Imaginary Numbers

by McGuire, Seanan

  I didn’t move. The cuckoo still aiming her stolen gun at me made that an easy decision. If she’d been more mammalian . . . for the first time, I found myself wishing that my pheromones could affect a cuckoo. If she’d shot me, I could have swayed her completely over to my side.

  Telepathy versus chemically-induced attraction, round one, fight. The cuckoo stood, eyes narrow, gun still aimed at me.

  “Jimmy, grab his gun,” she said. “He’s a Price. They always have guns.”

  “You know you hate being called ‘Jimmy,’ James,” I said. “If she was whatever she wants you to think she is—your sister or your girlfriend or your confessor or whatever—she wouldn’t keep calling you that.”

  “I don’t like you calling me Jimmy,” said James, stepping up to me and grabbing the handgun off my belt. The temperature dropped again as he got closer. The cuckoo didn’t seem to notice. Having antifreeze for blood comes with an annoying degree of cold resistance.

  James sneered at me as he tossed my gun on the couch and stepped back toward the cuckoo, slipping an arm around her waist and pulling her closer to him. Her aim never wavered. “I don’t like you calling me anything,” he continued. “Hel, are you sure we need to take him with us? You could shoot him right now for what he did to you.”

  I wanted to ask what I’d supposedly done to her. For once in my life, I kept my big mouth shut. Whatever lies she was shaping in his mind would only get stronger if I gave her an excuse to make him repeat them out loud. Lies are like that. The more they’re told, the more realistic they tend to become.

  Heloise looked briefly disappointed when she realized what I was—or wasn’t—doing. Then she jerked her chin toward the door. “All right, incubus,” she said. “Move.”

  “Do I have a choice?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I shoot you.”

  I moved.

  * * *

  This is fine, I thought as Heloise marched me across the lawn, the barrel of her stolen gun digging into the skin between my shoulders. Mom will know what to do. It was a little weird that Elsie hadn’t come charging back with the various parents yet, but that was probably because they were busy coming up with some sort of plan for getting the unfamiliar cuckoo out of here. They had to have a coherent failsafe for this sort of thing.

  A gun went off in the distance, from the direction of the barn. I stumbled, nearly losing my balance. Heloise laughed, sounding utterly, horrifyingly delighted.

  “I know what you were thinking,” she said. “You were thinking what people like you are always thinking. That you had a way out of this. Guess what? You don’t. You’re coming with me, and you’re never going to see your precious family again. You lose. Got that? You lose.”

  “You’re so good at this, Hel,” said James admiringly.

  I could hear the cuckoo preen behind me. “I know,” she said. “I should have been in charge of this extraction from the beginning. Ingrid’s too soft on the little freak.”

  “Don’t call Sarah a freak,” I said. It was a wild guess, but it was better than focusing on the real bombshell:

  There was at least one more cuckoo, maybe two. No one else would be giving this woman orders. I mean, they could try, but she wouldn’t listen. Cuckoos aren’t big on following other people’s plans.

  “Why not?” asked Heloise. “I thought you were into cryptid rights, ‘live life out loud,’ all that hipster Etsy bullshit. She’s a freak. She’s in her third instar now, and we only need her to molt one more time and she’ll be able to crack this world open like an egg. That’s not normal. That’s the sort of thing only a freak can do.”

  Instar. The word was starting to take on an ominous cast, like it was the key to a secret I had never been meant to hear. “She’s not a freak,” I said. “I don’t know what an instar is or why you’re so afraid of it, but she’s not a freak.”

  Heloise dug the barrel of the gun harder into my back, forcing me forward. “I’m not afraid of some sheltered little princess who doesn’t know what it means to be a Johrlac,” she spat. “Don’t even say that.”

  “Whatever.” The grass was slippery. It would be easy to fake a fall . . . but then what? I had lost my handgun. I still had a knife with me, and a weighted sap in my left pocket. Neither of them was going to be enough to stop a cuckoo with a gun and the sorcerer she had in her thrall. Maybe more importantly, neither of them was going to make her give me Sarah back.

  There had been four people in the barn before Elsie went to talk to them. Of the four, three were resistant to cuckoo influence, Mom and Uncle Kevin because of biology, Aunt Evie because of long exposure. Dad was the only one really at risk, and while he could dial his pheromones up to try to affect Aunt Evie, she was smart and knew how to protect herself from an incubus. No one in their right mind gets turned on by the smell of formalin and rot, both of which she had available to her in convenient pre-jarred form out in the barn.

  One gunshot meant one person had gone down. Dad wouldn’t have thought to start out by grabbing a gun—it wasn’t the way he preferred to fight, when he had to fight at all—and that meant he was probably the one who’d been shot. I was remarkably okay with that. Lilu heal quickly, and none of the people in the barn would have been shooting to kill.

  It probably says something weird about my family that “I bet my mother shot my father in the leg” was a comforting thought, but I’m a Price. Weird is sort of what we do.

  “I’m not afraid of her,” insisted Heloise, voice getting higher and shriller. “Jimmy, make him stop.”

  “With pleasure.” James flicked me in the side of the head. The flash of cold was immediate and intense enough to leave me with a ringing headache.

  I winced. “Dude, what the hell?”

  “I froze your eardrum,” he said. “Don’t make me do something worse.”

  I rubbed the side of my head, slanting a sidelong glare in his direction. “When this is over and you’re yourself again, I’m going to tell the mice you want them to sing you to sleep every night for a month.”

  “I am myself,” he said, scowling at me. “Hel understands me. She appreciates me for the scholar that I am, and not because she feels sorry for me. She’s going to help me find Sally and bring her home.”

  “Sure she is,” I said, still rubbing the side of my head. “How did you meet her again?” I half-expected Heloise to break in and make us stop talking. Only half. Cuckoos are notoriously arrogant and convinced that their weird mind games are unwinnable by anyone but the cuckoos themselves. As long as we were talking about Heloise, she probably wasn’t going to interrupt.

  “We went to elementary school together,” said James. “Me, her, and Sally.”

  “Sally. Your best friend. The one the crossroads took.”

  “Yes.”

  “If Heloise was there, why did Sally go to the crossroads alone to get taken? Shouldn’t Heloise have stepped in and made her do something else?”

  “That’s enough of that.” Heloise withdrew the gun from my back long enough to rap me lightly on the crown of the head with its grip. “Don’t try to confuse my Jimmy. I don’t like it when people do that.”

  “She’s so good to me,” said Jimmy, in a dreamy, puzzled tone. “She takes such good care of me.”

  “Yes, I do, don’t I, Jimmy?” There was a soft smacking sound, and I knew without looking that she had just blown him a kiss. Gross. Evil people shouldn’t blow kisses at my honorary cousins.

  We had almost reached the fence. James jogged ahead to unlock and open the door, holding it for us.

  “Thank you, James,” said Heloise, and started to push me through. The woods loomed dark and tangled and all-consuming, and I knew, all the way down to the bottom of my heart, that if I went into them with her, I would never come back out. My body could molder among the roots for years before anyone stumbled over it.

  I couldn’t
help Sarah by getting myself killed. I couldn’t help anyone that way. So when Heloise urged me forward again, I did the only thing I could do, and grabbed hold of the fence with both hands, swinging myself around in the process, so that I was blocking the exit.

  Heloise blinked at me, clearly nonplussed. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Stopping.”

  She lifted both eyebrows. “If you say so. Jimmy?”

  “Right away.” James moved toward me, hands outstretched, air around them crackling with cold.

  I blinked. “She has you, but she doesn’t have-you have-you, does she? Huh.”

  “What are you talking about?” demanded Heloise.

  I kept my eyes on James. “I know you and Annie have been digging in the library, going through all Grandpa Thomas’ old books, looking for ways to be better sorcerers. It’s like, all the two of you do most days. I’ve seen you do all sorts of stuff, and now all you’re doing is trying to turn people into ice cubes. She has you, because she’s in your head and everything, but she doesn’t have you, not really. You’re pushing back. Is that a sorcerer thing, or a stupidly stubborn thing? Either way, keep it up.”

  James made a sharp growling noise and grabbed my hand.

  The cold flowing out of him was intense enough to violate half a dozen laws of physics in the process of giving me virtually instant frostbite. I hissed through my teeth, fingers tightening on the metal, which did me the immense favor of freezing solid and adhering to my skin. That was going to hurt when it came time to pry me loose.

  “Make him let go,” snarled Heloise.

  James pulled my hand off the fence. My skin, frozen to the metal and taxed beyond all reasonable limits, did the only thing it could do, and tore. I staggered backward, staring at my red, raw fingers, which were slowly leaking blood. James lunged for me. I stuck my hand out automatically, catching him across the face, leaving a red smear behind.

  James froze, eyes becoming slightly glazed as he stared at me.

  My eyes widened. In the battle between cuckoo compulsion and incubus attraction, which would win? It wasn’t a question I’d ever really wanted to ask myself before, especially since it meant being close enough to a non-family cuckoo for it to matter. Suddenly, it seemed like a very big deal.

  “Jimmy! What the hell are you doing? Get him!” Heloise waved the gun in her hand like it was some sort of badge of authority.

  Hell, maybe it was. But if she was going to kill me, she was going to do it here, where at least my family would have a chance of finding my body. “No, James,” I said, voice calm and level. “Don’t get me. I want you to stay right where you are, buddy, okay? We’re friends, right?”

  “Friends,” he said, sounding dazed.

  I winced. I’d never actually bled on anyone who wasn’t related to me before. Even in elementary school, when I’d been young enough that people just wanted to be my friend and maybe give me their pudding cups, I’d been careful enough to avoid skin contact with people who could be enthralled. How long was this going to last? And was James ever going to forgive me?

  Not that it mattered if I was dead. Sorry, buddy, I thought, and nodded vigorously. “Friends,” I echoed. “We’re friends, and Heloise here, she’s not your friend. No matter what you think you remember, you only met her tonight, and she’s not acting like a friend, is she? Friends don’t hold their friends at gunpoint.”

  “What the fuck is this, an episode of Mr. Rogers? Grab him!” Heloise adjusted her stance, once again taking careful aim at my chest. Headshots are tricky. Even the best marksman can miss. Chest shots, at close range, are much more likely to do the kind of damage jerks like Heloise prefer. “Grab him, or I’m going to shoot you both.”

  Slowly, James turned to face her. His motions were jerky, like he was fighting some force I couldn’t see. I wanted to cheer for him. I kept quiet. The last thing I wanted to do right now was attract more potentially deadly attention to myself.

  “You’re my friend, Hel,” he said.

  “I know, Jimmy. I know.” Her voice was treacly sweet, a parody of a friend’s concerned tone. It made my skin crawl. The way she batted her eyelashes at him made it worse. “He’s a bad person. You need to stop him.”

  James nodded in that same jerky manner. Then he reached up, swiped his thumb through the blood on his cheek, and stuck it in his mouth. His eyes cleared. He lunged for Heloise, who shrieked and stumbled backward on the lawn, aiming her stolen gun directly at his face and pulling the trigger.

  Nothing happened. There was a dull click and that was all, and I had to swallow the urge to laugh even as I pulled the cosh out of my pocket with my uninjured hand. In all the chaos and the triumph of getting her hands on the gun, she had forgotten one essential step.

  She had forgotten to take the safety off.

  If this had been a movie, I would have said something pithy about safe shooting, some stupid little quip that would probably have alerted her to the problem. Thankfully, while we all come from the Spider-Man school of combat—the bad guys can’t hit you if they’re too busy trying to figure out what the hell you’re talking about—my parents had always been very clear that there was a time and a place for helping your enemies improve. The middle of combat was neither of those things.

  I rushed for Heloise, swinging my arm around so that the cosh hit her in the shoulder. She yelped with pain. She dropped the gun. James lunged for her again, barely missing as she staggered backward.

  And that’s when Sam dropped down on her from above like the two hundred pounds of furious pseudo-simian he was. He landed feet-first on her shoulders, toes gripping hard. For one glorious moment they stood there like cheerleaders getting ready to do a really impressive trick. Then physics kicked in, and Heloise went down hard, Sam on top of her, lips pulled back from his teeth in a genuinely impressive snarl. She screamed. The sound was almost enough to drown out the click of a hammer being pulled back. I looked behind me.

  There was Antimony, a scowl on her face and a gun in her hands. This one was bigger than the one on the ground, and the safety was most definitely not on. She looked like she was ready to start shooting people. It was a mood I could absolutely support.

  “Hey, cuz,” I said. “You okay?”

  “You mean after James hit me in the head with an ice cube the size of a golf ball? Oh, I’m dandy.”

  “You don’t sound dandy. You sound like you’re about to kill somebody.”

  Annie’s smile was more like a snarl. In that moment, it was easy to see why she was Sam’s perfect girl, even if I would have sooner gotten involved with a live wolverine even if we hadn’t been related. She was way too scary for me. “That’s probably because I’m about to kill somebody. Sam! Get off the fucking cuckoo so I can shoot it!”

  “You can’t shoot her,” said Sam, and slammed Heloise’s head into the lawn with a sharp shove of one foot. “No. Stay down. This is the part where you stop fighting so my girlfriend doesn’t kill the living shit out of you.”

  James clutched the sides of his head with both hands, bending almost double. “Can you please, please knock her unconscious?” he moaned. “Half of me still wants to save her from you because she’s been my best friend since grade school, and I know that’s not true.”

  “Listen to your sister, meaning me,” said Antimony. “She’s not your friend, she’s not your long-lost bestie, and she’s not the secret to bringing Sally home. She’s just a complication we didn’t ask for. Sam?”

  “On it,” said Sam, and gripped Heloise by the hair, pulling her head far enough off the ground to snake his tail around her throat and squeeze.

  The effect was immediate. Her eyes bulged as she reached up and clawed at the offending appendage with her one free hand, trying to break what looked like a fairly unbreakable grip. She began to thrash and wheeze.

  “Cuckoos breathe, right?” asked Sam, as
casual as if he weren’t choking a woman right in front of us. “Like, I’m going to knock her out if I squeeze long enough?”

  “Or you’re going to kill her,” said Antimony. “It’s not like we strangle Sarah for fun. James, why the hell weren’t you wearing your anti-telepathy charm?”

  “I was in bed,” he said, still holding the sides of his head, like he was afraid his skull might fly apart at any moment. “You said Sarah’s room was warded to keep her from wandering into our dreams at night.”

  “More to keep our dreams from wandering into hers, but yes, it is,” said Antimony. “That doesn’t mean taking off that charm was a good idea. There’s no bathroom in her bedroom.”

  “Go easy on him,” said Sam. “Not everyone’s as paranoid as you are.”

  “It’s not paranoia when you find an actual cuckoo in your living room.”

  “Fair,” allowed Sam. Heloise wasn’t thrashing anymore. “Hey, James, you still have a weird lady in your brain telling you to kill us all?”

  “No,” said James, shoulders sagging in relief. He dared a glance over at Annie. “I’m sorry about the hailstone. I don’t know what came over me.”

  “Don’t worry about it. The cuckoo came over you. Sam, can you get her out to the barn?”

  “Not back inside?” asked Sam, as he uncoiled his tail from around Heloise’s neck and stooped to pick her up. I finally realized that he’d stopped to put on a long-sleeved sweatshirt at some point; except for the very brief moment where he was grasping her arms and hoisting her over his shoulder, he was never touching her skin directly. The fur on his tail was thick enough to insulate him.

  “Did you take so long coming to my rescue because you felt the need to stop and change clothes?” I asked.

  Annie rolled her eyes at me. “You’re a Price, nerd. You can take care of yourself.”

  “Against a sorcerer and a cuckoo?”

  “You’re still standing, aren’t you?” She gave James a measuring look. “But that’s not his blood. Artie, what did you do?”