“It’s a date,” I said, and hung up. It was time to give in to the inevitable. It was time to call my father.
The less said about my call home, the better. By the end of it, I knew that the Brandts were an old Covenant family from Wales, and were mostly men of action, which meant that I didn’t need to worry about Peter hatching any clever plans against me. The Bullards were more recent additions to the fight, having signed up shortly before the Healys left. We didn’t have much data—most of what we did have came in with Grandpa Thomas, who referred to Darren and Cassandra Bullard as “right twats.” Somehow, I didn’t find that encouraging.
And Margaret Healy was, of course, likely to recognize me as a relative and shoot me on sight. Not in the head. That would have been too easy, and Healy women have always been good at resource management. She would shoot me in the kneecaps, and be able to grill me at length about the location and strength of the family in North America. And then she would hunt us down, one by one, and finally finish what the Covenant failed to accomplish in my grandparents’ time. She would be the one who killed the traitors. As one of the traitors in question, this didn’t strike me as a good way to spend my time.
The end of the call was as predictable as the rest of it. “This changes things, Very,” said Dad. “With your cousin in town . . .”
“You mean my biological cousin, not Sarah.”
“Yes, exactly. With your cousin—”
“And not my uncle-by-adoption, since you’re the reason Uncle Mike is here.”
“Verity—”
“Oh, and not all the people who depend on me. The ones I promised not to run out on, because they were going to need my help with the Covenant in town. The only one who matters is Margaret. Right? None of the rest of them. Just her.”
Dad sighed heavily. “I’m worried about you, pumpkin. I’m not ready to add you to the family history.”
“You won’t, Dad. I have good people here with me, and some of them are even human.” Mike and Ryan walked in just in time to catch that comment. They looked at me quizzically, their arms loaded down with bags of groceries. I waved for them to give me a second. “I can’t run out on New York. I’m needed, and what kind of Price would I be if I ran the second it looked like things were getting bad? I have to stay, and you have to stay far away.”
“I wish you weren’t there, Verity.” The misery dripping off his words was palpable. “I wish we’d told you ‘no’ when you said you wanted to go and spend a year dancing. We should have told you that you couldn’t go.”
“I’m a grown woman, Daddy. I would have gone anyway. At least this way, you know what’s going on. Uncle Mike just got back, and I need to fill him in. Can you catch Mom up?”
“I can, and Very—if things get really bad, come home. Don’t worry about whether you’re followed. We can handle it if you are. Just get Sarah, and get out.” He paused before adding, “If you can’t get Sarah, trust her to follow on her own. You just run.” He sounded guilty. I couldn’t blame him. The idea of leaving her behind had never even crossed my mind.
“I’ll be careful,” I said, and hung up before he could say anything else. Tucking my phone back into my pocket, I turned toward Mike and Ryan, who were watching me with almost matching expressions of bemusement on their faces.
“What was that?” asked Mike.
“Dad sounding the horns for Judgment Day,” I said. “Istas is upstairs having a celebratory feast with the mice. I just spoke to Sarah. She’s fine, and I’m supposed to go check on her later tonight.”
“So what’s the problem?” asked Ryan.
“The problem is that I’m no longer the only biological member of my family in this city,” I said, and turned to focus my attention more on Mike, who would understand the importance—and the danger—of what I was about to say. “One of the Covenant representatives is a woman named Margaret Healy. She’s a cousin.”
“Oh,” he said. “Crap.”
I nodded. “Yeah. There’s a lot of that particular sentiment going around. So now the question is . . . what are we going to do?”
Twelve
“If you get yourself turned to stone, you are grounded for a week. No TV, no dessert, and no trips to the range. Do I make myself clear?”
The Meatpacking District, which is nicer than it sounds, inside a converted warehouse, trying to come up with a plan that doesn’t get everyone killed
“I DON’T GET what the problem is,” said Ryan. “Verity’s this chick’s cousin, right? So why can’t she just explain that this city is her territory, and that the Covenant needs to leave? Family should respect family, even if they’re on opposite sides of a war.”
Tanuki have always been very family-oriented. Large portions of their culture were based around tracking who was related to who and through what sort of path, although that had less to do with filial affection and more with their having a limited gene pool. No one wants to find out after the fact that the cute guy you’ve invited back to your den is actually a first cousin. It was that devotion to family that got a lot of tanuki killed when the Covenant came to Japan. The tanuki just kept rushing in to save the ones who’d been captured, and got themselves slaughtered in the process. Being able to turn yourself to stone doesn’t stop the men with sledgehammers.
“It doesn’t work like that for humans, Ryan,” I said, and chucked another throwing knife at the nearest dart board. It embedded itself deep into the cork. “We keep track of our relatives more so we’ll know where to send Christmas cards and who to hate than because we’re planning to help each other out.”
“Hey, now.” Uncle Mike stopped cutting the lasagna long enough to shake his spatula at me. It was store-bought—the lasagna, not the spatula, although the spatula probably came from a store somewhere—and the smell rising off the baked meat-and-cheese concoction was heavenly. “Family is a good thing, too. Don’t you forget about that just because you’re busy being freaked out over some cousin you didn’t even know existed before yesterday.”
“Even knowing that the Covenant probably sent her becauseshe’s family? Nobody sniffs out a Healy like a Healy, and we’ve only been Prices for two generations.” If I was going by Grandma Alice and the pictures I’d seen of Great-Grandma Fran, I could call myself a Price as much as I wanted; I was still going to be an obvious Healy girl to anyone with eyes.
“Even knowing that she’s here because she’s family. Being a Healy doesn’t give you magic powers or anything. Maybe makes you a little stubborn. The stubborn has to be genetic. And then there’s the luck thing. But none of that guarantees that she’s going to trip over your hiding place, and you’ve got a lot more allies in this town than she does.” Uncle Mike dished a healthy serving of lasagna onto a paper plate. “Now eat. You’re too thin, and you’re going to worry yourself into getting even thinner.”
“I’m a professional ballroom dancer,” I said. “Thinner is a good thing.” I still took the lasagna, moving to sit down at the nearby table. The dragons had been living in this Nest for long enough to have paid—probably grudgingly—for converting the employee break room into a serviceable kitchen. Between the stove, the fridge, and the microwave Ryan and Istas had brought with them, we had sufficient facilities to keep us all fed for the duration of the siege.
“Not when you have to wrestle a lindworm out of its hole, it isn’t. Eat.” Uncle Mike turned and pressed another plate into Ryan’s hands. “You, too. Is that girlfriend of yours going to want some when she finishes partying with the mice?”