“Well, I can’t stay here any longer.” She narrowed her own eyes, looking for all the world like she wanted to stare me down. “I’m happy to keep watching the kids as long as you need me to, Ally, but I can’t keep doing it in Buckley. I’ve been in one place for too long already. The ghosts are starting to find me. I need to get back to the carnival.”

  As an umbramancer, Laura was even more exposed to haunting than an ordinary road witch. Routewitches and ambulomancers have their share of fans among the dead, but it’s the umbramancers who get the brunt of their attention. Why does it work that way? Hell if I know. I just know it does, and Laura had been trying to dodge the dead for as long as I had known her, which had made summers fun when we were kids and my best friend and my babysitter were effectively at war with one another. It had taken Laura years to be even a little bit comfortable with Mary, and Mary didn’t mean any harm. Random ghosts were likely to be less friendly.

  “You’re ready to go home, then?”

  She nodded. “It’s time. I can take any of the mice who want to go with me, so they don’t lose track of the kids, but . . . we won’t be here when you come looking, Alice. After you find Thomas, you’ll have to find us.”

  I think there was a choice in that moment. A chance to say “no, I’m done, I’m tired of wild-goose chases, I want my children and my family and I’ll come to the carnival with you, my mother started there, let me end there.” And I won’t look back now and pretend not to have been tempted. I was tired. I was more than tired; I was defeated. The endless futility of my search for answers was beating me down, and I didn’t know how much more I had in me. That moment was a turning point. It was an opportunity to turn my back on what I was becoming and choose what I had always meant to be.

  I bit my lip. I opened my mouth to answer. I never got the chance. The Covenant strike team that had surrounded the house after their lookouts saw me go inside opened fire.

  Why that exact moment? I didn’t know, and I still don’t. I can recount the past, but I can’t guess why things happened, only explain how they did. Laura and I were in the living room; Jane was in the kitchen. Kevin was upstairs, although I didn’t know that, and maybe that’s the answer to what I would have said if I’d actually had a chance to reply to Laura’s offer. I was home with my children, yet I hadn’t asked about my son at all. I hadn’t asked if he was okay, or whether I could see him. I was physically there, but I was still very far away, and I wasn’t coming back any time soon.

  The first bullet went through the front window, shattering it cleanly. The tailypo woke up, chittering in surprise as they jumped off the bookshelf and huddled under the coffee table, removing themselves from the line of fire. I pulled the gun from inside my jacket, snapping, “Get the kids,” to Laura.

  She nodded and ran for the stairs, racing up them as the second bullet came through the window. I dropped to a crouch, working my way over to peer outside.

  There was a ring of people surrounding the house. It looked like there were about fifteen of them, which would have been an insultingly low number if it hadn’t been such a relief. I was a terrible mother. I wasn’t pretending to be anything else. That didn’t mean I wanted somebody shooting at me and my kids. Especially not some Covenant asshole who had probably figured out a way to make their bullets hurt extra just so they could make the traitors suffer.

  At the center of the line was a tall, whipcord-thin woman with devastatingly sharp cheekbones. It was absolutely believable that she was related to Thomas; they looked similar enough for me to see it. She smiled when the curtain twitched, motioning for the shooters around her to stand down before cupping her hands around her mouth.

  “Mrs. Price!” she called. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced. I’m your husband’s aunt, Veronica Bell, and I’m here to collect my nephew.”

  I was pretty sure “nephew” wasn’t the term for what Kevin was to her, but like hell was she getting anywhere near him. I grimaced and shot out the window on the other side of the room, hoping to give her the wrong idea about my current location.

  She shook her head, expression turning disappointed. “Oh, Mrs. Price. I thought better of you.”

  That made one of us. We were isolated enough that no one was going to come to see what was going on out here; if the neighbors heard the gunfire, they’d assume someone was taking a few deer out of season, and leave it at that. You don’t live long in Buckley if you’re overly curious about things that don’t concern you, like people shooting up the house of the town outcasts.

  Staying low, I crossed the room to the kitchen doorway, where I lay down on the floor and hissed, “I call for counsel.”

  “Here, Priestess,” said a small, shaky voice from behind a crack in the baseboard. It was rare for an Aeslin mouse to be so subdued, or so obviously afraid. “How may we Serve?”

  “I need twenty volunteers,” I said, a plan coming together with blazing rapidity. It was stupid. It was quite possibly suicidal. It was going to give Laura and the kids the time to get away from here. “They will be lauded and honored above all others in my service—but they have to be volunteers, and they need to realize they may not be coming back. No novices who think this is how they earn their vestments, you understand?”

  “Yes, Priestess,” said the mouse, and went silent, save for the skittering sound that meant it was moving away from me, into the walls.

  I stayed where I was. I was still there when a small foot nudged my shoulder, and I tilted my head back to meet the guileless blue eyes of my daughter.

  “Where’s Andy?” she asked, sounding almost bored.

  “Andy?—oh, Auntie.”

  “Andy,” she repeated, now annoyed. “Where?”

  “She’s upstairs, sweetpea,” I said. “We’re playing the floor game now. Want to play the floor game with me?”

  She gave me a mistrustful look. “Cookie.”

  Oh, for . . .“You can have a cookie after we play,” I said, almost desperately. “You can have two cookies.”

  This seemed to satisfy her. She sat down next to my head, barely missing my ear. “Good.”

  That was when the shooting started again.

  This time, they didn’t stop with blowing out the front window. This time, they kept going until the air smelled like cordite and my ears were ringing so loudly that I could barely hear Jane wailing. I rolled over. She was uninjured but terrified, clinging to the leg of a nearby chair. She had gone for the chair, and not for me, when she was afraid. That should probably have hurt my feelings. In the moment, it felt like a blessing, since it meant I wouldn’t need to peel her off of me before I could react.

  “Laura?” I called. “Are you okay?”

  “They’re shooting for adults, not kids,” she called down the stairs. “They’re not aiming low. So I’m fine as long as I don’t try to come down the stairs and they aren’t actually inside the house.”

  “I think they want to be sure we’re incapacitated before they come in.”

  “That sounds like a nice way of saying ‘dead.’ Tell me you have a plan.”

  “I have a plan.”

  “Tell me you have a plan like you’re not lying.”

  “I have a plan.” Something skittered inside the wall. I rolled over, putting my hand in front of the hole in the baseboard. “I’m ready for you.”

  The mice started running out of the hole and up my arm, one after the other, until I had the requested twenty volunteers on my chest and shoulders, watching me with tiny, earnest eyes. I explained what I wanted them to do, and they listened as intently as they could until I was done. Then they ran away, as I rolled over and began to crab-crawl away from the still-wailing Jane, heading for the back door.

  The mice were faster than I was. I was almost there when one jumped onto my shoulder and squeaked, “Sixteen Enemies surround the Home, Priestess!”

  “Good,” I said. Sixteen was too many, but sixteen, I could handle. Sixteen meant my count hadn’t been that badly off. “How many are outside the back door?”

  “Two.”

  “Better.” I pushed myself into a low crouch and walked to the door without straightening. Pressing myself to the wall, I eased the door open and peered out.

  Two Covenant agents stood in the field behind the house, a good fifteen feet from the door, their attention turned toward the front yard, where Veronica was probably giving further instructions. I eased the door closed again.

  “You know what to do?” I asked the mouse.

  It nodded. “Yes, Priestess.”

  “Then tell the others it’s time.”

  The mouse was gone in a flash, racing for the living room. I stayed where I was, one hand on the doorknob, and listened as shouting began outside the house. Not just shouting: familiar shouting.

  Two things everyone who spends any time around the Aeslin mice quickly learns: they can be louder than should be physically possible, and they never forget anything they hear. That includes accents. If you know where someone is from, but not what they actually sound like, a yelling Aeslin mouse can do a remarkably good job of impersonating them.

  The mice ran for the bushes, getting under cover, and began to shout from all sides, some in Thomas’s perfect Penton pronunciation, others in Grandpa’s softer Scots-border accent, or Grandma’s Cornwall. They set up an incredible cacophony, and the Covenant answered with gunfire, all directed of it at the bushes.

  The Covenant was so focused on the noise that the two out back didn’t notice when I opened the door all the way, or when I stepped onto the porch. I shot them, one after the other, and retreated back inside. Jane was still wailing. I looked frantically around, finally spotting the cookie jar on a counter. Scurrying across the kitchen, I grabbed it and took out a handful of cookies, shoving one into her mouth and handing her the others.

  She chewed, eyes very wide and bright with tears.

  “I need you to play the quiet game now,” I said, voice low and probably unnervingly intense for someone as small as she was. She stared at me, and didn’t stop eating her cookie.

  That would have to be good enough. The Covenant was still shooting outside, although none of them were currently shooting at the house, which was a start. I stepped out of the kitchen, hissing, “Laura, come on,” toward the stairs.

  “What did you do?” she asked, finally descending, arms full of Kevin. He wailed when he saw me, reaching for me with open hands. I gave him the rest of the cookies and he slumped against Laura, looking puzzled.

  “The mice are providing a distraction,” I said. “The back door’s clear. You can take the kids and run for the Galway. It doesn’t mind you. If it doesn’t already know Jane, it should. I bet it’s going to love her. It loves all the Healy girls.”

  “Our things . . . ?”

  “After the Covenant’s sure they’ve killed us all, you can come back for them.” I gestured toward the door. “Between your wards and Thomas’s, I’m pretty sure they can’t burn the place down, even if they try. They may get through the front door, but they won’t get much further. The traps Thomas left will see to that.”

  Laura looked at me for a long moment, silent and solemn. Then she nodded, turned, and scooped Jane off the floor before she ran out the back door with the children in her arms, not looking back.

  The gunfire from the front of the house continued. I wanted to reload and start shooting. I didn’t dare. If I killed them all, the Covenant would just send more; that was how they operated. I needed them to believe they’d won, somehow. I needed them to go away and give up.

  Walking back into the living room, I slumped onto the couch, letting my head loll. “Mary, if you’ve ever cared about me, I could really use you right about now,” I said.

  “This is a fine pickle,” said my babysitter, the cushion next to me sinking under the weight of her as she settled on the couch. “How are you getting out of it?”

  “Covenant knows I’m here,” I said. “They know the kids are here. I think they know Laura’s here. So they’re expecting two women and two children. I know you can carry dead things through the lands of the dead. Can you get me some corpses?”

  Mary paused. “You want me to raid the local morgue?” she asked, finally, sounding horrified and intrigued.

  “I don’t care if it’s local. Local might not be for the best. I need bodies, Mary, bodies that won’t be missed and won’t be identified. And I need the Covenant to think they gunned us all down when they attacked the house, so I need them before they realize they’ve been tricked.”

  Mary disappeared. I closed my eyes. Either she was coming back with the bodies or she wasn’t, and if she wasn’t, this wasn’t going to work. The gunfire outside was starting to taper off, and I was starting to think it might be curtains for me when she popped back in, one arm wrapped around the ribs of a blonde woman with a bullet hole in the middle of her forehead. She didn’t look anything like me, but if someone didn’t know me, she might have been enough to fool them, especially because of the whole “corpse” thing. As a general rule, living people don’t like looking closely at corpses.

  Mary shoved her toward me and vanished as the woman fell limply to the floor, cold and dead and nameless. I looked at her and wished I could feel anything beyond faint relief.

  Mary reappeared with a dark-haired woman who could pass for Laura, and who had been shot through the throat, and then again with two children, both riddled with bullet holes. Them, I couldn’t look at directly. Them, I had to turn my eyes away from. Them, she didn’t drop, but settled on the far end of the couch.

  Then she turned to me, eyes cold. “Never ask me to do anything like that again,” she said, voice like a crypt door slamming closed.

  “The crossroads didn’t—”

  “The crossroads can go hang,” she snapped. “This protects you and it protects the babies you abandoned, so the crossroads can’t stop me, but don’t you ever, ever ask me to steal bodies for you again. The fact that I can doesn’t mean I should. Do you understand?”

  It was so rare for Mary to be truly mad at me—usually it was the other way around—that for a moment, all I could do was blink at her. Then I nodded and stood, pulling a knife from inside my shirt. She frowned.

  “What are you doing?”

  “That’s the one thing we don’t have: blood splatter. These people weren’t killed here.” I ran the knife down the side of my arm, careful to avoid the major veins, and swung around, holding my arm up so the blood splashed out in a wide arc. Some of it splattered against Mary, bright against her pale skin, before it fell through her and hit the floor. She blinked at me.

  “I can’t decide whether that’s clever or self-destructive,” she said.

  “It won’t hold up to any real forensic analysis, but it has to be good enough either way.” I glanced to the kitchen. “I need to go. Can you stick around and haunt the place, make sure they don’t stay here too long or get past the living room?”

  “For now,” said Mary, and vanished.

  That would do: I wasn’t getting anything better. I turned and ran, trusting the wards would hold, that the blood would be enough, that the lie would be believed. It was a thin hope, pinned on a flimsy deception. We would have to get lucky a dozen times for it to work.

  But getting lucky is sort of the basis of my life, and if I couldn’t count on that, what could I count on? So I ran, away from the house, toward the woods that had always been my sanctuary. I was still bleeding; I’d leave a trail the Covenant could follow, if they had dogs or tracking spells. I couldn’t go looking for Laura and the kids; I’d only put them in danger. So when I hit the edge of the woods, I paused, looking in all directions, and then took off along the tree line, away from the Red Angel, heading for the deeper woods.

  I’d ran for what felt like the better part of an hour—long enough for the bleeding to slow and stop as the wound on my arm clotted over, although it still threatened to start bleeding again if I moved it too much—before the ground turned marshy underfoot, and I realized I’d gotten turned around somewhere in the trees. I was coming up on the lakeside, well away from the Red Angel but still very close to the water.

  The trees thinned ahead of me, giving way to a clearing dominated by a decrepit old barn that looked like it hadn’t been occupied in decades. I slowed and angled toward it, intending to take shelter and give myself a chance to catch my breath. Cover could only benefit me if I was being potentially pursued by hostile Covenant assassins.

  The barn door wasn’t locked. It creaked ominously as I pushed it open, the wood swollen with moisture and smelling of damp rot. Inside, the farming equipment had long been removed or scavenged. Good thing, too, since this wasn’t good farming land. Why had someone bothered to build a barn all the way out here?

  Maybe out here hadn’t been “all the way” when they did it. The Galway didn’t move as much as some forests, being made up largely of slow-growing trees, but it did move, and given time, it would reclaim whatever was taken from it. Someone could have logged enough space to start a small farm, thinking they’d grow it into a larger one, and found themselves unable to handle the distance from Buckley proper, abandoning the land when they realized how hard it was going to be to be so isolated. Maybe there was a house the same age as the barn a little deeper into the trees. Given how far I’d traveled and how close I was to the swamp, maybe it was the house I’d found after the jackalope census, the one that basically belonged to the swamp hags now.

  Whatever the reason, the barn was here, solid and still stable, even if it was rotting, and the walls were intact enough to provide cover for as long as I wanted to rest. I could wait until the sun went down. The Covenant people wouldn’t be able to navigate the woods after dark the way I could, and by that point Laura would be well away from here with the kids.