Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  It’s a weird sort of slow-motion psychic flirtation that I really wish they’d hurry up and get on with. How they can keep insisting that they’re not totally hot for each other while they pull this sort of shit is a genuine mystery to me.

  But then, most elements of human—or cryptid—sexuality are a mystery to me. Hormones are a waste of time. And how their hormones can even recognize each other is like, double mystery, since he’s a human/Lilu hybrid, and she’s a giant telepathic wasp who looks like she should be headlining an indie rock act somewhere downtown.

  “Very mature,” I said. “I bet all the boys at math club love it when you make that face. Artie, will you tell your cousin that no one takes you seriously when you don’t know how to put your tongue away?”

  Sarah genially flipped me off before closing her comic and setting it safely to one side. “You can throw that pillow now,” she said.

  “Thank you,” I said, and threw it. She laughed as she batted it aside. If more cuckoos bothered with combat training, we’d all be even more comprehensively screwed than we are already, since an opponent who can see your blows coming is an opponent who isn’t there to hit.

  “But seriously.” I settled back on the bed, shifting position slightly so that I could look at both of them at once. Sure, in Artie’s case, I was just looking at the back of his head, but that was still looking in his general direction. “We have to go.”

  “I’m not stopping you.” Artie kept typing. “You’re right; it’s our responsibility to look into this, even if we don’t do anything else.”

  “I didn’t say I had to go. You really want me to roll into this sort of situation without any backup? That’s a good way for me to get myself very, very dead.”

  Sarah shifted positions on the floor, drawing her knees up toward her chest in what looked like a reflexively defensive motion. That made sense. Maybe it’s because she wasn’t born a Price, and maybe it’s because she’s already buried one set of parents, but she gets uncomfortable whenever one of us reminds her that our jobs stand a decent chance of getting us killed one day.

  I won’t be the first to die. That honor is almost certainly reserved for my sister, who seems to think that looking like our grandmother means emulating her in all things, including a lack of anything resembling a sense of self-preservation. Grandma stays alive through a combination of grenades, stubbornness, and being too scary for even the gods of death to go after. Aunt Mary was her babysitter—Aunt Mary died before Grandma was even born, and that’s one of the less confusing things about our family tree—and she says Grandma was always like this, even as a little girl.

  Clearly, the only explanation is that she’s secretly beloved of some chthonic deity or other, who doesn’t want to have to explain her to their spouse before it’s absolutely necessary. How else does a woman with a death wish broader than the River Styx wind up eternally youthful, and roaming the dimensional trails with enough ammunition to take out a small army?

  But I digress. Verity seems to think Grandma is a role model, and not a cautionary tale, and she’s taken the lead in the family “who dies first?” betting pool for the last three years out of four. She’s even been known to bet against herself. The only reason she didn’t sweep all four years was that we disqualified her when she decided to go off and be a reality television star instead of a good, honest cryptozoologist.

  But that’s over now. She lost her bid for stardom, and she’s back in the real world with the rest of the peons. And anyway, my stupid sister is not the point here. My desire not to go out of state without backup is the point. I glared daggers at the back of Artie’s head, daring him to turn around and see the look I was giving him.

  He squirmed in his seat, at least aware enough to know that he wasn’t doing much to stay on my good side. And staying on my good side is never a bad idea, especially not for my cousins, who have to live with me, whether they like it or not.

  Hi. My name’s Antimony, and I have it on good authority from basically everyone I’ve ever met that I can be really, really irritating when I want to be. Call it one of the benefits of being the youngest sibling out of three, and the youngest cousin out of six. Or call it proof that I am evolution’s perfect monster, all the obnoxiousness potential of my incredibly aggravating family boiled down into one aggressively geeky body. I am what happens when nerds are allowed to marry nerds and thus produce even more nerds, like nerdiness squared, like what happens when Seymour from Little Shop is allowed to hook up with Jordan from Real Genius. And if you got both those references, odds are good that you’re a nerd, too, which would explain why you’re following this road trip of the damned.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself again. Aunt Mary says it’s a natural consequence of being among the living but spending too much time with the dead. Ghosts have a questionable sense of linear time. Comes from being deceased. For them, everything happens in this sort of squishy, unending “now.” Makes cause and effect hard on them, and is just one of the many, many reasons that it’s not a good idea for dead people to hang out with living ones.

  Good thing my family has never put too much focus on prioritizing good ideas.

  I picked up another pillow, weighing it thoughtfully in my hand. Sarah raised an eyebrow, watching me. She knew what I was planning—she always knew what I was planning, such are the dangers of spending too much time around an attunement-based telepath—but she didn’t seem inclined to warn Artie, which meant she wanted him to go along with this as much as I did.

  You’d think that would make things easier on me. You’d be wrong. Sarah’s a cuckoo, one of two in the world who actually has some sort of moral center and ethical objection to treating other people like puppets—and since her mother, my grandmother, can’t treat people like puppets, no matter how much she might sometimes want to, the fact that Sarah doesn’t really makes her tediously unique. It also makes her remarkably wishy-washy and unhelpful when it comes to things like convincing Artie to leave the house.

  Her argument is that she knows exactly what to say to make him go along with what she wants, and so any sort of pressure from her is cheating, like playing a video game after you’ve purchased the hint book. My argument is that the hint book wouldn’t be for sale if they didn’t expect people to use it, and if she has the cheat codes, she should damn well be taking advantage of them. Which inevitably leads to her pointing out that I wouldn’t want her using the cheat codes on me, and then I have to go and throw knives at the targets in the backyard until I calm down.

  Whatever. Screw it. I flung the pillow at the back of Artie’s head, scoring a direct hit, as usual, and causing him to turn in his chair and narrow his eyes at me, annoyance warring with amusement for ownership of his expression.

  “If you’re going to keep throwing my stuff, I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” he said, before shooting a wounded look at Sarah. If she’d been able to read human expressions like a normal person, the degree of affronted puppy-dog eye he was giving her would have had her proposing on the spot.

  In the books and comics, it’s always easier for the telepaths and empaths to get a date. They just know they’re meant to be with their true loves forever, and they make it happen, like the big, stupid, fictional people that they are. In the real world, feelings are complicated and people are confusing, and adding new sensory input to the pile just makes things worse, especially when the people in question belong to completely different species.

  Sometimes I still wanted to knock their heads together.

  “Look, we’ve been over this,” I said sternly. “We know someone, or something—probably a siren, which would put us firmly into ‘someone’ territory, but I’m open to other interpretations of the data—has been hunting at large media conventions all spring.”

  “Yes, we know that,” said Artie warily.

  “And we know that Emerald City Comic Con is happening in Seattle next weekend
. Sarah’s already said that she can get us into the convention, and get us a hotel room once we arrive—”

  “It’s unethical, but I’m not morally opposed to defrauding the Hiltons,” said Sarah.

  “—so there’s literally no reason for us not to go and deal with this.”

  “I never said there was,” said Artie.

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “I just said I wasn’t going to go with you.”

  “You have to come with us.”

  “Oh, really.” He crossed his arms. “I have to go with you.”

  “Yes!”

  “I, the incubus, who doesn’t like to leave my bedroom, much less my house, have to go with you.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “To a large convention filled with literally thousands of people, many of whom will be sexually attracted to men and thus vulnerable to my pheromones, regardless of whether or not they would actually choose to be sexually attracted to me under ordinary circumstances, where we will steal a hotel reservation from someone who has probably planned their entire year around this event, all for the sake of you maybe getting to ruin a siren’s day?”

  “There were six deaths at the last convention we think she hit,” I said calmly. “And that one was just near Lake Michigan. Emerald City has Lake Washington and the entire damn Pacific. If a siren is actually targeting these conventions, we could be looking at a lot more than six deaths.”

  To my surprise, Sarah chimed in: “And if we don’t stop this now, we’re looking at the possibility of a siren hitting San Diego. That’s the biggest of the annual geek media trade shows. It’s basically a nerd buffet for someone—or something—that’s decided they would make a good target.”

  “Don’t any of these conventions happen inland?” he demanded, throwing his hands in the air.

  “Some do. None of the really big ones, though. Origins is usually inland. Worldcon is sometimes, but it’s like, half the size of the Dragoncon writer’s track, so I’m not sure it counts,” said Sarah. “Mathematically speaking, you’d have to attend almost all the available noncoastal media shows to equal one trip to San Diego. And that includes several large regional anime conventions.”

  We both turned to look at her flatly. She shrugged, utterly unrepentant.

  “What?” she asked. “I like doing my research, when my research involves a lot of numbers, and you’re the one who said you thought we might have something using the conventions as a hunting ground.”

  “Right,” I said slowly. “And the fact that only the shows near water have been hit makes me think that it’s probably a siren.” That, and all the bodies bobbing near the shore of the respective cities to have been targeted. When the Coast Guard has to keep fishing corpses out of the water, “siren” isn’t a difficult leap to make.

  “And I need to come with you why?” asked Artie. “Before we get so far off the original topic that you start advocating for Aquaman as a solution to our problems.”

  “Sirens hunt through emotional manipulation,” I said. “You’re an empath. If there’s a siren anywhere near the convention center, you’ll pick up on them before they can hurt anyone. We can use you as a dowsing rod.”

  “Plus I’ll be there,” said Sarah. “If any of the people who are impacted by your pheromones try to get creepy on you, I can disappear us both.”

  “Are you sure you’re up for making me disappear?” asked Artie dubiously. “Last time you tried, it didn’t go as well as you were hoping it would.”

  Sarah looked abashed, ducking her chin toward her chest and giving off the distinct impression that, had she possessed a mammalian circulatory system, she would have been blushing. Cuckoos don’t have red blood cells. It’s weird, and according to all my high school biology classes, they shouldn’t be able to convey oxygen effectively through their systems, leading to them dying in exciting and unpleasant ways. According to Sarah, the one time I tried to tell her that, biology can fuck right off, since she’s doing just fine. I guess a living, non-suffocated cousin is a better argument than Ms. Shindell.

  “That was a year ago,” said Sarah. “I’ve been practicing lots. I made Verity disappear twice while she was doing Dance or Die, and I made myself disappear lots. I can manage the two of us.”

  “I still don’t think you should have gone to that show with her,” said Artie.

  Sarah shrugged, chin still tucked down.

  “Cryptid” means “unknown to science.” We’ve sort of expanded the meaning locally, using it as a catchall for things that science may know about, but has chosen to dismiss as mythological, or illogical, or extinct. Psionic powers, for example, or wasps who look like women, or nonhuman species of primate capable of not only masquerading as humans but hiding among them as if they fully belonged. Technically, half the things we call cryptids aren’t. Because science knows people believe in unicorns, science just thinks we’re wrong. And science knows that a lot of people say that lake monsters are plesiosaurs of some sort, science just disagrees. But the fact that my family’s life work—the work of literal generations, people living and dying for the cryptid world—depends on staying unknown to science means that we tend to keep a pretty low profile.

  And then there’s the Covenant of St. George, which is also unknown to science—and subscribes to a frankly ridiculous interpretation of the Bible, claiming that only creatures explicitly called out as having appeared on Noah’s Ark are “real” and have the right to continue existing in our modern world—and would love to kill us all for the crime of not being members of their whackadoo little biological supremacy cult. We used to be members, before my great-great-grandparents figured out that the Covenant was doing more harm than good with their constant attempts to cleanse and conform the world. So yeah, it sucks that we used to play their reindeer games, and there are some cryptids who still hold it rightfully against us—you don’t get to erase generations of genocidal behavior by shrugging and saying “whoops, my evil Auntie Agnes’ bad”—but we don’t do that anymore.

  We’re conservationists now. For everybody, including the humans. If we sat back and let a hungry cryptid slaughter their way through the human population, sure, we’d be feeding one member of a marginalized population, but we’d be really, really risking that “unknown to science” status if we allowed it to happen without stepping in. And losing “unknown to science” would endanger the rest of the population, because if there’s one thing the Covenant of St. George has taught us, it’s that humans don’t like to share.

  All this need for secrecy means that we’ve lived our lives like we were living in a messed-up spy show version of witness protection. I was a cheerleader in high school, taking advantage of the fact that the strength and flexibility training inherent in the sport fed well into hand-to-hand combat and the sort of stealth missions I was best at, and my parents never once attended one of my games. They couldn’t safely be seen in my presence, and there was always too much of a chance that a random Covenant observer might spot them in the stands.

  Maybe it’s being paranoid to assume that a global organization of monster hunters would have someone monitoring a high school football game, but I say that paranoia keeps people breathing. It’s better to be safe and intact than sorry and in pieces.

  I had to quit cheerleading when I graduated high school, since collegiate cheerleading at a level that would actually challenge me and maintain my skills attracted too much attention. The World Cheer Competitions might be small potatoes so far as sporting events went, but they were still aired on ESPN, albeit at two o’clock in the morning, and if I’d been spotted in my spangled leotard and spanky pants, I could have triggered a purge that would end my entire family. I don’t look like a Price, in the sense that I actually do look like a Price, taking more after my paternal grandfather than the legions of dainty blonde women my ancestors have happily taken as their wives. I was still happier being saf
e than sorry.

  My brother was even more sensible with his choice of extracurricular activities. He joined the Society for Creative Anachronism, playing at being a medieval knight and whacking other people who had the same fantasy with foam-covered swords. Portland, where we grew up, is located in the SCA Kingdom of An Tir, and Alex was one of its staunchest defenders until he turned twenty-two and reached the point where the other knights were hassling him about why he never fought in the Crown Tourney to determine who was going to be the next King. Personally, I like a nerd party where the leader is picked by beating the holy hell out of everyone else who wants the job, but even as relatively innocuous and deep geek as the SCA is, it can—and does—attract media attention. There was too much chance that he’d become King on a slow news week and wind up with his picture in the local paper.

  So he quit. He took his existing peerage and his years of experience and his fondness for the community, and he packed them all away with an excuse about needing to leave the state for graduate school. As far as I’m aware, he never approached any other branch of the organization.

  And then there’s Verity. My older sister, whose chosen extracurricular activity had always been ballroom dance. She’d started competing before I was even in grade school, wearing wigs and colored contacts, concealing her identity behind a series of fake names like it was some sort of shell game, like she was never going to get herself caught. Like the judges didn’t move around and see her competing in different cities, different states, different regions. She’d settled on a single legend by the time she turned sixteen, a redheaded tango prodigy named Valerie Pryor who danced with a variety of partners, always toward the front of the mob.