Praise for the InCryptid novels

  “The only thing more fun than an October Daye book is an InCryptid book. Swift narrative, charm, great world-building . . . all the McGuire trademarks.”

  —Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times-bestselling author

  “Seanan McGuire’s Discount Armageddon is an urban fantasy triple threat—smart and sexy and funny. The Aeslin mice alone are worth the price of the book, so consider a cast of truly original characters, a plot where weird never overwhelms logic, and some serious kickass world-building as a bonus.”

  —Tanya Huff, bestselling author of the Blood series

  “McGuire’s InCryptid series is one of the most reliably imaginative and well-told sci-fi series to be found, and she brings all her considerable talents to bear on [Tricks for Free]. . . . McGuire’s heroine is a brave, resourceful and sarcastic delight, and her intrepid comrades are just the kind of supportive and snarky sidekicks she needs.”

  —RT Book Reviews (top pick)

  “A joyous romp that juggles action, magic, and romance to great effect.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “That Ain’t Witchcraft tells the kind of story that all series should be so lucky to have: one with world-bending ramifications that still feels so deeply personal that you don’t question if this could have been someone else’s book to narrate. McGuire has honed her craft over a decade-plus of writing, and if you call yourself a sci-fi or fantasy fan, yet haven’t picked her work up, you’re doing yourself a disservice.”

  —Culturess

  “Discount Armageddon is a quick-witted, sharp-edged look at what makes a monster monstrous, and at how closely our urban fantasy protagonists walk—or dance—that line. The pacing never lets up, and when the end comes, you’re left wanting more. I can’t wait for the next book!”

  —C. E. Murphy, author of Raven Calls

  “Seanan McGuire is one of my favorite urban fantasy authors and her InCryptid series is part of that reason. Imaginary Numbers is a stunning installment and one that every urban fantasy reader is sure to relish.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  DAW Books presents the finest in urban fantasy from Seanan McGuire:

  InCryptid Novels

  DISCOUNT ARMAGEDDON

  MIDNIGHT BLUE-LIGHT SPECIAL

  HALF-OFF RAGNAROK

  POCKET APOCALYPSE

  CHAOS CHOREOGRAPHY

  MAGIC FOR NOTHING

  TRICKS FOR FREE

  THAT AIN’T WITCHCRAFT

  IMAGINARY NUMBERS

  CALCULATED RISKS

  SPELUNKING THROUGH HELL

  SPARROW HILL ROAD

  THE GIRL IN THE GREEN SILK GOWN

  ANGEL OF THE OVERPASS

  October Daye Novels

  ROSEMARY AND RUE

  A LOCAL HABITATION

  AN ARTIFICIAL NIGHT

  LATE ECLIPSES

  ONE SALT SEA

  ASHES OF HONOR

  CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT

  THE WINTER LONG

  A RED ROSE CHAIN

  ONCE BROKEN FAITH

  THE BRIGHTEST FELL

  NIGHT AND SILENCE

  THE UNKINDEST TIDE

  A KILLING FROST

  WHEN SORROWS COME

  BE THE SERPENT*

  *Coming soon from DAW Books

  Copyright © 2022 by Seanan McGuire.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover illustration by Alastair Fell.

  Cover design by Adam Auerbach.

  Edited by Sheila E. Gilbert.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1911.

  Published by DAW Books, Inc.

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Nearly all the designs and trade names in this book are registered trademarks. All that are still in commercial use are protected by United States and international trademark law.

  Ebook ISBN 9780756411848

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

  pid_prh_6.0_139376812_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Praise for the Incryptid Novels

  Also by Seanan McGuire

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Price Family Tree

  Baker Family Tree

  Definitions

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Epilogue

  Bonus Novella: And Sweep Up The Wood

  Price Family Field Guide to the Cryptids of North America Updated and Expanded Edition

  Playlist

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Kory. Buckley owes you a lot more than we ever could have realized.

  And for Tyvar, for being a true source of joy in a dark time.

  Love, noun:

  An intense feeling of deep affection; may be romantic, filial, or platonic.

  Passion, noun:

  A strong or barely controllable emotion.

  Enthusiasm, interest, desire.

  See also “obsession.”

  Prologue

  “Never could handle working on the trapeze, me. The one thing I never learned how to do was let go. I guess it’s just not something I’m built to do.”

  —Frances Brown

  The old Parrish place, Buckley Township, Michigan

  Fifty-six years ago

  The old Parrish place—so called because the man who’d built it, Theodore Parrish, had committed the unforgivable but extremely memorable crime of killing his entire family with an ax as a sacrifice to a horrible swamp god who thankfully seemed to have existed only in his imagination—was never entirely quiet. No matter the hour of the night or day, the pipes rattled, the foundation creaked, and the windows shook in their panes, rattled by the wind whether or not the wind was truly there.

  Alice Price-Healy had grown accustomed to the sounds of the house around her, and while she often missed the less intrusive creaking and rattle of the house where she’d grown up, a childhood spent with a colony of pantheistic mice living in her bedroom walls had left her a deep sleeper, if only in self-defense. She was dead to the world, one arm thrown up over her head, the hard arch of her stomach pointed to the ceiling. At this stage of pregnancy, sleeping in any other position was a fairy tale, and the suggestion was likely to result in something being thrown.

  She was snoring. She’d done that during her first pregnancy as well and had denied it until Thomas got the mice to back him up. (The mice were rather more enthusiastic about the phenomenon than he was, declaring jubilantly that the Noisy Priestess had finally mastered the art of living up to her name even in her slumber.) After a shouting match during which she declared that if her snoring bothered him so much, he could damn well figure out how he was going to carry their next child, or else she was going to start taking that pill the ladies at the library kept talking about, he had decided sleeping in the living room was a better choice.

  But oh, some nights it was hard to leave her, even when she was so loud that he couldn’t possibly sleep in the same room. After five years of marriage, he still couldn’t fully believe they’d made it here. And even after everything it had cost them, everything it had cost him in specific, he didn’t have a single regret. She was lovely in the moonlight slanting through the window, casting shadows on her skin. She was lovely in the daylight, too, although considerably more likely to be covered in blood. With the baby expected sometime in the next month, he had finally managed to convince her to stay out of the woods. He’d been worried for a time that he was going to miss the birth of his second child when she went into labor while halfway up a tree in the middle of a forest that carried a distinct dislike toward him.

  It was funny, in its own ironic way. He lived in the sight of an ecosystem that actively and impossibly didn’t want him anywhere near it, trapped inside the house that had been intended as his punishment for daring to question the Covenant, and he co
uldn’t imagine a world where he’d have been happier. Even trying to imagine a world where he was still capable of leaving the house didn’t work, because it required a world where he’d chosen not to bargain with the crossroads for Alice’s life.

  She was his happy ending, if a man like him was allowed to ask for one. She was his reward for turning his back on everything he’d been raised to be and choosing a better path for himself: Alice, and their children. Kevin would be three soon. He was talking more every day, constantly discovering the world around him, and now that he’d mostly learned not to play too roughly with the mice or tailypo, he was an endless source of joy for their small family. His excitement over his new baby brother or sister was big enough to fill the whole house. Sometimes Thomas thought he might be even louder than the mice.

  As if anything could be.

  Alice made a snorting noise in her sleep, and for a moment, it looked like she might be waking up. Thomas reached over and smoothed her hair back from her face, and she stilled, slipping into deeper slumber. Yes. This was definitely one of the nights where he slept elsewhere. During the summer, his tendency to radiate heat like a broken furnace did neither of them any favors: her, because she would get too warm and wake up; him, because it meant he would be sharing a bed with his angry, extremely pregnant wife. Retrieving his glasses from the bedside table, Thomas swung his feet around to the floor and rose, heading for the door.

  (Later, when Alice was climbing the walls in furious, impotent panic, she would demand the mice tell her exactly how the evening had gone, over and over again, until she had a perfect vision of events. The one thing they could never tell her clearly enough to satisfy her was whether she had managed to wake at all, or whether she had simply slept through the moment when her husband walked away from her, possibly forever.)

  As for Thomas, he didn’t pause on his way out of the room, not to kiss her temple or even to look back at her. He simply left, unaware that this night was anything other than exactly like the night before.

  Like so many of the other important people who had left Alice alone, Thomas Price never looked back.

  * * *

  Thomas eased the door carefully shut behind himself, trying not to wake Alice. She needed her sleep. If she woke, he would have been happy to make her toast and tea, or whatever else she wanted that they had on hand, but it would be better if she could sleep until morning.

  Handling an increasingly rambunctious young boy who seemed to have inherited her fondness for the forest had been hard for her even before her pregnancy started to show, and—of course—he couldn’t help in any meaningful way. Everything outside the house might as well not exist for him and hadn’t for almost nine years.

  Not since his bargain with the crossroads, which he had made with full understanding of the costs and possible consequences, and one he would gladly have made again if it had been required. What he’d gained had been more than worth everything he’d lost.

  And if he needed to remind himself of that from time to time, when Kevin was having a tantrum or Alice was in a mood, well, it was a small price to pay to remain happy within what world he had remaining. He made his way down the hall toward the stairs, pausing to look into Kevin’s room and reassure himself the boy was fine.

  The mice were sometimes a little overenthusiastic about reciting the catechisms of Daniel, Alice’s older brother, who they referred to as the God of Early Arrivals and Earlier Departures. Thomas had been forced to sit down and have a long talk with the head priests, explaining how much they were upsetting Alice, before they would stop. But the damage had been done, and it was rare to make it through a night without at least one of them looking in on their sleeping son, half-afraid he would have been snatched out of his bed.

  Not that most things potentially inclined toward snatching could get through the layers of protection Thomas had thrown over the house: wards and enchantments and thick walls of elemental energy. Even perfectly mundane home invaders would have trouble muscling their way inside. Every time Alice woke up crying out of concern for the brother she’d never known, he would research and add another protective screen, trying to keep his family as safe as he could.

  It was something he could still do for them, even though he wouldn’t be able to drive Alice to the hospital, or take Kevin to school, or attend any of his milestone events as he grew older. No field trips or science fairs or graduations or weddings for Thomas Price. No, those things were for other men, men who hadn’t sold their souls to save their wives.

  A jet of something that tasted too much like bitterness tried to force its way up his throat, and he forced it down again. He knew full well that the crossroads had only allowed him this much because they were sure, in their terrible, inhuman way, that he’d be suffering every day for the rest of his life. The happiness he’d been able to snatch was all the sweeter for being stolen, and he was going to keep stealing it every day for as long as he was able.

  The stairs creaked as he descended, one more quiet message from a house that never stopped talking, and he stretched, beginning to fully waken. A cup of tea and then back to sleep on the living room couch, which was comfortable enough and would let the tailypo curl up with him. They didn’t like to sleep with Alice; she smelled too often of blood and gunpowder, and it unsettled them, but he had come to enjoy their company as a man might enjoy the company of a beloved dog, and it would be good to wake in their tangled, furry midst—

  Then he stepped into the living room, and the gentle wakefulness he’d been stumbling toward evaporated in an instant, replaced by something cold and clear and altogether cruel.

  Mary Dunlavy was waiting for him.

  As always, their semi-resident ghost looked like a teenage girl with a pleasant face, the sort of girl who could be found in any American school or diner, except for her long white hair. She was even dressed in what he was sure was the latest fashion, a gray pleated skirt and a yellow button-down cardigan with a pressed Peter Pan collar. She looked at him solemnly, with nothing but sorrow in her eyes, which were the exact color of the sky above Penton Hall on a frozen winter morning. He shivered and forced himself to keep walking.

  Finding Mary in the house was nothing unusual. She sat for Kevin when Alice needed a break, and she would be responsible for the new baby at least some of the time. She was the family babysitter. She had been since she died.

  She was also the local representative for the crossroads, and the person who had helped Thomas broker his deal with them. Everything he had, he owed to her.

  And if she was waiting for him in the living room in the middle of the night, it was because she was finally coming to collect.

  “Please,” he said, and when she gave a minute shake of her head, he sighed. “At least, not here?”

  “You don’t have a lot of options, Tommy,” she said. “I was able to convince them to let me wait until you came down instead of snatching you out of the bed, but that was all they were willing to give, and they only gave it because there was too much of a chance Alice would have been able to force her way through after you if they’d taken you upstairs.”

  If not for Mary, Thomas might have protested that Alice would never do that, would never risk leaving Kevin alone. But he knew his wife, and he knew how much faith she placed in Mary’s ability to protect the children, and he could understand how Mary had been able to spin it into letting him wait. Into giving him just a few more precious hours.

  He hadn’t kissed her before he left. He should have kissed her. He knew she would ask the mice, and they would tell her the truth: they would tell her he’d walked away without even kissing her on the forehead, and that would be the last she knew of him before he left her a widow with two children to raise alone.

  They’d be able to unlock the Price family vaults if they needed money, but they’d have to go to England if they wanted to do that, and Alice’s sensible fear of the Covenant would close that avenue before it ever had the chance to open. He was leaving her with nothing.

  “Please,” he repeated. Then, with a bit more certainty, he added, “At least the kitchen? You can take me in the middle of a cup of tea. It will hurt her when she finds it in the morning.”