Page 31 of Installment Immortality

The anger of a child is rarely strong enough to hold up to the lure of cookies, and thank Persephone for that. I straightened, tugging my shirt back into position, and vanished, reappearing in the kitchen, where Elsie and Arthur were seated at the breakfast table while Shelby set a platter of cookies and large mugs of coffee in front of them. Half the table was covered in paperwork, probably from Angela’s accounting business, while the other half was cluttered with sippy cups and plastic cutlery. Shelby glanced over as I reappeared, attention attracted by the flicker of motion, and smiled.

“Time for a change of clothes, eh?” she asked.

I blinked and looked down at myself. My former outfit had been replaced by purple leggings and aGoblin Marketsweatshirt, which caused me to look back up at Shelby. “Really, still?” I asked. “I thought she’d be all aboutFrozenby now.”

“No longer the unifying passion of the preschool set, and Isaac picked up on how much Sarah loved the Lowry stuff, and passed it on to Lottie,” she said, matter-of-factly.

If Charlotte hadn’t been Alex Price’s daughter and thus part Kairos, giving her a degree of natural resistance to cuckoo telepathic influence, I would have worried about Isaac overwriting her preferences with his own. As it was, I knew she was just a kid choosing to enjoy things she could share with her brother and best friend.

Charlotte came thundering down the hall into the kitchen. “Mom! Mary said—” She stopped as she saw the cookies, eyes going very wide and bright. “CanIhaveacookie?” It was all one word, which was more than reasonably impressive.

“It’s a special occasion, so yes, you can have a cookie,” said Shelby magnanimously.

I suppose I should have anticipated what happened next.

Charlotte rocketed to the table and grabbed the largest cookie she could reach, shoving it into her mouth. She made a happy humming sound as she bit down, and Shelby turned back to me.

“You need to visit more often,” she said. “She never talks this much.”

“I have that effect on kids,” I said, mildly.

Which was when the screaming started.

It came from upstairs, high and breathless, the sound of a child waking from a terrible nightmare. I blinked out without even thinking about it, reappearing in Isaac’s room a beat later. There was only one bed; at some point in the past six months, Alex and Shelby had managed to convince the children they should havetheir own rooms. The walls were the usual mix of educational posters, family pictures, and brightly colored cartoon characters, some of which I recognized, while others were new to me.

Sitting up in the bed, clutching the covers to his chest like a debutante in a horror movie, was Isaac. Like all cuckoos, he was so pale as to seem almost unhealthy, the living definition of “porcelain skin,” with jet-black hair and crystalline blue eyes. It was a beautiful combination, if you could get past the part where it belonged to a giant telepathic wasp that just happened to look like a human being. Evolution is a harsh mistress. She knows the shapes she likes making, and she makes them over and over and over again.

On a terrestrial level, that means crabs, beetles, and weasels. On a pan-dimensional level, it means those things, plus snakes and bipeds. Evolution really, really seems to like making things that are almost, if not completely, indistinguishable from humans.

Isaac was a things, in this context. So were Elsie and Arthur, being a mixture of human, Lilu, and Kairos. God forbid any member of this family should ever try to use one of those DNA ancestry sites. They’d cause the whole database to corrupt itself.

Isaac wasn’t just wailing. He was weeping, huge, crystalline tears running down his cheeks and dripping off his chin. His eyes and nose weren’t getting red from all the crying, which was just another sign of his biological origins: he didn’t have blood in the way mammals do. Instead, he had a form of hemolymph, clear and thick and a perfect biological antiseptic. Cuckoo blood is one of the best tools a field medic can possibly have in their kit.

He turned toward me as I appeared, letting go of the blankets and reaching for me with both hands. “Hey, buddy,” I said, walking over to sit down on the edge of the bed and let him come closer if he wanted to. “What’s the matter?”

Isaac wailed again and burrowed against me. He reminded me of a much younger child when he did that, and I wondered—notfor the first time—whether we’d done him a disservice by placing him in a home with another child his own age who was naturally inclined to accept his telepathy. He and Charlotte had set up a feedback loop almost as soon as they’d been introduced, and while both of them were thriving in areas like reading, writing, and being able to do simple math problems, they had also been slow to speak, and even slower to associate with other children. Even adults could have trouble breaking into their closed-circuit relationship.

“I’m not Lottie, sweetheart,” I said. “I need you to use your words.”

Isaac sniffled again, and finally said, in a small, clear voice, “There’s a monster.”

“Aw, buddy, monsters are so scary when you don’t know them, aren’t they? But we can make friends with a lot of monsters, and find out what their real names are, so they won’t be so scary anymore. Remember your Uncle Drew? A lot of people think he’s a monster, just because he’s a bogeyman and they don’t know how nice bogeymen can be. Is this monster under the bed? Or in the closet?”

Not for a moment did I think he could be talking about an actual monster in his room. A lot of cryptids are called monsters by people who don’t know any better. So are a lot of types of ghost. I’m sure a few people have called me a monster in their day. But this house had excellent security, and the chances of something dangerous sneaking past Shelby were very slim.

“No,” he said, and tilted his head back so that he could look at me, tears still rolling down his cheeks, eyes very grave. “The monster’s downstairs in the kitchen, with Char. I don’t want it there. I don’t want it to hurt Char. I don’twantit.”

I blinked. There hadn’t been any monsters in the kitchen when I’d been there. “What kind of monster, Zachy?”

“A bad monster. It’s all cracks, like the time I dropped an eggand it broke everywhere. But someone put the egg back together with tape or something, and now it’s all leaking out through the cracks in the shell.”

If Charlotte’s increased vocabulary had been a surprise, this was a stunning speech, possibly worthy of an Oscar. And I was dreadfully afraid I knew what it meant. I smoothed Isaac’s hair back from his forehead. “It’s not a monster, sweetheart. It’s a member of your family. His name’s Arthur, and you’re not wrong about what happened to him. He got dropped like an egg, sort of, and when that happened, Sarah had to put him back together as best she could. But what she used was a lot more fragile than tape, and it’s not perfect.”

Isaac brightened immediately. “Sarah?” he asked. “Is Sarah here?”

“No, and don’t go calling for her, either.” I didn’t know what the range on his telepathy was like, but I knew hers could cross incredibly large distances when she exerted herself, and we were only about five hundred miles from New York at this point. If Isaac started mentally yelling for her, she might show up. And with Elsie in the house, that could only end badly.

Isaac looked at me, lower lip wobbling in a way that promised more tears in the near future. I looked impassively back. Tears I can handle. The nuclear meltdown if Elsie was suddenly faced with Sarah on what was closer to Sarah’s home turf than hers… that, I wasn’t so sure about.

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