Imaginary Numbers

by Seanan McGuire

  “Finfolk?” asked Sam.

  “Like mermaids, but less cannibalistic, and more capable of breeding with humans,” I replied, and kept walking.

  We made a weird little line, working our way along the side of the road, and we didn’t see any cars. I pulled out the cellphone I’d signed up for as soon as we were sure that Leonard Cunningham was on his way out of the country, taking the threat of the Covenant of St. George with him. I had a surprisingly good signal, considering our surroundings. I shot a quick text to James, asking whether he’d been able to reach anyone with a tow truck. His reply came just as quickly: the truck was on its way, and he’d been able to confirm with the mechanic that he could tow our trailer wherever we needed it to be.

  I responded with the address of the old Parrish place. Maybe spending the night at my family’s least haunted house would be more tolerable if we did it in the trailer, and the tailypo probably wouldn’t be able to figure out how to get inside. Probably. They have creepy little serial killer hands, like racoons but with longer fingers. For all I knew, they could work locks.

  Gradually, the road curved away from the orchards for which it was named, moving toward the lake. The township of Buckley became visible off to the right, a low, ramshackle collection of buildings with no skyline to speak of. Those were for big cities where things happened, not for good, honest places filled with good, honest people doing good, honest work.

  I could have told the people of Buckley some stories about the things that could happen even in the absence of a skyline. But they wouldn’t have listened, or they would already have known those stories from their own family histories, where they were kept buried, quietly sanitized, or locked away.

  The world is stranger than most people admit, and because no one ever wants to talk about it, no one ever seems to realize that they’re not unique. Everybody already knows.

  The Red Angel was a low-slung building right on the edge of the lake, somehow managing to be two stories and squat at the same time, like it was crouching down and getting ready to pounce. The paint, what little there was, was an unassuming shade of brown that had probably looked sun-bleached even before it had started to peel. There were only a few cars parked in the churned-up mud around the building, each of them looking faintly ashamed of itself, like they knew they didn’t belong there.

  I sped up. Sam matched me. Fern slowed down.

  “I don’t want to go into the murder shack,” she said, in what would probably have seemed like a perfectly reasonable tone if I hadn’t been so eager to get something cold in my stomach and wash away the dust at the back of my throat. I turned and flashed her a smile.

  “It’s not a murder shack; it’s a respectable drinking establishment that profits from being mistaken for a murder shack by most of the locals,” I said. “Come on. Don’t you want something to drink?”

  “I don’t want to be murdered,” said Fern, uncertainly. “You’re sure we won’t die?”

  “Come on. My family’s been going to the Red Angel for generations, and none of us have been—okay, a lot of us have been murdered, but not in the bar, and not by anyone who drinks here. We’re good at getting killed.” I shrugged broadly, trying not to focus on the sour look on Sam’s face. I guess being reminded that his girlfriend had the life expectancy of Bobby’s first grade hamster was hard on his nerves. “No one’s getting murdered today. Come have a beer.”

  “I don’t drink beer,” said Sam.

  “Come have a fruity cocktail with too many cherries in the bottom,” I said. “I promise they won’t offer you banana liqueur unless you ask for it.”

  He wrinkled his nose but stepped forward and slipped his hand into mine. I resumed my trek toward the Angel, the others trailing along in my wake.

  The main door faced the lake, a dazzling view that was fairly wasted on the windowless bar. I pulled the screen open, propping it with my hip before opening the actual door and stepping into the cool, dark confines of the Red Angel for the first time in literally years.

  It hadn’t changed a bit. That wasn’t a surprise. This was the sort of place that viewed bar fights as the moral equivalent of redecorating and had never heard of modernization. The tables were round, scarred, and ancient, covered in thick layers of dark varnish that rendered them all functionally identical. The mingled scents of sour beer and cigarette smoke hung in the air. Technically, smoking indoors had been banned in Michigan since before I was born, but functionally, the health inspectors had a “see no evil, don’t get swallowed alive by an unspeakable terror from the dark woods” relationship with the ownership of the Angel.

  The woman behind the bar was svelte and pale, with Nordic facial features, shockingly red hair, and an apron tied tightly around her waist. A little too tightly for how wide around she appeared to be; it curved inward at the back, like she didn’t have any internal organs to get in the way. That, combined with the swishing lash of her tail, confirmed her species as well as any sort of ID card. Huldrafolk.

  Sam, who had entered right behind me, froze and stared at her. Rude. Fern and Cylia stepped around him, heading for the server. Cylia was already relaxed, beaming as she bellied up to the bar.

  “Huldra?” she asked. When the woman nodded, she pointed to her chest and said, “Jink.”

  “No luck bending inside the Angel,” said the woman. “We’ve had a couple of nasty scares.”

  “Understood, understood,” said Cylia. “Can I get a beer? Whatever you have on tap is good.”

  “Gin and tonic for me, please,” said Fern.

  I turned my attention to Sam. “Hey, honey. You’re allowed to relax now. We’re inside, and no one who drinks here is going to rat you out.”

  “That woman has a tail,” he said, in a stiff tone.

  “Well, yeah. Cynthia’s been running the bar since my grandmother was a little girl,” I said. “She’s a huldra. They’re from Finland, originally, and they can live for hundreds of years before their skins harden and they turn to stone.”

  “My wife is one of the angel statues out back,” said Cynthia, as she slid drinks to Cylia and Fern. “Hi, Annie. Mary stopped by and told me you might be passing through. I admit, I thought she was pulling my tail. Who’s your grim-looking friend?”

  “This is Sam,” I said. “My boyfriend.” It felt weird to be introducing him that way to Cynthia, who had been a friend of the family for generations, ever since my great-grandmother had shot her door off its hinges.

  “And is there a reason your boyfriend is scowling at me like that?” A note of cautious wariness slipped into her voice.

  I couldn’t blame her. As both Grandma and Verity prove, my family isn’t always clever about picking our romantic partners. One too many Covenant foot soldiers for most cryptids to be really comfortable.

  “You don’t have any security,” he blurted. “Anyone could just come in the door, any time they wanted to! How is this safe?”

  “We’ve been here for a long, long time,” said Cynthia. “The locals tell lots of scary stories about us, how we cook runaway kids on the weekends, how people will break your jaw just for stepping into the parking lot. We’re hiding in plain sight by being part of the landscape. Sometimes that’s the safest choice of all.”

  “But the Covenant—” said Sam.

  “They know about the Angel,” said a voice from the far end of the bar. Its owner stood, pushing her drink away as she unspooled from her stool. She was short, curvy, and underdressed for the chill generated by the bar’s air-conditioning, in cut-off denim shorts and a red tank top. Tattoos covered her left arm, and the left side of her neck, complicated and interlinked. She looked at Sam with all the emotion and sympathy of an alligator assessing a stray dog that had wandered too close to the water. “They’ve known about the Angel for at least fifty years, and they’re smart enough to leave it the hell alone.”

  “Mary came through
, huh?” I said, with a glance at Cynthia.

  “Maybe I wasn’t her only stop.” She shrugged generously. “You want your usual?”

  “Please. Sam? This is where you order a drink, so the nice bar doesn’t throw us out.”

  “Um. Hard cider, if you’ve got it,” he said.

  Cynthia nodded and moved to start pouring drinks. I approached the woman who was still standing next to her stool, virtually glaring at Sam. She transferred her gaze to me as I got closer. It didn’t warm.

  “Some of these tattoos are new,” I said, gesturing toward her wrist. I didn’t touch her. It was never a good idea when she had that absent, unrecognizing look on her face. Maybe she knew who I was and maybe she didn’t. If she didn’t, unwanted physical contact could get me shot. “Were you traveling again?”

  “I’ve tried a few new dimensions, looking for Thomas, since the last time you came home,” she said. The numbness in her expression cracked. “I thought we’d sent you off to die,” she said, before sweeping me into her arms and crushing me against her chest. The rules against me touching her didn’t run in the opposite direction.

  “Hi, Grandma,” I wheezed.

  * * *

  Motion out of the corner of my eye alerted me to Sam’s approach. When he wanted to be, he was faster than anything human. The fact that he was moving like that told me even without getting a good look at him that he had returned to his more customary fūri form. The true potential of his speed is reserved for when he’s moving with the bones and muscles he was born to, and not the human ones he occasionally tries on for size.

  “Sam,” I managed, despite the lack of oxygen entering my body, “don’t hit my grandmother. Grandma, don’t attack my boyfriend.”

  “Grandmother?” said Sam, at the same time as my grandmother said, “Boyfriend?” It was impossible to tell which one of them sounded more confused. But at least Grandma let me go.

  I immediately stepped backward, out of easy reach, and started rubbing my sternum with one hand, encouraging the bone to stop aching. “Ow,” I said, with as much coherence as I could muster. “Grandma, did you forget that I’m not you?”

  No one in our family is in poor physical condition. We’ve been lucky when it comes to illnesses and injuries, and all of us, even Alex, have chosen extracurricular activities that keep us in excellent physical shape. And then there is my grandmother. She’s been moving between dimensions for decades, trying to locate her missing husband, doing a lot of God-knows-what to keep her stomach full and her guns loaded during that time—and honestly, I don’t think she puts a priority on food. She could probably bench-press me and Sam both without breaking a sweat.

  She looked at me flatly for a moment, and in her faintly confused expression, I could read the answer to my question: yes, she had forgotten, and not for the first time. Whatever function of her dimensional wanderings kept her young, it also left her occasionally bewildered about her own life and family, unable to keep straight whether something had happened to my sister or her mother. It made our relatively rare family dinners exciting.

  “Uh, Annie?” said Sam. “This is your grandmother? How is that possible? She looks younger than you do.” Then he winced, like I was going to pull some stereotypical “girl in a sitcom” routine and get angry at him for telling the truth.

  My grandmother was born in 1938, making her fifty-five years older than me. Despite that reality of our family tree, she looked like she was in her early twenties at the absolute most, and probably a few years younger than I was. That made her collection of tattoos, which completely spanned the left side of her body, all the more impressive; if her apparent age had been accurate, she would have needed to start the process when she was still in her teens, and some skilled tattoo artists were probably going to go to prison.

  “It’s complicated,” I said. “Yes, this is my grandmother, Alice Price-Healy, originally of Buckley Township, Michigan. Grandma, this is my boyfriend, Sam Taylor. He’s a fūri.”

  “I can see that,” said Grandma. “Honestly, him being a fūri is a lot less surprising than him existing at all. When you say ‘boyfriend,’ you mean . . . ?”

  “I mean we’re dating.” I reached over and took Sam’s hand. His tail snaked around my ankle a beat later, like me touching him in front of my grandmother was permission for him to touch me back.

  “Okay,” said Grandma, and took a swig from her beer. “Well, you’re a brave man, Sam Taylor. I should buy you a drink. Do you want a drink?”

  “I asked for a hard cider,” he said. “I think I need a drink at this point, um, Annie’s grandmother. The terrifying, infamous, ex-Covenant monster hunter.”

  “That’s a filthy lie,” said Grandma. “I was never a member of the Covenant. They wouldn’t have had me even if I’d wanted to join, on account of how my grandparents were filthy traitors to their cause and my mother was a carnie brat.”

  “What a coincidence,” said Sam. “So am I!”

  “A filthy traitor or a carnie brat?” asked Grandma.

  “We met at his family’s carnival,” I said, desperate to seize control of the conversation back from my grandmother before she could decide that my boyfriend would make a lovely rug. Cynthia slid a bottle of pear cider down the bar. I grabbed it and thrust it at Sam. “He does the flying trapeze. We were partners for a little while before I had to burn the place down so we could get away from the Covenant handlers who thought I was working for them.”

  “Oh, you have had a hard time, haven’t you?” Grandma shook her head. “I’m so sorry we sent you into that situation. I should never have agreed to it. But after your sister’s little indiscretion, it seemed like the best way to clear things up . . .”

  “You mean after Verity declared war on the Covenant of St. George on live television? That ‘little indiscretion’?” I asked, not quite able to keep the disbelief out of my voice. My family has always downplayed Verity’s errors, leaving me and Alex to clean up her messes. It’s never great when it’s obvious who the family favorite is, and none of us had ever had any question.

  “Everyone makes mistakes, Antimony,” said my grandmother. “If we’re lucky, they turn out to be mistakes that we can learn from and talk about later. For example, if you burned down a carnival, you’ve learned a lot about fire since leaving home.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “About that.” I extended one hand toward her as balls of flame appeared above my fingertips, each about the size of a marble, ranging in brightness from lambent white to sullen red. “I’ve learned a lot about fire.”

  For possibly the first time in my life, I beheld the rare sight of my grandmother struck completely speechless. I lowered my hand. She took another swig from her beer.

  “Well, I always wondered when that was going to crop up again,” she said. “You kids hungry?”

  “I could eat,” I allowed slowly. “But our friend James is with the car—we’re having mechanical problems—and we told him to meet us here. I’ll have to call him if we’re going somewhere else.”

  “Oh, there’s no need for that,” said Grandma. “Cynthia’s always happy to have an excuse to fire up the barbeque, aren’t you, Cynthia?” She twisted around to look at the bartender, who sighed and reached back to untie her apron.

  “For you, Alice, always,” she said. “All we’ve got in the kitchen right now is chicken. That work for everybody?”

  “I’m not a vegetarian,” said Sam.

  “I like chicken,” chirped Fern.

  Grandma looked at Fern and Cylia like she had just figured out that they were with me—which, if she was having a bad day and hadn’t been expecting me to walk in on her, she might not have. She cocked her head slightly to the side.

  “Sylph and . . . ?”

  “Jink,” said Cylia, turning her attention toward our little group. “Annie and I played roller derby together.”

  �
�And you didn’t bend her luck toward yourself?”

  “No, ma’am. Manipulating luck when you have a dozen women on roller skates whipping around a track is a good way to get somebody killed, and I’m not that kind of girl.”

  Grandma nodded, looking pleased. “You’ve got a good group here, Annie,” she said.

  “Wait until you meet James.”

  “He eat chicken?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “Then he’ll fit right in. Come on. We can sit out back.”

  “I’d rather stay inside if you don’t mind,” said Sam, gesturing to himself with one long-fingered hand. “It’s uncomfortable to play human for too long, and it’s harder when I’m trying to eat. It’s like trying to hold in a sneeze and swallow at the same time.”

  “If you need privacy, there’s the old pool room,” said Cynthia. “As long as you don’t mind some cobwebs.”

  “We’re good with spiders,” I said. Sam’s tail squeezed my ankle, acknowledgment of what was essentially an inside joke. The first hint he’d had that I wasn’t just some greenstick girl with no idea about the cryptid world had come when we’d been forced to fight a Jorōgumo—sort of a spider-centaur without arms—to make her stop killing people who just wanted to enjoy the carnival.

  Normal people get meet-cutes. I get crime scene cleanup. But I’m used to it, and I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if the world decided it didn’t want to work this way.

  “All right,” said Grandma. “Everybody grab your drink.”

  * * *

  Cynthia hadn’t been kidding about the cobwebs. The “old pool room” clearly got its name from the three pool tables that took up most of the floor space. What remained of their velvet was scratched and torn, making them useless as playing surfaces, although they still did an excellent job of getting in the way. It might as well have been called the “spider storage room.” Fern immediately squeaked in delight and launched herself into the air, spinning as she rose into the cobweb-choked rafters.