Seanan McGuire - Midnight Blue-Light Special

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?”

“He did, but I was the only family member who could get here before you were out of surgery . . . and given the circumstances, I was the only one for the job.”

The Bakers lived in Columbus, Ohio, the same city where my brother was doing his research project on basilisk breeding. I frowned. “Is Alex here?”

“No. I couldn’t reach him when the call first came, and I told him he didn’t need to come once we were sure that you were going to live.” Her smile was fleeting, and strained. “I didn’t see any point in filling this hospital with anxious relatives before we had to. Not when Mike and I are already filling that role, and your various cryptid friends are coming and going at all hours.”

She wasn’t mentioning Sarah. The chill intensified. “Grandma, what aren’t you telling me?”

She took a deep breath. When she let it out, she seemed smaller somehow, like she had deflated. “Verity, it’s important you understand that I am not angry with you. I’m not angry with any of you. You were in an impossible situation, and it was a choice between doing . . . what you did . . . and endangering the whole family. I might have done the same thing, if I were in your position. Sarah made her own choices.”

Alarm bells were ringing in my head. I sat up a little straighter. “Where’s Sarah?”

“She’s asleep.” Grandma’s lips thinned into a hard line. “She’s been asleep since I got here. I made her sleep, because it was the only way to make her stop screaming.”

“Oh, God,” I whispered, slumping against the pillows. “Is she going to be okay?”

“I’ll be honest with you, Verity: I don’t know. I don’t have any way of knowing. Cuckoo psychology is such a strange thing, and Sarah didn’t start out like me.”

I swallowed hard, looking at her as levelly as I could. “You mean Sarah didn’t start out knowing right from wrong.”

Grandma didn’t say anything.

By human standards, cuckoos are born sociopathic. They get it from their mothers. Literally: when a telepathic sociopath carries a baby for nine months, that baby is going to be born with a radically skewed moral compass. Grandma Angela was born “normal” by human standards, because she’s not a receptive telepath. So she didn’t get the in-utero conditioning to teach her that other people existed only to be pawns and playthings. Sarah, on the other hand . . . did. Grandma adopted her when she was seven years old, after her human foster parents died, and spent years after that carefully removing the deep conditioning Sarah had received from her biological mother.

Sarah is a sweet, thoughtful, empathic person. She didn’t start out that way. And there was no way of knowing whether Grandma had managed to get all the little mental land mines out of Sarah’s head. That was a large part of why Sarah always arranged to audit courses at schools near one of her cousins. If she ever went back to her cuckoo roots, she wanted one of us close enough to kill her before she did too much damage.