Page 77 of Backpacking through Bedlam

We ambled down the block, me temporarily in the lead, the others following behind. Only Dominic looked nervous about how exposed we were—I supposed there wasn’t much concern about the rest of us actually being recognized before we could reach our goal.

We didn’t find a safe place for Ryan to change on that block. We made our way to the next. Sally pulled up next to me and asked, in a low voice, “Is this really it? No plan? We don’t have some grand strategy that’s going to help us find the people we’re looking for and make it all come out okay?”

“Dominic’s planning to use Ryan as a sniffer dog, if that helps,” I offered.

“Not really. That’s not a plan.”

“I thought I would wait and see what Alice decided to do,” said Thomas. I looked at him, blinking. He smiled as he shrugged, a remarkable gentleness in his eyes. “We could do with a bit of that luck of yours.”

Healy family luck: sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, but it’s never, ever boring. Or, as it might be better called, Brown family luck, because I definitely got it from my mother. If you give me two doors to open, I’ll always choose the one that leads to certain doom: two paths across a room, I’ll pick the one with the hidden pit trap. Every single time. And then I’ll survive them both, through some ridiculous combination of coincidence and one-in-a-million shots. Whatever it is, it’s genetic, I know that much: both my kids have the same weird coincidence field. It extends to the grandkids, too. Where it stops, I don’t know, but whatever something extra Mom brought to the family tree, it’s gotten me in—and out of—trouble more times than I can count.

“It’s not a switch I can flip, you know.”

“I know. But when we most need you to be in the right place, you tend to wind up there.” His eyes crinkled at the corners as his smile grew. “It would never have taken you so long to find me if there hadn’t been someone yanking you in the wrong direction every chance he got. So go, follow your feet, and let the random coincidences that have kept you alive this long lead you.”

“Okay,” I said, rolling my shoulders in a shrug. It wasn’t like anyone had a better idea. We still had no real intel or plan—and I was a little annoyed about that. Shouldn’t Dominic have at least asked the shapeshifter who wouldn’t be useful until he stopped looking like a human being to transform before we left the hidden passage in the subway? Amateurs. But picking a fight wasn’t going to do us any good right now. So we walked.

We walked, and New York City closed around us like a fist, and that was exactly right. This was our world, where we should have been all along; this was where we could fit in. It might take us time, but eventually, it was going to be like we had never left, and that was going to be wonderful.

Thomas made a small, pleased sound. I stopped walking, snapped out of my brief reverie, and blinked at him. He smiled at me again. Was I ever going to get tired of seeing him outside in the sun, smiling at me? No. No, I was not. After the amount of time I’d spent trying to make this moment even remotely possible, I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more.

Maybe to have it happen without a bunch of missing juvenile dragons and the Covenant of St. George in the mix, but there’s wishful thinking and then there’s being a little bit delusional, and I’d rather trend toward the former than the latter.

“You found me a bookstore,” he said.

I blinked again, turning to see what he was looking at. We were standing outside a store, its wide glass windows crammed with books and its front overhung by a red awning. Carts packed full of discounted books had been pushed out in front, tempting customers.

“Good job, you found the Strand,” said Ryan, sounding only a little bemused. “I don’t think we’re here to shop, though. We’re supposed to be finding an alley.”

“Do they have a public bathroom?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, sounding even more bemused.

“Great.” I turned to Istas. “Can I have the ribbons from your pigtails?”

“Why?”

“I want to use them to rig a leash to put on him,” I nodded toward Ryan. “If we go into the bathroom together and wait ten minutes, I can tie the ribbon around his neck and pretend that I’m one of those assholes who takes her dog everywhere she goes. I’m blonde. If I look confused, people tend to believe it.”

“I want to be offended by the suggestion that we leash me, but it’s not a bad one,” said Ryan, slowly. “No security cameras in the bathrooms, either.”

“And since we won’t be shoplifting, if they ask to search my bag, they’ll just find your clothes. Which is a little odd, but I don’t think it’s out of the ordinary for New York.” It was a decent plan, if not a great one, and I tried to sound more confident about it than I felt.

Dominic sighed. “You know, standing out here and talking about going into the bookstore is not actually as effective as going into the bookstore. Shall we?”

“It’s the beginning of a plan, if not the end of one, and we may as well go with it,” said Thomas.

Dominic nodded, and as a group, we moved inside.

Seventeen

“I’ve always been lucky, since the start. There’s people who’d say being found in a cardboard box isn’t lucky, but I say that if I weren’t lucky, no one would have found me.”

—Frances Brown

The Strand Bookstore, trying hard to come up with a better plan, not really succeeding

THE DOOR OPENED ON a large room filled with shelves and tables, all groaning under the weight of more books than I’d seen outside of a library. Thomas nearly stumbled, his eyes gone wide behind his glasses, and I wondered, with a brief jolt of guilt, how long it had been since he’d held a book, much less seen such a massive assortment of them. There hadn’t been time for him to get reacquainted with his library in Buckley before we’d been on our way out the door. For a man who loved books as much as he did, the last fifty years must have been hell.