Imaginary Numbers

by Seanan McGuire

  “You’re sure this place isn’t haunted?” asked Cylia, voice low.

  “According to the ghosts, it’s not, and I usually listen to them,” I said. “We could call one of them, if you’d like.”

  “I think it’s looking at me,” said Fern.

  “A bunch of people got murdered here before the house belonged to my family,” I said. “Something about a swamp god convincing the last owner that chopping his family into hamburger meat would win him its favor. Never go courting the favor of unspeakable gods of the swamp. They don’t have a good track record when it comes to leaving their worshippers alive. Anyway, the ghosts don’t like the house because of the whole ‘swamp god was here’ thing. They respect the territorial claims of the unspeakable.”

  Grandma had reached the porch. She hopped up the sagging steps, bending to pat something on the porch swing, and turned to wave at the rest of us. “Well, come on!” she called.

  We came on.

  She had the door unlocked and open by the time we reached her, allowing the distinctive dusty smell of a house that had been sealed off for a while to drift out into the afternoon. A ball of brown-and-black fur chittered at us from the porch swing.

  “How cute, a raccoon,” said James.

  The “raccoon” stood up, uncurling a tail that was easily three times the length of its body, and chittered again before reaching for him with eerily simian hands.

  “Not a raccoon,” corrected James, a faint edge of panic in his voice.

  “Tailypo,” I said, reaching down to let it sniff my hand. “The American lemur. They’re almost extinct now.”

  “But your grandfather always liked them, and he encouraged a colony to form around the house,” said Grandma, from her place just inside the front door. “Lord love the man, sometimes he made me look like the one with common sense in this relationship.”

  “I just met her, and I know that’s terrifying,” muttered Sam. I laughed and elbowed him in the side before taking my hand away from the tailypo and following Grandma inside.

  Despite the lingering smell of dust and ancient paper, the house was remarkably clean, with none of the cobwebs that had blazoned the Red Angel. The couch had been turned into a tidy makeshift bed, with two reasonably new-looking pillows under a threadbare patchwork comforter. Grandma’s camping supplies were stacked in the corner, out of the room’s main walkway. She perched on the arm of the couch as the rest of our group filed in, James at the rear with the tailypo at his heels. It chittered at him as it ran for the kitchen, and he jumped.

  “Don’t mind them,” said Grandma. “There are two males and three females currently living on the property. They have kits every spring and drive them off as soon as they’re properly weaned. We may wind up with the last viable population of tailypo in the country, and all because my husband didn’t have the heart to say ‘no’ when I brought him an injured animal—or when that animal started courting and showing off how nice its situation was.”

  “Will they bite us while we’re sleeping?” asked Fern. “Or touch us with their creepy little hands?”

  “They don’t bite; we’ve had plenty of time to reach a compromise on living space here, they and I. Anyone who arrives in the company of a family member is safe and welcome. They don’t bite strangers, either. When local teens decide to dare each other to go into the murder house, the tailypo will make a lot of noise and drive them off, but not by biting. They know that biting tends to summon animal control, and any of their children who’ve been taken away by the dogcatchers don’t come back again.”

  “That’s a little smarter than I like my weird woodland creatures to be,” commented Cylia. “Are they people-smart?”

  “Not quite,” said Grandma. “But they’re smart enough to know when they’ve got a good thing going, and I’m here rarely enough that they basically own this house most of the time. They have for years.” She smiled wistfully after the tailypo.

  “Well, this is all nice and portentful, Annie’s Grandma,” said Sam, sitting down on the floor and shifting into his monkey form at the same time, so that he could wrap his tail around my ankle again. “Are you going to be in Buckley long?”

  “Just as long as you kids are,” she said. “I was stopping by between bounties. I’ll go when your car’s fixed.”

  That couldn’t have been her original plan—my grandmother’s not an oracle, she can’t see the future—but Healy luck is a real thing. It’s not like jink luck, where they can control the outcomes. It’s more like an extreme form of being prone to coincidence. Sometimes it’s almost unbelievable, but I’ve seen it in operation my whole life, and I believe. It would be hard not to. Dad and Aunt Jane have the same thing, in a slightly less extreme form, and then by the time you get to my generation, it’s just a higher-than-normal tendency to run into cryptids every time we turn around.

  I’d give a lot to know what kind of things my great-grandmother Fran’s ancestors got up to behind the woodshed, is what I’m sort of saying here. There’s something in our bloodline on that side of the family that’s not human, and while whatever it is doesn’t seem to be hurting anything, it would be nice to know what we’re working with.

  “And where will you go?” I asked, in a challenging tone.

  Grandma sighed, looking around the room at my friends before focusing on me. “You really trust these people.”

  “They went with me to face the crossroads, so yes, I really do.”

  “I’m so glad.” She smiled so broadly it looked painful. “I was worried you’d never find people you could trust that way. Verity can take up all the air in a room—she gets that from my side of the family—and Alex is good at holding his breath, but you never could. You needed to get out, and you needed to breathe. And now you can go home and keep on breathing. My perfect girl.”

  “Where are you going, Grandma?”

  “Off to talk to Mary, and then to find my husband, and this time, I’m not coming back until I do.” She offered me her hand. After only a momentary hesitation, I took it. “If Mary says he’s alive, he’s alive. I’ve known her since I was a baby, and there’s no one I trust more where the crossroads are concerned. If he’s alive, he’s out there somewhere, waiting for me, and I need to go find him before he gives up.”

  Somehow, I didn’t think he was going to hold out all this time only to give up on her now. If he was still out there, he was going to be thrilled when his inexplicably young, hot, emotionally disturbed wife showed up to pull him out of whatever weird oubliette the crossroads had chucked him into. I couldn’t imagine my grandmother would be this dedicated to a man who didn’t deserve it, although it was difficult to ponder what he might have done so wrong in his life as to deserve her.

  I made a face. Grandma laughed. “Did you honestly think telling me you’d found and killed the crossroads would get you any other response? Of course, I’m going to go find your grandfather. You know he must be dying to meet you all.”

  “Um,” said James.

  “All right, probably not all of you, but he disappeared while I was extremely pregnant, and he probably knows it’s been long enough for his children to have had children. I know I would be wondering about my descendants if our positions were reversed.”

  “I would certainly hope so, since I’m one of them,” I said.

  Something rustled in the backpack next to the couch. James flinched away from the sound.

  “Is it another tailypo?” he asked. “Or worse—rats? Do you put traps down here?”

  “I would never,” said Grandma, and reached into her bag—not with a grasping hand, like a normal person, but with her fingers fully extended and her palm flexed. It was a position I was deeply familiar with, and I smiled even as she pulled her hand free, displaying two mice, one brindle and one pale fawn, sitting in the center of her palm. Both of them were wearing jewelry made from bullet casings, and the br
indle had a cloak of stitched-together candy bar wrappers.

  “Whoa,” said Sam. “More mice.”

  “More?” asked James. “I wasn’t aware that mice were a risk.”

  “Why are those mice wearing clothes?” asked Fern. “Does this mean that all the other mice I’ve seen were naked?” She sounded genuinely distressed by the idea.

  Cylia nodded toward my grandmother’s palm. “S’up, Aeslin buddies?”

  Grandma and I both turned to stare at her. She shrugged. “I get around. I’ve heard the rumors about you people having an intact colony. A lot of jinks get mixed up with the exotic animal trade. Easier to poach when you’re guaranteed to find what you’re looking for. You know what your friends there would go for on the open market?”

  Grandma pulled her hand closer to her body, taking the mice with it. “Our mice are not for sale.”

  “I never said they were, and that whole gig isn’t my thing. I have cousins who work the shows, but I haven’t spoken to them in years. I’m not threatening your mice, I swear.”

  Grandma looked at me. I nodded encouragingly.

  “I trust Cylia,” I said. “She’s saved my ass more than once. She’s not going to hurt your mice. Speaking of, hello.” I shifted my attention and address to the mice. “Are you the current head clergy of the Pilgrim Priestess?”

  “We are,” squeaked the brindle, puffing out its chest at the same time. As was often the case with Aeslin mice, I couldn’t tell whether it was a boy mouse or a girl mouse, and I wasn’t sure it mattered. Not being human, or even humanoid, the mice tend to prefer “it” as a gender-neutral pronoun, and we all go along with that, even as it makes some of us profoundly uncomfortable. Aeslin mice have a casual relationship with human concepts about gender at best. It’s not that they don’t care about our social norms. It’s that once they have an idea in their heads, they don’t let it go easily, and they got all their concepts about how humans think about such things from four-times great-grandmother, who found them in her chicken coop on what I’m sure was a very bracing morning.

  “I am to be traded to the temple of the Noisy Priestess when this pilgrimage is done,” said the fawn mouse.

  Grandma Alice is sort of weird within the family because she has two separate temples dedicated to her mysteries. One of them observes the rituals created before Grandpa Thomas disappeared, while the other is occupied in chronicling her life as it continues to happen. They’ll switch roles if he ever comes back. It makes my temple’s structure seem simple and easily understood.

  “Annie.” James grabbed my arm, white-knuckled. “Annie, the mice are talking.”

  “Of course they are,” I said. “They’re Aeslin mice. The hard part is getting them to shut up.” I looked at Grandma. “Just the two?”

  “I can’t take a whole colony with me when I’m moving between dimensions,” she said. “It’s too dangerous. Size doesn’t impact the rituals I use, but the number of living things does.”

  “Ah.” I nodded. “Three is within your limits?”

  “I can’t use rituals that won’t accommodate at least two. What would happen if I found Thomas and didn’t have anything on me that would get us both home? Three is a strain sometimes, but it’s better than asking one of the mice to travel alone with me the way I used to.”

  The Aeslin mice are the living history of my family. They remember everything they see and hear, so as long as someone travels with their mice, everything goes into the record. There had been days when I missed the presence of my own mice so badly that it was all I could do to keep from screaming. I’d sent them back to Portland after I burned down the carnival, once it had become clear that it wasn’t safe for them to stay with me while I was running from the Covenant. If I’d died while I was in my self-imposed exile, I would have been the first member of the family since great-great-great-great-grandma Beth to be even partially forgotten. Bemoaning the lack of privacy brought on by having a colony of nosy, intelligent rodents living in the walls is practically a family pastime, but I was going to sleep so much better when I was back with my mice.

  “Here.” Grandma held her hand out to me, mice still on her palm, looking at me with quivering whiskers and bright, curious eyes. “You need to take them home with you.”

  “Grandma . . .” I raised my hand automatically. The mice transferred from her palm to mine. I pulled them protectively toward my chest as she moved her hand away.

  “You are going home, aren’t you?” She frowned. “Your parents are worried sick. So are your siblings. Alex has asked me to go looking for you, twice. Verity’s still in New York, and it’s not safe for me to go see her, but I spoke to Dominic, and he asked about you. You need to show them that you’re still alive.”

  “We will Chronicle your journey!” squeaked the brindle mouse, proudly. “We will Recount it to your clergy with precision.”

  “This is too weird,” said James. His face had gone pale, and the temperature of the air around him was still dropping. Poor guy kept thinking he’d hit the threshold of how weird the world could be, and then discovering that once my family got involved, that was a well with no bottom. “Talking mice. And this is normal for you.”

  “She had two in her backpack when we met,” confirmed Sam gravely. “I took them to the airport when she left me. Which she’s never allowed to do again—it was very distressing.”

  “Yes, dear,” I said, patting his arm.

  The mice cheered. James jumped, obviously startled by the volume. I smirked at him.

  “The Aeslin mice are a lot louder than you’d think they could be, sometimes,” I said. “And they take a very close interest in the romantic lives of the family. So you’d better get used to it.”

  “Is a New Relative discovered?” asked the fawn mouse, whiskers quivering with barely contained excitement.

  “James here is my brother now,” I said. “His old family didn’t take proper care of him or appreciate him enough, so I stole him.”

  “HAIL TO THE COMING OF THE STOLEN GOD!” shouted the mice in unison. Grandma laughed.

  “Oh, you’re in it now, boy,” she said. “Once the mice take to you, you never hear the end of it. Do you like cookies?”

  “Yes,” he said uncertainly. “Why—”

  “I’ll bake you a batch when I get home, to say welcome to the family.” She rose, spreading her hands to indicate the cluttered living room. “The house is yours, as long as you need it. There’s a key under the mat. Lock up when you leave, then give it to the tailypo. They’ll take care of things.”

  “Right,” muttered James. “Of course, the tailypo will take care of things. Why would I expect anything different?”

  “Why do I need to take your mice, Grandma?” I asked.

  “I don’t currently have a charm that’s strong enough to get four people across a dimensional border,” she said. “And I told you, I’m not coming home without Thomas. Not this time.”

  The numbers didn’t add up. “If you don’t have a charm that’s good for four, how have you been traveling with two mice for this long?”

  Her expression sobered. “I’ve been losing faith, my lovely. Even I can’t keep going without answers forever, and I suppose I was . . . I was starting to believe I’d lost him. Thank you for giving my faith back to me.”

  “Are you leaving right now?”

  She looked at Sam, smiled knowingly, and looked back to me. “Wouldn’t you?” she asked.

  She grabbed her backpack, which rattled in an ominous way that probably meant it contained more ammunition than any one person needed unless they were planning to challenge an army, and then she was heading for the front door.

  She didn’t look back.

  “Well,” said Cylia, once she was gone, leaving the five of us alone. “She seems nice.”

  “She seems terrifying,” said Fern.

  “
She’s both those things,” I said, looking down at the mice in my palm. “She’s my grandma. I’ll go check the kitchen, see if she left us anything to eat.”

  I transferred the mice to my shoulder as I walked out of the room. They promptly hid themselves in my hair, their claws scratching against my scalp in the soft, reassuring way they had since I was old enough to be considered responsible and capable of caring for my own clergy. No one followed me.

  The fridge contained eggs, milk, and half a roast chicken. The cupboard had sugar, coffee, and a loaf of bread. My grandma may be half-feral these days, but part of her still trends more toward Donna Reed than Norma Bates. Lucky for us, although we were going to be pretty sick of chicken by the time we got back on the road.

  The tailypo was sitting on the counter, tail wrapped several times around its haunches. It looked at me and chirped. I handed it a raw egg and left the room as it was working to chew through the shell.

  “There’s breakfast,” I said. “Hopefully we’ll be on the road pretty soon after we eat. I don’t like to stay here longer than I absolutely have to.”

  James sat up straighter. “Is your grandmother really heading for another dimension?”

  I shrugged. “Probably. She doesn’t tend to lie about things like that. I think she doesn’t see the benefit of lying to her family.” She might have had a better relationship with her kids if she’d been a little more dishonest. But then again, they could have gotten the real story any time they wanted it by talking to the mice, and then she would still have deserted them, she would have just lied while she was doing it. Family is difficult sometimes. “We’re all used to the fact that none of us matter as much as a man that most of us have never met. Dad was really little when Grandpa Thomas disappeared. Aunt Jane wasn’t even born yet. Mary remembers him—they were friends—but she hasn’t been able to talk about him for as long as I’ve been alive.”

  “The crossroads wouldn’t let her?” asked Sam.

  I nodded. “They really wanted us to just let him go. I don’t think Grandma knows how to do that.”