Half-Off Ragnarok

Nine

In the kitchen of an only moderately creepy suburban home in Columbus, Ohio, dealing with a suddenly homicidal girlfriend

IF SARAH WAS UPSET about having a gun aimed in her direction, she didn’t show it. I wasn’t even sure she realized the thing in Shelby’s hands was a gun, as opposed to a stapler or something similar.

“You can leave the kitchen if you like, Alex,” said Shelby. “I know this must be very confusing for you, but I promise, it’s all going to start making sense soon.”

“What are you—”

“You never gave it to her, but I couldn’t hear her,” said Sarah, blinking her enormous blue eyes with Disney princess guilelessness. “I didn’t even know she was in the house until she started talking to you. She should have been here until you gave it to her, and she wasn’t.”

“Gave what to her? Sarah—” I glanced at Shelby, who was holding her perfect shooter’s stance with a casual ease that implied she could do this all night if she needed to. I was in favor of that. As long as she was standing still, she wasn’t shooting my cousin. “Maybe this isn’t the best time to talk about what you could and couldn’t hear, okay?”

“But you never gave it to her.” Sarah’s eyes stayed fixed on Shelby, but her tone turned petulant. She seemed more perturbed by me than she was by the woman with the gun. Oh, priorities. “You promised.”

“Gave what to . . . oh.” I froze, feeling the blood drain out of my face.

I had never given Shelby the anti-telepathy charm. I left the kitchen to get it for her, but I’d been distracted by the cockatrice in the backyard, and I’d never given it to her. I risked a glance over my shoulder, confirming that the little glass-and-copper pendant was still lying on the floor. I’d dropped it and then forgotten about it in the scramble to keep me from turning to stone. Shelby couldn’t be wearing it—but if she wasn’t wearing it, Sarah should have been able to “hear” her presence. Having a stranger in the house should have been driving my cousin’s telepathy into a frenzy.

And instead we were all gathered calmly in the kitchen, except for the part where Shelby had a gun. I looked back to Shelby, trying to assess the distance between us. What had I invited into my home?

More importantly, what could I do to fix things?

“Shelby . . .” I began.

“It’s all right, sweetheart,” said Shelby, in the sort of wheedling tone she normally reserved for her charges at the zoo. She never took her eyes off of Sarah. “We’re going to get you all sorted out, and then I’ll explain everything about what’s happening here. Assuming you remember there’s anything to explain. You may not.”

There was a gun strapped to my calf. I bent casually forward and reached for the holster, trying to make it look like I was just scratching an itch. Please don’t make me shoot you, Shelby, I thought. That would be a bad breakup, even by my admittedly low standards. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“No, you wouldn’t, would you?” The sympathy in Shelby’s expression died, replaced by a sneer as she focused her attention back on Sarah. “Where’s the rest of your flock, you filthy brood parasite? There’s no point in protecting them. I’ll find them with or without your help.”

Sarah looked bemused. “I don’t have a flock,” she said. “They abandoned me on a doorstep, and they never came back. Fly little bird, fly and be free. But I’m not a bird, you know. Biologically, I have nothing in common with birds. Well. Lungs, I suppose.” She looked to me, sudden curiosity lighting up her eyes. “Do birds have lungs?”

“Yes, Sarah, birds have lungs,” I said, as soothingly as I could manage when I was trying to unclasp my holster without Shelby realizing I was going for a gun.

“Stop prattling and answer the question,” snapped Shelby.

The gun came free in my hand. I sat up straight, pulling it out from under the table and aiming at Shelby’s shoulder. I flipped the safety off with my thumb. I’d be shooting to wound, not kill, as long as she didn’t move. Please, Shelby, don’t move. “Put down the gun.”

Shelby—who had stiffened at the small, clean snap of the safety being released—didn’t move. “How far has she managed to get her claws into you, Alex?” she asked. She sounded almost regretful. “I’m so very sorry. I didn’t realize what was happening to you at first, and by the time I did, it was too late.”

“Put down the gun,” I repeated. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I do know that we’re not having a rational conversation about it until you stop holding a gun on my cousin.”

“She’s not your cousin, Alex. She’s not even human.”

Oh, crap. I stiffened in my seat, considering half a dozen solutions and rejecting each one before I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I think today may have upset you more than I realized.”

“She’s messed with your mind, Alex. That’s what her kind does.” Shelby kept her gun trained on Sarah, who was still sitting calmly in her chair. Thank God for small favors. “They scramble your perceptions until you don’t know right from wrong, up from down, or your family from the things that would destroy it.”

“Shelby . . .” Sometimes you have to take risks—and I was willing to bet that I was a faster shot than Shelby. Taking a deep breath, I said, “Sarah’s not human, but she’s still family. Her being what she is just means we have to clean ketchup out of the toaster every now and then.”

“What?” Shelby finally turned to stare at me, although her aim didn’t waver, and she didn’t take her finger off the trigger. “You know she’s a Johrlac?”

My family calls Sarah’s species “cuckoos,” but their real name is “Johrlac.” I nodded slowly, my own gun staying raised. “She always has been, and she’s not messing with my mind. She’s family.” Shelby, on the other hand . . . she’d been a better girlfriend than I deserved, maybe, but I didn’t really know her. I stood, adjusting my position as necessary to make certain that my aim never wavered. “Who are you?”

“What?” Shelby blinked, eyes going wide as she did her best to look innocent. “I’m your girlfriend. Don’t tell me she’s forced you to forget me.”

“Sarah isn’t capable of forcing me to do anything. I’m wearing an anti-telepathy charm that keeps her from getting into my head without my permission.” I steadied my gun hand against the opposing wrist. “I know who you’ve been to me for the last few months. I know who I think you are. But who are you really?”

“I could ask you the same question,” Shelby shot back. “All those nights you said you weren’t available for dinner, all those dates you canceled, and for what? I was getting ready to break it off with you, write you off as a bad deal, when I realized what was happening. Your Johrlac ‘cousin’ isn’t here because she loves you. She’s here because she’s a brood parasite, and you’re her latest nest. So what are you to her? Are you her next meal, or are you some sort of collaborator, luring her prey into range?”

“They call us ‘cuckoos’ here, but you got the rest right,” said Sarah. She leaned back in her seat, looking at the ceiling. “We infect nests that should belong to other birds. Just a crack in the eggshell . . .” She started humming to herself.

Shelby glanced at Sarah, frowning. “Is this some kind of trick?” she asked. “She’s not acting like a normal Johrlac.”

“That’s because she’s not a normal Johrlac. She’s my cousin, and she’s not well. She was injured saving my sister’s life. She’s here in Columbus to recover.” I shook my head. “She’s not a danger. Unlike you.”

“Me?” Shelby actually looked shocked. “What did I do?”

“You came into my house and drew a gun on my cousin. I find that pretty damn dangerous.”

“You’re the one who had a gun hidden in your trouser leg!”

“Shoulder holsters mess up the line of the shirts I’m supposed to wear to work.”

Shelby blinked. Blinked again. And then, apparently against her will, she snorted in amusement. “Right,” she said. “Fashion. That’s what ought to be the concern here. Whether or not something looks good under a tweed professor’s coat.”

“Tweed is a valid lifestyle choice,” I shot back. “Now please answer my question: who are you?”

“My name is Shelby Tanner,” she said, without inflection. I’d never heard her voice so dead. “I am a visiting naturalist from Australia.”

I stared at her in horror. There’s only one group of people I know who are that bent on destroying cryptids, even to the point of following them home. “Oh, God,” I said. “Covenant.”

I’ve mentioned the Covenant of St. George, but I haven’t explained them very well, and a little understanding is important if you want to know why having a Covenant operative in my home was such a terrifying concept.

Several hundred years ago, relations between humans and what we’d later come to call “cryptids” were . . . well, strained. The fact that all nonhuman intelligences were referred to as “monsters” may give you some idea of how bad things were. This was exacerbated by the fact that many cryptids didn’t regard eating humans as wrong. If we could eat cattle, why couldn’t the occasional meat-eating cow eat us? It was an egalitarian approach to the problem, and naturally, some people didn’t like it. The Covenant of St. George was founded to rid the world of dragons, werewolves, basilisks, and anything else that might threaten mankind’s dominion.

I can’t exactly call their original mission statement “wrong.” It’s a lot easier to be live-and-let-live about ghouls and harpies when they aren’t sneaking into your home and stealing your children in the middle of the night. The problem arose when the mission statement expanded, coming to serve as an order of execution for anything that wasn’t explicitly listed as accompanying Noah on the Ark. (Where they got a full shipping manifest for the contents of a boat which may or may not have actually existed is anybody’s guess.)

The Covenant of St. George never tried to understand the things it killed, and the modern Covenant still doesn’t make the effort. They slaughter whatever they judge unnatural, and leave history littered with the bodies of those who crossed them. If it seems like there’s a little resentment there, it’s because I’m descended from two good Covenant families—the Healys, who were among the best assassins in a society filled with killers, and the Prices, whose scholarship and devotion to the cause helped move the Healys into position. Killing is in our blood. My great-great-grandparents turned their back on the cause, but they couldn’t change who they were, or who their children would grow up to be.

My sister, Verity, met a Covenant operative in New York City, and true to family form, she promptly seduced him, convinced him to abandon his holy calling, and brought him home to meet the parents. Talking to Dominic had just confirmed what we’d believed for years: the Covenant of St. George thought that the Price-Healy bloodline had died out in Buckley, Michigan, but they were more than willing to be proved wrong if the opportunity arose.

And the orders regarding our family weren’t friendly ones.

If Shelby was Covenant, I wasn’t going to have any choice about what I did next. I was going to hate it, possibly forever, but I was going to do it anyway. Family comes first. That’s the one good lesson that we took away from our time with the Covenant. Family always comes first.

Shelby blinked, expression turning quizzical. Then, to my surprise, she burst out laughing. “You—I—you really—oh, Alex.” She raised a hand to wipe her eye, and somehow turned that gesture into a full-body turn, bringing her gun around to aim at my chest. I guess saying the word “Covenant” had rendered Sarah the lesser threat. Bully for me. Face gone suddenly cold again, she demanded, “What do you know about the Covenant? Are you working for them, is that it? A double agent? Because don’t think I won’t shoot you where you stand.”

“Wait—what? One second you’re threatening my cousin for being a cryptid, and the next you’re threatening me because you think I’m with the Covenant? Don’t you think you should make up your mind before you shoot me? And if I were with the Covenant, why the hell would I be asking if you were with the Covenant?” I frowned. “You’re not with the Covenant, are you?”

“Are you mad? I’m from Australia!”

That seemed to answer everything for her. It just raised more questions for me. “What the hell does Australia have to do with anything?”

“The Covenant tried to have the entire continent declared anathema and cleansed, you moron!” Shelby was yelling now. “They’d have wiped out our ecosystem and replaced it with things they considered ‘acceptable’! Idiots. Destructive, shortsighted idiots. I can’t believe you work for them!”

“Oh, no, we don’t work for the Covenant.” Sarah’s tone was light, almost dreamy, like she was working on getting in touch with her inner kindergarten teacher. Shelby and I both whipped around to look at her. Judging by the look on Shelby’s face, she’d almost forgotten Sarah was there. I couldn’t blame her; so had I. Sarah looked down from her study of the ceiling, a beatific smile on her face. “The Covenant broke me like a hammer breaks an egg. That’s why the eggshell is cracked, and we’re putting Humpty together again. They wouldn’t have us if we wanted to go back.”

“Back?” echoed Shelby. She swung back around to me. I realized belatedly that I’d just missed my best chance at disarming her. “What does the Johrlac girl mean, ‘back’?”

“Her name is Sarah,” I said. “As far as the rest goes . . .” I paused, studying Shelby.

Either she was an enemy or she was an ally. If she was an enemy, I had nothing to lose by telling her the truth: she might still shoot me and Sarah, but there was no way she’d be getting away with it for long if she did. The mice would tell my grandparents what she’d done, and Grandma would track her down, and Grandpa would make her understand why it wasn’t okay to hurt his family. That assumed she was prepared to shoot me at all. She hadn’t done it when she had the element of surprise, and now? She was on my home turf. I knew where all the weapons were, and I was ready to disarm her if she got distracted again.

Of course, all that assumed that she was an enemy. If she was an ally, she’d only stop lying to me if I stopped lying to her. One of us had to go first.

“The only thing I lied to you about was my last name. It’s not Preston: it’s Price,” I said. “I’m not part of the Covenant of St. George. My family quit several generations ago. If you’re against them, then it looks like we may be on the same side.”

Shelby blinked. “You’re a Price?” she said, disbelieving.

“Yeah.”

“As in Thomas Price, the author of The Price Field Guide to the Cryptids of Australia and New Zealand.”

I vaguely remembered seeing that book in the library at home. “Yes,” I said, with more certainty than I felt.

“You’re lying. He didn’t have children.”

“I think that’s something you should take up with my grandmother, since she’s pretty adamant about us being his, and he married her before my father was born, which means we’re all legitimate in the eyes of the law.”

Shelby blinked again. Then, much to my relief, she lowered her gun. Her shoulders started to shake. I worried for a moment that she was crying, until I realized that the shaking was from the effort of keeping her laughter contained. “All these weeks . . . all those nights of being afraid you’d catch me out, or you’d start asking questions . . . all the times I worried you’d stumble over something on one of your field trips and get yourself eaten . . . I’ve been worrying about a Price. That’s worse than worrying over nothing. That’s like worrying about the well-being of the crocodile in your billabong!”

“Um,” I said. “Sorry about that?” I lowered my own gun. Playing fair is important, especially when there are firearms involved.

“I thought you were completely clueless and just didn’t know how to deal with women!” Shelby shook her head. “I truly believed you were a dead man walking!”

“Getting less flattering by the second, but thanks,” I said. “Now do you want to explain what the hell you’re doing pulling a gun on my cousin? Since we’ve established that we both had a little bit of a smokescreen going on?”

“A little bit of a smokescreen? What would you term a large one? Convincing me you were a Martian?”

“Alex would make a terrible Martian,” said Sarah. “He doesn’t have a giant laser and he’s not planning an Earth-shattering kaboom.” She slid out of her seat and wandered toward the fridge. Apparently, once we’d lowered our weapons, she no longer felt the need to remain seated. That was sort of reassuring, in a way: it meant she recognized the guns for what they were.

Shelby tracked Sarah’s movement, but she didn’t raise her gun. That was also reassuring.

“I’m not a Martian, and the only thing I ever lied about was my last name and my state of origin—we don’t live in California.” I didn’t tell her where we did live. There’s feeling out an ally in the hopes that no one has to get killed, and then there’s being stupid. “I do sort of feel like the information exchange is a little one-sided right now, though, so if you could please explain how you know what a Johrlac is, or why you’ve read my grandfather’s work, that would be awesome.”

“I belong to the Thirty-Six Society,” she said, with an almost prim air. “We’ve got our reasons to be interested in your movement, although it’s been decades since any member of your family set foot in Australia.”

I blinked at her. “You’re a Thirty-Sixer?”

“Just said that, didn’t I?”

“You . . .” The urge to laugh at the sheer improbability of it all was high. “Don’t you think it’s a little, well, bizarre for the first Australian I meet to be a Thirty-Sixer?”

A smile tugged at the edges of Shelby’s mouth. “I don’t know. How bizarre is it for the first American biologist I really get to know to be a Price?”

“It’s zebras all the way down,” said Sarah agreeably, as she walked back to the table. She was holding a can of V8. At least that would keep her occupied for a little while. We both turned to look at her. Then, as one, we turned back to each other and burst out laughing. Shelby sat back down, placing her gun on the table. I did the same.

“All right,” she said. “Story time. We can decide whether anyone’s getting shot later.”

“Deal,” I said. “I came to Ohio to oversee a basilisk breeding project . . .”

Telling Shelby my life story—edited to remove details that could be used to track down my family or otherwise do us harm—took a while. Sarah occupied herself with the V8, and Shelby listened attentively, fingers never twitching toward her firearm. I chose to view that as a good sign, rather than as proof that she considered herself fast enough that she didn’t need to twitch.

“. . . and then you asked if you could come over, and here we are,” I finished. “My grandparents should be home any time now.”

“I want to go over the autopsy reports with you when they come in,” said Shelby. It sounded just like every request she’d ever made for dinner or a movie, except for the suddenly morbid content. I blinked at her. She shrugged. “I was there when you found him. You can’t expect me to sit idly by and let you have all the fun.”

“Since you didn’t tell me until tonight that you had any idea about any of this stuff, I can absolutely expect that.” I wiped a bit of gravel out of the corner of my eye.

“Ah, but by the same token, I expected you to keep your nose out of things that you couldn’t possibly understand. So we’re really in the same position as regards each other.”

I sighed. Growing up with two sisters has given me a highly-advanced ability to know when I’ve been beaten. “I’ll talk to my grandfather.”

“The equation hasn’t balanced,” said Sarah suddenly.

“What do you mean?” I glanced over at her. “Do you need more juice?”

“Yes,” she said. “But no. I mean, yes, I need more juice, the good kind, please and thank you, but I also mean the equation isn’t balanced. You’ve given one half of the numbers. She needs to provide the other, or we’ll never know what it equals.”

“What?” Shelby looked from Sarah back to me. “Are all Johrlac like this?”

“You knew what she was well enough to come hunting for her,” I said, picking up my gun and flipping the safety back on before I stood and stuck it into my belt. I started for the fridge. “Haven’t you ever talked to one before?”

“No. I don’t like getting this close, even with blockers to keep them out of my head.” She fingered her necklace, finally cluing me in as to the location of her anti-telepathy charm. “They’re tricky.”

“That’s true, I suppose. No, most Johrlac aren’t like Sarah. She’s from the rare ‘not a sociopath’ segment of the population, and she really is ill. I wasn’t making that up.” I pulled the orange juice and A-1 sauce out of the fridge as I spoke, combining them in one of the large juice tumblers. Sarah was aware enough of her current limitations that she didn’t mix her own drinks, but I knew what she meant by “the good kind.”

“Then you should let nature take its course.”

I slammed the orange juice down on the counter, making both Sarah and Shelby jump. “She’s ill because she telepathically injured herself saving my sister’s life,” I said, barely restraining the urge to yell. “If she’d been willing to let ‘nature take its course,’ I’d be short a sibling right now. So you’ll excuse me for feeling like I owe her.”

“Okay, I’m sorry,” said Shelby, eyes very wide. “I didn’t know.”

“No, you didn’t. So back off.” I shook my head, picking up Sarah’s drink. “Besides, I think you’d like Sarah under normal circumstances. When she’s feeling herself, she’s a lot more linear and a lot less like trying to have an argument with a prerecorded phone tree. Right now, she’s getting better. It’s just a slow process.”

Shelby looked dubious. “I’m sorry. I just can’t imagine caring for one of them this much.”

“Stop that right now,” I snapped. I stalked to Sarah, put her juice down in front of her, and rounded on Shelby. “You are in my home, which means you are in her home. Yes, you were invited, but I don’t recall saying ‘bring your own bullets’ when I called you. Stop acting like she’s not a person. She’s done nothing to hurt you. If anything, she’s helped you. Now leave her alone.”

Shelby blinked at me. “You really mean all that. She’s not toying with your mind, is she?”

“Didn’t I just spend the last twenty minutes telling you my life story so you’d believe me on this?”

“That was my concern, yes: that you were telling me what you thought I wanted to hear in order to keep me from harming her. Again, Johrlac can be tricky.”

“Right now, Sarah’s about as subtle as a bull moose in the middle of a shopping mall.” I reclaimed my seat. “Now it’s your turn. Explain what you’re doing here, and why you’re so bent on shooting my cousin.”

“Why should I?”

“Because if you don’t, we’re going to have to shoot each other, and that would be a lousy end to an already lousy day.” I shook my head. “Also that would officially be my worst breakup ever, and that’s not a bar I was looking to exceed. So please. What are you doing here?”

Shelby sighed, leaning forward a little to rest her elbows on the kitchen table. “How much do you know about the Thirty-Six Society?”

“Um . . . Australian organization, very territorial, successfully drove the Covenant of St. George out of the country during my grandparents’ time, although according to the family records, the Covenant has been trying to get back in since the door was slammed in their faces.”

“Hence you thinking I might be a member; you thought the Covenant had succeeded and taken us over while your family wasn’t looking.”

“Something like that,” I agreed. “I mean . . . no offense, but you guys are awfully far away, and we’ve always had other things to deal with here at home. I guess you just fell off our radar.”

“That’s always what happens to Australian ecological concerns, if you’re not Australian, isn’t it?” There was a faint bitterness in Shelby’s voice, but it wasn’t aimed at me: more at the whole world. “There have always been cryptozoologists in Australia. They predate the word ‘cryptid’ by quite a lot, but for a long time, we weren’t organized. The Covenant never found us easy targets, but they could still make headway against us. The Thirty-Six Society was founded after the death of the last officially known thylacine—the Tasmanian wolf—in 1936. They were hunted to extinction over a relatively short period of time, and a lot of the incentives that were used to goad people into killing them were provided by the Covenant of St. George. Your Covenant always hated my country. Everything in the ecosystem looked like a monster to them.”

“They’re not my Covenant,” I protested. “We quit generations ago.”

“Some things take a long time to stop mattering, if they ever do.” Shelby shook her head. “We’ll never forget the thylacine. My parents were both members of the Thirty-Six from as far back as I can remember, and so were my grandparents. I grew up understanding that if I didn’t help protect Australia’s more . . . esoteric . . . flora and fauna from humanity, no one would.”

“It’s a big world,” I said, feeling obscurely bad. I shouldn’t have: North America is large enough that my family can’t patrol it all on our own, even as we enlist allies from the human and cryptid communities. Covering Australia as well would have been impossible, and would have stretched our already overtaxed resources to the breaking point. That didn’t stop me feeling like I should have helped.

“It is,” Shelby agreed. “Trouble is, we’re an island ecosystem. Sometimes things get in and turn out to be a great deal more destructive than they ever were in their original habitats. Game animals, mostly, imported by idiots thinking that Australia needs a native population of manticores or tailypo. But sometimes that extends to beings that can get their own passports and trick their way through immigration.” Her gaze slipped back to Sarah, who was peacefully drinking her sewage-colored orange juice and A-1 combination, seeming to ignore everything that was going on around her.

“Johrlac,” I said.

Shelby nodded. “Yes. A hive came over on a cruise ship about ten years ago. I don’t know why, or how they tolerated one another long enough to make it across the ocean without multiple murders, but they made it. We’d never seen a Johrlac in Australia before that. No one realized what they were until it was too late.”

Any story that started with “until it was too late” wasn’t going to end well. But if I wanted it to end without Sarah getting shot in the head, I needed Shelby to keep going. “What happened?”

“What always happens when Johrlac introduce themselves into an unprepared population: nothing remotely good. They spread out, and then one of them found a member of the Society.” Shelby stole another glance at Sarah. “She looked just like your cousin.”

“Cuckoos have minimal visual variance within the species,” I said. “It’s probably because they evolved from insects, not true mammals.” Every female cuckoo we had a record of looked enough like Sarah and Grandma to be their sister. Every male cuckoo we had a record of looked like their brother. Just one more clue that they didn’t handle mammalian biology the same way the rest of us did.

“Doesn’t make her look any less like the woman who killed my brother,” said Shelby calmly. She looked back to me. “She took out six Society members before someone found the anomaly in our records and we realized what was happening. Six! And she wasn’t the only one. There were eight Johrlac in Australia. It took us five years to catch them all.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry doesn’t bring back the dead.” Shelby shook her head. “All of us juniors wound up in field positions years before we expected, and for what? Because some horrible brood parasites wanted a vacation? It wasn’t fair. It was never going to be fair.”

“No, it wasn’t, and I’m sorry. But killing my cousin won’t bring back your dead.” I frowned. “If all your juniors got promoted to seniors, why are you here? Why aren’t you back in Australia, making sure that nothing starts eating people?”

“Manticores,” she said, with a shrug.

“Manticores?” I echoed.

“Some damn fool imported three breeding clusters around the turn of the century, to use as game animals. They ate him and got loose—”

I groaned. “Of course they did.”

“—and now we have manticore issues in Queensland and the Northern Territory. I was hoping that by coming here, I could learn more about how manticores behave in the wild, and maybe find a few solutions.”

“There are manticores in Ohio?”

“Oh, yeah.” Shelby frowned. “Hadn’t you noticed?”

“No, I hadn’t. I’ve been studying the local fricken population, and trying to convince my basilisks to breed. Which they are absolutely refusing to do, the lazy stoners.”

“Why would you want to breed basilisks?” asked Shelby.

“They’re big ratters, for one thing, and they tend to avoid humans whenever possible. They’re also the only known predator of stone spiders. So they have their uses, as long as we can keep them out of the cities.”

“You had me at ‘spiders,’” said Shelby. She took a deep breath, letting it out through her nose. “So. Here we are.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “Here we are.”

The sound of a crossbow bolt being notched into place drew our attention toward the kitchen doorway. Grandma was standing there, a pistol crossbow in her hands, the point aimed solidly at Shelby. Grandpa was a dark shape in the hall behind her. If I squinted, I could just make out the cudgel in his hands.

“Great,” said Grandma. “Now that we’ve established where we are, let’s move on to the part where no one ever finds your body.”

I put my hand over my face and groaned.