Backpacking Through Bedlam, page 12
The phone rang four times before there was a click and a familiar voice said, “You’ve reached the Red Angel, this is Cynthia speaking, how can I help you?”
“Cyn, it’s Alice,” I said.
“You’re back!”
“We are,” I confirmed. “And I was hoping whatever you had on for dinner would stretch a little farther.”
“You could have just come to the bar, you know. No one here’s going to run screaming from the sight of a human.”
“Not so much an option yet.” There was nothing in the fridge except for a few bottles of beer and some ancient condiments. I was pretty sure the mustard was old enough to vote. “Oh, and if you have someone who could go on a grocery run tomorrow, the cupboards are bare over here.”
“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.”
“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.”
“You’re right,” said Sally. “That sounds fake. But I’ll allow it.”
“So he couldn’t call me, and I couldn’t call him without risking damage to my reputation. And I was angry, because he didn’t tell me about his deal right away. He didn’t want me to feel like I owed him for saving my life. So I thought he was cutting me off for no reason, like he was punishing me for getting hurt. And I went off to school, and he stayed here, locked inside this house.” I waved my hands. “Maybe he’ll want me to reclaim my family home once he’s had some time to get his footing back. It’s a year-to-year lease, we’d have to wait twelve months at the absolute most before we could move. Or maybe he’ll feel the way I do, like the good times we had here outweigh the bad parts.”
“So you couldn’t call each other. What about the mail?” asked Sally.
“My father didn’t like Thomas. Thought he had come to Buckley to abduct me, drag me back to Britain, and force me to join the Covenant against my will, and he refused to see that I was always going to be my mother’s daughter, and I was never going to turn into the mild-mannered, accommodating princess he wanted. So he ‘helpfully’ agreed to mail Thomas’s letters, and they never reached me, and my letters to him never reached him, and we both thought we’d been abandoned. For years.”
“How the fuck did you wind up married?”
I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. “Long, long story. Wasps killed my father, I thought they were going to kill me too, I didn’t want to die without banging the man I’d been in love with since I was a teenager, so I came here to screw him senseless before I made my last stand. I did, and then I did, and I didn’t die, courtesy of the mice, and I came back and he dug the wasp eggs out of my back, and then I just never left.” I gave him an unabashedly fond look. “I never left. He told me about the terms of his deal eventually, and then I married him, and yelled at him a lot for thinking I’d have been willing to do that out of obligation, and we got five years of happily ever after before the crossroads took him away from me. Oh, and he quit the Covenant. Right around the time he sold his soul. Guess he didn’t want to risk them showing up and finding out how weird things were getting around here.”
“Okay,” said Sally. “But what about—”
The doorbell rang.
I stood, scattering tailypo in all directions. Sally rose from the floor, her grasp on her spear shifting from casual to anticipatory. I glanced back at her. “No stabbing,” I said. “We are currently in a no-stabbing phase of our lives. I’ll let you know if that changes.”
She scowled at me, but lowered her spear.
I opened the door.
The redhead on the porch would have looked perfectly normal in any crowd, as long as she wasn’t expected to remove the overstuffed down jacket encasing her arms, shoulders, and back in a puffy layer so thick that the actual shape of her was all but obscured. She had a large foil pan in her hands, a paper bag perched on the top. She blinked at the sight of me, and blinked again as she looked past me into the house.
