“He’s a Lilu,” I said desperately. “Lilu heal faster than humans.”
“Sure, but we’re not superheroes, and healing at roughly three times the human rate doesn’t mean we can’t be broken.” Elsie glanced over her shoulder at the brightly lit car. “So you know, if he dies before the two of you get to talk this out, I am never going to forgive you.”
“Talk what out?”
A wave of irritation washed off Elsie as she focused back on me. “You’re not this stupid. Stop trying to be.”
“Whoo!” We both turned. Annie was trudging back up the incline, her hands dark with soot, radiating contentment. “Car’s done. Fire’s contained. Let’s get the hell home before something else goes wrong.”
“This isn’t over,” said Elsie, attention on me.
“I know,” I said, and walked toward the car. I was tired, I was injured, and I already wanted to go home.
Sometimes recovery’s not everything it’s cracked up to be.
Six
“Every relationship, good or bad, is different. Some of them are just more different than others.”
—Enid Healy
On the way to a safe, secure, intentionally isolated family compound in the woods outside of Portland, Oregon
SHARING THE BACKSEAT WITH Artie meant riding with his head resting in my lap, since the seatbelt could keep him safely restrained, but it couldn’t keep him upright. I stroked his forehead with one hand, savoring the foggy glimpses of his thoughts that came with the contact. It wasn’t enough to tell me what he was thinking—or whether he was aware enough to be thinking anything at all, rather than displaying flashes of random brain activity—but it meant he was alive. That was what really mattered. Artie was alive.
I let my hand rest against his skin, reaching deeper, looking for signs that the faintness of his thoughts was somehow related to the damage he’d suffered in the accident. Elsie’s words from before were haunting me, making it difficult to focus on anything but worrying.
People die from head trauma. People die. Artie was people, and Artie had hit his head, and no matter how silly and overdramatic the thought might seem, Artie could die. I could wake up tomorrow to a world that didn’t have an Artie in it, and I would never have told him—
And that didn’t matter, because I was pretty sure he didn’t feel the same way about me. He loved me because I was his cousin, not because I was a girl who liked him more than girls are supposed to like their cousins, even the ones who belong to a completely different species. All I could do by saying something was make it weird.
Still, I pushed deeper into his blurry, half-formed thoughts, looking for some sign that they were anything out of the ordinary. What would thoughts born of a concussion even look like? Would they be tattered around the edges, or too scrambled to hold themselves together, or something else, something worse and more confusing?
“—are you listening?”
Annie’s voice. I raised my head, pulling myself out of Artie’s thoughts, and said, “Huh?”
“You weren’t listening.” She twisted in her seat so she could look at me. “I said, we’re almost to the house. How’s Artie doing?”
“Still knocked cold, but I’m not finding anything scary in his head. Just a lot of jumble. Pretty normal for someone who’s hit their head. I’m not too worried. I’m pretty sure I’d be able to tell if something was really wrong in there.”
“And if you couldn’t?” asked Elsie.
I took a deep breath. She was worried about her brother. Of course she was worried about her brother. Drew was enough older than me that we’d barely ever lived in the same house, and I’d still be worried about him if he’d been in a car accident. “If I couldn’t, if I can’t, then Evie will be able to figure it out. He’s going to be okay.”
Elsie didn’t say anything.
The woods unrolled around us, dark and tangled and so crowded that they became featureless, a solid wall of black wood pressing in from all sides. I tensed every time we passed another road, waiting for the truck to make a second appearance. It never came. We were driving on a virtually deserted road, deep into the middle of nowhere, and while we might not be safe, we weren’t in active danger.
Artie stirred in his sleep, mumbling something that was almost, if not quite, a word. I stroked his forehead again, stealing glimpses of his tangled half-thoughts. Were they getting stronger, or was that just wishful thinking on my part? I wanted him to wake up so badly that I could be imagining signs of improvement.
We were moving too fast for me to have any good sense of the minds in the woods around us. I would have known if there’d been a large gathering of humans—campers are surprisingly psychically noisy—or anything like that, but the smaller, individual thoughts of the night were slipping through my mental fingers before I could really clamp down on them.
Then we turned a corner onto a half-concealed private road, and a new set of thoughts washed over me, strong and bright and terribly familiar, now that we were past the charms buried at the borderline.
My family.
Evie was there, as fierce and quick and eager to help as always. She was the best big sister I could have asked for, unjudgmental and constantly willing to take the time to make sure I understood what was going on. Her husband, Kevin, was with her, and while he had more of a core of worry than she did, he was still ready for us. There were two more minds in the house, both male, both unfamiliar enough that I couldn’t pick up anything more than the most superficial of impressions—I needed to meet them before I’d be able to get more than that without pushing. And I didn’t want to push. After the day I’d had so far, pushing seemed like a terrible idea.
“Almost there,” said Elsie, and she sped up, taking us around the curves of the long road to the front gate like she thought she was being timed. It would have felt unsafe if I hadn’t known that she’d done this hundreds of times over the years, speeding up a little more with every trip, sometimes while actually being timed.
The Oregon compound started out as Kevin’s idea. His mother, my Grandma Alice, hadn’t really been there when he’d been growing up; he and his sister, Aunt Jane, had both been raised by the Campbell Family Carnival, which was sort of like growing up with family, and sort of not at the same time. He’d been dreaming of real roots, a home he could design and defend, since he was a little boy. After he met Evie and realized it was time to settle down, he’d set about making his dreams a reality. A house, isolated from the nearest human communities, big enough to host not only his immediate family, but every other living relative and maybe a dozen extras. Outbuildings and barns and fences and floodlights. Everything your average small militia needs to feel like they’re not going to be crushed under the heel of “the Man,” only in this case the militia was more like a wildlife conservation convention, and “the Man” was the Covenant of St. George.