Page 40 of Backpacking through Bedlam

“And they definitely came for Kevin? Not to talk to Thomas about the cuckoos?”

“If they’d come a year ago, maybe. Now? I think they’d be willing to take Jane, but they came for one of the children.” Laura had looked at me levelly. “That Bell woman said that as it was clear Thomas was not going to come back and do his duty by the family name, someone else would have to come and continue the name. Oh, and unlock the Price assets for ‘proper’ use.”

“I swear, I’d sign those accounts over myself if I had the authority, and let the Covenant choke on it,” I’d muttered. “How’s Cynthia?”

“The Angel’s locked down, has been since Bell came to town. According to Mary, she’s got a whole team with her. A dozen Covenant operatives, all of them ready to close in. I don’t know what they’re waiting for.”

“I do, if you were able to push their lead agent out of the house. They know we have some sort of extra-natural protection in place, and that means they also know they won’t be able to just stroll inside. They’re preparing for a show of force. If you asked me to lay a wager, I’d say they’ve been waiting for either me or Thomas or both to put in an appearance, so they could take us out and be sure we wouldn’t follow them. They’re going to have to answer your refusal with violence. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“None of this makes sense.” Laura looked at me with impotent fury. “It’s been two years, Alice. Have you even found a way out of this dimension?”

“Not yet. But I’m getting closer. The answer’s out there. If I can just get hold of Naga, I’m sure he’ll be able to help me. I’m sorry.” I met her eyes without flinching, because I really wasn’t sorry. After everything we’d been through, everything I’d put and was putting my family through, I wasn’t actually sorry. “It’s going to be a little longer.”

“Well, I can’t stay here any longer.” She narrowed her own eyes, looking for all the world like she wanted to stare me down. “I’m happy to keep watching the kids as long as you need me to, Ally, but I can’t keep doing it in Buckley. I’ve been in one place for too long already. The ghosts are starting to find me. I need to get back to the carnival.”

As an umbramancer, Laura was even more exposed to haunting than an ordinary road witch. Routewitches and ambulomancers have their share of fans among the dead, but it’s the umbramancers who get the brunt of their attention. Why does it work that way? Hell if I know. I just know it does, and Laura had been trying to dodge the dead for as long as I had known her, which had made summers fun when we were kids and my best friend and my babysitter were effectively at war with one another. It had taken Laura years to be even a little bit comfortable with Mary, and Mary didn’t mean any harm. Random ghosts were likely to be less friendly.

“You’re ready to go home, then?”

She nodded. “It’s time. I can take any of the mice who want to go with me, so they don’t lose track of the kids, but . . . we won’t be here when you come looking, Alice. After you find Thomas, you’ll have to find us.”

I think there was a choice in that moment. A chance to say “no, I’m done, I’m tired of wild-goose chases, I want my children and my family and I’ll come to the carnival with you, my mother started there, let me end there.” And I won’t look back now and pretend not to have been tempted. I was tired. I was more than tired; I was defeated. The endless futility of my search for answers was beating me down, and I didn’t know how much more I had in me. That moment was a turning point. It was an opportunity to turn my back on what I was becoming and choose what I had always meant to be.

I bit my lip. I opened my mouth to answer. I never got the chance. The Covenant strike team that had surrounded the house after their lookouts saw me go inside opened fire.

Why that exact moment? I didn’t know, and I still don’t. I can recount the past, but I can’t guess why things happened, only explain how they did. Laura and I were in the living room; Jane was in the kitchen. Kevin was upstairs, although I didn’t know that, and maybe that’s the answer to what I would have said if I’d actually had a chance to reply to Laura’s offer. I was home with my children, yet I hadn’t asked about my son at all. I hadn’t asked if he was okay, or whether I could see him. I was physically there, but I was still very far away, and I wasn’t coming back any time soon.

The first bullet went through the front window, shattering it cleanly. The tailypo woke up, chittering in surprise as they jumped off the bookshelf and huddled under the coffee table, removing themselves from the line of fire. I pulled the gun from inside my jacket, snapping, “Get the kids,” to Laura.

She nodded and ran for the stairs, racing up them as the second bullet came through the window. I dropped to a crouch, working my way over to peer outside.

There was a ring of people surrounding the house. It looked like there were about fifteen of them, which would have been an insultingly low number if it hadn’t been such a relief. I was a terrible mother. I wasn’t pretending to be anything else. That didn’t mean I wanted somebody shooting at me and my kids. Especially not some Covenant asshole who had probably figured out a way to make their bullets hurt extra just so they could make the traitors suffer.

At the center of the line was a tall, whipcord-thin woman with devastatingly sharp cheekbones. It was absolutely believable that she was related to Thomas; they looked similar enough for me to see it. She smiled when the curtain twitched, motioning for the shooters around her to stand down before cupping her hands around her mouth.

“Mrs. Price!” she called. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced. I’m your husband’s aunt, Veronica Bell, and I’m here to collect my nephew.”

I was pretty sure “nephew” wasn’t the term for what Kevin was to her, but like hell was she getting anywhere near him. I grimaced and shot out the window on the other side of the room, hoping to give her the wrong idea about my current location.

She shook her head, expression turning disappointed. “Oh, Mrs. Price. I thought better of you.”

That made one of us. We were isolated enough that no one was going to come to see what was going on out here; if the neighbors heard the gunfire, they’d assume someone was taking a few deer out of season, and leave it at that. You don’t live long in Buckley if you’re overly curious about things that don’t concern you, like people shooting up the house of the town outcasts.

Staying low, I crossed the room to the kitchen doorway, where I lay down on the floor and hissed, “I call for counsel.”

“Here, Priestess,” said a small, shaky voice from behind a crack in the baseboard. It was rare for an Aeslin mouse to be so subdued, or so obviously afraid. “How may we Serve?”

“I need twenty volunteers,” I said, a plan coming together with blazing rapidity. It was stupid. It was quite possibly suicidal. It was going to give Laura and the kids the time to get away from here. “They will be lauded and honored above all others in my service—but they have to be volunteers, and they need to realize they may not be coming back. No novices who think this is how they earn their vestments, you understand?”

“Yes, Priestess,” said the mouse, and went silent, save for the skittering sound that meant it was moving away from me, into the walls.

I stayed where I was. I was still there when a small foot nudged my shoulder, and I tilted my head back to meet the guileless blue eyes of my daughter.

“Where’s Andy?” she asked, sounding almost bored.

“Andy?—oh, Auntie.”

“Andy,” she repeated, now annoyed. “Where?”