Pocket Apocalypse: InCryptid, Book Four (14 page)

Sleep came fast, which was a mercy, given the events of the evening; the change of time zones was hitting me harder than I’d expected. Wakefulness came even faster, when I felt someone slide into the bed beside me. I snapped instantly alert, thrusting my hand toward the bedside table, and the waiting protection of my pistol.

A hand caught my wrist, fingers tightening enough to let me feel the familiar shape of them. “It’s me,” Shelby said. “Alex, it’s me. Calm down.”

“Shelby?” The question came out louder than I intended, powered by both adrenaline and relief. I hadn’t realized I was sleeping so deeply. I should have snapped awake as soon as she opened the bedroom door, and the fact that I hadn’t was a worrisome failure on my part.

“In the flesh.” She pressed herself against me, looping one ankle over mine, as if to hold me on the bed. I outweighed her by enough that it was a futile gesture; I could have had us both on the floor in seconds, if I’d needed to. And somehow, that made it okay. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get here sooner. Had to wait for everyone to be asleep enough not to catch me sneaking out.”

“Wha’ . . .” I was still waking up, and it took a few seconds for the import of her words to hit me. When it did, I tried to push myself away, stopping only when my back thumped against the cool plaster of the wall. “Shelby, you can’t be in here, your father will
kill me
,” I hissed. “He will kill me, and then he will feed my body to the crocodiles. Crocodiles are very efficient methods of body disposal. Trust me, I’ve done it.”

“Won’t, shan’t, can’t,” said Shelby, scooting closer, so that I had no way to escape without hurting her. She was wearing a thin shirt and a pair of running shorts. I was wearing nothing. Between us, we had way too little clothing for this conversation to be comfortable, under the circumstances. “I’m a grownup. I’ve been living with you for going on a year now. He knows I haven’t had my own room that whole time—I told Raina, and I know damn well she’s told him by now. That’s the sort of loving sister she is. My father needs to come to terms with the fact that our relationship isn’t as pleasantly chaste as he might like to think it is.”

“Okay, Shelby, all my ‘your girlfriend is right here’ instincts say to agree with you, and all my ‘you grew up surrounded by women who could kill you in their sleep’ instincts say that your father doesn’t get to control your life, but my ‘let’s try not to die in Australia’ instincts keep reminding me that he’s twice my size. I mean, have you
seen
the man?”

“Don’t worry, Alex, if he tries to start trouble with you, I’ll come to your rescue. I’m supposed to be his successor, after all. He listens to me.” Shelby leaned in and kissed me before I could point out the flaws in her logic. Her lips were soft and warm and tasted like beeswax lip balm, and I was kissing her back before I could remind myself what a terrible idea this was.

Shelby pushed herself closer still, sliding one knee between my legs as she did something clever with her hands that resulted in her shirt being hiked up to her collarbones. Her breasts pressed against my chest, nothing keeping her skin from mine.

Dim reason told me to make one more effort to keep myself from being murdered by a large Australian cryptozoologist, and was promptly shouted down by my libido, which was much more interested in the present goings-on. I tugged at Shelby’s shirt, and she obliged by leaning back long enough to let me pull it off over her head.

“I see you’ve got the spirit now,” she said, and then her mouth was back on mine, and there was no more conversation for a while.

Having sex with Shelby in a house that was, at least nominally, her parents’ was . . . strange at best. We’d been sexually active while we’d been living with my grandparents, of course, but neither of them was human, and neither of them cared, providing we used protection and didn’t do anything messy outside of our shared bedroom. The one time I’d tried to bring up the subject with my grandfather, who had at least started out human—before he died and was brought back to life by carelessly applied science—he had laughed in my face. “Alex, your generation didn’t invent sex, and we came to terms with the idea of our descendants getting intimate with other people when your mother called home and told us she was pregnant. We really don’t care.”

That had been the household policy ever since, and it was a good one. I doubted
my
parents would be quite as easygoing about premarital relations under their own roof, and I
knew
Shelby’s parents weren’t as easygoing. And somehow, once we got started, that just made it all the more exciting. Every touch, every kiss, it was all stolen, and we were willing accomplices in the burglary of one another’s bodies.

Time ceased to matter for a while. When we were finished, lying spent and sweaty on a bed that had seemed too empty before, and now felt perfectly full, Shelby dropped her head into the crook of my shoulder, sighed, and said, “Going to have to do a lot more of that, you know. We both need the stress relief.”

“What, you don’t find your family relaxing?”

Shelby snorted. “Do you find your family relaxing?”

“Point.” I sighed, running my fingers through her hair, and said, “It’s weird. When we got here . . . enough of the tactics you use, enough of the policies and procedures, are like the ones we use at home that I almost fell into the trap of thinking we were the same. That everything the Thirty-Six Society did would make sense to me. I mean, you have two sisters, one of them’s a misanthrope who likes video games, the other one’s in the arts; your mother’s friendly but deadly . . . your father is sort of where the comparison falls down. Mine’s tall, skinny, and academic.”

“I think all families have their similarities,” said Shelby. “Gabby’s a little less, well, willing to play along than your sister. I don’t think she’s going to give up opera in favor of coming back to the family business. And Raina wasn’t always so unpleasant to strangers. She doesn’t trust people she doesn’t know. Hasn’t done since we lost Jack.”

There it was. “Your brother?”

“Yeah. Raina was his favorite, you know? He and I weren’t close—too similar in some ways, we always wound up wanting to kill each other, and that’s no good for anyone—but the two of them were like ticks on a sheep. Where he went, so did she, always. She holds herself responsible for what happened with him.”

“How? Cuckoos can get to anyone. That’s part of what makes them so dangerous.”

“You know that, and I know that, and even your family knows that. Raina knows on some level, I suppose, but most of her just knows that Jack stopped calling, and stopped answering her email, and she didn’t sound the alarm. I don’t think we could have saved him at that point—it wasn’t really possible by then, you know? He was too far gone when he cut contact—but that’s not going to help her forgive herself.”

“No, it’s not.” I kissed Shelby’s forehead. “I’m sorry. I can’t imagine losing a sibling.” Except that was a lie. I
had
imagined it, over and over, for my entire life. The idea of the loss lasting after I woke up . . . that was the terrifying part.

“Done is done, you know? Jack was a good guy. I think you’d have liked him. I know he’d have liked you. He was going to take over for Dad someday. Now he’s gone, and the crown falls to me, and I don’t want it.” She sighed again, deeper this time, and nestled herself close. “Need to get some sleep now. It’s going to be a busy day tomorrow.”

“I was sleeping fine before you came in and woke me up, you know,” I protested. It was too late: her eyes were shut, and she had relaxed in that way that meant she wasn’t going to be talking anymore tonight. She couldn’t
actually
go to sleep instantly, but had learned to fake it at some point. It was probably a natural consequence of sharing a bedroom with two younger sisters.

For a little while, I just lay there and listened to her breathing. Then I closed my own eyes again, and let sleep come back to me.

“You’re both going to get murdered, and it’s going to be horribly messy.” The proclamation was made with incredible good cheer—“chirpy, treacle-y, Sleeping Beauty talks to the woodland creatures” levels of good cheer. I pried my eyes open and peered into the faintly bleary distance. Shelby was still asleep, her head tucked under one of the pillows and her right arm slung across my waist. That meant the tall blonde blur couldn’t be her.

It hadn’t sounded quite like her mother, and so I took a guess. “Gabrielle?”

“Oh, you are good. Yes, this is Gabby, I’m here because you’re about ten minutes short of sleeping through breakfast, and I volunteered to be the one who came looking because it would give you half a chance in hell of Dad not finding out Shelby had switched rooms in the night. If Raina saw you like this, it’d be game over.”

“You’re very kind.” I reached over Shelby and fumbled on the bedside table until I found my glasses and pushed them on, squinting as my focus adjusted. “We’ll be down in a minute.” This was the second time one of the Tanner sisters had been able to sneak up on me while I was sleeping. I was starting to give serious thought to belling the door.

Gabby dimpled at me. “It’s all part of the service. You’re a lot more cute than you looked under that stuffy academic shirt, aren’t you? I’m starting to see what Shelly finds so appealing.”

“I will end you,” said Shelby, voice muffled by the pillow.

“Love you, too,” said Gabby, and fled the room before sororicide could become a genuine threat.

Shelby groaned and pushed herself up onto her elbows, shooting a halfhearted glare in my direction. “Whose idea was it to come back to Australia again? Because at the moment, I’m inclined to blame you.”

“They’re your family,” I said. “You’re the one who asked if I would help them.”

“Right. Damn.” She stood, stretched, and began recovering her clothes from the floor. “I need to duck down the hall to get something suitable for the breakfast table. You going to be all right on your own?”

“I think I can manage getting dressed and walking down the stairs,” I said.

Shelby grinned. “I’m never sure with you.” She stepped into her shorts, pulled her shirt on over her head, and then she was gone, out the door and on the way to her room.

I took more time getting dressed, although I didn’t linger over anything beyond getting my weapons secured inside my clothing. The mice hadn’t made an appearance by the time I had my shirt buttoned and my shoes tied. I glanced around nervously, half expecting to see a mouse head on the floor under the edge of the bed. The wildlife of Australia was nothing to fuck around with. Neither were the Aeslin mice.

If any of them had met an unfortunate end, it wasn’t apparent from the contents of my room. I shook my head, grabbed my jacket off the door, and left the room.

As before, the smell of food greeted me when I reached the head of the stairs. This time, it was accompanied by voices, clear and loud and close. I followed them to the kitchen, where I found the Tanners—minus Shelby, who was still getting dressed—sitting around the kitchen table, passing a platter of ham and another of fried eggs around. Only Gabby looked up when I entered, and her quick, sly smile confirmed that she hadn’t informed her parents about my sleeping arrangements of the night before. For whatever reason, she was keeping that part between us . . . for now.

“Oh, hey, you’re not dead.” Raina raked her eyes along the length of my body before passing judgment: “You still look kind of dead. Maybe you need to sleep more. Sixteen hours out of the last twenty-four isn’t excessive, if you’re a housecat. Are you a housecat?”

“Good morning, Alex,” said Charlotte, apparently deciding that ignoring her middle daughter was the better part of valor. “How did you sleep?”

“Very well, thank you,” I said, following her lead. “I’m not adjusted to local time yet, but I think I’ll be there before much longer.”

“Good,” said Riley. Unlike his wife and daughter, he didn’t sound chatty: he sounded like a man who’d been waiting to get down to business for the better part of an hour, and was ready to go. “Grab a roll and some ham, and let’s get out of here. I have Cooper standing by at the medical station. We’ve cleared the whole thing for your use.”

I nodded. “All right.” I had been expecting something like this, although to be honest, I had been hoping it would happen on the other side of several cups of coffee.

“Here’s a fun fact for you: one in three wildlife rescue stations in this part of the country is run either wholly or in part by the Society,” said Charlotte, her eyes on her husband. “Come on, Riley, let the boy have a decent breakfast before you set him to brewing magic potions to save us from the werewolves.”

“Oh,” I said, unable to come up with a more intelligent response. The thought of having that sort of resources at our disposal was staggering. Most of the time, we had to make do with whatever the local cryptids had set up for themselves, or visit helpful veterinarians who had seen one too many immature lindworms presented as “iguanas” to remain in denial over the cryptid world. Then I paused. “Wait, what is it you’re expecting me to do?”

“You said you could brew the stuff to keep us safe from the werewolves,” said Riley. “So you’re going to do that. You’re going to keep us safe from the werewolves.”