“Nobody’s absolutely sure of anything, cuckoo girl,” said Kitty, sending mutters through some of the staffers who had managed to forget what I was. Stupid, stupid cuckoo powers. Sometimes I get tired of apologizing for my species to the same person a dozen times. “How are we supposed to know that we’re not all walking into a trap?”

“We employ spies,” said Uncle Mike, dipping his hand into a pocket.

When he pulled it out again, one of the younger mouse priests was standing proudly on his palm. “Hail!” squeaked the mouse.

Silence reigned.

No one’s sure whether Aeslin mice are extinct except for the family colony, or whether they just like their privacy. Whichever the answer, most people have only heard of them in passing, and they’re largely regarded as a weird sort of fairy tale, Cinderella’s mice without the vegetable transport and poor footwear choices. But they’re the only species of talking mouse that anyone has found so far, and so there wasn’t much question about what Uncle Mike was holding. The only question was how.

“Hello, mouse,” said Istas, sounding pleased.

“What the . . . ?” said Kitty.

“Is that an Aeslin mouse?” asked Joe.

“My hair is hungry,” announced Carol.

That brought the conversation to its second screeching halt in as many minutes, as everyone turned to stare at the gorgon. Carol blushed, ducking her head slightly while radiating embarrassment. She was telling the truth about her hair; the individual snakes were stretching toward the mouse, their mouths open and their tongues scenting the air.

“This just gets better and better,” muttered Ryan. I didn’t disagree.

Uncle Mike ignored them all in favor of focusing on what mattered—the plan—rather than what didn’t—everything else. “We’ve got half a dozen volunteers from Verity’s resident Aeslin colony. They’re going to go in, scout the place for traps, and report back. That lets us get a feeling for the lay of the land before we put ourselves in harm’s way.”

“You mean she wasn’t just bragging when she said she had a colony of Aeslin living with her?” asked Kitty.

Dominic snorted. “Bragging? No. Complaining vociferously? Almost certainly. While she is quite fond of her resident rodents, she seems to enjoy complaining about them as she does little else.”

“The family has coexisted with Aeslin mice for generations, which brings us to the one possible flaw in this plan,” said Uncle Mike. “We don’t know for sure that this Margaret woman doesn’t have a colony of her own. It seems unlikely, given the Covenant’s stance on cryptids, but the original colony was harbored before the family defected.”

“If we encounter heretics while on the search for our brave Priestess, we will smite them down with the Fury of a Thousand Angry Rolling Pins!” squeaked the mouse.

“Don’t know what that means, really. I’ve got to assume it’s pretty dire, since it’s coming from a talking mouse,” said Uncle Mike. “Now I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m going to go and rescue my niece from the Covenant of St. George. Who’s with me?”

“I am,” said Dominic.

“It will be a pleasing diversion,” said Istas.

“Verity’s my friend,” said Ryan.

“These people give humans a bad name,” said Angel.

“We’re with you,” said a voice from the back of the room. I turned to see Priscilla standing in the door to the hall. She must have been speaking for the dragons while Candy’s pregnancy kept her confined to the Nest. More dragons stood to either side of her, both the European and Chinese varieties. Several of the lizard-like servitors that Verity insisted on calling “Sleestaks” were behind them. All of them were holding weapons.

“All right, then,” said Uncle Mike. He sounded pleased. Who wouldn’t be, when they had just been handed their very own cryptid army? “Now we’re cooking with gas. Let’s go get Verity back.”

This time, when the mouse cheered, so did everybody else. One way or another, it was time to go and face the Covenant of St. George. Hang on, Verity, I thought, wishing there was any chance at all that she was in a position to hear me. We’re on our way.

Just hang on . . .

Twenty

“I’ll never understand why people think kidnapping is a good way to solve their problems. Near as I can tell, it just makes more problems that you need to solve, and who are you going to kidnap then?”

—Frances Brown

An unknown location in the city of Manhattan, returning to our original narrator, who has just regained consciousness after a nasty blow to the head

I KNEW THREE THINGS even before I opened my eyes: that I was somewhere enclosed, probably no larger than a bathroom stall, that someone had changed my clothes—nothing was riding the way it should have, which probably meant my weapons were also gone—and that I was in serious trouble. Then I raised my aching head, opened my eyes, and added a fourth thing to the list: wherever I was, it was pitch-black. No natural or artificial light, and I’m not a bogeyman, I can’t see in the dark.

Well, shit, I thought. I was smart enough not to say it out loud. There was no point in letting my captors know I was awake before I absolutely had to.

The last thing I remembered was Margaret Healy’s gun slamming into the back of my head, and the meaty, deadweight sound of my body hitting the rooftop. Not the sort of thing I like to go to sleep on. I’m more of the “dance until you can’t feel your knees, two or three rounds of really fun sex, wine cooler, bed” school of thought. Still, we all have to work with what we’re given in this life, and what I’d been given was a crazy cousin from England who seemed to think my skull was a piñata.

At least she hadn’t managed to hit me hard enough to make the candy come out. I could turn my head easily enough, and while I couldn’t see a damn thing, I was reasonably confident that it was due to a lack of light, not because she had somehow knocked my optic nerves offline. I sat up a little straighter. The gesture caused the chains holding my wrists to the wall to pull up tight, clanking faintly.

“Damn,” I whispered, not bothering to internalize it this time. I hadn’t even realized I was chained until I tried to move. That was an amateur mistake—I should have assumed I was bound the second I woke up, and planned accordingly.