Oh Pretty Bird

by Seanan McGuire

  “The mice like to stay with the eldest member of the family accompanying any given expedition,” he said. “In this case, that means my mother.”

  “Isn’t your daddy older than she is?”

  “Yes, but from their perspective, he’s the one who married in. He comes before me. Not before her.” Jonathan swung down from the truck and started for the porch. “Mary has Alice. She’s happy to keep her for the whole weekend. Are you sure that’s going to be enough time?”

  “If it’s not, two of us will come back here and take care of her, while the other two keep hunting,” said Alexander. He stood and hopped down from the porch. Once on the ground, he picked up the largest of the suitcases and handed it to Jonathan, claiming the second largest for himself. “We can’t let her get away this time. I don’t know whether we’ll be able to track her down again.”

  Tracking her down in the first place had taken five years. Five years of wondering who had hired an assassin to break into their home and kill Jonathan and Fran’s firstborn son. Five years of dead ends, bad leads, and so-called “tips” that led to nowhere at all. Johnny and Fran had done their mourning, and while no parent could ever be said to get past the death of a child, they had Alice to focus their energy and attention on: a living little girl who needed them more than her brother’s absent shadow ever would. Enid had been a little slower to let go, but even she had been recovering from her grandson’s death, inching toward acceptance day by day. But Alexander…

  Of the two of them, Alexander had always blamed himself for failing the pieces of their family who had been left behind in England when he took his wife and ran from the Covenant. Enid hadn’t forgotten their older son, or their daughter; she wasn’t a beast, to so casually dismiss that which had been lost. But she had been able to find peace in the life she had made in America, and in a community where the names of their children were never known, or spoken, or mourned. Alexander, however—Alexander had never forgiven himself for the look on Charles’s face when he repudiated his father. The boy had been six years old, and already sunk so deeply into the teachings of the Covenant that he had refused to hear anything that might contradict them.

  Ada hadn’t even been allowed to say goodbye to her parents. Enid still woke up with damp cheeks and aching eyes, remembering the smell of her daughter’s hair. But all that was in the past. The Covenant had seen to that, when they severed ties between the two oldest Healy children and their parents. Buckley was the present, and the future, and everything that mattered. That was the only way things could be.

  Enid believed in bullets and building better defenses; she believed in closing the doors against the darkness. She had been a Carew before she’d become a Healy, and the Carew family had always been more about defending than attacking. The Healys, on the other hand…they were a family of killers, born and bred, and Alexander had been among the best of them. Maybe the absolute best of them, if some of the stories were to be believed.

  This woman—this impossible woman, from a species that shouldn’t have existed in any universe, not under the auspices of any type of loving God—had done the unthinkable. She had harmed Alexander’s family. And now, barring a miracle of the blackest kind, Heloise Tapper was going to die for what she had done.

  The others were already at the truck, loading their cases into the back. Enid stood slowly, unable to shake the feeling that this enterprise was going to strain them all to the breaking point. The part of her that would always be a Carew girl knew that this was not the answer. The part of her that had grown, content, into a Healy woman knew that it was the only answer they had.

  Enid Healy swung her suitcase up into the bed of the truck before climbing into the cab, balancing the leather case that held the delegation from the colony carefully on her knees. She watched in the rearview mirror as Johnny and Fran pulled themselves up into the bed of the truck, settling atop the suitcases. Jonathan turned toward the front and flashed a quick thumbs up to Alexander, who started the engine. And just like that, they were away.

  May God have mercy.

  The drive from Buckley to Whiting, Indiana was long enough that under any other circumstances, they would have taken a train, or—barring that as a viable option—rented a closed car from someone in town. Something that seated four, rather than leaving half of their party exposed to the elements. But there hadn’t been time for that, not really, and the amount of equipment they needed made anything smaller than the pickup truck impractical.

  Alexander drove with his hands strangling the wheel and his eyes fixed on the road, jaw set so harshly that Enid could see every fluttering muscle when he swallowed. She watched him with concern. They weren’t young anymore. The days when they could hunt forever and never feel weary or cold were long, long behind them.

  “Talk to me,” she said quietly. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “I sent a letter to the Covenant before we left Buckley,” he replied. While she was staring at him, speechless with surprise, he continued, “I was careful about it. It’s being bounced through Chicago, Seattle, Manhattan—a dozen cities, all told, before it crosses the Atlantic. There’s no return address. But I made sure they’d know it was me.”

  Enid knew better than to ask about whatever details he’d included with his letter. Even after more than forty years of marriage, there were things he wouldn’t tell her, things that sometimes woke him, crying, in the night. Growing up in the Covenant was not easy on anyone, but she sometimes thought that growing up a Healy must have been very different than growing up a Carew. And then her thoughts would turn to the children she struggled daily to forget, and she would find something to distract herself, something that was less likely to destroy her.

  “I had to, Enid.” Alexander didn’t look at her, but his hands tightened on the steering wheel, until she began to fear that he would break his fingers seeking absolution. “They had to know what we’re facing.”

  “What are we facing, Alex?” When Johnny and Fran had come home from Colorado bruised, burnt, and engaged, she’d honestly been more interested in her son’s sudden brush with common sense—marrying the girl was the only logical thing to do, given how long he’d been in love with her—than in his stories of a pale-skinned, dark-haired woman who had somehow been able to rewrite his memories. Maybe that was a failing on her part, that she was more interested in the here and now than in the potential future. But that was as she had always been, and Alexander was there, as he had always been, to make sure that nothing was missed.

  For example, there was the fact that no one had ever documented anything like Heloise Tapper in any known record or oral tradition. Thought-transference was known of course—Apraxis wasps used something like it to communicate across the hive, some types of succubi and incubi were believed to be empathic, and clairvoyance had been documented across all intelligent races. There were even indicators that some non-intelligent races, such as shisa and Dawon tigers, possessed foresight or other clairvoyant tendencies. But thought-transference had never been identified as a source of memory manipulation. It should have been impossible for anyone to rewrite a human mind as Jonathan had described.

  And yet Fran had corroborated his story, even expounded upon it: he had been the rewritten one, after all, while she had been his target. They had been left with no choice but to believe that Heloise Tapper, whatever she was, was something they had never encountered before.

  Alexander had redoubled his efforts to map the migration of the known Apraxis hives after that. Perhaps more worryingly, he had called upon the scientists, bounty hunters, and monster-killers he knew all across North America, asking them to refrain from slaughtering Apraxis wasps unless there was immediate danger to a sentient population. Even Enid had not truly understood his reasoning…until she looked at the maps, and saw how sometimes hives bent away from what should have been their natural migration path. They were avoiding something.

  They were avoiding Heloise Tapper, or something that was very much
like her.

  “We’re facing a monster,” said Alexander quietly. “You know that.”

  “Yes, I do,” said Enid. “What I don’t know is why you felt the need to involve the Covenant in our family’s business. You know they’ll be setting every resource they have on tracking where that letter came from. If they find us…”

  “If they track it all the way back to its source, they’ll find Whiting,” said Alexander. “God willing, she’ll still be there.”

  Enid went quiet for a long moment. The road rolled by outside the truck, fields and houses blurring into one panoramic smear across the horizon. Finally, she asked, “What aren’t you telling me, Alex? Why are we doing this?”

  “We’re doing this because I finally found her,” Alexander said. “I’ve been searching since the Colorado incident. I never gave up looking.”

  “I know you didn’t,” she said, unable to keep the questioning lilt from her voice. Something was wrong. She just didn’t know what it was, and until she knew that, she couldn’t begin the process of trying to fix it.

  Alexander didn’t take his eyes off the road. She supposed that should have been reassuring: he wasn’t so distracted that he was forgetting about safety. She couldn’t quite take it that way. It felt less like he was being a safe driver, and more like he couldn’t bring himself to face her.

  “The last time I was able to pinpoint her location was in 1935,” Alexander said. His voice was flat, factual. It was a voice she hadn’t heard him use in years, not since he’d been called on to report the results of a botched cleansing to his superiors within the Covenant. It sent a chill running down her spine, where it buried itself in her belly and seemed set to freeze her straight through. “She was in Connecticut. One of my contacts there got eyes on her, and sent me a telegram using the signal phrase we’d agreed upon.”

  “I remember you went to Connecticut that year,” she said slowly. “It was about a month before…” She stopped herself, unable to face the words that came next.

  “A month before Daniel died,” said Alexander. “I went to Connecticut. I went to the last known location of my contact, a very nice Bigfoot man with shipping concerns in the area. He was gone.”

  “He’d left?”

  “She’d killed him.” A note of grim fury crept into his tone. “It looked like suicide, of course. The gun was in his hand, and I have no doubt that his finger pulled the trigger. But Marcel would not have killed himself. He had a family that loved him. He was one of their primary providers. He had a thriving business, and one of his wives was pregnant at the time. He was a man with everything to live for, and I had never known him to give any signs that he would consider suicide as an option.”

  “You think Heloise found him out.” Enid had to fight to keep her voice steady. “You think she killed him.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “But you think she read his mind first, don’t you?”

  “The timing—”

  “So he tells her you sent him, and then what? How did she know where we lived?” Enid was getting louder. She found that she really didn’t care. “Did you tell him?”

  “No, but she didn’t really need to know, did she? All she needed to do was contact the local bogeyman community, and offer payment for the sending of a message. We’ve known for a while now that Heloise was behind Daniel’s death, even though she used another’s hands to carry it out. Whatever this woman is, she depends on secrecy, on being able to rewrite the minds of everyone around her. Well, Fran was able to overcome her control once before. She wasn’t going to come anywhere near us if she could avoid it. So she tried to destroy us in a different way.”

  “She very nearly succeeded,” said Enid. “Alexander Christopher Healy, you are going to tell me right now why we’re going after a mind-reader who’s already struck at us through our children once, or I am going to stab you.”

  “I’ll lose control of the truck if you stab me, dear.”

  “I’m very good in tense situations. I’m sure I can grab the wheel before we go entirely off the road. Now answer my question.” There was abruptly a knife in her hand, appearing there as if by magic.

  Alexander, who appreciated the difference between magic and a good old fast-draw, slowed down the truck a bit, to hopefully avoid any sort of massive disaster if his wife decided to carry out her threat of stabbing. “Open the glove compartment,” he said.

  “That isn’t an answer,” said Enid, eyeing him suspiciously.

  “Trust me.”

  Enid was angry, but she wasn’t furious. This was a deep, cold anger that would take a long time to pass, but which nonetheless left her capable of listening to reason. After one last wary look, she leaned forward and opened the glove compartment. The contents were mostly normal—a greasy owner’s manual, a flashlight, some battered leather gloves, a box of ammunition, some dried aconite—but there was a clean manila envelope on top of the jumble. Carefully, Enid extracted it and peeked inside.

  “You brought…jewelry?” she ventured, trying to make sense of the jumble of copper chains and glass baubles in front of her. “I’m not that easily bribed, Alex. Never have been, God willing, never will be.”

  “They were made by a Letiche witch from Louisiana. She’s dealt with thought-transference before, and guarantees that these will keep our minds from being invaded by any force, be it friendly or otherwise. We’ll be safe from Heloise’s influence as long as we’re wearing them.”

  Enid’s frown didn’t lessen. “And if your witch is wrong about that? What happens if this Tapper woman plunders our minds in self-defense, and finds out about Alice? Mary Dunlavy’s not a fighter. She won’t be able to keep our granddaughter safe.”

  “I’m doing the best I can here, Enid.” For the first time, there was a trace of strain in his voice. “We knew Heloise Tapper was a danger when John and Frannie came back from Colorado talking about her. We just thought she was a remote one. You all knew I was trying to find her—we needed to know more.”

  “You never told me you’d lost a man.”

  “What good would it have done, Enid? Marcel would still have been dead, and Daniel would still have been dead, and Heloise would have stayed miles outside of our reach. It’s taken me this long just to find her again. The Apraxis wasps…she can’t be the only member of her species. She’d need to be able to fly in order to cause as much disruption of their hives as I’ve charted.”

  “We don’t know she can’t.”

  “No, we don’t,” Alexander allowed. “But right now, we’re treating her as a woman who is somehow capable of thought-transference on a level we’ve never seen before—a woman who Frannie swears took a bullet to the heart and kept on moving. We don’t want to credit her with any more powers than we already know for a fact that she possesses.”

  Enid sat quietly for a little while, looking at the packet of glass and copper charms in her hands. Alexander kept his eyes on the road, not interrupting her. He knew his wife: he knew that whatever decision she was going to come to, she needed the time to come to it naturally, and without any influence from him. Enid was one of the most forgiving women he’d ever known, as long as you didn’t endanger her family. Well, he had endangered her family. Even though he hadn’t meant to, he was going to face the consequences of his choices.

  “What is it you’re suggesting we do, Alex?” she asked finally. “You got Johnny and Fran so spun up that they let you lead us off half-cocked, instead of coming up with a coherent plan. That says to me that you already have one, and you didn’t want to waste time arguing about whether or not it was the best way to go.”

  “I have a charm for each of us,” he said. “Wearing them should keep her out of our heads. That’s going to give us a tactical advantage that she won’t necessarily anticipate. We find her. We catch her. And we make her tell us everything.”

  Enid’s lips pursed. “You mean I make her tell us everything.”

  “I’m so sorry, darling, but yes.” Healys were kil
lers. Carews were more defensive, building fences, building traps…and gathering intelligence, when the need arose, to help make those fences and traps as effective as possible. There was no one in the world more deadly with a pair of pliers and a smile than a Carew woman.

  “Are we going to kill her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there any chance this is going to go badly for us?”

  “Yes.” Alexander sighed. “If the charms don’t work—if she’s not the only one—if she’s managed to use her particular powers to subvert the entire town. We could wind up in a great deal of trouble. But we have a lot of bullets, and we have years of training between the four of us. Really, the only thing I’m genuinely worried about is those charms not working.”

  “But Alice…”

  “I sent Arturo a letter as well.” Enid was silent. Alexander continued, “He should receive it in a week. It asks him to call, and to ask several questions that would require an unrevised memory to answer. If we’ve been subverted, he’ll know. And if no one answers, he’ll know that something has gone wrong. The letter has instructions for what to do, if that’s the case.”

  “Fran would want Alice to go to Juney, you know she would,” said Enid.

  “I know. That’s why the instructions say that he should take the baby and find the carnival, see what they want to do. Alice is young yet, but she knows Arturo well enough not to be afraid if he takes her on an adventure, and then she can choose who she stays with.” The thought of his granddaughter growing up without him made his heart ache, but there was no way around it. This needed doing. Heloise Tapper couldn’t be allowed to become the family curse, lurking in the shadows, terrorizing them with her very existence.

  For the most part, Alexander Healy was a man who had come to terms with his past and his future, and the areas where they would never overlap. But sometimes he missed the simplicity of the man who’d known his duty, known his place in the world. The Covenant was not necessarily a good place. It was still a place that had been his home for a very long time, and as he drove down the road toward Indiana, he found himself thinking, once again, that life was never easy for an exile. Not even a voluntary one.