Pocket Apocalypse: InCryptid, Book Four (9 page)

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.

“I don’t have any photo ID with my real name on it, because that would be a violation of all known security protocols, but I may have something better,” I said. “Do you mind if I get my proof of identity out of my suitcase?”

“You armed?”

“I’m a Price, sir. If I were unarmed, I would be trying to take someone else’s weapons, just for the sake of my own peace of mind. But you have my word that I’m not going for a weapon. Even if I were lying about my identity, which I’m not, I wouldn’t want to risk Shelby getting hurt.”

“I can take care of myself, Alex,” said Shelby. She was still hanging off her father’s arm, and part of me insisted on pointing out that this would throw his aim slightly off, making it easier for me to take his gun away if it came to that.

“I know you can take care of yourself,” I said. “I also know that making a good impression on your parents gets harder if I get you shot in the process.”

“This is what you call making a good impression?” asked Raina. I decided to ignore her. It seemed like the safest course of action.

Shelby’s father frowned, his eyes narrowing further. “The ship of good impressions may have already sailed,” he said. “Keep your movements slow. Ray, if he does anything you don’t like, subdue him.”

“Sure thing, Dad,” said Raina, her attention still on her Gameboy. “If the presumably heavily-armed American does something I don’t like, I will absolutely throw myself on that grenade.”

“Actually, my grandmother’s the one with the grenades,” I said, and unbuckled my belt before twisting—oh, so slowly—to lean over the backseat and rummage through the top level of our luggage. Luckily for me, my carry-on bag had been placed with the zipper facing the front of the car, and it was a relatively easy matter for me to wiggle it open and call, “I require an acolyte,” into the depths of the bag.

A tiny brown head popped out, whiskers quivering and ears pressed forward, like its owner was afraid of missing some piece of essential wisdom that would finally tie the workings of the universe together. “Hail!” piped the mouse.

“That’s definitely a mouse,” said Raina, who had actually looked up from her Gameboy when I started talking to the luggage. “It’s not a reprogrammed Furby. Not even a little bit.”

“No, it’s not,” I agreed. I held my hand out to the mouse. The tiny creature stepped reverently onto the pad of my thumb, wrapping its tail tight around its legs. I kept my eyes on the mouse. The Aeslin mice love it when we talk directly to them. It makes them feel like they’re communing with their gods, not just serving as a really weird footnote. “Hail,” I said. “Do you mind confirming a few things for me?”

“Thy Will Be Done,” squeaked the mouse, throwing its head back in a burst of religious ecstasy.

“Thank you,” I said. I twisted back around, returning my butt to its original position on the seat, and extended the mouse toward Shelby’s waiting father. “Sir, do you know what this is?”

He blinked. “It looks like an Aeslin mouse,” he said. “But that’s impossible. They’ve been extinct for over a century.”

“Not in my family’s attic they haven’t.” I allowed myself a faint smile. “If you want to confirm my identity, ask the mouse.” Aeslin mice don’t lie. They never forget anything they see or hear, they preserve the history of a colony through religious dogma and ritual recreation, and they don’t lie.

For the first time, Shelby’s father looked vaguely impressed. “That’s a clever one,” he allowed, before turning his attention on the mouse. “Hello.”

“Hail!” squeaked the mouse.

Shelby’s father was a man trying to defend both his home and his daughter from a potentially dangerous visitor, and yet he couldn’t swallow the smile that tugged at the corners of his mouth. He looked like a man who’d just been told that Christmas wasn’t canceled after all—which wasn’t an unreasonable response to finding out that one of the world’s weirdest, most wonderfully useless sapient species wasn’t extinct. “Mouse, can you confirm the identity of the man who’s holding you?”

“Yes,” said the mouse proudly. It preened its whiskers, looking like it had just passed a quiz of some sort.

I sighed. “You’ll have to be more literal, I’m afraid.”

“Sorry. I’m not well-versed in human to rodent communication techniques.” He focused back on the mouse. “Who is the man holding you?”

“I stand in the palm of the God of Scales and Silence, son of the Thoughtful Priestess and the God of Decisions Made in Necessity,” said the mouse.

“He wants their names,” I said. It seemed almost a pity to shortcut what otherwise promised to be an entertaining bout of Man vs. Mouse, but I needed to pee, and I wanted to get out of the car before somebody lost patience and did something we were all going to regret later. “Please tell him the names.”

“Oh!” squeaked the mouse, sounding surprised. Then, drawing itself up to its full height of almost three inches, it said, “He is Alexander Jonathan Price, son of Evelyn Baker and Kevin Price, son of Alice Healy and Thomas Price—”

“—who wrote the field guide to the cryptids of Australia and New Zealand, which I have with me, so you should be able to compare his handwriting to any local samples,” I said. “I know this is an unorthodox method of confirming identity, but given that ‘please come to Australia with me, there are werewolves everywhere and they’re going to eat my family’ is an unorthodox request, can we call it good?”

There was a long pause, during which I began to fear that I’d overplayed my hand, before Mr. Tanner lowered his gun. My heart rate immediately began dropping back toward normal. It dropped further as he opened the door and gestured for me to get out of the car. “Riley Tanner. Nice to meet you. Shelly’s told us a lot, but that’s no substitute for actually getting to spend time with someone—and as you mentioned, there’s our little werewolf issue to focus on.”

“It’s nice to meet you, sir.” I slid out of the car, raising my hand to my shoulder long enough for the mouse to hop off before offering it to him to shake. His grip was firm enough to make my fingers ache, but I didn’t get the feeling he was trying to crush my hand; he was just a man who was accustomed to shaking hands without thinking about how hard he squeezed. “Shelby hasn’t told me much about her family, apart from the fact that she has sisters and parents.”

“She told us the same about you,” said Riley, dropping my hand. “We raised her to understand operational security, didn’t we, Shelly?”

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that, Daddy.” Shelby finally unpeeled herself from his arm. She trotted back toward the car, pausing long enough to kiss my cheek as she passed. “I told you, it’s Shelby. That’s my name.”

“We call Raina ‘Ray,’ and we call Gabrielle ‘Gabby,’ so you should put up with it; we’re your parents,” said Riley. He sounded amused; this was apparently a conversation they had with some frequency. Shelby responded with a snort.

Shelby’s mother, meanwhile, had finally gotten out of the car. “The girls will get your luggage,” she said, walking over to stand next to me. “You look like you’re about to drop dead where you stand. Let’s get you inside and to a bed before you collapse.”

“I’m not that tired,” I lied. The trip was catching up with my body, which was protesting the change of time zones and hemispheres in the only way it knew how: with growing fatigue. “Can I get a few old boxes for the mice to use while I’m here? They’ll be less trouble if they have a designated place to go when they’re not demanding I do something for them.”

“Hail!” squeaked the mouse on my shoulder, like a demented punctuation generator.

Shelby’s mother smiled. “I think we can find something. This way.” She started walking. I followed.

I hadn’t really noticed the lack of a house when Shelby’s father appeared outside my window: I was more focused on the gun, and what it could mean for my future. Now that I was following Shelby’s mother into increasingly thick brush, the lack of a house was becoming more pressing. “Er,” I said, and stopped, unsure how to proceed.

Fortunately for me, this seemed to be the opening line of a question she’d heard before. “We don’t have a driveway,” she said. “This is where we park the car—and no, that’s not an Australian thing, it’s a family thing. We have to carry our groceries a little farther, but we don’t get surprised by visitors.”

“You’re going to get on splendidly with my mother,” I said. “Speaking of which, and I don’t know how to say this without sounding awkward, but. . . .Shelby never told me your name. I’m happy to keep calling you ‘Ms. Tanner,’ if that’s your preference. I just wanted to ask.”

“Charlotte,” said Shelby’s mother. “You can call me ‘Ms. Tanner’ if that’s what you’re comfortable with or ‘Lottie’ if you feel like being more informal.” She swept aside a curtain of dangling branches, revealing a swath of wide, open ground covered with the glowing fuzz of new-grown grass. Something that I would have taken for a kangaroo, if it hadn’t been covered in rosette spots like a leopard, was cropping at the grass within a small enclosure. There was also a house, three stories high and rising against the sky like a monument to human habitation, but it seemed somehow less important than the animal I’d never seen before.

Charlotte followed my gaze to the enclosure, and said, “We don’t know what she is. She wandered in one morning with a broken leg—we thought she’d been painted at first, but the dots wouldn’t wash off. So we built her a pen, and we’ve been studying her, trying to suss out her story. Could be she’s a chromatic mutant. Could also be she’s a member of a highly endangered species, and explains some of the periodic ‘leopard’ sightings that we’ve never been able to figure out. Either way, we’re taking care of her until we understand her story a little better.”

“Neat,” I said. I felt immediately silly, but that didn’t change the accuracy of the word. Mysterious, leopard-spotted kangaroos were definitely neat, no matter how immature that sounded.

Charlotte smiled indulgently and kept walking. I could hear cracking noises and footsteps coming from the brush behind us as the rest of the family followed with the luggage. That, more than anything, motivated me to speed up and match pace with Charlotte as she bounded up the porch steps and opened the screen door. Shelby’s sister had been grumpy enough before she was forced to carry my suitcase through a stretch of carefully cultivated forest.

“Come on, Alex,” said Charlotte. “Jet lag is going to catch up with you if you hold still for too long, and then you’ll fall asleep on the porch.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” I said. “It’s a beautiful day.”

“Yes, but around four o’clock in the afternoon, the spiders come.” With that, she vanished inside. She was probably kidding—Australia has a lot of spiders, but as far as I know, they don’t keep to a strict schedule. “Probably” wasn’t a word I wanted to risk my life on.

Charlotte was already halfway across the living room and heading for the stairs by the time I made it through the front door. I hurried to catch up.

“You’ll be in the guest room, of course,” said Charlotte when I drew close enough, as calmly as if I’d never lagged behind. “It has locks on both the inside and outside, and I’ve mostly talked Riley into not locking you in at night, but you shouldn’t push it if you don’t have to. He’s not exactly keen on the fact that the American expert Shelby brought is also the man she’s sleeping with, if you follow. Says it smacks of trying to impress him with how suitable you are, when you’re clearly not suitable at all.”

“Er,” I said. “What makes me unsuitable?”

Charlotte gave me a look that, while kind, somehow managed to clearly indicate that I was being a fool, and should stop at once. “You’re dating our daughter, and you’re an American. You represent both ‘our little girl is growing up’ and ‘our little girl is having her loyalties divided.’ You were never going to be suitable. Not for a minute.”

“Ah,” I said, blinking.

Charlotte started up the stairs without waiting for any further reply. I followed her.

The stairs led to a hallway, which led in turn to a series of doors. Charlotte stopped in front of one of them, and said, “Guest room, attached toilet, so you should be taken care of. Wireless password is on the bedside table, and I’ll send Raina up with your bags while we debrief Shelly on the situation. You need to take a nap. No matter how much you feel like you’re at top operating condition, you’re wrong. Jet lag plays with your head. Gabby will be back by dinner, so I’ll send someone to wake you then.”

It made sense that they’d want to debrief Shelby without me around—everything that had happened since we had arrived had made sense—but that didn’t mean I needed to like it. I put my hand on the doorknob, looked at her, and asked, “Is it as bad as I think it is? Shelby told me what was going on.”