“To get my keys.”
“Why?”
Elsie paused long enough to give me an absolutely withering look. “Our telepathic cousin comes home from Ohio for the first time in years. You finally figure out how to get over yourselves and hook up. And that same night, you and I both have a weird dream that ends with a new word being planted in our brains? Yeah, that’s not normal. Even for us, that’s not normal. So we’re going back to the compound to make sure Sarah’s okay.”
“Couldn’t we just call?”
“At two o’clock in the morning? If we call and she says nothing’s wrong, we won’t believe her, and we’ll go over there anyway. If we call and she says something’s very wrong, we’ll be too far away to help. No, getting in the car is the right decision. We can stop and pick up donuts or something in case someone has a problem with us rolling in before the sun comes up.”
There was an urgency in her tone that made me stop, blink, and look at her more closely. “You’re really freaked out.”
“We come from a family of biologists. One way or another, we’ve been exposed to more science lessons than those poor kids on the Magic School Bus. But you know what I’ve never studied voluntarily? Bugs.” Elsie shook her head. “I don’t like bugs. They’re weird and they’re creepy and they have too many legs. They skitter. I am not a skittery person.”
“Okay . . .” I said, not sure where she was going with this.
“I know, without a doubt, that I’ve never heard the word ‘instar’ before. It’s a whole new word. And somehow, it’s in my head, which tells me someone put it there. Hopefully, it was Sarah. I’m not sure why she’d be putting words in our heads, and we’re going to have a talk about privacy and boundaries if she did, but that’s the good option. That’s the option where no one’s violating what should absolutely be a safe space. If it wasn’t Sarah, she’s in trouble. So we go. You, and me, and right now.”
“Mom and Dad—”
“Are still at the compound.”
That explained some of her urgency. We were alone in the house. If someone was playing with our heads, that wasn’t good.
“I’ll get my shoes,” I said.
She nodded tightly. “Meet me at the car.”
I turned and walked back toward my room, speeding up as I went, until I was practically running down the stairs.
Being a Price means spending your life preparing for an emergency you hope won’t ever come. Elsie and I aren’t as physical as our cousins—we can’t be, not when our blood tends to make people fall in love with us—but that doesn’t mean we got out of the basic training. I grabbed clothes and yanked them on before picking up the bug-out bag that leaned against my desk and slinging it over my shoulder. Inside I had medical supplies, rope, a flashlight, batteries, water, a compass—all the low-tech answers to low-tech problems. Well, most of the low-tech answers.
The handgun I took out of my desk and clipped to my belt would provide the rest of them.
I’m a pretty good shot, and my parents have always been careful to make sure Elsie and I are comfortable with firearms. Verity prefers knives and Antimony prefers anything that keeps the fight at a comfortable distance, but Alex and I bonded over shooting when we were in elementary school, and I’m good enough at it that even Grandma Alice says I have potential. From her, that’s the next best thing to being given an actual medal.
The last thing I grabbed was my phone, fully charged and ready to work. I don’t know how anyone had the nerve for cryptozoology before we had a decent cellular network. I mean, Sarah’s a pretty good substitute, but telepaths are rare, and most of them can’t be counted on to play mission control. Assuming Sarah was okay.
Sarah was okay. She had to be. We just got her back. There was no way she could be hurt again, not so soon after she’d come home.
I tried to hold onto that thought as I made my way up the stairs and out the garage door to where Elsie was leaning against the side of her car, impatiently waiting for me.
“I would have left without you if we hadn’t just set your car on fire,” she said, getting into the driver’s side. She turned the key in the ignition. The radio immediately began blasting K-pop, bright and peppy and infectiously enthusiastic, even though I couldn’t understand a word.
I got in and buckled my belt. “Let’s go.”
“How’s your cheek?” Elsie pulled out, eyes on the road. “I don’t like going into whatever this is with you already wounded.”
“Almost better.” Lilu—both incubi and succubi—heal faster than humans. Dad can snap a broken bone back into place and be fully recovered an hour later. Elsie and I don’t have quite that kind of regeneration, but we don’t stay down for long. Mom thinks it’s because our blood is so potent that our bodies have evolved to keep as much of it inside us as possible. I think that sounds like revisionist bullshit, even though I’d never say that out loud. Evolution isn’t that careful. Evolution just happens, and the consequences fall on the evolved.
“Good. Let me know if we need to pull the stitches out.”
I touched the side of my face, self-consciously. I knew Sarah didn’t register faces the way a human girl would, but it still felt weird to be seeing her with a big gash in my cheek. “I think they’re okay. They’re already starting to break down.”
“Good.” She hit the gas harder, accelerating along our sleepy suburban road like she believed speed limits were things that happened to other people. The night blurred around us, and we were on our way, racing against a catastrophe that might not even have happened.
Please, let it not have happened, I thought, and listened to the music, and tried not to be afraid.
* * *
My name is Arthur Harrington-Price. My friends call me “Artie,” which really means my cousins call me Artie, since I haven’t had any flesh-and-blood friends since I hit puberty and got hit with the wrong end of the incubus stick. I’m not devastatingly handsome or suave or capable of talking people into anything I want—which Antimony says is a good thing, since people who can get anything they want just by asking for it tend to turn into supervillains, and she’d hate to have to put me down. She means it, too. My cousin loves me, but she’s ruthless. That’s part of why I trust her. She’d never let me go evil.
Elsie and I come from a mixed marriage, human mother—well, mostly human; everyone seems to think Great-Grandma Fran brought a little something extra to the table, even if whatever it was is so diluted now that we can’t identify it with anything short of full genetic sequencing, and we don’t have the resources for that—and incubus father. Elsie got more of the control and less of the chemistry. I got the reverse. She can usually talk people into things, and she has some skill at dream-walking, wandering through sleeping minds and seeing what they have to offer her. Me, I got biological love potion number nine. When people who might be into me get a whiff, it’s love at first whatever. And that’s not cool. The only people who are immune are the ones who are actually related to me, which I guess proves that nature abhors inbreeding.