Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  Praise for the InCryptid novels:

  “The only thing more fun than an October Daye book is an InCryptid book. Swift narrative, charm, great world-building . . . all the McGuire trademarks.”

  —Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times-bestselling author

  “Seanan McGuire’s Discount Armageddon is an urban fantasy triple threat—smart and sexy and funny. The Aeslin mice alone are worth the price of the book, so consider a cast of truly original characters, a plot where weird never overwhelms logic, and some serious kickass world-building as a bonus.”

  —Tanya Huff, bestselling author of The Wild Ways

  “McGuire’s InCryptid series is one of the most reliably imaginative and well-told sci-fi series to be found, and she brings all her considerable talents to bear on [Tricks for Free]. . . . McGuire’s heroine is a brave, resourceful and sarcastic delight, and her intrepid comrades are just the kind of supportive and snarky sidekicks she needs.”

  —RT Book Reviews (top pick)

  “A joyous romp that juggles action, magic, and romance to great effect.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “That Ain’t Witchcraft tells the kind of story that all series should be so lucky to have: one with world-bending ramifications that still feels so deeply personal that you don’t question if this could have been someone else’s book to narrate. McGuire has honed her craft over a decade-plus of writing, and if you call yourself a sci-fi or fantasy fan, yet haven’t picked her work up, you’re doing yourself a disservice.”

  —Culturess

  “Discount Armageddon is a quick-witted, sharp-edged look at what makes a monster monstrous, and at how closely our urban fantasy protagonists walk—or dance—that line. The pacing never lets up, and when the end comes, you’re left wanting more. I can’t wait for the next book!”

  —C. E. Murphy, author of Raven Calls

  DAW Books presents the finest in urban fantasy from Seanan McGuire:

  InCryptid Novels

  DISCOUNT ARMAGEDDON

  MIDNIGHT BLUE-LIGHT SPECIAL

  HALF-OFF RAGNAROK

  POCKET APOCALYPSE

  CHAOS CHOREOGRAPHY

  MAGIC FOR NOTHING

  TRICKS FOR FREE

  THAT AIN’T WITCHCRAFT

  IMAGINARY NUMBERS

  CALCULATED RISKS

  SPELUNKING THROUGH HELL*

  SPARROW HILL ROAD

  THE GIRL IN THE GREEN SILK GOWN

  ANGEL OF THE OVERPASS*

  October Daye Novels

  ROSEMARY AND RUE

  A LOCAL HABITATION

  AN ARTIFICIAL NIGHT

  LATE ECLIPSES

  ONE SALT SEA

  ASHES OF HONOR

  CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT

  THE WINTER LONG

  A RED ROSE CHAIN

  ONCE BROKEN FAITH

  THE BRIGHTEST FELL

  NIGHT AND SILENCE

  THE UNKINDEST TIDE

  A KILLING FROST

  WHEN SORROWS COME*

  *Coming soon from DAW Books

  Copyright © 2021 by Seanan McGuire.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover illustration by Lee Moyer.

  Cover design by Adam Auerbach.

  Edited by Sheila E. Gilbert.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1876.

  Published by DAW Books, Inc.

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Nearly all the designs and trade names in this book are registered trademarks. All that are still in commercial use are protected by United States and international trademark law.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780756411824

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

  pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  For Chris.

  Thanks for still tolerating me after all these years.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Praise for the Incryptid Novels

  Also by Seanan McGuire

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Family Trees

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Bonus Novella: Singing the Comic-Con Blues

  Price Family Field Guide to the Cryptids of North America

  Playlist

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Memory, noun:

  The ability to retain and review facts, events, impressions; to recall or recognize previous experiences.

  Delete, noun:

  To strike out or to remove.

  Cancel, erase, expunge.

  See also “lethe.” Not to be confused with “lethal.”

  Prologue

  “As long as you’re still breathing, there’s a chance. There are surprisingly few things in this world that can’t be taken back.”

  —Mary Dunlavy

  A small survivalist compound about an hour’s drive east of Portland, Oregon

  Nineteen years ago

  No.” The dark-haired little girl clutched her seatbelt like it was a lifeline, shaking her head hard enough that her pigtails bounced wildly, flicking across her eyes and obscuring her expression. That was fine: Angela wouldn’t have been able to read the nuances of Sarah’s feelings in her face even if she’d been able to see it clearly. Being a non-receptive member of a naturally telepathic species had forced her to get better at reading facial expressions than most cuckoos, who had the neural capability but never developed the skill. Why bother, when it was so much easier to just skim someone’s thoughts and know exactly what they were trying to convey?

  Why bother, when most cuckoos didn’t actually care about the feelings of others in the first place? Being “better” at something didn’t mean actually being good at it, and since Sarah tended to assume anyone around her could pick up her feelings from broadcast alone, “What are you feeling?” was a common question in the Baker household. Angela was doing her best to raise Sarah to be a thoughtful, compassionate little girl, and to be fair, Sarah’s nature lent itself well to being polite and caring and interested in the people around her, but most of the cuckoo children Angela had encountered had been like that. They were as sweet and sociable and occasionally horrible as human children. Something changed in them around pube
rty, turning them into monsters.

  Whatever it was, she was determined that it wasn’t going to happen to Sarah. Not to her little girl. She hadn’t been intending to be a mother again after Evelyn and Drew were grown and happy in their adult lives, but when the world had dropped a cuckoo child in her lap, she’d found herself both unwilling and unable to refuse. Sarah needed a family who could understand her and give her the best chance at a good life, and at the end of the day, Angela and Martin were in a position to be that family. That was the only thing that mattered.

  That, and finding a way to avoid Sarah growing into the homicidal impulses their species seemed heir to. Angela assumed those impulses were somehow tied to their telepathy. She was the only cuckoo she knew of who was non-receptive to the thoughts of others; she could project, but she couldn’t receive. She was also the only adult cuckoo she knew of who had never tried to kill anyone. Being able to view the minds around them as if they were open books had to make it very difficult for cuckoo children to make friends, and without friends to keep them anchored to society, maybe they were just having a normal teenage response to raging hormones and changing bodies.

  Not that she thought most teenagers were secretly yearning to kill everyone around them and salt the ashes, but it was a theory, if nothing else.

  Evelyn wasn’t biologically a cuckoo—she was as human as the day is long. But she’d been adopted by a cuckoo, and raised in a house with a cuckoo, and in the process, she had developed a certain bright resistance to the constant aura of “you know me, you love me, you would die to make me smile” projected by most cuckoos. Even her learned resistance wouldn’t have been enough to make it safe to bring Sarah around Evie’s children, but Evelyn had married a man named Kevin Price.

  Kevin was kind, friendly, a little distractable, and most importantly of all, a descendant of Frances Brown, the woman who had been the personal nightmare of every cuckoo in North America from the moment she’d first crossed paths with them back in 1931 until her death in 1945. For some reason, Frances Brown had been resistant—although not quite immune—to cuckoo influence. She could fight off their memory alterations. She could hear their telepathic commands without feeling any need to obey them.

  And her descendants had inherited her resistance. When Kevin had met Evelyn, it had been because he’d been investigating reports of a cuckoo in the area who was suspected of preying on local families. Instead, he’d stumbled onto the Bakers, a stable, nuclear family that just happened to be made up of members of four entirely different species. He’d been surprised but pleasant about it, and once he’d established to his own satisfaction that Angela wasn’t telepathically holding her family prisoner, he’d run off with her daughter, taking her to Portland to settle down and have two daughters—and a son—of her own, all of whom were better equipped to shrug off cuckoo influence than the human norm.

  If Sarah was going to make friends without manipulating their minds, she was going to do it here. Now it was just a matter of convincing her to get out of the car.

  Sarah had been excited about the trip while they were still in Ohio, talking animatedly about seeing the three cousins she’d already met and meeting the other two. She’d chattered about how wonderful it was going to be to see Verity again the whole time she was packing, and how she was going to be best friends with all five of her cousins. She’d been excited enough that she’d even left room for clothing between her math workbooks and the various field guides to bugs and birds and reptiles that were native to Oregon but not found in Ohio.

  Her excitement had started to fade at the airport, where she was had been bombarded from all sides with strange minds, some of them thinking things she wasn’t equipped to deal with. She’d gone from bouncing along at Angela’s side to clinging tightly to her hand and refusing to be parted from her for more than a few seconds, flinching away from the thoughts of the people around them.

  If she hadn’t looked so incredibly much like Angela—all cuckoos were virtually identical, which made it easy for them to pass as mother and daughter—Sarah’s growing distress might have made it difficult to get through security. Angela couldn’t deflect negative attention as easily as Sarah would eventually be able to, couldn’t take the temperature of a room and know when she needed to step in. But they’d reached their gate with plenty of time to buy Sarah a bottle of V8 and some cheese crisps before their flight, and she had almost calmed down by the time they boarded.

  The flight itself had been peaceful. Sarah had settled quietly in her window seat, filling out a math workbook and munching cheese crisps. One of the flight attendants had come back to give her a pair of honorary pilot’s wings, but as she’d been doing that for all the children, Angela hadn’t become overly concerned that Sarah was being shown favoritism because she was changing the minds around her. Angela had actually started to think this would be okay.

  And then the plane had touched down, and the thought of seeing her cousins had become abruptly very real in Sarah’s mind, and all hell had broken loose. She’d been sobbing and promising to be good by the time Angela had carried her off the plane into the terminal, struggling a little under the combined weight of a child, her own carry-on bag, and Sarah’s heavily laden backpack.

  Fortunately, the flight crew was used to children having meltdowns, and given that Sarah was sobbing about being scared to see her cousins because they weren’t going to like her, no one had called security. Angela had calmed her as best she could, then led her to the baggage claim and the car rental desk so they could continue their journey.

  It would have been better for her to use cash and buy a beater car from the local personal ads, something she could leave behind for Kevin and Ted to strip for parts when she took Sarah back to Ohio. But “better” wasn’t always the same thing as “practical,” and much as she knew her son-in-law would hate having a traceable rental car parked on his property for a week, it would be worse trying to go through the delicate dance of under-the-table vehicle acquisition while shepherding a crying child. Sarah had been all cried out by the time she’d been strapped into the car, and had ridden quietly for the roughly two hours it took Angela to navigate out of the airport, across the city, and onto the optimistically-named “roads” leading to the family compound.

  And all that had stopped now that they were at their destination. “I won’t,” she said, voice peaking just below a wail. Something pushed against Angela’s temples, an almost physical pressure. She sighed.

  “You know you can’t manipulate me that way, Sarah, and it’s rude to even try when someone is your friend,” she said, and leaned over to unbuckle Sarah’s belt. “We came all this way so you could see your cousins, and meet the two you haven’t met yet.” Arthur and Elsinore were Kevin’s sister’s children, half-human and half-Lilu. They were still descended from Frances Healy. Whatever protected her descendants would protect them, too.

  Sarah sniffled, but she didn’t push again, just balled herself tight against the car door, making it impossible to open the door without sending her tumbling onto the gravel driveway.

  Angela stifled another sigh. She’d thought she was past these times and tantrums when Drew graduated from high school and went into the world to seek his fortune, whatever that meant. Now she was right back at the beginning, or close enough as to make no difference.

  “They know we’re here, Sarah. We have to get out of the car.”

  “How?”

  “Kevin has cameras everywhere on the property. He knew as soon as we turned down the road that brought us here.”

  Sarah sniffled and lifted her head. “That was a mile ago.”

  “Everything inside the ring of ‘no trespassing’ signs belongs to your sister and her family,” said Angela. “They like their privacy because they have some pretty special people living with them,” although “living” was a generous way to describe Mary and Rose, both of whom were definitely dead, “and they d
on’t want anyone finding out or getting into trouble.”

  Sarah sat up a bit more. “Special like us?”

  “Not exactly like us. There aren’t any other cuckoos here. But your Uncle Theodore is a Lilu, and his children are half-Lilu, so they’re a little bit like us. They’re empaths. Do you know what that means?”

  Sarah gave her a withering look that even an ordinary cuckoo would have been able to interpret as scorn. Angela swallowed her smile. “Of course. I’m not a baby. They feel other people’s feelings.”

  “And their own, and they can influence what other people are feeling, just by thinking about it. They don’t hear words the way you do, but feelings can be just as powerful if you know how to interpret them.” Something Sarah would get better at doing if she spent time with people she couldn’t influence, like her cousins.

  “Oh.” Sarah wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, keeping a death grip on the seatbelt with her other hand. “I still don’t want to go inside.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m tired. I want to go home and sleep.”

  “We’d have to take another plane to get home. We don’t have a hotel room. We’re supposed to sleep here tonight.”

  “In a house with other people?” Sarah’s alarm grew again. “What if I hurt them?”

  “They have special rooms warded against all sorts of things, like telepathy. If you sleep in one of them, you won’t be able to hurt anyone.” Angela unfastened her own seatbelt. “Come on, Sarah. Be my brave girl. Let’s go inside.”

  Sarah looked uncertain. Angela opened her car door. Maybe she’d have to dump the girl out on the driveway after all.

  As if they’d been waiting for someone in the car to move first, the door of the house burst open and a swarm of children came pouring out. The one in the lead was very blonde, very fast, and roughly Sarah’s age, followed by an older girl with hair a few shades paler, who somehow managed to make a flat-out run look like a saunter. Verity and Elsinore. Alex was close on their heels, and Antimony was barreling along behind him, her eagerness not quite compensating for her shorter legs. At the rear of the pack was a smaller dark-haired boy who looked almost as if he was there under duress. Arthur.