Page 48 of Imaginary Numbers

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.

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.