“You know your father insists,” said Shelby’s mother. I realized I still didn’t know her first name. It hadn’t seemed important, somehow. The parents of friends and acquaintances were always “Mr. and Ms. Last Name,” not independent people. Not until they were the ones holding the gun.

“Uh, what are we insisting on, and do I get a vote?” I asked, trying to keep my tone light, even amiable. The sort of tone that belonged to a man no one was planning to shoot and dump in the nearest billabong.

“Mum wants you blindfolded for the final approach to the house,” said Raina. She had her Gameboy out again, and was focused on the little glowing square of the screen. “Since you’re a stranger and you’ve been exposed to Johrlac and all, it’s best if we don’t let you know where we live, in case this has all been a long, elaborate plan to get yourself to where you can invite your hellish masters over to slit our throats while we sleep.”

The image of Sarah slitting anyone’s throat was enough to make me pause. Laughing felt like a terrible idea, but that didn’t kill the urge. “I see,” I said, in a somewhat strangled tone. “Shelby? Could’ve warned me.”

“Didn’t want to spoil the surprise.” At least she sounded apologetic.

“Right.” I removed my glasses and tucked them into my pocket before leaning back in my seat and closing my eyes. “You may want to tie my hands, too, if we’re taking basic precautions. I won’t fight you. If you try to disarm me, on the other hand, you’re going to find that it’s not worth your time, and someone’s going to wind up with a bloody nose.”

There was a long pause before Raina said, “What?”

“If you tie my hands, I can’t go for a gun. I figure that makes the odds about even. That doesn’t mean I’m going to let you take my weapons.” I kept my eyes closed. Nothing says “willing to be blindfolded” like voluntarily giving up the sense of sight. “I’m trying to be accommodating, in part because I’ve just traveled a long way to help, and it would be silly to get myself put on the next plane home because I don’t feel like playing your reindeer games, and in part because we’re in the middle of nowhere, and I’m hoping that my being cooperative will reduce the chances of a bullet to the brain.”

There was a long pause. Then: “Your boyfriend’s mad as a cut snake,” said Raina, at the same time as her mother said, “I’m beginning to see why you like him.”

“He’s pretty neat,” said Shelby. There was a little upward lilt in her voice, and I knew that if I opened my eyes I would see her looking back at me, a smirk on her lips, eyes bright with amusement. Looks like that made a lot of things worthwhile . . . even the feeling of her sister pulling a strap of canvas tight across my eyes.

“Not going to chain your hands,” she said brusquely. “Didn’t think you’d stand for it, so we didn’t bring the handcuffs. Don’t give me reason to regret that, yeah?”

“I’ll do my best,” I said. The car started moving again.

My parents were fond of alternative teaching methods, reasoning that we were the latest—and largest—generation of a lineage that had supposedly been wiped off the face of the earth, and would thus need to be prepared for anything, because the one thing they didn’t prepare us for was going to be the one that got us killed. Our training included an entire summer spent being locked in the trunk of the car and taken for long, rambling drives, after which we would be dumped by the side of the road and expected to find our own way home. Verity had made it back to the house about half the time. Antimony had never made it back, but after she had displayed her unerring gift for locating the nearest pool hall, comic book store, or arcade for the fifth time, my parents had declared that her sense of direction was just fine: it simply had a different set of priorities. And I?

I had made it back every single time. So I sat in the back with my eyes covered, and mentally mapped the route from the highway to Shelby’s house with no distractions from the local flora or fauna. I was almost grateful for the blindfold. It’s funny how we underestimate each other in this world, isn’t it?

The car rolled to a stop after fifteen minutes. “You can take the blindfold off now, Alex,” said Shelby. “We’re here.”

I hesitated, waiting for Raina to contradict her sister, before I reached up and removed the strip of canvas, bringing the world back into blurry color. Replacing my glasses on my nose put the hard edges back on the scene around me, and I turned to look out the window . . .

...only to find myself looking straight into the barrel of a shotgun that had apparently been designed to take down rampaging bull elephants. I blinked, following the line of the barrel until I reached the man on the other end. He, too, was built like he had been designed to take down rampaging bull elephants, possibly by punching them in the face until they decided to go rampage somewhere else. He had sandy blond hair, narrow blue eyes, and the sort of deep tan that only comes from spending every possible minute outdoors over the course of twenty or thirty years. I blinked. He scowled.

The car door slammed and Shelby leaped into my field of vision, hurling herself at the gun-toting mountain of a man with a gleeful cry of, “Daddy!”

For his part, the man with the gun—who had to be Shelby’s father, unless their family was substantially more complicated than I’d been led to believe—weathered her impact without flinching or allowing his aim to waver. “Roll down the window,” he said, loudly enough that I could hear him through the glass.

“Better do as he says,” said Raina, who hadn’t budged from her seat beside me. “He gets impatient easy.”

“Yes, but if he was going to shoot me, you’d have already gotten out to avoid the glass spray,” I said, and rolled the window down, careful to keep my hands visible. The smell of eucalyptus and freshly-cut grass wafted into the car, garnering a cry of “Hail!” from the suitcase behind me. I ignored the mice as best I could, fixing a polite smile on the man with the gun as I said, “Mr. Tanner, it’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“You bring any proof you are who you say you are?” It wasn’t the friendliest greeting in the world. That wasn’t a real surprise. Cryptozoological conservation is difficult. Not only are we trying to protect a population of creatures that can’t be legally defended from poachers, on account of not legally existing, but we’re trying to do it without attracting the attention of the Covenant of St. George, which is always lurking in the shadows, waiting to destroy everything we’ve worked for. We’re friendly with each other, once our identities have been confirmed, but as far as Shelby’s father was concerned, I was a semi-known quantity. His daughter vouched for me. His daughter also claimed I was sharing a house with two cuckoos without having my brain come dribbling out of my ears. There was every chance in the world that she’d been compromised.