He missed by what my mother would have called a country mile. I was already dropping to land balanced on the fingertips of my left hand and the toe of my right foot, knee bending as it accommodated my sudden half-crouch. Kicking my left foot upward in a maneuver I was certain to regret in the morning, I slammed my heel into his wrist, sending the knife flying out of his hand and away into the darkness on the roof.

He was good. I’m not sure he wouldn’t have been better, had he been attacking to kill and not to capture. I had no such qualms. Fighting like a gentleman is the sort of luxury reserved for people who can afford to lose.

Dominic recovered quickly, delivering a kick to my kidneys. I rolled with it, letting the borrowed momentum carry me several feet before springing to my feet and shoving the gun into his face.

“You are not a good listener,” I said, trying not to show how badly that kick had hurt, or how disgusted I was by the congealed ahool blood now staining my windbreaker.

For his part, Dominic was looking like a man who’d just learned the world wasn’t perfect. “You little—”

“Finishing that sentence gets you shot,” I said, and stepped backward. “Here’s a tip: never bring a knife to a gunfight. Here’s another: stop killing my cryptids, and get out of my city. If I hear one word about you harassing the people that live here, or see you one more time, I’m not going to fight fair.”

“The Covenant will be hearing about this.”

“What, that you met a random girl on a rooftop who told you she was a member of a family you guys wiped out years ago right before she kicked your ass? As if. Even if your pride would take it, they wouldn’t believe you.” I took another step backward. The edge of the roof was only a few feet away. “Get out of my city, De Luca. Next time, I won’t play nice.”

“Next time, neither will I,” he snarled, and pulled another knife from his coat, flinging it toward my chest—or at least toward the space where my chest had been. By the time the knife finished its flight, I was already over the edge of the roof, dropping like a rock into the darkness below.

Six

“Always remember two things about the Covenant: shoot first, and then keep shooting for as long as your ammunition holds out. You can’t reason with fanatics. All you can do is match them in your own fanaticism.”

—Enid Healy

A small semilegal sublet in Greenwich Village, cranky and in pain

RECOVERING THE HEIGHT I LOST during my getaway would have been too much trouble, especially when I could feel the bruises forming as I ran. My left ankle was throbbing steadily, making my footing questionable at best. One of the first rules of successful free running talks about how you do it with injured ankles, wrists, knees, or hips. It’s a simple rule: don’t. It’s a good way to do permanent damage, and unless you’re being chased by a hungry wendigo, no shortcut is worth that.

I found a fire escape three blocks from home that was close enough to the ground to let me finish my descent. I made the rest of the trip on foot. It was late enough that the only people I passed were drunk, homeless, drunk and homeless, or in the middle of traveling from one nightclub to another. None of them gave my outfit, or the blood covering it, a second glance.

The mice had either finished their religious ceremony or moved on to one of the quieter parts of the liturgy. The apartment was silent when I came in, and stayed that way as I dug my phone from my backpack and retrieved the first aid kit from the medicine cabinet. I dropped my windbreaker in the bathtub. I didn’t know whether ahool blood was acidic, but I’d be finding out soon. There was a little blood on my skirt. I stripped it off and threw it into the tub on top of the windbreaker. Then I turned and limped back to the living room.

The couch was covered in last week’s laundry. I swept it onto the floor as I sat down, groaning a little when my bruises brushed against the cushions. Once the aching slowed, I removed my left shoe and rolled down the sock.

The damage was both better than I’d been expecting and worse than I’d been hoping; not an uncommon combination when it comes to me and injuries. I’m pretty resilient. That doesn’t mean I enjoy getting hurt, or the complications that come with it. At least it was all just surface damage; the snare had done a good job of scraping my skin through the sock, but the rope never actually touched me. I slathered the scrapes liberally in antibiotic cream, pasted on some gauze, wrapped an Ace bandage around it, and called it good. As long as I didn’t need to win any foot races or dance any Paso Dobles for the next few days, I’d be fine.

I leaned back into the couch, wincing, and snapped open my phone. If the Covenant was in Manhattan, there was only one reasonable place to call.

Home.

The story of my family winding up in a sprawling farmhouse outside of Odell, Oregon is simple, even though it takes the mice three days to tell. My great-great-grandparents left England and settled in Pennsylvania; the Covenant promptly sent a man to check on them. The family sent him packing and moved inland, to Michigan. The Covenant sent another man to check on them. They didn’t send this one packing. Instead, my grandmother married him.

The family stayed put for a few years, largely due to issues involving a contract with a demon, an open dimensional rift, and preschool, but once the demon finished doing its thing, the survivors weren’t that keen on Michigan anymore. They moved to Oregon. According to the mice, the whole family originally lived in the house where I grew up, which was selected for reasons of geographic isolation and ease of potential defense strategies. I find that concept horrifying. Putting Dad and Aunt Jane in a room together on the holidays is bad enough. Making them share a house should have resulted in homicide. Dad went to Cleveland, met Mom, and brought her home; Aunt Jane went to Portland, met Uncle Ted, and settled down close enough to be a nuisance, yet far enough away that nobody dies.

We don’t really have a family tree at this point; it’s more like a family branch, given the way people keep getting themselves killed or sucked into alternate dimensions that may or may not be capable of supporting human life (the jury’s still out on what happened to Grandpa Thomas, although Grandma Alice insists he’s alive, and my mother raised me never to contradict anyone who regularly carries grenades).

It’s always been assumed that my siblings and I will settle in the Pacific Northwest. It’s not empty nest syndrome: it’s practicality. We’ve lost a lot of family members since Alexander and Enid Healy decided to move to America, and none of their tombstones say things like “died peacefully in her sleep” or “lived a good long life.” If we don’t stick close to home, we don’t make it home.