Pocket Apocalypse: InCryptid, Book Four (10 page)

Charlotte’s laugh was strained and tight, the laugh of a woman who has looked into the abyss only to discover that it is deeper than she could possibly have imagined. “Shelly never had much of an imagination,” she said. “However bad she said it was, she was wrong. It’s worse.”

I sighed. “Of course it is,” I said. “What would be the fun of it being anything else?”

“This is a terrible, horrible, incredibly foolish idea. Let’s try it and see what happens.”

—Jonathan Healy

The guest room of an isolated house in Queensland, Australia, trying to wake up

I
HADN’T EXPECTED TO
be able to sleep after Charlotte’s dire proclamation, but I had gone into the guest room anyway: it was clear that I wasn’t going to be left anywhere else without a chaperone for the time being, and I wanted to visit the promised toilet sooner rather than later. She had been speaking in the British sense—instead of a commode in the middle of the room, there was a narrow door leading to what my family would have called a “half-bath,” with a toilet, sink, and nothing else. I took care of my business, washed my hands and face, and returned to the main guest room to find my bags propped against the foot of the bed. The roller bag was unzipped, and the mice were nowhere to be seen.

Aeslin mice are small and have limited natural defenses, but they’re also smart, and surprisingly good at surviving, considering the massed forces the world has rallied to kill them off. I sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled out my laptop, trusting the mice to take care of themselves.

The wireless password was where Charlotte had said it would be, and I got it on the first try. My inbox was a nightmare sea of messages from the zoo, my grandparents, Dee, and people who hadn’t emailed me since I’d left college, but had been prompted by the strange force that works to explode the email of travelers. I tapped out quick messages to the people who needed to know that I had landed safely—my parents, Grandma, Verity—before closing the lid on my computer and setting it aside. My eyes itched. I removed my glasses so I could rub my eyes with the heel of my hand, and somehow that translated to placing my glasses on the bedside table and letting my head drop to the pillow. It wouldn’t hurt anything to close my eyes for just a few moments, I reasoned; I didn’t actually have to take a nap.

The sound of a knock on the guest room door snapped me back to consciousness, my hand going for the gun at my belt before I realized where I was—and that I’d gone to sleep with a loaded weapon on my person. Not good gun safety. Not good anything, really. I sat up, rubbing my entire face with my hand, and noticed that the room had gone dark. However long I’d been asleep, it had carried me past sunset. “Who is it?” I called.

“Shelby,” came the answer. “Are you done snoring your life away and ready to join the ongoing crisis, or should I come back in an hour? Mum’s made lamb stew, if that makes a difference in your answer.”

“I’m up.” I grabbed my glasses, slid them on, and stood. Everything hurt substantially more than could be explained by the position I’d been sleeping in. I decided to hate jet lag. “What time is it?”

“Just past seven. You decent?”

I paused. Shelby had seen me naked any number of times, and I had seen her the same way; I could recreate the scars she bore from her years of working with predators both known and cryptozoological with my eyes closed. Being in a house with her parents was going to take some getting used to. “I fell asleep with my clothes on.”

“Alex.” The door swung open to reveal Shelby standing silhouetted by the light that filled the hall. She was wearing a sundress I’d never seen before, and her hair was down, tempting me to plunge my fingers into it and skip straight to getting in trouble with her father. That temptation only lasted a few seconds before my attention was caught by the creature crouching on her shoulder and watching me with wary, avian eyes. It was about the size of a small housecat or a very large ferret, with bright pink plumage on its head and wings, and the striped hindquarters of an animal I’d never seen before.

Shelby saw where I was looking, and beamed. “Alex, meet Flora. Flora, this is Alex.” The little beast responded with a warble that devolved into a screech.

“I’ve never seen a garrinna in the flesh,” I said, standing and moving slowly closer, so as not to frighten her. “She’s beautiful.”

“She was the runt of her litter, which is why she wound up brought into the house instead of staying in the aviary with her brothers and sisters. They all moved on to conservation sites, she stayed here with me.” Shelby kissed the top of the garrinna’s head. Flora responded by rubbing her beak, birdlike, against Shelby’s cheek. “She’s a clever girl. Can have the blender apart in minutes, if we leave her unmonitored in the kitchen. You ready to come downstairs?”

It took me a moment to follow her change of topics. I nodded. “I think I’m as ready as I’m going to be. Did your other sister get here safely?”

“Gabby? Yeah, she’s here. Came in about half an hour ago with a sob story about Cooper getting them lost and being stopped by tourists and something about a kangaroo in a chemist’s and anyway, she’s here now, so if you’re ready to come downstairs . . . ?” Shelby stopped, looking at me expectantly. The garrinna on her shoulder chirped.

I smiled. “Let’s go.”

The sound of voices and the meaty smell of stew greeted us halfway down the stairs, wafting from somewhere toward the back of the house. I let Shelby take the lead, since we were on her territory now, and focused instead on the things around me, trying to get an idea of what I was walking into.

The first thing: there were no pictures on the walls. Back at home, my family history was displayed in black and white, Kodachrome, and even the occasional ink drawing. Once you were in the house, you knew who we were and where you were standing, and you weren’t going to leave alive unless we let you. There was no point in hiding ourselves in the one place where we should have been able to be safe. But these walls were virtually bare, brightened only by a few small watercolor paintings. There were alcoves set into the wall every three feet, and vases of bright artificial flowers had been placed in them, creating a slightly homier atmosphere.

My impression of the front room had been that it was functional but not lived in. Looking closer only reinforced that idea. All the furniture was exactly weathered enough to be believable—the sort of effect that comes either from actual use, or from carefully patronizing the local thrift stores until you’ve put together the right combination of couches, chairs, and slightly scuffed coffee tables. It was too perfectly flawed to be real, which should have been an oxymoron, and yet somehow wasn’t. It was a television set, not a home.

Shelby caught me squinting at the couch and smiled wryly. “Should’ve guessed, I suppose,” she said. “Well, it wasn’t my call and it’s too late now, so we might as well make the most of it, don’t you think?”

She hadn’t said anything to confirm or deny my suspicions. She didn’t need to. “No one lives here,” I said. “This is . . . a way station? A safe house?”

“Sort of a combination of the two,” Shelby said. “It belonged to one of our founders. Anyone can use it, if they have legitimate need and can get approval from the rest of the Society. Basic furnishings and such come with the house, and we all work to keep them updated and keep the place in proper shape. It’s good to have bolt-holes, when you need them.”

“It is,” I agreed, thinking of the family home back in Buckley. It was old and crumbling, and the walls were full of black mold, but we kept it all the same. You never knew when you might need to run away. “I thought we were going to your house.” It was hard to admit, even to myself, but the fact that I wasn’t seeing the place where Shelby had grown up stung. I knew less about where she’d come from than I liked; I’d been looking forward to seeing her childhood home, and starting to get an idea of what it had meant to her.

But this wasn’t about me. This was about werewolves in Australia, and the danger they presented to the entire continent. I tried to remind myself of that as Shelby pressed a hand against the hallway wall and a section swung inward, revealing a hidden door. The smell of our waiting dinner grew stronger. “Seeing the places where we actually live comes later,” she said. “Maybe after the danger’s past. Now in you get.”

“Is this a ‘so everyone can aim a weapon at me’ request?” I asked warily.

Shelby smiled like the sun rising across Botany Bay. “Call it a bonding exercise,” she suggested, while Flora chirped and flapped her wings.

I sighed. “If they shoot me, you get to explain it to my family,” I said, and stepped through the door in the wall to the room on the other side.

It was a large space, big enough to be considered a small ballroom, with several long wood tables pushed together in the center, bringing back unpleasant memories of summer camp. Half the tables were full, packed with people I had to assume belonged to the Thirty-Six Society. Some of them were in the archetypical Australian khakis, but most were dressed like the sort of people I saw every day at the zoo back in Ohio: jeans and light shirts, knee-length skirts and tank tops, shorts and sundresses and every other combination of casual clothing that could be easily moved in while still being substantial enough to conceal a reasonable number of weapons. Some of those weapons were on display.

As soon as I had stepped through the wall, almost every person in the room had drawn a gun, knife, or sling of some sort, and aimed it in my direction. Only Raina, whose attention was back on her DS, and the thin, short-haired blonde girl sitting next to her were disinterested in threatening my life. Given placement, the short-haired girl was probably Shelby’s other sister. It made sense that she’d be reluctant to attack me: the sooner we dealt with the werewolf problem, the sooner she could get back to opera school.

“Er, hello,” I said, offering a small, nonthreatening wave. “I’m Alexander Price. You must be the Thirty-Six Society. I would greatly prefer it if you didn’t put a bullet into my brain; it would complicate my plans for life, most of which involve not being dead.”

Shelby appeared behind me, pulling the door shut as she entered. She crossed her arms, looking at the gathered crowd with the bland disinterest that she always brought to staff meetings at the zoo, and asked, “Well? You lot going to shoot us or what? Because I’m starving, and I’m going to take it personally if somebody decides to kill my boyfriend.”

“Well,
I’m
going to take it personally if I get eaten by a
werewolf
because we went and shot the dude who actually knows how to kill them,” said Raina, finally looking up from her video game. It was a video game now, not a monitoring device—when she tilted her screen, I could see colorful animated monsters beating the snot out of each other. “Can we all say ‘yay, we waved our dicks around,’ and eat our damn dinner already?”

“I think I like your sister,” I murmured.

“Don’t worry, she doesn’t like you,” Shelby murmured back. Louder, she said, “I’m Shelby Tanner; you all know me; my parents are custodians in residence of the house you’re all sitting in, and my mum cooked that stew you’re getting ready to enjoy; I affirm and testify that Alexander Price is who he says he is, and that he’s here to help us, assuming all this nonsense doesn’t scare him off. I further affirm and testify that if you don’t all stop being such right twits, I’m going to take him and go find a nice motel. Dad.” She turned, focusing on her father. His cheeks were red, and he looked like he couldn’t decide whether to be amused or angry. “I know you’re just trying to look out for the Society, and I also know that when Thomas Price came through here, he was still with the Covenant, but
you
know that he was in the process of quitting, and we
both
know his descendants never signed up at all. So can we stop? This isn’t funny, it isn’t fun, and it isn’t dealing with the
werewolf problem
that’s threatening to eat us all.”

Shelby wasn’t the sort of person who got impassioned. Even when her old apartment had been set on fire, she had remained relatively calm, right up until we were free and clear and passing out from shock and pain. But as she addressed her father, spots of hectic pink appeared in her cheeks and her hands clenched into fists at her sides, clearly telegraphing her frustration. I hesitated before reaching out and taking her hand in mine. She shot me a quick, surprised look, but she didn’t pull away. She needed me as much as I needed her. That was becoming increasingly clear.