Lay of the Land

by Seanan McGuire

  The doorbell didn’t work. Alice tried it twice before raising her hand and rapping her knuckles briskly against that rotting-flesh colored door.

  There was a crash from inside, as if someone had been trying to load a bookshelf and had lost their balance at the sound of an unexpected knock. Alice bit her lip to stop herself from smiling. It wouldn’t do to make the man think she was making fun of him when she was just trying to be neighborly.

  She had counted silently to fifteen when the door was unlocked, and opened, and there was Thomas Price, blinking at her in the afternoon light. Anything clever she might have been planning to say was promptly lost to the winds of time as she got a good look at him when he had slept, and showered, and wasn’t dressed like an undertaker preparing for a funeral. Travel was not, it seemed, the best thing for him. Living in a horrifying murder house, on the other hand…

  He was still tall and thin, with cheekbones that looked like they could be used to slice bread. But he looked much more relaxed, which had the odd effect of making those cheekbones seem much less severe. He was wearing a pair of khaki slacks, like something from a military uniform, and a button-down shirt that had been rolled to the elbows, exposing the colorful tattoos covering his arms. A few more tattoos showed at the top of shirt, following the line of his sternum and collarbones.

  “Um,” said Alice.

  For his part, Thomas looked first surprised and then pleased. “Miss Healy. I didn’t expect to see you again so soon! I was honestly worried that I’d managed to get you into trouble by telling your grandparents that you were here.”

  “Um,” said Alice again. She thrust the plate she was carrying at him. “Shortbread. Runic. Um. I mean, it’s runic shortbread, it’s been painted with lemon sigils to prevent demonic possession and improve digestion and I thought it might be nice to bring you some baked goods since you probably haven’t started baking yet. If you bake. Do you bake? Wait. Here.”

  Thomas blinked and took the plate. Alice’s appearance had been a surprise. Alice’s apparent separation from the English language was a bit more complicated. “Thank you. I don’t bake, as a rule, so this is very welcome. Did you make the shortbread?”

  “No, my grandmother.” Simple questions were apparently still okay. Alice huffed out a breath in relief. “She says hello, and hopes you’re settling in well.”

  “Please give her my regards.” Thomas stepped to the side, gesturing to the living room behind him. It had acquired several boxes of books from somewhere. The same couch was still there. “Would you like to come in?”

  “No, thank you,” said Alice. Before she could seem rude, she hastened to add, “My father isn’t sure you’re not here to make trouble, so I figure it’s best if I don’t go in. Besides, it’s the old Parrish place. It gives me the willies.”

  “You’re not the only one,” said Thomas. He set the shortbread down on a small table next to the door. “Well, if it’s not a terrible imposition, and since you’re here, would you mind showing me around the area behind my house? I don’t want to be eaten by something I haven’t been introduced to yet.”

  “I’d be happy to,” said Alice’s mouth, before her brain could catch up with it and properly point out what a terrible idea this was. She winced, but only a little.

  Walking around the woods with Thomas Price didn’t really feel like such a hardship.

  “I’ll get my jacket,” said Thomas, and vanished back into the house, leaving Alice standing alone and empty-handed on the front porch.

  Alice didn’t do well with empty hands. She produced a knife from inside her jacket and began spinning it between her fingers, slowly at first, and then with increasing speed, until all of her attention was focused on the spinning blade.

  The sound of a throat being cleared in the doorway was surprising enough that she jumped, head jerking up. The knife clattered to the porch. After a quick glance to confirm that she hadn’t sliced her fingers open, Alice bent, cheeks burning, and recovered the knife, making it disappear back into her jacket.

  “That was some admirable knife work, Miss Healy,” said Thomas. “Have you been formally trained, or are you self-taught?”

  “A little of both—Grandma teaches me when she can get away with it, and I work on my own when she can’t,” said Alice. “The mice are pretty helpful, too. They remember my mama working with her knives—she was circus folk, and she had a knife-throwing routine. They can’t demonstrate so much, but they’re good about talking me through things.”

  “The mice,” said Thomas, with a slow blink.

  “Yeah. We have a colony. In our attic. Um. Aeslin mice? Have you ever heard of those?”

  Thomas blinked at her again before pursing his lips in what looked like amusement. “You know, there used to be rumors about Caroline Carew—I believe she’d be your great-grandmother—keeping some sort of intelligent rodent as a pet. I don’t think anyone ever made the jump to ‘Carrie Carew keeps a colony of Aeslin mice.’ I’m sure there’d be something in the records.”

  “You knew my great-grandmother?” Alice asked.

  “No, she was before my time, but I learned all about your family in my field training, which included a lot of empty gossip.” Thomas closed the door. “Shall we? I don’t want to keep you out too late and get you into trouble.”

  “I have time,” said Alice. She moved to pace Thomas as he stepped down from the porch. “What kinds of things did you learn about my family?”

  “Names, descriptions, combat training. Your grandmother was pregnant when they left, so we knew there had been a baby, and some field operatives managed to learn his name about fifteen years ago. Apart from that, it was mostly warnings about not letting anyone with Carew blood get the upper hand, and always knowing where the exits were if you were dealing with a Healy.” Thomas gave her a thoughtful sidelong look. “I wonder which holds true for you, Miss Healy. You look very much in the Carew mold, if you don’t mind my saying so, and most of the Healys I’ve known have been more…restrained when it comes to dropping knives in front of relative strangers.”

  “I’m more likely to stab you than I am to snare you, if that’s what you mean, and I have a name,” said Alice. “I’m only ‘Miss Healy’ when I’m in trouble at school. Which is most of the time. So if you could call me ‘Alice,’ that’d be swell.”

  “All right, Alice. You can call me—”

  Alice shook her head before he could finish his sentence. “I really, really can’t. You’re old enough to be one of my teachers. I’m not supposed to call adults by their first names. It’s rude, and it’ll get me in trouble at home if I slip and do it in front of my father.”

  “I understand,” said Thomas. “I know it’s rude to ask a lady her age, but you said before that you were sixteen? Is that correct?”

  “It is,” said Alice. “My birthday was a few months ago, during the summer.”

  “Ah,” said Thomas. “At home, you’d be considered more than old enough for field duty. I’ll try to adjust my thinking, but you’ll have to be patient with me.”

  “I’m not too good at patient, but I’ll try,” said Alice. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-six,” said Thomas. “I promise not to let my advanced age slow you down.”

  “I’ll hold you to that,” said Alice.

  They had walked across the field while they were talking, and had reached the edge of the wood. Alice stopped before they could step into the trees. Thomas gave her a curious look, but waited, letting her explain things in her own time.

  “Do you have frickens in England?” she asked.

  “Frickens?” said Thomas blankly.

  “You know. Frogs with feathers. They hang out in trees and go ‘creep creep creep.’”

  “Ah!” Thomas nodded. “You mean Anuraves. Yes, we have them.”

  Alice looked at him like he had just sprouted an additional head. “No, I mean frickens. That other thing is a stupid name. It’s bigger than they are. Anyway, if you can hear them
creeping, that means you’re probably okay; most of the predators around here scare the frickens, so they shut up when something nasty’s nearby.”

  “They aren’t worried about humans?”

  “Most people don’t go into the woods around here, and they’re used to me,” said Alice. “They know I won’t hurt them.”

  “It must be very reassuring, to be a friend to frickens,” said Thomas solemnly.

  “Don’t tease,” said Alice. “If you can hear the frickens, you’re probably okay—only probably, since there’s stuff that doesn’t upset them, like the giant flower that tried to eat me the other day. Watch where you step, and if something looks like a big mouth full of teeth that doesn’t want you to think it’s a big mouth full of teeth, don’t put your foot inside it.”

  “Swamp hagfish?” guessed Thomas.

  Alice nodded. “We have a lot of things around here with ‘swamp’ in their names. It wouldn’t be so bad if most of them would stay in the swamp, but they pretty much go wherever they want to. Mostly they stay in the woods. They don’t like going where there are too many people.”

  “Wild animals generally don’t,” said Thomas. “I’m following you. Anything you refuse to step on, I won’t step on either.”

  “I’ll hold you to that, too,” said Alice, and stepped into the woods.

  They had been walking for no more than ten minutes when Thomas Price made his mind up about two very different, very important things. The first was that Alice was absolutely a Healy: she might look like her Carew forefathers, but she had the Healy smile, the Healy way of walking, and most of all, the Healy tendency to charge headlong into potential danger without pausing to look to either the right or left. The second was that it was a miracle she had lived as long as she had. Her mother—whoever that had been—must have brought something extra to the table, some indefinable degree of preternaturally good luck that she had then passed on to her daughter. It was honestly the only explanation for Alice still being among the living.

  Case in point: she was standing some five feet away from him, a large stick in her hand, attempting to goad a boulder into attacking her. She was accomplishing this by poking the boulder briskly before dancing backward, almost losing her balance several times in the process. He was considering the relative merits of telling his local guide that he was tired of watching her taunt the rocks when the boulder had finally had enough. It split into several dozen palm-sized scorpions, all of them clacking their claws like castanets, and went scuttling off into the underbrush, leaving Alice laughing in its—their—in the boulder’s wake.

  “See?” she said, sounding altogether too pleased with herself. “That’s what an igneous scorpion nest looks like. You gotta hit the rocks a few times before you sit down, or they’ll bite your butt right off.”

  “I see,” he said faintly. He was going to have to get himself in Alexander’s good graces. If he didn’t obtain access to whatever field guides the elder Healy had composed since moving to Buckley, he wasn’t going to survive to falsify his first report back to the Covenant. “How were they, ah, discovered?”

  “Some local kids didn’t hit the rocks before they sat down,” said Alice. “Closed casket funerals are pretty common among the families that live on the edge of the woods. Nobody talks about it. What good would it do?”

  “If people are being killed by creatures—” he began, and stopped as Alice whirled on him, looking actively angry for the first time.

  “You mean if people are going into the woods and bothering perfectly normal critters that are just trying to have normal lives?” she asked. “It’s one thing if the critters come into town and bother folks at home, but when you come into their habitat and make trouble, it’s your fault when bad stuff happens. The scorpions that killed those kids got killed right back, and you know what happened? Big explosion in the swamp hagfish population. Killed ten people. Everything’s connected. Until we understand those connections, we can’t just go around killing things!”

  Thomas blinked slowly. “I was going to suggest posting signs warning people of quicksand and other believable hazards, but I appreciate your passion for conservation. I’m sure it will serve you well in your chosen profession.”

  “Um.” Alice’s cheeks flared bright red. “I’m sorry. I just thought…”

  “That because I was Covenant, I was about to suggest burning down the entire forest? Not an unreasonable supposition. It would even have been correct, in my younger days, when I was more interested in pleasing people who would never be pleased by anything I did.” Thomas smiled, a trifle wryly. “I assure you, I’m far more interested in learning about monsters than I am in hunting them. There’s more to learn from a live creature than a dead one.”

  “Um,” said Alice again. “Yes. I mean…yes. There sure is. I mean. Um. This way.” Cheeks still red, she turned and forded deeper into the forest—although not, Thomas was pleased to note, in the direction previously taken by the igneous scorpions. While he was sure that they were charming creatures that had every right to their share of the swamp, he wasn’t particularly excited about the idea of meeting them without better boots. And Alice had stirred them up with a stick, just so he could see how they worked.

  He was smiling as he followed her. He simply couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  Alice’s blush had faded by the time he caught up with her, at the edge of a narrow creek. The frickens were singing overhead, marking the area as at least partially safe. She flashed him a quick smile, and asked, “Want to see something nifty?”

  “That’s why I asked you to bring me out here,” he said.

  “Then check it out.” Before he could ask what “it” was, she had plunged her arm into the bank of the creek, all the way up to her elbow. She felt around for a moment before pulling out what looked like a cross between a leech and a lamprey. It was easily a foot and a half long and, after a few seconds of squirming, wrapped itself around her arm, going still.

  “A bloodworm!” said Thomas, delighted. “Oh, I didn’t know you had those here. What a handsome fellow.”

  “Isn’t he just? He’s one of the bigger breeders around here. I bring them liver sometimes, so they stay in their burrows even when I have to pull them out for bleeding.” Alice held the bloodworm up so Thomas could get a better look. “He’s a sweetie. Barely ever bites at all.”

  “Lovely,” said Thomas—and he sounded like he meant it.

  Alice beamed. “You can usually find them around the creeks. Look for the little circular depressions in the mud. Depressions, not holes.”

  “Hagfish again?” guessed Thomas.

  “Burrowing vipers,” said Alice.

  Thomas grimaced. “Tell me again how there’s anyone alive in this town? It seems like everything is actively trying to kill anyone foolish enough to stand still.”

  “Oh, that’s easy. Most of the things that can be dangerous have been driven into the woods long since. They don’t come slithering down Main Street going ‘hiss hiss, I’m here to bite people.’ They mind their business, and as long as folks don’t come poking, things are pretty much okay.” Alice gently set the bloodworm back down on the creek bank. It squirmed into the mud and disappeared. “Sometimes scientists find a thing and it gets to turn ‘real,’ and then everybody knows it’s there. Only if it’s a dangerous thing, even if it’s been minding its own business in the woods for centuries, all of a sudden people feel like they have to kill it. I guess humans are just offended by the idea that there’s stuff out there that can make them die.”

  “I think that’s a very good way of looking at it,” said Thomas. “What do you know about the history of Buckley?”

  “Um. Founded in the 1850s, I think, still a township instead of a town—I don’t really know what that means, but I know that people get really cranky when you don’t refer to it by the right name—and we’re actually the second Buckley in Michigan. There’s also a Buckley Village over in Hanover County. They’re a lot classier tha
n we are. They have fewer unexplained deaths and everything.” Alice wiped her hands on the legs of her dungarees as she started walking again. Thomas followed. “We have a Settler’s Day every October. I bet you could learn more there. Or you could ask my grandpa. He’s the head librarian, he knows everything.”

  “You think he’d be willing to talk to me?”

  “I think so. Just do it soon. He’s going to retire in a year or so, and then my father’s probably going to take his job.”

  Thomas nodded. “Your father being the one who won’t talk to me.”

  “Yeah.” Alice grimaced. “He’s worried that you’re here to twist my mind around until I think the Covenant are the good guys and agree to start killing things for you.”

  “Well, you can assure him for me that that’s not going to happen,” said Thomas. “I have fond memories of many things about the Covenant of St. George, but there’s nothing about them that would make me try to recruit you to their cause. They’re…increasingly misguided in this day and age. And I doubt they’d take any recruit that I brought them.”

  “I don’t think he’d listen,” said Alice.

  “Maybe someday.”

  Something rustled in the bushes ahead of them. Thomas shot Alice a look, waiting to see what her response would be. She cocked her head to the side, motioning for him to be still. He stopped moving. She was…fascinating in this environment. On his porch, she’d been all nerves and anxiety, dropping her knives, losing the power of speech if he so much as looked at her oddly. Here, in the forest, she was utterly at ease. If he was going to know her better, he rather thought it would need to be outside the house. And he did want to know her better, if only because he could see Buckley becoming very lonely, very fast. Having a friend might make things a little easier.