“That’s definitely a mouse,” said Raina, who had actually looked up from her Gameboy when I started talking to the luggage. “It’s not a reprogrammed Furby. Not even a little bit.”
“No, it’s not,” I agreed. I held my hand out to the mouse. The tiny creature stepped reverently onto the pad of my thumb, wrapping its tail tight around its legs. I kept my eyes on the mouse. The Aeslin mice love it when we talk directly to them. It makes them feel like they’re communing with their gods, not just serving as a really weird footnote. “Hail,” I said. “Do you mind confirming a few things for me?”
“Thy Will Be Done,” squeaked the mouse, throwing its head back in a burst of religious ecstasy.
“Thank you,” I said. I twisted back around, returning my butt to its original position on the seat, and extended the mouse toward Shelby’s waiting father. “Sir, do you know what this is?”
He blinked. “It looks like an Aeslin mouse,” he said. “But that’s impossible. They’ve been extinct for over a century.”
“Not in my family’s attic they haven’t.” I allowed myself a faint smile. “If you want to confirm my identity, ask the mouse.” Aeslin mice don’t lie. They never forget anything they see or hear, they preserve the history of a colony through religious dogma and ritual recreation, and they don’t lie.
For the first time, Shelby’s father looked vaguely impressed. “That’s a clever one,” he allowed, before turning his attention on the mouse. “Hello.”
“Hail!” squeaked the mouse.
Shelby’s father was a man trying to defend both his home and his daughter from a potentially dangerous visitor, and yet he couldn’t swallow the smile that tugged at the corners of his mouth. He looked like a man who’d just been told that Christmas wasn’t canceled after all—which wasn’t an unreasonable response to finding out that one of the world’s weirdest, most wonderfully useless sapient species wasn’t extinct. “Mouse, can you confirm the identity of the man who’s holding you?”
“Yes,” said the mouse proudly. It preened its whiskers, looking like it had just passed a quiz of some sort.
I sighed. “You’ll have to be more literal, I’m afraid.”
“Sorry. I’m not well-versed in human to rodent communication techniques.” He focused back on the mouse. “Who is the man holding you?”
“I stand in the palm of the God of Scales and Silence, son of the Thoughtful Priestess and the God of Decisions Made in Necessity,” said the mouse.
“He wants their names,” I said. It seemed almost a pity to shortcut what otherwise promised to be an entertaining bout of Man vs. Mouse, but I needed to pee, and I wanted to get out of the car before somebody lost patience and did something we were all going to regret later. “Please tell him the names.”
“Oh!” squeaked the mouse, sounding surprised. Then, drawing itself up to its full height of almost three inches, it said, “He is Alexander Jonathan Price, son of Evelyn Baker and Kevin Price, son of Alice Healy and Thomas Price—”
“—who wrote the field guide to the cryptids of Australia and New Zealand, which I have with me, so you should be able to compare his handwriting to any local samples,” I said. “I know this is an unorthodox method of confirming identity, but given that ‘please come to Australia with me, there are werewolves everywhere and they’re going to eat my family’ is an unorthodox request, can we call it good?”
There was a long pause, during which I began to fear that I’d overplayed my hand, before Mr. Tanner lowered his gun. My heart rate immediately began dropping back toward normal. It dropped further as he opened the door and gestured for me to get out of the car. “Riley Tanner. Nice to meet you. Shelly’s told us a lot, but that’s no substitute for actually getting to spend time with someone—and as you mentioned, there’s our little werewolf issue to focus on.”
“It’s nice to meet you, sir.” I slid out of the car, raising my hand to my shoulder long enough for the mouse to hop off before offering it to him to shake. His grip was firm enough to make my fingers ache, but I didn’t get the feeling he was trying to crush my hand; he was just a man who was accustomed to shaking hands without thinking about how hard he squeezed. “Shelby hasn’t told me much about her family, apart from the fact that she has sisters and parents.”
“She told us the same about you,” said Riley, dropping my hand. “We raised her to understand operational security, didn’t we, Shelly?”
“I wish you wouldn’t call me that, Daddy.” Shelby finally unpeeled herself from his arm. She trotted back toward the car, pausing long enough to kiss my cheek as she passed. “I told you, it’s Shelby. That’s my name.”
“We call Raina ‘Ray,’ and we call Gabrielle ‘Gabby,’ so you should put up with it; we’re your parents,” said Riley. He sounded amused; this was apparently a conversation they had with some frequency. Shelby responded with a snort.
Shelby’s mother, meanwhile, had finally gotten out of the car. “The girls will get your luggage,” she said, walking over to stand next to me. “You look like you’re about to drop dead where you stand. Let’s get you inside and to a bed before you collapse.”
“I’m not that tired,” I lied. The trip was catching up with my body, which was protesting the change of time zones and hemispheres in the only way it knew how: with growing fatigue. “Can I get a few old boxes for the mice to use while I’m here? They’ll be less trouble if they have a designated place to go when they’re not demanding I do something for them.”
“Hail!” squeaked the mouse on my shoulder, like a demented punctuation generator.
Shelby’s mother smiled. “I think we can find something. This way.” She started walking. I followed.
I hadn’t really noticed the lack of a house when Shelby’s father appeared outside my window: I was more focused on the gun, and what it could mean for my future. Now that I was following Shelby’s mother into increasingly thick brush, the lack of a house was becoming more pressing. “Er,” I said, and stopped, unsure how to proceed.
Fortunately for me, this seemed to be the opening line of a question she’d heard before. “We don’t have a driveway,” she said. “This is where we park the car—and no, that’s not an Australian thing, it’s a family thing. We have to carry our groceries a little farther, but we don’t get surprised by visitors.”
“You’re going to get on splendidly with my mother,” I said. “Speaking of which, and I don’t know how to say this without sounding awkward, but. . . .Shelby never told me your name. I’m happy to keep calling you ‘Ms. Tanner,’ if that’s your preference. I just wanted to ask.”
“Charlotte,” said Shelby’s mother. “You can call me ‘Ms. Tanner’ if that’s what you’re comfortable with or ‘Lottie’ if you feel like being more informal.” She swept aside a curtain of dangling branches, revealing a swath of wide, open ground covered with the glowing fuzz of new-grown grass. Something that I would have taken for a kangaroo, if it hadn’t been covered in rosette spots like a leopard, was cropping at the grass within a small enclosure. There was also a house, three stories high and rising against the sky like a monument to human habitation, but it seemed somehow less important than the animal I’d never seen before.
Charlotte followed my gaze to the enclosure, and said, “We don’t know what she is. She wandered in one morning with a broken leg—we thought she’d been painted at first, but the dots wouldn’t wash off. So we built her a pen, and we’ve been studying her, trying to suss out her story. Could be she’s a chromatic mutant. Could also be she’s a member of a highly endangered species, and explains some of the periodic ‘leopard’ sightings that we’ve never been able to figure out. Either way, we’re taking care of her until we understand her story a little better.”
“Neat,” I said. I felt immediately silly, but that didn’t change the accuracy of the word. Mysterious, leopard-spotted kangaroos were definitely neat, no matter how imm
ature that sounded.
Charlotte smiled indulgently and kept walking. I could hear cracking noises and footsteps coming from the brush behind us as the rest of the family followed with the luggage. That, more than anything, motivated me to speed up and match pace with Charlotte as she bounded up the porch steps and opened the screen door. Shelby’s sister had been grumpy enough before she was forced to carry my suitcase through a stretch of carefully cultivated forest.
“Come on, Alex,” said Charlotte. “Jet lag is going to catch up with you if you hold still for too long, and then you’ll fall asleep on the porch.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” I said. “It’s a beautiful day.”
“Yes, but around four o’clock in the afternoon, the spiders come.” With that, she vanished inside. She was probably kidding—Australia has a lot of spiders, but as far as I know, they don’t keep to a strict schedule. “Probably” wasn’t a word I wanted to risk my life on.
Charlotte was already halfway across the living room and heading for the stairs by the time I made it through the front door. I hurried to catch up.
“You’ll be in the guest room, of course,” said Charlotte when I drew close enough, as calmly as if I’d never lagged behind. “It has locks on both the inside and outside, and I’ve mostly talked Riley into not locking you in at night, but you shouldn’t push it if you don’t have to. He’s not exactly keen on the fact that the American expert Shelby brought is also the man she’s sleeping with, if you follow. Says it smacks of trying to impress him with how suitable you are, when you’re clearly not suitable at all.”
“Er,” I said. “What makes me unsuitable?”
Charlotte gave me a look that, while kind, somehow managed to clearly indicate that I was being a fool, and should stop at once. “You’re dating our daughter, and you’re an American. You represent both ‘our little girl is growing up’ and ‘our little girl is having her loyalties divided.’ You were never going to be suitable. Not for a minute.”
“Ah,” I said, blinking.
Charlotte started up the stairs without waiting for any further reply. I followed her.
The stairs led to a hallway, which led in turn to a series of doors. Charlotte stopped in front of one of them, and said, “Guest room, attached toilet, so you should be taken care of. Wireless password is on the bedside table, and I’ll send Raina up with your bags while we debrief Shelly on the situation. You need to take a nap. No matter how much you feel like you’re at top operating condition, you’re wrong. Jet lag plays with your head. Gabby will be back by dinner, so I’ll send someone to wake you then.”
It made sense that they’d want to debrief Shelby without me around—everything that had happened since we had arrived had made sense—but that didn’t mean I needed to like it. I put my hand on the doorknob, looked at her, and asked, “Is it as bad as I think it is? Shelby told me what was going on.”
Charlotte’s laugh was strained and tight, the laugh of a woman who has looked into the abyss only to discover that it is deeper than she could possibly have imagined. “Shelly never had much of an imagination,” she said. “However bad she said it was, she was wrong. It’s worse.”
I sighed. “Of course it is,” I said. “What would be the fun of it being anything else?”
Five
“This is a terrible, horrible, incredibly foolish idea. Let’s try it and see what happens.”
—Jonathan Healy
The guest room of an isolated house in Queensland, Australia, trying to wake up
I HADN’T EXPECTED TO be able to sleep after Charlotte’s dire proclamation, but I had gone into the guest room anyway: it was clear that I wasn’t going to be left anywhere else without a chaperone for the time being, and I wanted to visit the promised toilet sooner rather than later. She had been speaking in the British sense—instead of a commode in the middle of the room, there was a narrow door leading to what my family would have called a “half-bath,” with a toilet, sink, and nothing else. I took care of my business, washed my hands and face, and returned to the main guest room to find my bags propped against the foot of the bed. The roller bag was unzipped, and the mice were nowhere to be seen.
Aeslin mice are small and have limited natural defenses, but they’re also smart, and surprisingly good at surviving, considering the massed forces the world has rallied to kill them off. I sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled out my laptop, trusting the mice to take care of themselves.
The wireless password was where Charlotte had said it would be, and I got it on the first try. My inbox was a nightmare sea of messages from the zoo, my grandparents, Dee, and people who hadn’t emailed me since I’d left college, but had been prompted by the strange force that works to explode the email of travelers. I tapped out quick messages to the people who needed to know that I had landed safely—my parents, Grandma, Verity—before closing the lid on my computer and setting it aside. My eyes itched. I removed my glasses so I could rub my eyes with the heel of my hand, and somehow that translated to placing my glasses on the bedside table and letting my head drop to the pillow. It wouldn’t hurt anything to close my eyes for just a few moments, I reasoned; I didn’t actually have to take a nap.
The sound of a knock on the guest room door snapped me back to consciousness, my hand going for the gun at my belt before I realized where I was—and that I’d gone to sleep with a loaded weapon on my person. Not good gun safety. Not good anything, really. I sat up, rubbing my entire face with my hand, and noticed that the room had gone dark. However long I’d been asleep, it had carried me past sunset. “Who is it?” I called.
“Shelby,” came the answer. “Are you done snoring your life away and ready to join the ongoing crisis, or should I come back in an hour? Mum’s made lamb stew, if that makes a difference in your answer.”
“I’m up.” I grabbed my glasses, slid them on, and stood. Everything hurt substantially more than could be explained by the position I’d been sleeping in. I decided to hate jet lag. “What time is it?”
“Just past seven. You decent?”
I paused. Shelby had seen me naked any number of times, and I had seen her the same way; I could recreate the scars she bore from her years of working with predators both known and cryptozoological with my eyes closed. Being in a house with her parents was going to take some getting used to. “I fell asleep with my clothes on.”
“Alex.” The door swung open to reveal Shelby standing silhouetted by the light that filled the hall. She was wearing a sundress I’d never seen before, and her hair was down, tempting me to plunge my fingers into it and skip straight to getting in trouble with her father. That temptation only lasted a few seconds before my attention was caught by the creature crouching on her shoulder and watching me with wary, avian eyes. It was about the size of a small housecat or a very large ferret, with bright pink plumage on its head and wings, and the striped hindquarters of an animal I’d never seen before.
Shelby saw where I was looking, and beamed. “Alex, meet Flora. Flora, this is Alex.” The little beast responded with a warble that devolved into a screech.
“I’ve never seen a garrinna in the flesh,” I said, standing and moving slowly closer, so as not to frighten her. “She’s beautiful.”
“She was the runt of her litter, which is why she wound up brought into the house instead of staying in the aviary with her brothers and sisters. They all moved on to conservation sites, she stayed here with me.” Shelby kissed the top of the garrinna’s head. Flora responded by rubbing her beak, birdlike, against Shelby’s cheek. “She’s a clever girl. Can have the blender apart in minutes, if we leave her unmonitored in the kitchen. You ready to come downstairs?”
It took me a moment to follow her change of topics. I nodded. “I think I’m as ready as I’m going to be. Did your other sister get here safely?”
“Gabby? Yeah, she’s here. Came in about half an hour ag
o with a sob story about Cooper getting them lost and being stopped by tourists and something about a kangaroo in a chemist’s and anyway, she’s here now, so if you’re ready to come downstairs . . . ?” Shelby stopped, looking at me expectantly. The garrinna on her shoulder chirped.
I smiled. “Let’s go.”
The sound of voices and the meaty smell of stew greeted us halfway down the stairs, wafting from somewhere toward the back of the house. I let Shelby take the lead, since we were on her territory now, and focused instead on the things around me, trying to get an idea of what I was walking into.
The first thing: there were no pictures on the walls. Back at home, my family history was displayed in black and white, Kodachrome, and even the occasional ink drawing. Once you were in the house, you knew who we were and where you were standing, and you weren’t going to leave alive unless we let you. There was no point in hiding ourselves in the one place where we should have been able to be safe. But these walls were virtually bare, brightened only by a few small watercolor paintings. There were alcoves set into the wall every three feet, and vases of bright artificial flowers had been placed in them, creating a slightly homier atmosphere.
My impression of the front room had been that it was functional but not lived in. Looking closer only reinforced that idea. All the furniture was exactly weathered enough to be believable—the sort of effect that comes either from actual use, or from carefully patronizing the local thrift stores until you’ve put together the right combination of couches, chairs, and slightly scuffed coffee tables. It was too perfectly flawed to be real, which should have been an oxymoron, and yet somehow wasn’t. It was a television set, not a home.
Shelby caught me squinting at the couch and smiled wryly. “Should’ve guessed, I suppose,” she said. “Well, it wasn’t my call and it’s too late now, so we might as well make the most of it, don’t you think?”