Oh Pretty Bird

by Seanan McGuire

  “I have,” said Jonathan, and pulled open the front gate, allowing her to lead the way onto the property. It was a tactical decision, and not as heartless as it seemed: Fran might not have been raised a Healy, but she was the fastest shot they had, and was second only to Enid when it came to hitting her target without time to steady her aim. If anything attacked them, Fran was more than capable of taking it out while Jonathan was still going for his gun.

  Nothing attacked them as they walked down the long walkway to the front porch, and climbed the steps. They exchanged a glance and nodded in unison before Fran leaned forward and calmly rang the bell.

  The door opened a few seconds later, revealing a weary-looking Heloise Tapper. “I know you, don’t I?” she asked. Then, perplexingly: “You came to the library today. I’m sure I did something to you once upon a time. You may as well come inside. Whatever happens next, I probably deserve it.”

  Fran and Jonathan exchanged another glance, bewildered. They hadn’t gone to the library…but his parents had, and hadn’t they theorized that these…whatever the Tappers were, these cuckoos, couldn’t see properly if they couldn’t read the mind of the person in front of them. Maybe they were more right about that than they had expected.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” said Jonathan, and stepped inside. Fran was right behind him, warily scanning the space in front of them. Neither of them looked back. Neither of them expected something as simple as a man hidden by an open door.

  The door swung closed. There was a small, brittle snap as Robert Tapper reached up and broke the chain holding Fran’s anti-thought-transference charm around her neck. It was followed by a much louder click as she released the safety on the gun that was suddenly in her hand and pointed at the back of Jonathan’s head.

  “There now,” said Heloise Tapper, suddenly smiling. “I did do something to you. Hello, Johnny. It’s been a long time.”

  Enid saw Fran and Jonathan disappear through the front door and moved quickly to join Alexander behind the house, taking a route through the side yard of a house a block over, where the lights had not yet come on. He was waiting just outside the back door. A few seconds with a lock pick and they were in, stepping into a darkened kitchen that smelled of dust and neglect. It was just light enough for Enid to see the dirty dishes piled in the sink, and the heaped-up remains of moldering food on the counter. She wrinkled her nose. These cuckoos clearly didn’t care about housekeeping.

  Then again, why should they? It wasn’t like they’d made the nest that they were defiling.

  Silently, the pair crept out of the kitchen and down the hall, following the light, listening for the sound of voices.

  The first voice they heard belonged to Jonathan, and boded nothing good. “You can kill me if you like, but you can’t control my wife forever,” he said. “She’ll break whatever compulsion you have on her, and you’ll be sorry you didn’t run the second you realized we were here.”

  Heloise clicked her tongue. “Oh, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny. I just can’t believe you went and married the uncivilized little thing. Wasn’t I a good enough wife for you? I would have made you happy, you know I would.”

  “You killed my son,” he said, through gritted teeth.

  “A son you would never have had if you’d just gone along with me,” Heloise countered. “I could’ve been your whole world, and when I got tired of you and cast you aside, you wouldn’t have had the strength left to mourn. It would’ve been better than this, because Johnny, let me tell you, this is going to be an awful way to die.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t toy with your food,” grumbled a male voice that Enid and Alexander both assumed had to belong to Robert. He was the only absent party in this little passion play, after all. “Just make the bitch shoot him, and then herself. Nice and easy, and we can get back to amusing overselves.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do, Robert,” snapped Heloise. “I’m having enough trouble tolerating your company without you telling me what to do.”

  “The feeling is mutual.”

  Jonathan cleared his throat. “If you would release your grip on my wife’s mind, I would be happy to come back later, and allow you to settle this little spat in privacy.”

  Smart boy, thought Enid, wishing she could see into the living room. She settled for hunkering down where she was and closing her eyes, trying to map the relative locations of the speakers. Once she knew where everyone was—more or less—she could leave the hall and start shooting.

  Fran hadn’t spoken. Not once since her mother- and father-in-law had entered the house. That was the only real problem with figuring out what to do next. Rushing the living room might take out the Tappers, but it stood a more than even chance of also killing Fran.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” said Heloise. “How did you find us?”

  “Shouldn’t you be asking my wife that? You’ve seized her mind.”

  “I could have yours, too, if I wanted it,” said Heloise. “You’re only still wearing that little trinket because I’m not afraid of you.”

  “I am,” muttered Robert. “This woman’s brain is a cesspool of violence and pornographic imagery. Humans are disgusting. Please, can’t we just kill them?”

  “I said no,” said Heloise. “Don’t push me. You know I’ll win.”

  Alexander and Enid exchanged a glance. All was apparently not well in the cuckoos’ nest. They could use that to their advantage, if Fran would ever speak.

  “Why did you take the town?” Jonathan’s tone was level, even reasonable, like he was having a perfectly normal conversation with two perfectly normal people. “Surely you don’t make it a habit to claim ownership of areas quite this…robust. I can’t imagine it’s easy for you, and it must increase the chances of your being found.”

  “I wanted it, and so I took it,” said Heloise. “That’s how it is with us. When we want something, we take it, just like we’ve taken your wife. How did you find us? No one called you. We’d have known.”

  “We followed the Apraxis wasps.”

  Robert made a disgusted noise. “Those vermin. I told you I saw signs that they’d been in the woods near the lake. We should have hunted them down and killed the entire filthy hive before we let ourselves settle here. Imagine if they’d found the baby.”

  The sound of flesh striking flesh was unmistakable. “Idiot!” hissed Heloise. “They didn’t know until you told them!”

  “Yes, we did,” said Jonathan. “There was no other reason for you to have seized so many minds, set yourself up in such public positions. You came here to breed. Where is the infant? We’ll spare it, even if we can’t spare you.”

  “Oh no?” asked Heloise.

  “No,” said Jonathan. “You killed our son. I’m terribly sorry, but that’s something we can’t forgive you for.”

  Heloise actually laughed. Alexander, who hadn’t believed himself capable of hating the woman any more than he did already, felt his heart harden.

  “Why did you do it?” asked Jonathan. “We were miles away from you. We would never have gone looking. You were a curiosity, not a threat.”

  “But you were looking, or at least you were charting the movement of those damn bugs, and what was I supposed to think? That you just wanted to know where the Apraxis were in case they might endanger your vacation plans? Uh-uh. I had to send you a message, one that you couldn’t possibly ignore. I had to make sure you understood the danger of tracking me down.” She clicked her tongue again. “I didn’t specifically tell them to go after your larva. That was entirely on whoever the bogeymen sent. Take any issues up with the way the contract was executed with them, not me.”

  “He was just a message to you.” Jonathan sounded infinitely sad, yet somehow also unsurprised. “You’re a monster.”

  “And quite proud of that fact,” said Robert.

  “I see. Have you heard enough?”

  “I have,” said Fran, finally giving the listeners her location in the room. The sound of her voice was follo
wed almost immediately by the sound of a gun being fired.

  “Johnny!” shrieked Enid, all stealth abandoned as she rose and flung herself into the living room—

  —only to find Jonathan and Fran, both with their pistols drawn, slowly backing Heloise Tapper into a corner. Robert was dead on the floor, a hole between his eyes and a startled expression on his face. Something was leaking from the hole, something Enid could tell even at a casual glance wasn’t blood, but there wasn’t time to dwell on that. There was the matter of Heloise still to be attended to.

  “How?” she demanded. She looked up at the sound of footsteps, and something almost like hope—raw and naked—flashed across her face before she realized who had come racing in. Her attention went back to Fran. “I had you! I had you!”

  “Nope,” said Fran laconically. “Didn’t you learn anything from Colorado? I ain’t yours to have.”

  “Where’s the baby?” Jonathan asked. “We’ll see to it that your child gets a fair chance.”

  Much to their surprise, Heloise laughed. “If I thought it would save me, I’d tell you. But it won’t, and so I won’t. You’ll never find our child, and when it grows up, it’s going to be just like mama. So you won. So what? You can’t beat us all. You can’t—”

  Two gunshots silenced the rest of her rant; two holes appeared in her forehead. Heloise Tapper, looking as surprised as her mate, wobbled backward and slid down to the floor, silent.

  Johnny and Fran, who had fired in almost the same instant, lowered their guns and turned to Enid and Alexander. If they had expected to be chastised, they were sorely disappointed: not a harsh word was spoken as their elders closed the gap between them, put their arms around them—Enid with Johnny, Alexander with Fran—and held them tight.

  Getting out of Whiting before the population could react to the sound of gunfire was made a little easier by the length of the Tappers’ stay. Most of the citizens had been under mental control for so long that they couldn’t shake it off all at once; they reacted slowly, and by the time anyone thought to investigate the mayor’s house, the Healys were long gone.

  They stood around the truck, the night sky spread out above them and the bodies of the two cuckoos wrapped in tarp in the back, mostly hidden by the suitcases. Dissecting them would be educational. “You could have warned us,” said Alexander.

  “I did,” countered Fran. “We told you she didn’t manage to catch hold of me in Colorado. Don’t know why, and don’t care.”

  “We didn’t figure on Robert breaking Fran’s charm, but once he had, it seemed like a worthwhile gamble,” said Jonathan. “I knew she wasn’t under their control.”

  “How?” asked Enid.

  “If they’d really been able to read more than just her surface thoughts, and had seen what kind of threat we posed, they would have ordered her to shoot me on the spot,” said Jonathan.

  There was a moment of silence as the elder Healys considered this. Finally, Alexander said, “So it’s over. Do you feel any better?”

  “I feel like maybe now we can move on,” said Fran slowly. “We did our job. We made sure that Daniel could rest in peace. That was enough, wasn’t it?”

  “It’s never enough,” said Enid. She touched Fran lightly on the arm, one mother to another. Then she sighed and said, “I’ll get the mice. We should head home. Mary will be climbing the walls by now.”

  “Yes,” said Jonathan, putting his arm around Fran’s waist. “Let’s go home.”