

I lifted my head, eyeing him suspiciously. “You’re not upset?”

“Oh, I’m so upset that I’m astonished I can still draw breath,” he said, in a reassuring tone. “I left our infant son, and now his daughter is old enough to have a child the age he was the last time I saw him.”

“That wasn’t him in the kitchen?” asked Sally.

I felt Thomas turn his attention in her direction. “I suppose it was, but I have trouble wrapping my head around that fact. I’ve mostly been cleaving to the idea that it proves he’s still alive, and not dwelling on all the reality of what his age means. Alice was a surprise but not a shock. She still looks almost like she did when I had to leave her behind. I would have loved her no matter what. I still didn’t have to make any major mental adjustments to look at her and see my wife. Looking at a grown man and seeing my son is a more difficult feat. Looking at a grown woman with a daughter of her own and a De Luca by her side—a De Luca! Now there’s a family I never thought to see turn traitor— Well. That all takes a bit more adjustment.”

I uncovered my face and sat up, looking at her. “I haven’t missed nearly as much time as Thomas has—or as you have—but five years is a bigger jump forward than I usually make. I vanish for a year, maybe two. Not five. Not long enough for my granddaughter to get pregnant and have a daughter of her own, and probably decide I was dead. She’s not going to evacuate. Even with a baby, there’s no way we convince her to leave this city to its own ends, not when she feels responsible for what’s happening.”

“So your whole family’s like this?” Sally asked.

I considered for a moment. “They’re all different,” I said finally. “But pretty much, yeah. I ran out on my children when they were too small to understand why it was happening. They couldn’t tell me not to go. They couldn’t come with me. All they could do was stay behind. And somehow that led to them growing up with this incredible determination never to leave family behind again. Verity is what she was raised to be, and she was raised by the people I broke, so I know where her cracked bits are. Yeah, they’re all like this, to one degree or another. I haven’t seen most of them in . . . well, in five years longer than I thought I had.”

I barked a sharp laugh that threatened to become a sob, and Thomas shifted his hand from the small of my back to my shoulder, drawing me closer. I took another deep breath, looking for serenity. Looking for stability. Looking for anything other than the bone-deep exhaustion that threatened to rise up and overwhelm me.