Page 8

“If life is a highway, I’m not paying a single toll until somebody gets down here and fixes all these damn potholes. This is shitty road maintenance.”

—Rose Marshall

Pulling into Columbus, Ohio

Two days later

T WO DAYS IN A CAR with the Harrington-Price siblings was a lot less annoying than I’d expected it to be, probably because all my ideas of how the trip would go were based off riding with Elsie and Artie, and I was riding with Elsie and Arthur. Almost but not entirely different. Elsie still fell back on some old habits when it came to dealing with her brother, even though he could make a legitimate argument for being a completely different person now than he’d been on their younger road trips.

So she argued when he wasn’t doing anything, just to keep herself awake during the night drives. She refused to let him take a turn behind the wheel. She kept control of the radio like she might die if she heard a single note of whatever he was into these days. And Arthur just took it.

If there’d been any question in my mind as to whether he was exaggerating how bad it was inside his head, it was answered by the end of the first day, when he hadn’t pushed back against her once. The Artie I knew wasn’t particularly argumentative, but he had opinions, and he would have been making them heard, not just riding passively along in the back seat, trusting his sister to get us wherever we were supposed to be going.

Weirdly enough, Arthur was only the second strangest thing about the trip so far. The absolute strangest was the total lack of mice. Elsie was fighting with them, and Arthur had intentionally not invited any, wanting to enjoy this trip on his own terms and without anyone telling him what he had or hadn’t supposedly said in the past. So it was just the three of us riding along until we reached Ohio and angled toward Columbus, where the prospect of a hot shower, a decent meal, and one of the only uncomplicated family reunions we had available to us awaited.

Ted had been calling daily to make sure his kids were still alive, but he hadn’t sounded nearly as interested in the answer as I would have expected him to be, given that we hadn’t informed him before taking off with Arthur. Both his kids were gone, and he was still just flat, vocally and emotionally. It was sort of terrifying.

Losing Jane had broken more than a few hearts, and we were going to be seeing the damage echo through our family for a long time to come. I guess every death is like that. No matter how much warning you have, how much time you have to prepare, death changes things, and even if the dead linger, it’s never going to be the same. It never could be.

Elsie turned down an ordinary, almost generic-looking suburban street, driving deeper into the heart of the city. Houses passed us on all sides, painted the same six HOA-approved shades of blue, gray, and beige. Lawns still gleamed green, spattered here and there with jeweled dustings of fallen leaves. Ohio was so much better at a dramatic autumn than Oregon was. They really understood how to do fall and frost there.

Of course, nothing would ever beat Michigan, where I’d been alive and young and free to run through the fallen leaves, letting them crunch underfoot, unaware of just how sharp and temporary my senses were. There’s nothing in this world like being alive. It’s why even knowing ghosts endure after death isn’t a good enough reason to give up on living.

“Everything here looks like it came out of a 3-D printer owned by a model train enthusiast,” complained Elsie.

“That’s very specific,” I said. “A for effort, even as you’re edging closer to coastal smugness than I like. If you say the words ‘flyover state’ in any sort of tone that implies you mean it, I will wash your mouth out with soap.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Elsie.

“What’s a flyover state?” asked Arthur.

I gave his reflection in the rearview mirror a hard look, and found nothing there to indicate that he was kidding. “It’s a nasty thing people on the coasts say about people in the middle of the country,” I said. “Like ‘oh, that place doesn’t matter, it’s just a flyover state.’ Meaning a state you fly over in order to get somewhere important. It’s a mean, shitty thing to say, and I like to think I helped to raise you both better than to think like that.”

“I don’t know whether you raised me at all,” said Arthur. “But I feel like you’re right, and that’s not something you should say about the places where people live.”

“I didn’t,” said Elsie, sounding chastened. “I just said it looked 3-D-printed. That’s not the same thing as saying anything bad about Ohio. I don’t like cookie-cutter suburbs. We have them in Oregon, too.”

“All right,” I said, and indicated a house up ahead of us on the right. “That’s them. We’re here.”

Elsie pulled up to the curb and stopped the car, getting out faster than I would have thought possible. She stretched languidly, linking her hands above her head, before slamming her door and shoving the car keys into her pocket. Arthur got out more slowly, moving with the cautious slowness I had come to recognize as his way of approaching entirely new situations.

“Have I been here before?” he asked, voice low.

“A few times, when you were much younger,” I said. “Sarah lived here for most of the year until she graduated high school, and you used to come out and visit during the summer.” Not that Sarah had attended an in-person high school. Virtual and home schooling had been safer for her and everyone else involved. It had allowed her to get an education without accidentally rewriting the histories of the people around her to make herself the most popular girl on campus—not a position she would have enjoyed very much to begin with.

Since Sarah hadn’t been able to socialize much with her peers, Angela and Martin had been overjoyed to have her cousins over during the summers, giving her people roughly her own age to spend time with. And when it hadn’t been possible for the cousins to come to Ohio, they’d gladly sent Sarah to Oregon, keeping her in touch with her social group.

“Ah,” said Arthur, sounding disappointed. “Is Sarah here now?”

“No. She’s in Michigan with Alice and Thomas.”

His disappointment grew, becoming visible. “Oh. I hoped she’d be here so I could see her.”

“Well, I’m glad she’s not,” said Elsie. “I might not be able to resist smacking her for what she did to you, and I don’t think that would end well for me.”

“No, probably not,” I said. “You both ready?”

They nodded, and I started toward the house, letting them follow along at their own pace.

I was halfway up the walk when the door banged open and a tan blonde woman with an almost-funereal expression stepped out onto the porch, a cherubic-looking little girl propped against her hip. Charlotte was six years old, and in the middle of that growth stage where she became all arms and legs and huge blue eyes, gangly as a colt. She was wearing a West Columbus Zoo sweatshirt with a ring-tailed lemur on the front, and staring at me like she’d just seen, well, a ghost.

Shelby’s expression wasn’t much different. Like mother, like daughter. “Mary?” she said, Australian accent flattening the syllables of my name like a butterfly pressed between two sheets of glass. “Is that really you?”

“It’s really me,” I said.

“Can’t be,” she said, setting Charlotte on her feet. “Mary didn’t come back from England. If something had changed, surely you would have called and told us. Alex was in bits.”

“I mean, technically, I was the one in bits,” I said. “But yeah, it’s really me.” Elsie and Arthur were getting closer, coming up the walkway with slow, careful steps. “Can we come in?”

“Aunt Mary?” asked Charlotte. Her voice was high and piping, with just a trace of her mother’s accent mixed in with the Midwestern tones she was learning from everything around her. It was oddly charming as a combination.

“Yes, sweetie,” I said, and flickered myself, vanishing from where I stood and reappearing right behind her.

Like any good girl who’d been babysat by a ghost since she was born, she squealed and whipped around to hug my upper legs. I ruffled her hair with one hand.

“Did you get like a foot taller in the last six months?” I asked.

“She’s growing like it’s her job,” said Shelby. She was taller than most of the Healy women I’d known, which made sense, since she was a Tanner. As far as I knew, she had yet to marry into the family, although Charlotte was probably a lot more binding than a wedding ring. “You going to tell me how you’re here?”

“Not until we have everyone together,” I said. “I don’t really feel like going over the whole story eight more times.”

“You’d top out at four,” she said, amiably, and turned her attention to Elsie and Arthur. “Oi! You two look like hammered shit. What have you been doing?”

“Driving, mostly,” said Elsie. “We just got in from Portland.”

“And you drove?” Shelby raised an eyebrow. “That’s a bit of an undertaking. Someone trying to murder you?”

“No, but we’re on a job,” said Arthur, trying to sound professional and serene, and not like he was talking to someone he couldn’t remember ever meeting before. “Mary needed help dealing with a Covenant outpost in Boston.”

“That’s simplified,” I said quickly. “We’re looking into some Covenant ghost hunters operating somewhere between Boston and the other Portland. We’ll have to find them before we can ‘deal with them.’”

“Hoping the ghosts they didn’t hunt yet will lend you a hand?” asked Shelby.

I nodded, finally letting go of Charlotte and straightening up. Charlotte responded by squeezing my leg like a boa constrictor trying to keep hold of dinner. “Hey, sweetie, can you let go before you cut off circulation?” I didn’t actually have circulation anymore, but encouraging her to hug me hard enough to hurt would only mean she’d have trouble hugging other people later in life. We learned that lesson with Kevin, the hard way. It took him years to stop hurting people when he was just trying to show affection.

Charlotte replied by shaking her head and burying it against my side, covering her face. I looked to Shelby. “Still not talking much, is she?”

“Not really. She and Isaac have everything they need without using their outside voices more than absolutely necessary, so why should they bother? We’ve been working on Lottie, trying to get her to understand that she’ll eventually want to talk to people outside the house, but we haven’t quite managed to get her there yet.” Shelby sighed, looking put-upon. “Since Isaac won’t be old enough for kindergarten until next fall, we’ve decided to hold her back and send them together. It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t help to get her over her dependence on him, but it means they’re more likely to go without tantrums, and doesn’t leave us with a preadolescent telepath having a fit because we’ve taken his sister away.”

“Poor buddy,” I said.

Shelby rolled her eyes. “Poor all of us. You lot want to come inside? Alex is at the zoo, but he’ll be back in an hour or so.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I would legitimately give you a kidney in exchange for the use of your shower,” said Elsie.

“Oh? Whose?” asked Shelby.

“Dealer’s choice,” said Elsie.

Shelby laughed and stepped to the side, letting the rest of us get to the door. Not that I could exactly walk with Charlotte still latched on to my leg the way she was. I looked mournfully down at her as Elsie and Arthur walked inside.

“Hey, kiddo,” I said. “I know I was gone a long while, and that wasn’t very fair of me. I didn’t mean to be gone for so long, I swear. And now that I’m back, I’m going to be doing my very best never to be gone that long again.”

Charlotte pulled her face away long enough to give me a mistrustful look.

“I’ll still have to go sometimes,” I said. “Olivia’s younger than you and Isaac are, and her mommy is expecting a new baby soon; she’s going to need my help. But I’ll still be here when you need me, and when your parents want to have a night out to themselves. I’m not going to go away the way I did before.”

Charlotte frowned, deeply. “Six months, ” she said.

For her, that was a speech. “Yes,” I agreed. “I was gone for six months, but I’m not going to be gone for six months again, and your cousins are here. Don’t you want to go in the house and see Arthur and Elsie while they’re visiting? I bet your mommy is a lot like their mommy, and brings out the specialest treats when there’s company, especially family company.”

“I’m six years old.”

I stopped to blink at her, trying to figure out why this was the message important enough to deliver out loud. “Yes, sweetie, you are.”

But Charlotte wasn’t finished: “You were gone one month for every year. ”

This was apparently the greatest offense the world had ever known. “I’m so sorry, and it won’t happen again,” I said. It wasn’t really a surprise that a child growing up surrounded by cuckoos would fixate on the numbers. Johrlac are the greatest mathematicians in all reality. Math comes as easily to them as breathing.

I crouched to put myself on eye level with Charlotte, and looked at her gravely. “I wasn’t gone six months because I wanted to be,” I said. “I didn’t have a choice. I got hurt in a special, bad way that only ghosts can be hurt, and it took six months for me to heal enough that I could come back to you. I’m not going to do the thing that hurt me again, so you don’t have to be afraid I’ll go away for so long.”

Charlotte seemed to consider this for a long, solemn moment. Then she nodded, blonde curls flying, and turned to run back into the house, presumably in search of either her mother or the special treats I had essentially promised her.

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 a Goblin Market sweatshirt, which caused me to look back up at Shelby. “Really, still?” I asked. “I thought she’d be all about Frozen by 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 have their 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—not for 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’t want it.”

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 egg and 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.

Isaac must have seen my immunity to tears in my expression, because his lip stopped wobbling and his expression turned cold in that way that only very self-possessed children can ever quite manage. It was less arrogant than it was aspiring to arrogance, like it might be really cutting if the child who wore it was just given a decade or so to practice looking witheringly displeased. I’ve had a lot of practice not laughing at that sort of look, and to my delight, I managed it once again as I swallowed my initial reaction.

“Did you wake up because Lottie had a cookie?”

A nod, expression thawing by a few degrees.

“Would you like to have a cookie? I know the one she ate was chocolate, but I bet there’s some oatmeal walnut with sun-dried tomato cookies in the jar.”

Cuckoos have weird taste buds—it’s not just Sarah, no matter how tempting it might be to think that her passion for tomato in everything is a personal choice, rather than a function of the way her species processes Earth flavors. For Isaac, sun-dried tomato chunks baked into an oatmeal cookie were probably about the most appealing thing I could have offered.

He held his arms out, silently asking me to lift him out of the bed. I leaned over and scooped him up, noting how much bigger he was than the last time I’d seen him. With a kid on my hip, I couldn’t just relocate myself to the kitchen, and so I left the room the normal, living way, one step at a time, child balanced against me with his arms around my neck and his head against my shoulder.

His grip tightened as I went down the stairs, until I felt obligated to stop and say, “It’s not polite to choke people, Isaac.”

He relaxed his hold on my neck, allowing me the air I didn’t need.

“Thank you.”

We reached the kitchen to find Elsie gone and Charlotte sitting on a puzzled-looking Arthur’s lap. That was apparently the last straw for Isaac, who had been trying to hold himself together. He saw his beloved sister sitting in the lap of the monster he’d detected from his bed, and he pushed himself away from me, jumping to the ground before he rushed over to yank Charlotte down from her perch and put himself firmly between her and Arthur, glaring at Arthur with every ounce of menace he could summon into his little cuckoo face. One of the advantages of letting him bond so closely to Charlotte was finally fully apparent: he had a much more expressive face than most of the cuckoos I’d known. He was learning facial expressions from her, and he clearly understood how to put them to good use.

“ No! ” he shouted, balling his hands into fists. “You don’t touch my sister !”

“Isaac!” said Shelby, hurrying to his side and trying to turn him away from his cousin. “That’s not how we talk to our guests!”

“He’s not a guests! He’s a monster all up inside, where he isn’t supposed to be!” Isaac allowed himself to be turned and looked at Shelby with wide, injured eyes. “Make him go away!”

“I’m so sorry, Arthur, he’s not normally like this,” said Shelby, holding Isaac by the shoulders as she turned to look at Arthur. Charlotte, clearly confused but not wanting to be left out, sniffled and started to cry.

That was the last straw for Arthur. He shoved his chair back as he stood, lurching away from the table like the monster we were all insisting he wasn’t. “Thank you for your hospitality, Shelby,” he said, and looked to me. “Tell Elsie I’ll be in the car.”

“Art—” began Shelby, only to cut herself off at his bitterly unhappy expression. He didn’t say another word, to any of us, just pushed out of the kitchen and stormed down the hall. Isaac relaxed. Charlotte stopped crying.

The front door slammed.

“That went well,” I said. “I should go after him. Shelby, when Elsie gets out of the shower, can you let her know we’re outside?’

Charlotte blinked, and then started wailing again, this time while lunging at me. She grabbed hold of my thigh again, even tighter than before. We were definitely going to have a talk about circulation for normal people. “No!” she shouted. “No go!”

“Sentences, please, sweetie,” I said. “How about ‘I don’t want you to go’?”

“No,” she repeated, at a lower volume, but with the same vehemence. “Mary stay. ”

I looked at Shelby. She sighed, taking her hands off of Isaac’s shoulders. He responded by mirroring Charlotte, spinning around and wrapping his arms around Shelby’s hips like she was all that was tethering him to the world. “We’ve been working on talking to people so they can understand her,” she said. “It’s hard going. Isaac doesn’t make it any easier, and because of the way he is, we can’t even think too hard about most possible solutions.”

Meaning she couldn’t consider separating the pair so Charlotte couldn’t rely on Isaac’s telepathy anymore. That might be the only way to help Charlotte with her verbal language skills—although from the little I’d seen, the skills were perfectly present. It was just a matter of convincing her she needed to use them. “I’ll see if I can come up with some answers while I’m not here,” I said, then turned my attention back to Charlotte. “Your cousin Arthur had a bad accident when he was doing something really important with Sarah,” I said. “He got hurt, really a lot, and the scars are where Isaac can see them.”

Charlotte looked puzzled. “Grandpa is all over scars,” she said. “Is Arthur like Grandpa?”

Martin Baker—her paternal great-grandfather—was a Revenant, a reanimated corpse made up of multiple formerly dead people assembled into a unified whole by a scientist with a flexible relationship to things like “scientific ethics” and “physical reality.” We didn’t know much about Martin’s creator. He’d never been something Martin wanted to talk about. But the reanimation process left its scars, some more visible than others.

It wasn’t the worst comparison, not least because Arthur as we presently knew him was also a sort of revenant. In her desperation to save the man she loved, Sarah had reassembled his mind using the memories of everyone close enough for her to reach out and touch. He was a patchwork man, and none of his thoughts or memories were originally his own. Unlike Martin, however, he wasn’t content with this, and had been trying to fit back into the space he’d occupied before his accident for as long as I’d known him.

It probably didn’t help that Martin had died, been reanimated, and gone off to start a whole new life, with people who’d never known him as a living man—not any part of him—while Arthur was still surrounded by his original family, many of whom were hoping, as quietly as they could manage, that he was somehow miraculously going to fix himself and turn back into the Artie we all knew and loved. More and more, it was clear that wasn’t going to happen, but we’d suffered so many losses lately, it was hard not to hope.

“Arthur is a little bit like Grandpa,” I said. “They have some things in common. But he’s also not like Grandpa at all, and he’s very sad and very sorry and very tired of people telling him that he’s broken. I understand why Isaac looked at him and saw a monster, and I understand why he wouldn’t want Arthur touching you, but you need to remember that Arthur isn’t a monster. He’s your cousin and he loves you.”

Isaac, still clinging to Shelby, hiccupped and looked faintly ashamed. I glanced at Charlotte. She was wearing the exact same expression. I frowned. Was Isaac looking ashamed, or had he just managed to copy Charlotte’s face when he thought it was necessary? It was impossible to say.

I stepped away from Charlotte, turning intangible so that her clutching arms passed right through my thigh, leaving me free to make my exit. She stumbled and nearly fell at the loss of my support, then looked at me, her huge blue eyes brimming over with tears.

“He’s your cousin, and that means he’s my responsibility,” I said. “I have to make sure Arthur is all right, and that he’s not so sad that it’s hurting him. We can’t stay any longer, not with him so sad. When Elsie finishes her shower, we’ll leave for what we’re on our way to do, and I’ll come back when it’s all finished.”

“Promise?” whispered Charlotte.

“I promise,” I said. Isaac was still holding on to Shelby; he started crying again as he looked at me, probably picking up on how disappointed in him I was. I’m not a Price-Healy by birth, and I don’t have their resistance to cuckoo telepathy. It helps that all the cuckoos I spend time with actually are members of my family—they don’t need to nest-parasite their way into my memories. As a ghost, my thoughts are a little fuzzy and distant for cuckoo purposes, but not being partially immune to their influence makes me easier to read. And I can’t hide my disapproval.

I understood why Isaac had reacted so badly to the close sight of Arthur’s mind. That didn’t mean I wasn’t disappointed, or that I hadn’t been expecting better from him. Then again, I couldn’t see what he had seen. Maybe the inside of Arthur’s head was a genuine nightmare. The only adult cuckoo I could have reasonably asked was also the only person I couldn’t ask.

Sarah would be able to tell me what Arthur looked like on the inside, but she would never voluntarily look.

I gave Charlotte one last, hopefully reassuring look and disappeared.