Prologue
“No one deserves to be the only living example of their own kind. No one should be that alone in the world.”
—Angela Baker
On the road from Florida to Ohio, passing through the Virginias
Twenty years ago
IT HAD SEEMED LIKE such a good idea at the time.
Take the grandchildren and go to Lowryland. Sure, it was a thirteen-hour drive, but what was the point of having an RV if you didn’t use it to go on an adventure every once in a while? Martin loved to drive—one of the men he’d been before he died had been a long-haul trucker, and some of the old instincts and habits still lingered in the long muscles of his legs and the subtle cant of his spine. Angela wasn’t as fond of sitting behind the wheel, but her presence caused the worst of the folks they shared the road with to decide to go and drive like fools in someone else’s lane; the traffic police could probably have charted their route by looking for the odd reduction in accidents.
The trip down to Florida had been as perfect as a two-day road trip with a six-year-old, a nine-year-old, and a twelve-year-old could possibly have been. They’d lost Verity up a tree at one of the rest stops, and had needed to give Alex permission to shoot her with a slingshot in order to get her down; they’d had to dissuade Antimony from following the bright lights of a traveling carnival across the highway and onto private property.
(Angela understood why the girl had been lured. Like her father before her, Annie had already spent a summer with the Campbell Family Carnival, and probably assumed anyone who owned a Ferris wheel was a friend of the family. Not being interested in explaining why she’d allowed one of her human grandchildren to run away to join the literal circus, Angela had been forced to lure Annie back to the RV with promises of candy, soda, and another play-through of her favorite Raffi CD. They were all going to have “Baby Beluga” stuck in their heads for the rest of their lives.)
Lowryland had been, as expected, wonderful. Verity had scaled the geodesic wall before any of the security guards on duty had realized what was about to happen; Alex had managed to catch sixteen different species of frog, snake, and lizard, all within the Park proper; Antimony had been able to take her picture with several princesses and a very confused Goblin King, all while consuming her weight in cotton candy. Thirteen hours each way was a small price to pay for five days of grandchild bliss.
Well, thirteen hours each way and a fairly substantial amount of money. The wonders of Lowryland didn’t come cheap, and that was before souvenirs, food, and all the other little pins and needles that accompanied a theme park stay. But it was worth it.
Angela looked approvingly at her grandchildren, who were sleeping peacefully on the RV couch. The three of them were tangled together in a rare moment of sibling peace, Alex at one end with Verity’s head on his shoulder, Annie curled up with her own head in Verity’s lap. All three were sunburned, wearing Lowryland T-shirts, and completely at ease with the world, trusting their grandparents to keep them safe no matter what happened next.
Angela knew they would lose that peace soon enough. They were being trained as soldiers in a war they’d never asked for any part of, and while their parents would never force them to fight, she already knew they would never walk away of their own volition. They had too much family involved in the conflict. She could never leave. Neither could Martin, or Drew, or their Uncle Ted, or their cousins. As long as humans hated cryptids, cryptids would have to fight. As long as cryptids fought, the Prices wouldn’t be able to get away.
She was considering going to fetch her camera when the pain began.
It lanced through her head like a bolt of lightning, sudden and intense and agonizing enough that she gripped the nearest piece of furniture to keep herself from falling to the floor. It pulsed, rising and falling like a wave, filling the inside of her skull with static, making it almost impossible to keep her balance.
Slowly, the pulse began to resolve into words. Help. Help me. Help. Help me.
Angela’s expression hardened. Another cuckoo. One who was broadcasting so loudly that they’d been able to break through her natural barriers against telepathy. She couldn’t pick up simple thoughts the way most of her kind could—it was all out and no in, for her—but if someone really wanted to scream, she could occasionally hear them.
The pain would pass. Even the most powerful telepath in the world didn’t have an infinite broadcast range, and there was no way she was lingering here, not in another cuckoo’s hunting grounds.
Angela was all too aware that she was an aberration among her own kind, a freak of nature. She’d been reminded of that fact every time she’d been forced to interact with another cuckoo. It was a miracle she’d survived—something must have had her mother running scared when it came time to select a nest for her defective offspring, something big enough that she hadn’t noticed when Angela failed to acknowledge her telepathic commands. In a species of people who could bend others to their wills, Angela was weak, and cuckoos didn’t tolerate weakness.
The girl—she thought it was a girl—screaming in her head certainly wasn’t weak. She was loud enough to make Angela’s teeth ache, to make every muscle in her neck lock up in sympathetic agony. They needed to drive faster. They needed to get away from here before the psychic screaming attracted something dangerous.
Please, please help me, wailed the girl, and Angela went cold.
Cuckoos didn’t say “please.”
Oh, they understood the meaning of the word—they heard it often enough. They just didn’t believe in it. “Please” was something victims said. “Please” meant the fun was just beginning. But this girl, this cuckoo-child who sounded no older than Verity, also sounded like she meant it. Like she was in trouble, and terrified, and reaching out in the only way she knew how.
Angela Baker was a defective cuckoo who had spent her entire life running away from the species of her birth, putting as many miles as she possibly could between herself and the rest of her species. Her desire for isolation had landed her in a sleepy neighborhood in Ohio, where no cuckoo could hope to find anything to benefit from, had led her to keep herself even further below the radar than her natural inclination. And now there was a cuckoo girl, a child, screaming for help inside her head, in the place that had always been hers, and hers alone.
She had tried to be a good person. She had tried to rise above the inclinations of her species, to choose the better way. She had tried so hard to put her family above herself, to measure her desires against her needs, to get along with the world. And now there was a child screaming in her skull.
Angela Baker was many things. Cuckoo, accountant, monster . . . mother. Mother, and grandmother, and when she heard a little girl crying, it didn’t matter where they came from or what they were. She needed to comfort them.
Head still pounding, she pulled herself up straight and turned toward the cab of the RV, opening the small door between herself and the driver. Martin was still focused on the road, humming along with a classic rock CD he had slipped into the player as soon as the children had gone down for their nap. He didn’t seem to realize that anything was wrong. Well, of course, he didn’t. He wasn’t a telepath.