“No!” Sarah grabbed my hands, flipping the grip around so that she was holding onto me. She bit her lip, and said, “Please, no. I don’t want everything to come apart again.”
“Sarah . . .”
“I won’t push, I promise I won’t push, but Angela’s filled with worrying about me, and I can’t read Martin at all. Please, let me stay and be organized? Just for a little while? Please?”
She looked so anxious—and so exhausted—that I relented. It wasn’t like I could keep her out, and at least this way, she might follow instructions. “All right, but I need to sleep. Can I do that?”
“Even your dreams are orderly,” said Sarah. She let go of my wrists. “Hurry please. Hurry.” She still sounded more coherent than she had before she grabbed me, but there was an edge of harried desperation to it, like she was clinging to her renewed lucidity by her fingernails.
“I’ll hurry,” I assured her, and grabbed my pajamas from the floor next to the bed before fleeing the room, heading for the bathroom down the hall.
I reviewed my options as I brushed my teeth. I could wake Grandma and ask her to take Sarah back to her own room, possibly with a few strong suggestions about locks. That would prevent things like this from happening again, and also allow me to dismiss the dull but growing concern over how many times Sarah had crept down the stairs to watch me sleep. And yet . . .
And yet Sarah, for all that she wasn’t human, was family. Family comes first. The cryptid community comes second. She represented both those things, and she’d been wounded saving my little sister’s life. If all she wanted was for me to sleep holding her hand, was that really so much for her to ask? I had my anti-telepathy charm, and I had the mice. If she’d done anything to threaten me, I had faith that they would have woken me up.
Sarah was still sitting on the bed when I returned with my teeth brushed, my pajamas on, and my anti-telepathy charm firmly in place. “Hello, hello,” she said, looking down at her crossed ankles. “How’s your father?”
“In Oregon,” I said, reaching out to take her wrist. “Sarah.”
“Yes?” She raised her head, eyes focusing a bit better already.
“A few ground rules for tonight.”
“Yes, yes, it’s good to be grounded; how are you grounding me tonight?”
“You are sleeping on top of the covers; if you try to come under the covers, I’m sending you back to your room.” It wasn’t as harsh as it sounded. Cuckoos get some benefits from the clear hemolymph in place of blood; for one, they don’t feel heat or cold the way most mammals do. Like I said, Nature likes a good practical joke every now and then. As for why I didn’t want her under the blankets . . .
Skin contact made her stronger. If I wanted to keep her from burning my brain out when she had a nightmare, I needed to minimize how much we were touching one another.
Sarah nodded. “That’s fair,” she agreed.
“If you start feeling like you’re going to project at me, rather than just reading, you need to let go and get out.” I folded back the covers with my free hand.
“Okay.”
“Okay,” I said, and got into the bed. It felt strange to trust her like this. It felt even stranger to doubt her. Sarah waited until I was settled before she curled up next to me, resting her head on my shoulder. I dropped our joined hands to my stomach, staring up at the darkened ceiling as I listened to her breathing slowly level out into sleep.
Sometime after that, I joined her in unconsciousness.
My dreams were full of algebraic equations and the sewers of New York, where alligator men danced with ladies made entirely of numbers, and carnival music played on an unseen hurdy-gurdy. Even asleep, I knew that Sarah’s dreams were leaking into mine, but it didn’t really seem to matter. Together, the two of us slept on.
Four
“The trouble with the word ‘monster’ is that it’s very much in the eye of the beholder. Show me a monster, and I’ll show you a man who just didn’t know how to explain himself to you.”
—Martin Baker
Ohio’s West Columbus Zoo, home of many exotic species and way too many geese
I PULLED INTO THE zoo parking lot at ten past eight, trying to yawn around the bagel I had clamped in my teeth. It wasn’t working very well, given my desire not to aspirate chunks of breakfast food. Crow wasn’t helping. He was curled in the passenger seat making throaty churring noises that sounded suspiciously like laughter.
As soon as I had a hand free, I removed the bagel from my mouth and waved it at the uncaring Church Griffin. “You are a terrible pet,” I informed him. “My mother was right. I should have gotten a dog.” Any dog that my parents would have approved of me getting would probably have breathed fire or transformed into a dragon on the full moon or something, but at least it wouldn’t have laughed at me.
Crow croaked.
“Uh-huh. Out, before I change my mind about bringing you to work today.” I opened my door. “Office, Crow.”
Crow launched himself from the seat in a flurry of madly beating wings and flew out the open door, smacking me in the face with his tail as he passed. I spat out a small hairball and got out of the car, tucking my keys into my pocket. Time for one more day in the real world, explaining that the existence of House Slytherin in the Harry Potter books doesn’t make snakes evil and keeping small boys from climbing into the snapping turtle enclosure.
The Canada geese that infested the pond outside the zoo thronged the sidewalk as they saw me approach, snaky necks bent into S-curves and orange beaks working overtime as they honked frantically. I threw the rest of my bagel into the water. The geese followed it, fat gray-and-white bodies hustling as each one tried to beat the others to the prize. I walked on undisturbed, smothering another yawn behind my hand.
Sarah hadn’t been in the bed when my alarm rang. Since she didn’t put off as much body heat as a human, I couldn’t tell how long she’d been gone by feeling the blankets, but my fingers were stiff, like something had been gripping them for hours. I hoped the night had been more restful for her than it was for me. My dreams had been strange enough to keep me from sleeping well, probably because they weren’t my dreams. I wasn’t mad at her or anything. I was still going to talk to Grandma after work, to find out whether that sort of thing was actually helpful to Sarah’s recovery.
(That assumed that she would know. Cuckoo mental health is something of an unexplored territory, since most of them are too dangerous to attempt to psychoanalyze. If anything, Sarah’s actions had proven that she wasn’t your ordinary cuckoo. After all, an ordinary cuckoo would probably have slit my throat while I was unconscious. All Sarah had done was try to steal a pillow.)
It was almost an hour to the zoo’s official opening, and the arrival plaza was empty, the ticket booths standing deserted. By nine o’clock they’d be thronged by excited children, harried parents, and even more harried teachers with their school groups. For now, I could walk through the area without worrying that I was going to step on any runaway toddlers. I paused to stroke the nose of the brass lion statue, murmuring a good morning, and turned toward the gate.
“Morning, Dr. Preston,” said the guard on duty. “ID please?”
“Does it ever occur to you that ‘good morning, person I know by name, please provide proof of who you are’ is a little silly, Lloyd?” I asked, digging my zoo ID card out of my pocket and handing it to him.
“Every day of my life, but you know what happens when you don’t do your job.” Lloyd was an older man, tan and thin as a sun-dried lizard, with a battered slouch hat pulled firmly down over his presumably bald pate. I’d never seen him without the hat, or without the thick-lensed glasses that gave his gaze a fishbowl quality that I knew all too well from my time in my high school science club. I put his age as somewhere between sixty and eighty, in that timeless country occupied by men lucky enough to live that long.