So I spend most of my time indoors, in my bedroom, or doused in cheap cologne when I absolutely have to go out somewhere. I read comics and I code and I work at making things easier for my family. I’ve been producing most of our false IDs since I was still in high school, that sort of stuff. It’s something I can do when field work isn’t on the table. And field work is almost never on the table. Lilu have what Uncle Kevin calls a flexible genetic structure, meaning we can reproduce with virtually anything and get children that are more Lilu than whatever their other parent was. It’s a way of guaranteeing the species continues even when we have a tendency to piss off our neighbors and get ourselves burned at the stake. Which is honestly not as much of an overreaction as it seems. We’re sort of bad for people.
Elsie didn’t drive like she cared about other people. Elsie didn’t drive like she cared about us. She hadn’t strayed too far from the speed limit until we were outside city limits, but as soon as she’d been sure we were in the clear, she’d slammed her foot down on the gas and she hadn’t let up once. The K-pop was gone, replaced by a playlist of Broadway songs, none of which had a BPM of less than oh-god-we’re-gonna-die, and she seemed to be trying to match her driving to the music. I held tight to the grip above my door and wondered whether this was some sort of cosmic karma coming to get me for all the times I’d pictured Sarah—not biologically related to me, still technically my cousin—in that bikini she’d worn when we went to the lake house the year before she’d been hurt.
“Can you slow down?” I asked.
“Are you picking up any static?” she shot back, swerving around a corner like she thought she was auditioning for a Fast & Furious reboot.
That stopped me.
Telepaths are normally undetectable, which makes sense, since a telepath you can detect isn’t going to sneak up on you very well, and every kind of telepath we know about is an ambush predator. They hunt by making sure their prey doesn’t know they’re coming until it’s too late. Only it turns out that once a telepath has spent too much time around specific non-telepaths, they start creating a sort of psychic white noise that even non-psychics can pick up when they’re around. They become detectible.
Maybe that’s why cuckoos are usually such jerks: they don’t want anyone to be able to track them. I could follow Sarah across the world, as long as I never let her get quite out of range. Even when I don’t know exactly where she is, if she’s in range, I know she’s there. I know she’s all right. That matters. It matters a lot.
We were too far away for the static to have kicked in, but when it did, I’d be able to relax. Except if she was up in her room, there wouldn’t be any static; the charms that keep the rest of us from projecting inward also keep her from projecting out. I’d need to wake her up if I wanted to be completely sure.
Dammit.
The drive from our house to the compound normally took about an hour. Elsie managed to get it down to forty minutes, mostly by ignoring any traffic law that inconvenienced her. She screeched up to the front gates shortly before three o’clock in the morning.
“Get out,” she instructed. “Punch the code and let’s go.”
“I’ll follow you up,” I said. Something was wrong. I could feel it. “I want to count lights. See how many people are still up in the house.”
She nodded, lips pressed into a thin line as I got out of the car and moved to the keypad.
The fact that entering the compound meant someone getting out of their vehicle or coming out of the house has always been a problem. It’s more secure than putting the security system on wireless controls, which could be compromised, but it means someone’s exposed every time the door opens. We were never allowed to order pizza when we were kids. Someone always had to be willing to go into town.
The air was cold—not strange for three in the morning—and weirdly silent. Even the owls and tailypo in the woods weren’t making any noise. I moved toward the keypad, punching in the security code, and moved toward the door next to the gate as Elsie prepared to drive through.
It was already unlocked.
I twisted the knob back and forth several times, checking that it was actually unlocked, and not unlatched or something else mechanical. Even being unlatched would have been a little alarming—one of the only times I’ve ever seen Uncle Kevin really lose his temper, it was because Verity had run out too quickly and forgotten to make sure everything was secure, and she’d been thirteen at the time—but unlocked? Unlocked was barely this side of impossible.
None of that changed the door’s condition. I stepped through, locking it properly behind myself, only glancing over my shoulder twice as I followed Elsie up the driveway. If someone was locked out now, they could call the house, assuming they had their phone. Or they could use the intercom. The door needed to be locked. The door shouldn’t have been unlocked in the first place.
Something was really wrong. The feeling of wrongness only intensified as I moved toward the house without the white noise that would signify Sarah’s presence kicking in. She was probably upstairs in her room. She was probably fine. That didn’t make this comfortable.
Elsie was waiting for me on the porch. “See anything unusual?”
“The gate was unlocked.”
Her face smoothed into quick, unreadable neutrality. “You’re sure?”
“I checked it three times. It was unlocked.”
“The lights in the barn are still on. Our folks were there when we left.”
I caught her meaning quickly. “You want to go tell them something’s up while I check inside for Sarah?”
“If you wouldn’t mind?” She grimaced. “This whole situation has me twitchy. I just don’t know what’s going on, and I want some backup.”
Annie was my preferred backup for situations like this one. Anything my cousin couldn’t beat to death with a hammer wasn’t worth being scared of. But she’d been sharing her room with Sam since her return from the road, and Sam didn’t wake up friendly, or without throwing things. I didn’t want to prod the giant monkey in the middle of the night if I didn’t have to.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I’ll see you in a few minutes.”
“Scream if you need help,” she said, and hopped down from the porch, heading around the side of the house.
I opened the front door.
It was unlocked, like the gate. Unlike the gate, that was normal. The front door was only locked when no one was inside; otherwise, anyone who’d made it past the fence could just stroll on in. Aunt Evie liked to explain it as a way to disorient people who expected military-grade security at all times, but honestly, I thought she just liked being able to run around without carrying her keys. Aunt Evie could be that sort of mixture of canny and careless, probably because she’d grown up in a household where her human privilege had been so completely world-changing.