“Really?” I blurted.
Artie went pale, thoughts turning alarmed. He pulled his hands away from my face, taking a stumbling step backward.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and fled from the room.
I tried to twist and run after him. Elsie kept hold of my shoulders.
“Believe me, we’ve been waiting for this for a long, long time, and no one wants it to happen more than I do, but there’s a gigantic gash in your forehead, and you need to tell the rest of us what just happened,” she said. “He’ll be lurking around for you to have uncomfortable conversations with when we’re done.”
“Sorry, honey, but she’s right,” said Evie. “I’ve never seen anything like that. I have to call Mom and tell her about it, and that means I need to understand it.”
I stared at her. She shook her head, walking around the bed to take my hands and tug me toward a seat. The connection brought her thoughts into sharper focus, which didn’t help, not really; she was worried about me, she was concerned about Artie, she was already making plans for mobilization of the family if there was further cuckoo activity in the area. Evie had been practicing her whole life for moments like this one. She wasn’t going to lose her focus now.
I temporarily put all thoughts of Artie from my mind and grudgingly allowed her to push me into the room’s one open chair. Annie and Sam were still on the couch. They had been joined by James, forming a line with Annie in one corner and James in the other, with Sam in the middle between them. I frowned. Sam and James were too new. I couldn’t pick up their thoughts clearly yet, apart from the subtle sense of presence that kept me from being surprised by the people around me. They couldn’t be here.
“They have to leave,” I said, eyes still on James and Sam.
Annie bristled. “They’re family, too,” she said.
“It’s not that. They don’t have . . . they need telepathy blockers. They’re family, but they’re not family.” James had a mind that felt like frostbite and Sam had a mind that felt like the moment when a roller coaster began its descent down the first big hill on the track, and neither of them had any defenses against me. If I was hurt again, if I was dangerous again—
Annie’s thoughts turned suddenly static and sharp. “Oh,” she said.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Oh.”
“Come on, guys,” she said, standing. “Crash course on cuckoo biology and anti-telepathy charms in the kitchen. I think there’s leftover pie.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so?” asked Sam, and followed her. James trailed after the two of them, his thoughts hopping back and forth between sensible wariness and the growing desire to stay in my presence. Meaning he needed that charm sooner than later, if we didn’t want him declaring me to be his long-lost sister and trying to protect me from my own family.
Sometimes the way cuckoo powers work is really, really annoying.
Evie waited until they were gone before she focused on me and said, “I’ve seen your eyes go white before. This was more than that. They lit up.”
“Like you had fireflies inside your skull,” said Elsie.
I bit my lip. Bioluminescence is a fact of nature, and more common than most people realize. Even humans glow a little bit, under the right conditions, although human eyes aren’t engineered to see it. The fact that my eyes glow sometimes is a quirk of biology, unremarkable on the greater scale of things. That didn’t mean I liked hearing that they’d gotten brighter.
Being one of the only reasonable people out of an entire species really makes it hard to understand my own biology. It’s frustrating.
“I went into Artie’s thoughts,” I said. “I had to if I wanted to defuse the trap the other cuckoo set. It was a nasty one. She set it all the way down at the bottom of his brain, so that he couldn’t wake up. He could still think, it was just . . . buried. Covered over by everything else. I found it, and I ripped it apart, and he woke up. That’s all. But we should probably find that cuckoo. She knows who Artie is now.”
“That’s not going to be a problem.”
The voice belonged to my Aunt Jane, which was odd, since I hadn’t felt any trace of her entering the building. I turned to look over my shoulder. She was standing in the doorway with Uncle Ted behind her, a silver anti-telepathy charm dangling from a chain around her neck. She raised one hand in a small wave when she saw me looking, bending her fingers into the American Sign Language for “I love you.”
That helped. Since I can’t read faces, anti-telepathy charms turn people into inscrutable monoliths, making their moods and expressions virtually impossible for me to understand. Simple hand signals can make all the difference between me being totally lost in a conversation and me knowing what’s going on.
“Jane?” Evie straightened. “Hi, Ted.”
“Hi,” said Uncle Ted, with a distracted wave. He sniffed the air. “Artie was bleeding here. I’m going to go find him, make sure he’s okay. Jane will fill you in on what we found in the woods.”
That sounded ominous, a feeling that only intensified as a wave of dismayed concern rolled off of Evie. She put her hand on my shoulder, pinky finger against the skin of my throat, and the feeling intensified. I knew she was doing it to make up for the functional black hole that was Jane, but in the moment, her feelings were so big, and mixed with so many other things, that I almost pulled away.
Uncle Ted turned and walked back toward the kitchen. Aunt Jane stepped into the room.
“Annie did a good job burning the car,” she said. “I checked the whole thing for signs of contamination, and I didn’t find any. No one’s going to come hunting Artie down because they’ve decided he’s destined to be their one true love.”
“That’s good,” I said uneasily.
“The indents on the side were definitely made by a truck—it’s not that I don’t believe you, Sarah, it’s just that it’s important to verify that sort of thing directly, to be sure we haven’t missed anything.”
I nodded. “Of course.”
“There was no sign of the vehicle or the driver. They really must have hit you and then kept on going. Elsie said you didn’t get any warning before the accident?”
“No, none.” I shook my head. “They came out of nowhere. I should have heard the driver’s thoughts, even if they were drunk or drugged—I should have had something to tell me what was about to happen. The fact that I didn’t hear anything before the impact means they must have been being masked somehow. An anti-telepathy charm, maybe—although that wouldn’t be very safe, since wearing one of those is like shutting myself in a lead box—or the other cuckoo was the one driving, and she was pulling herself way, way back.”