As I got older, I learned that not everyone knows their way around a scalpel before their tenth birthday, and that maybe taking jars of organs preserved in formaldehyde for show and tell wasn’t a good way to make friends. I’d learned, in short, to be ashamed. But none of that changed the way the smell of the barn swept over me, chemicals mixed with wood rot and hay and clean, freshly-sharpened steel, all of it blending together to say “home” and “you are safe” and “boy, I hope you’ve had your tetanus booster recently.”
The smell of bleach hung heavy in the air, drowning everything else out. I took a breath, then sneezed. “Dude, what the hell? Why does it reek of aconite in here?”
“There’s Benadryl in my purse,” said Elsie. She was standing next to one of the surgical tables, taping a piece of gauze down on Dad’s shoulder. He was shirtless and sheepish, hands braced to either side of his knees while she worked. “After Mom shot Dad, all the grownups got squirrelly and horny. Mom’s out walking the perimeter to make sure there’s nothing else coming.”
I paused, looking around. Mom was accounted for, but Aunt Evie and Uncle Kevin were missing.
Antimony must have done the same math I had. Her whole face screwed up in an expression of radiant disgust. “Ew,” she said. “I didn’t need to know that. Why did you make me know that?”
“Because I was here when my father got shot—meaning I was here when my mother shot my father—and everything tried to turn into the world’s most embarrassing orgy,” said Elsie.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” said Dad. “I don’t have any control of what happens when I’m bleeding.”
She sighed. “I know, Dad. You can put your shirt back on now.”
“Please,” said Annie.
“You’re never that anxious for me to put my shirt back on,” said Sam, and dumped the unconscious Heloise onto another of the surgical tables.
“Yes, because you’re not twice my age, related to me, and capable of making me stupid with lust just by flexing a bicep.” Annie holstered her gun and moved to help Sam strap Heloise down. “Okay, maybe that last one applies, but it’s not creepy because you’re not my uncle.”
They made an efficient team, and if I focused on that, I didn’t have to pay attention to my father squirming back into his shirt, or—somehow even worse—the fact that the woman they were securing to the table was a dead ringer for Sarah. With her hair askew after Sam landed on her, it was apparent that she had even mimicked Sarah’s injuries. This had been very carefully planned, and they hadn’t expected us to catch on.
I paused, frowning. “Hey, so, you know how there’s that mental hum when you’ve been around a telepath for too long?”
“We went over this earlier,” said Annie.
“Sure, but Dad and Elsie weren’t there,” I said. “This cuckoo doesn’t have the hum, because she’s not Sarah, so we’re not attuned to her the same way we’re all attuned to Sarah.”
“Not all, but sure,” said Sam.
“Why didn’t she know?”
That was enough to make everyone pause and turn to look at me.
Dad spoke first. “What do you mean, Artie?”
“I mean she’s wearing clothes that look like Sarah’s, or maybe are Sarah’s, and I don’t want to think about that, so I’m not going to think about it anymore than I have to, and she made some snarky comments about wishing everything had gone wrong before she’d cut her hair, since she doesn’t like having bangs, and she even has a cut on her forehead that looks just like the one Sarah got in the accident. She planned for an insertion. She thought it was going to take us time to figure out that she wasn’t who she was pretending to be. But she also knew that being a Price makes you resistant to cuckoo powers.”
“Meaning what?” asked Elsie.
“Meaning she didn’t think she could fool most of us telepathically,” said Annie, taking up the thread. She stared at me with dawning comprehension. “She thought she could pretend to be Sarah so well that we’d all believe her, which means she didn’t know we could pick up on the hum.”
“I don’t think ordinary cuckoos spend enough time around people to even know about the hum,” I said. “I think they just . . . come and go, and leave things broken behind them.”
“That’s pretty much the long and the short of it, yes,” said an unfamiliar voice from behind me.
We all turned, except for Heloise, who was both unconscious and tied down. The man standing just inside the barn door raised his hands.
“I surrender,” he said. “Or I come in peace, or whatever you need to hear in order to not shoot me immediately. Because we need to talk, and we don’t have a lot of time.”
His skin was pale and his hair was black and his eyes were blue and I didn’t have to be a genius to know that if I hadn’t been wearing an anti-telepathy charm, he would have been nudging the edges of my mind, looking for a way past my natural resistance. He was wearing blue jeans and a University of Portland sweatshirt and he looked like Sarah’s brother and I saw red, I literally saw red. I was moving before I had a chance to think about it, striding across the barn to knot my hand in his sweatshirt and yank him toward me even as I raised my fist and cocked it back.
He looked at me impassively, resigned, not flinching. “If it’s going to make you feel better, go for it,” he said. “Like I said, we don’t have a lot of time. Get it out of your system.”
I hesitated, hand still raised, unable to decide what to do next.
Antimony saved me from myself. She appeared next to me, pushing down on my fist until my arm was back by my side. She didn’t touch the hand clenching the man’s sweatshirt. “Hi,” she said, in the brightly pleasant tone that meant she was about five minutes away from setting everything in sight on fire. “Who are you, why are you here, and why should we let you leave?”
“My name is Mark,” he said. “I’m here because I need your help if we’re going to save the world, and you shouldn’t let me leave. I’m a cuckoo. I know you know what that is. You have one of us tied up on the table over there.”
“They’re cuffs, not rope, but continue,” said Antimony. I looked at her. She shrugged. “Precision is important, even when you’re talking to people you’re probably about to kill. Maybe especially when you’re talking to people you’re probably about to kill. That way they get to the afterlife with an accurate idea of what took them out.”
“I don’t think cuckoos go to this dimension’s afterlife,” said Mark, in a resigned tone. “If they do, I’ve never heard about it, anyway. We’re not from around here. Presumably, after we’re dead, we go wherever the hell it is we actually belong.”