My heart leaped, even as my lungs gave up working to pull air into my body. “Hi,” I managed, forcing the word out despite my lack of oxygen. That was enough to get my lungs working again, at least. “You’re okay. Are you okay? You’re okay.” I was babbling. I didn’t care. Just seeing him, alive and standing on his own two feet, was more than enough. I half-remembered him dying, bleeding out on the warehouse floor, and—
—and—
—and that had never happened. The memory was shredding like a cobweb even as I tried to look at it. I shuddered all over, trying to wipe the false events out of my mind. “Whoa,” I said. My voice quavered. I hated it for that. “I thought I was protected by that anti-telepathy charm.”
“It turns out that when your cousin really, ah, ‘turns on the juice,’ she punches rather harder than any of us suspected she was capable of,” said Dominic, as he came to stand by the side of my bed. “Even Istas—who claims to possess a natural resistance to Sarah’s manipulations—got somewhat confused about what had actually happened, which could have been rather unpleasant, as it seems that she dislikes zombies. Strongly. And when she saw me up and moving about, despite having seen me ‘die,’ she was sure I was a zombie. I very nearly found myself put down as a menace to the public health.”
I laughed at that. I couldn’t help myself. It was a small, strained thing, but it still made Dominic smile.
“I didn’t think the irony would be lost on you,” he said. “The former cryptid hunter, killed by a cryptid, as a cryptid. You would doubtless have been disappointed that you’d missed it.”
My laughter died. “No, I wouldn’t have been disappointed,” I said. “I already saw you die once today.”
“Ah, yes. I was spared the strain of seeing you shot down; I fell first, after all.” Dominic walked over to the bed, where he sat down gingerly on the very edge of the mattress. “Your Uncle Mike informs me that Sarah put together a thoroughly rational and believable scenario.”
“Peter?” I asked.
“According to the memories she gave them, I killed him myself, when I broke in looking for my false ‘Price girl.’ You were a cocktail waitress that I was cultivating to look like an enemy of the Covenant, so that I could rally the cryptids of Manhattan to my side.” He leaned over and pressed a kiss against my forehead. “Even when you’re not allowed to be a true representative of your family, you’re dangerous.”
“Yeah, well.” I sniffled. It was getting hard to keep from crying. “I guess some things never change.”
“No, I guess they don’t.”
“But why would you—?”
“Turn traitor? It’s happened before, Verity, and it will happen again. Bogeymen and dragons offering wealth and knowledge, succubi and Oceanids offering love . . . it happens. Most traitors simply die quickly. Few are as successful as your family at thwarting us.” He paused, grimacing. “Thwarting the Covenant. I suppose I need to adjust my thinking.”
There was nothing I could say to that. Leaving the only place he’d ever called his own was still a raw wound in his voice; any words of comfort would have just been salt rubbed into it.
Dominic sighed, and continued, “I killed Peter, and Margaret killed us both, while Robert took out our allies. As for the bodies, there was an unfortunate collision between a stray bullet and a gas pipe, and the warehouse was lost. All remains were destroyed.”
I closed my eyes. “That’s convenient.”
“True. But they both believe it with all their hearts.” I felt his fingers on my forehead, brushing back my hair. “They’ll return to England and give their report to the Covenant. By the time another team can be dispatched, the cryptids of the city will be ready to disappear as if they’d never existed.”
“The dragons can’t move.”
“The Covenant still believes dragons to be extinct, and dragon princesses are on the books as too difficult to tell from humans to be worth hunting. They’re to be killed if encountered, but a waste of resources to search for unless the coffers are getting low.” Dominic stroked my hair back again. “Manhattan will be safe. Margaret and Robert uncovered a conspiracy by one of their own. All the trainees and journeymen will be kept under closer attention for a while; I doubt they’ll be sending anyone any time soon.”
“Wait.” I opened my eyes, staring up at him. “They really believe you’re dead.”
“Yes. And as they were the target of your fair cousin’s ‘whammy,’ they’re going to keep believing it.” Dominic grimaced. “Remind me never to make her angry.”
“Smart man.” I looked around the room again. “Where am I?”
“In the recovery ward of St. Giles’ Hospital,” said a familiar, if unexpected, female voice. “Welcome back to the land of the living, Very-Very.”
“Grandma?” Eyes wide, I turned toward the voice. “Grandma!”
The black-haired, blue-eyed woman standing in the doorway smiled. “Hello, sweetheart. How are you feeling?”
“Surprisingly good, given the whole ‘shot in the gut and lost consciousness’ thing and— Grandma! What are you doing here?” I glanced to Dominic. “Have you met my grandmother?”
“Yes.” Dominic stood, offering a nod to my grandmother. “Ma’am.”
“Dominic,” she said.
He looked back to me. “I’m going to let Mike and Ryan know that you’re awake. Please. I know you’re a madwoman, but try to stay still and take it easy.” He pressed a kiss to my forehead before turning and leaving the room before I could react. Grandma Angela stepped aside to let him pass.
Once he was gone, she stepped fully into the room, pausing to close the door behind herself, and started walking toward my bed. “I’m glad you’re awake.”
“So am I.”
Angela Baker is my mother’s mother, and we’re not related by blood: Mom was adopted, since Grandma wasn’t willing to spend enough time with a member of her own species to have a biological child. She looks more like Sarah than anyone else in the family, with pale skin, black hair, and improbably blue eyes that sometimes go white around the edges. She’s old enough to be my mother’s mother by birth, not just adoption, but she looks like she’s barely Mom’s age. I have long since resigned myself to the fact that I won’t look nearly as good as either of my grandmothers when I’m their age, since Grandma Alice spends most of her time in dimensions where time runs differently, and Grandma Angela isn’t human.
She adopted Mom because cuckoos can only have children with other cuckoos, and—like all sane individuals—Grandma hates pretty much every cuckoo she’s ever met. She adopted Sarah because Sarah was just a little girl who needed a home, and she wanted to find out whether cuckoos were really innately sociopathic.
I looked at her face, so grim, so serious, and felt a chill run down my spine. Maybe she was here because we finally had the answer. “Grandma,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“Mike called me once they managed to get you and Sarah both here and stabilized,” said Grandma. She pulled a chair from against the wall closer to the bed, sitting down in it. “It was pretty touch and go for the first twenty-four hours.
I bit my lip. “How bad?”
“Your doctor will tell you exactly what the bullet perforated that wasn’t supposed to be perforated, and all those other nasty things. All I know is that if you didn’t have a Caladrius working on you, you probably wouldn’t have lived. Please don’t get shot like that again. I don’t think my heart could take it.” She smiled weakly at her own joke. Cuckoos don’t have hearts. Their circulatory systems are entirely decentralized, controlled by micropulses of muscles throughout the body.
Cryptid humor is weird sometimes. “Why didn’t Uncle Mike call Mom and Dad?”