Page 19 of Butterfly Effects

When Elsie’s brother Artie got pulled into another dimension with me, Mark, James, and Sarah during the whole “Cuckoos try to destroy the world” incident, he got his mind erased in the process of the rest of us getting out of there. I was there, I saw it happen, and I know it was an accident, but I can completely understand why Elsie blamed Sarah for the way things went down: most days, I blamed her too. Artie had touched her. That was all he did. He’d touched her, and she’d lost control of her powers, because cuckoos are too dangerous to be around normal people, and he was gone in less than the time it took to blink an eye. He left his body behind, because he didn’t die: he was just deleted, like he’d never existed to begin with.

Sarah had built a new person to take his place, one who remembered a lot of Artie’s life and shared some of his passions—but not enough to believably replace him. He’d started coming apart inside of six months, losing the memories that weren’t properly anchored inside his head, forgetting things he should have known, and insisting we all call him “Arthur,” because he knew he wasn’t Artie.

Watching a stranger wearing my cousin’s body like a borrowed suit had been hard on me. It had been a lot harder on Elsie. She was his sister, and she loved him—both versions of him—more than any of the rest of us. It had taken a cross-country road trip with Arthur and Mary before she’d started really spending time with Arthur on any sort of a voluntary basis. But somewhere between Oregon and Massachusetts, she figured out how to love him as he was, not mourn him for what he wasn’t.

And now he was gone. Taken by the cuckoos, just like Artie had been, if a bit more physically. I slid the phone back into my pocket, looking between my grandparents. They both looked horrified in their own ways: Thomas’s mouth was set in a hard, furious line, and Alice’s hands were flexing like she wanted a knife, or a pistol, or something.

“Well?” I asked. “What do you know, and what are we going to do about this?”

Five

“Breaking things is easy. A child can do it. Putting things back together, now, that’s harder than most people can imagine.”

—Frances Brown

Buckley Township, Michigan, the dining room of the Old Parrish Place

SAM AND I SAT ON one side of the dining room table, his tail looped around my left ankle like a tether keeping me from leaping up and throwing myself into danger. Both of us were tense, a state that wasn’t aided by the fact that as soon as we’d gotten upstairs, Alice had gone for her revolvers and Thomas had gone to his study for some books. I tilted my head back, looking up at the ceiling.

“This is going to be bad, isn’t it?”

I glanced at Sam. “What makes you say that?”

“I dunno. I’ve been hanging around with your family for a while now, and when people start looking for weapons and research materials, that means things are about to get messy and probably start sucking.” Sam made a dour face. “I was enjoying our little summer vacation.”

I bumped my shoulder against his. “You mean you were enjoying harassing every living thing in the Galway Woods.”

“Hey, your grandmother said the forest liked me. I figure I should go on little play dates with it to make sure it keeps liking me.”

“You are so weird.”

He grinned. “Takes one to know one.”

“I am not weird.”

“You agreed to marry me. That’s weird.”

I rolled my eyes. “You do not get to play that card.”

“Watch me.”

We were bantering to distract ourselves from the elephant in the room: two of my cousins had apparently been abducted by cosplaying cuckoos, and they knew Sarah’s teleportation trick. I didn’t know whether we were looking at two separate groups or one coherent hive, but either way, things were likely to get very unpleasant before they settled down again. A little silliness now would spare us at least a little stress once things got started.

Alice came striding back into the room, an old-fashioned gun belt riding low on her hips and a knife strapped to her left bicep. She was pretty set in her ways, and if she looked more gunslinger than modern mercenary, well, she could still kick the asses of most of the mercenaries I’d met. Fifty years of practice will do that for a person.

“Sam, you’re sort of optional here,” she said, bluntly. “You can stay in Michigan and keep an eye on the house and Sarah’s spider.”

I groaned. “I forgot about Greg.”

“How do you forget about a spider the size of a grizzly bear?” asked Sam. “He’s roaming around in the woods. Half the horrible things I’ve brought to show you, I only found because he flushed them out. I saw him take down a peryton this morning. Just jumped up and snatched it right out of the air.”

I whistled. “Wow. I wish I could have seen that.”

Sam made a sour face. “No, you don’t. Peryton are gross-looking enough without having pieces ripped off by a giant spider.”

“Fair enough.” Peryton are part of the vast class of cryptids that are best described as “not deer.” Oh, they have hooves and antlers and the basic body plan of a deer, but all the not-deer are somehow wrong. Peryton, for example, don’t have skin as such. They have a thick layer of gelatinous mucus that keeps their organs in place and helps to prevent their musculature from being covered in a layer of dust and grime, but it’s not the same. They look like they’ve been flensed. Nasty pieces of work.

Sometimes I wonder what the hell evolution was thinking. And then I remember that evolution isn’t known for thinking at all. It’s not even selecting for the most successful forms, no matter what third-grade biology classes will try to tell you: it’s selecting for “Can it make it to adulthood and live long enough to reproduce?” Everything after that is gravy in evolution’s eyes.