That gave me pause. Narrowing my eyes further, I shot a sharp thought at him. You touch them and you die.
“Oh, now you’ll talk to me like a civilized person? You’ve been living among the humans for too long, Sarah. What went wrong inside that pretty little head of yours? You should have entered your second instar when you reached puberty, and you didn’t. You held it off for years, and look at you now. Frightened. Pathetic. Moral.” He sounded genuinely disgusted by the last word, practically spitting it at my feet. “How did you delay your metamorphosis?”
“What’s an instar?”
His eyes widened. “This is worse than I thought. Why in the—it doesn’t matter. It isn’t my problem, I’m just the retrieval guy. Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to walk to the gate, and you’re going to let yourself out. You’re going to come with me. No alarms, no attracting attention to yourself, no funny business. And then we’re going to leave.”
“Why the hell would I do that?”
“Because if you don’t, then you’d better be prepared for a siege.” He leaned forward. “The blood of Kairos isn’t enough to protect these people from us. We’ll hem them in, pin them down, and have them, one by one—and that’s just the ones within these walls. We know where the Lilu live. Their defenses aren’t as good as they ought to be. They’ll be dead by morning, all of them, and it will be your fault, Sarah. You’ll finally have done what a good little second-instar cuckoo ought to do and killed the family that raised you. Is that what you want?”
He wasn’t making any effort to shield his thoughts or emotions from me. Calm conviction radiated around him, colored with the absolute serenity of truth. He wasn’t lying. He wasn’t trying to deceive. He genuinely believed every word he was saying.
“You can’t . . .” I began. Words failed me, so I continued in silence, You can’t. They’re Prices. They’ve beaten cuckoos before. They’ve beaten everything.
“Three of them are Prices,” said Mark. “Two of them married in. The Lilu and the one who thinks of herself as your sister—and that’s disgusting, by the way, do you always let your pets have that much power over you? It’s vile. They’re not Prices, not genetically. The boys aren’t Prices either. The fūri might be a problem. He could probably hurt a few of us before we shut him down. The sorcerer is less than half-trained, and he wants. He wants so badly that we know everything we need to know. We can break him. We can break them all. It’s your choice, Sarah. Come quietly, come now, and we leave them alone. Sound the alarm, fight us, and we take them down before we take you anyway. The end result is the same.”
He was utterly sincere. I couldn’t see his thoughts well enough to know how many cuckoos he had with him, but I got the impression of at least five—a larger swarm than anyone had ever documented. Cuckoos usually work together only at mating time, and then only for as long as it takes the child to be conceived, carried, delivered, and deposited with an unwitting host family. Six cuckoos in one place wasn’t just dangerous: it was a natural disaster.
“Seven,” he said.
I snapped my head up, staring at him. “You’re starting a countdown now? Don’t those usually begin with ‘ten’?”
“Not a countdown,” he said. “A clarification. There are seven of us. You’re a cuckoo, too.”
The cuckoo choice would be to go back inside and sound the alarm. I would be safe. I would be protected. I would be selfish. I’d be putting my entire family at risk. I looked at the other cuckoo, who looked politely back. He somehow managed to look like he was focusing on my face, the lines and angles of it, as if he could actually see it like a human would. It was a good trick.
I took a slow breath. My whole body ached with the stress of the moment, and with the knowledge of what I was about to do.
“If I come with you, you stay the hell away from them,” I said. “You don’t come back and start making trouble as soon as my back is turned.”
Amusement radiated through his thoughts, warm as morning sunlight. “How are you going to hold me to that?”
“I don’t know. But I am. If you ever come anywhere near here again, I will kill you. Maybe only you. Maybe the rest of the cuckoos get away. Maybe you kill me in the process. Doesn’t matter. It means there’s one less cuckoo on your side, and that shifts the numbers in a way that I can live with.”
“Two less,” he said.
I frowned. “What?”
“You said there would be one less cuckoo on my side. There would be two less. I would kill you, princess. It might be the last thing I ever did, but I’d do it.”
“I’m not on your side.”
“You will be.” He cocked his head, like he was listening. I didn’t hear anything. He was the only cuckoo close enough for me to detect. He must have been playing relay with someone who was in his range but not in mine.
That didn’t necessarily mean he was stronger than me. There are plenty of things a cuckoo can do—plenty of things I knew how to do—to increase their range where a specific person was concerned. Maybe he’d been willing to stay in contact with another cuckoo long enough to become attuned to them. It was strange. A whole pack of cuckoos coming for me was even stranger.
“Fine,” he said finally, eyes flashing white. “We give you our word that no one will come back here to interfere with your family. We can’t promise they’ll be spared if they track us down. Take it or leave it, because we’ve already been out here too long.”
They wouldn’t thank me for this. Family is supposed to be the most important thing in our world, and by walking away, I was as good as saying that my family couldn’t protect me. The thing was, they couldn’t protect me. Not against this. Not against an enemy that could get inside their heads. Anti-telepathy charms are the solution against one cuckoo, acting alone or trying to defend their territory. They wouldn’t hold the line against a group of them. They would just make the enemy harder to see coming.
My family had protected me after New York. It was my turn to protect them. I looked the cuckoo in the eye and nodded, once, before I turned and started for the door next to the gate.
Tucking the family compound away in the forest had been a good way to control traffic in and out. It hadn’t eliminated the need for things like getting the hell away from your family, hence the occasional doors set into the fence. Without them, my cousins—Verity especially—would have been forever setting off the motion detectors along the top as they climbed their way to freedom. Sure, freedom looked like an evergreen forest in the middle of nowhere, but it was still freedom.
Or it had been. I keyed in the gate code, which I’d lifted from Kevin’s mind without even thinking about it, and stepped out of the supposed safety of the yard into the dangerous darkness of the woods. It didn’t feel like freedom anymore. It felt like walking into a trap.