She made it to the front lawn, pausing only to lock the door carefully behind herself before shock and blood loss overtook pure stubbornness and she collapsed. The ambulance arrived ten minutes later and found her lying there, covered in blood, barely breathing.

  For the second time in under a week, Alice Healy went to the hospital.

  6.

  * * *

  They couldn’t call it a suicide attempt, not exactly; not even a foolish girl would try to kill herself by opening a vein in her upper arm, and Alice Healy was far from foolish. It didn’t matter that the edges of the wound were unusually clean. She’d been clutching a bloody bread knife in one hand when she was found, and there were bread crumbs inside the wound. No one was going to argue with evidence like that.

  “Grief confuses a person. It can make them clumsy,” said the attending doctor. For the most part, people were willing to accept that. It was easier than the alternatives.

  Alice herself was serene when she woke up, all apologies and bashful embarrassment over her own clumsiness. The loss of her father had overcome her while she was cooking, she said; she’d been slicing bread and heard a noise that sounded like a footstep, and she’d stabbed herself in the arm in the process of turning toward it. “I don’t believe in ghosts or anything,” she said, with a small, nervous laugh, “but I’m not in the habit of being alone out there. It’s an old house. It makes noises, sometimes.”

  “If this is going to be an ongoing problem, Alice, maybe you should consider moving closer to town.” The doctor gave her a serious look. They’d known each other for years; they’d gone to school together, and while they’d never been friends, he had a certain measure of respect for her, odd as she could sometimes be. “There are quite a few rooms for rent for a respectable young lady like yourself. You could move away from the memories. Start over again. Or move back once you’d found yourself a fellow, start a new family.”

  It was good advice if you were talking to a woman who planned to eventually get married and settle down with her new husband. For Alice, it was something like suggesting she pack her things and relocate to Jupiter. Still smiling, she nodded, replying, “I’ll think about it. I was born in that house, though; I’m not sure I’m ready to let go quite that much.”

  “Just keep it in mind, and try not to hurt yourself again,” he said. “Your system can only take so many blood transfusions before it stops recovering.”

  “I’ll do my very best,” she said.

  “Good.” He rose from the chair beside her bed. “I’ll get you your clothes and release papers.”

  “Thank you,” said Alice.

  Her smile lasted until he was out of the room. She sagged against her pillows, closing her eyes. She’d successfully removed all the nymphs. There were no more odd bruises or unusually sore spots on her arm, and given the size of the ones she’d found, they couldn’t move through the body without leaving some signs behind. Now what?

  Now she needed to get out of the hospital, go home, and start putting things into a more lasting order. Now she needed to bury her father, who had been dead for two and a half days. That was less than half of the first week the nymphs would need to spend gestating in his body before they reached full maturity and broke free. They needed three weeks in total. She had time.

  Thinking logically, she knew she’d have an easier time of things if she could do it now and get to the nymphs before they reached adulthood. There was just one problem with trying to extract them now: the books agreed they grew more slowly in the dead, and while she might kill any nymphs by burning the body, she wouldn’t destroy any unhatched eggs. Anything small enough to be overlooked by the doctors who’d stitched her up would be nearly impossible to find in a corpse. And getting her father’s body away from the morgue without releasing it to the funeral home would be even harder. Maybe if she hadn’t wound up in the hospital . . .

  But then, if she hadn’t wound up in the hospital, she’d be dead, too. They’d both be incubating their deadly new family members somewhere deep in the woods, out of sight until they hatched and could lay siege to an unsuspecting, undefended town. No, it would have to be a burial and a grave robbery. Not particularly ladylike, but it wasn’t like she had a choice.

  She managed to keep herself from either laughing or crying as they brought the papers in, and she checked herself out.

  7.

  * * *

  Buckley Township was too small to have anything as metropolitan as a cab, but the receptionist had a brother who was willing to give Alice a ride home. He dropped her at the foot of the driveway, asking several times if she was sure she could make the walk on her own, if she was sure she should be alone. She smiled and smiled and ground her teeth and felt like screaming the whole time she was convincing him to leave her, and she walked up to the house alone, pausing on the porch until his headlights faded and then using her toe to trace a circle on the boards.

  “Mary, if you can hear me, I could really use you about now,” she said, voice low. “I know we haven’t been talking much, but Daddy’s dead and I’m afraid.”

  There was no reply. She waited several minutes, hopeful to the end, before she sighed, and turned, and let herself inside.

  The mice were waiting for her on the stairs. It looked like the entire population of the attic had come down. They formed a sea of black, brown, white, and patchwork fur, spreading out to completely cover the bottom six steps. Tiny oil-drop eyes watched her step inside, but none of them said a word until the door was closed and locked behind her. The mice knew the rules as well as any Healy.

  “Hello,” said Alice wearily, dropping the keys into her coat pocket as she turned to face the colony. “Did you need me for something?”

  The current high priest of her congregation stepped forward. His ceremonial headdress of beads, bones, and crow feathers was attached to an ivory thimble that rode low over his muzzle in what was doubtless an impressive display, if you happened to be another mouse. “There was blood in many places in the Room of Eating,” he declared, thumping the step with his kitten-bone staff for emphasis. “One who had been in the walls when you departed came to us saying that you spilled your own blood in mourning for the God who was your father. We called for the Phantom Priestess, to ask if you yet lived, but she did not come. Are you well, Priestess?”

  Lovely; now even the damn Aeslin mice thought she was suicidal. “I had to remove three Apraxis nymphs from my arm before they burrowed their way out of my flesh and devoured me alive, actually,” she said, rubbing the side of her face with one hand. “It was an act of self-preservation, not mourning, I promise. I’m sorry Mary’s being cagey.”

  The mouse tilted his head to the side, regarding her. “Then you do not seek to join your forbearers in the Land Where All Is Well, Turn Out the Damn Lights and Go to Bed?”

  “What? I . . . oh. I see.” Alice sighed as comprehension dawned. Sometimes she still had trouble understanding the mice, even though she’d grown up with them. “That’s one of your terms for Heaven, isn’t it?” The entire sea of tiny bodies rippled with an almost tidal motion as the mice nodded. “I don’t want to go to Heaven, no. Or Hell, or anyplace else that involves being dead. But thank you for your concern.”

  “The God is gone,” said the priest, continuing to watch her. “Will a new God be coming before us, to aid you in preservation of the way?”

  Alice paused. The Aeslin had been living with the Healy family for a very long time. They knew just about everything there was to know about their history—more than anyone had ever written down. “Has there ever been a time without a God before?” she asked as lightly as she could manage.

  “No,” said the priest, as the mice behind and around him murmured negation. “There have always been two to guide and protect us, a God and His Priestess. Sometimes more are granted unto us, and we rejoice, but always, there have been two. When does the new God arrive? Will you go to the God of Inconvenient Timing?”

  The question was so innocent. She knew they didn’t mean anything by it. It still burned. “He . . . a new God isn’t going to be arriving, and Thomas isn’t going to come,” Alice said slowly. “This is a new time, a time when it’s just . . . when it’s just us. All of you, and me.”

  The mice exchanged shocked whispers before the priest looked up to her again, asking hesitantly, “This is a time for learning and purification? To prove we remain worthy?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what this is,” said Alice, trying to mask her relief. There was an art to talking to the mice, assuming you wanted them to actually pay attention. How was she supposed to say, “When the cryptid wasps swarm out of Daddy’s corpse and eat me, you’re going to have to go stay with Mr. Price until Naga can get to this dimension to pick you up.” It wasn’t the sort of thing she’d ever needed to say before. Finally, she settled for the reasonably neutral, formal-sounding, “There may be some other changes ahead of us. Things aren’t going to be the way that they were. But you have to prove yourselves worthy before you can learn what’s next.”

  “Worthy of what, Priestess?”

  “I don’t know,” Alice replied. Then she smiled, sadly. “I guess we’ll find out together, won’t we?”

  8.

  * * *

  The funeral was held on Sunday.

  Alice hadn’t been able to come up with an excuse to make it a private ceremony. “Friends and family” wouldn’t be exactly private, given how much of the town had known her father, and “just family” looked too much like her sitting alone with a corpse. There wasn’t even religion to fall back on—the Healys were well-established as Easter Sunday Presbyterians, showing up for church only when social custom absolutely demanded it and mostly steering well clear. In the end, she simply had to agree to go along with the burial and start making plans for digging her father up again after it was over.

  She greeted the mourners with a small, distant smile, shook hands and accepted hugs from people who’d known her all her life. The whole time, she was wondering whether her arm was recovered enough to let her handle the shovel properly. She barely saw the faces of the people offering their condolences. They would all go home at the end of the service talking about how sad it was, how tragic. Poor Alice, so clearly crushed by the loss of her father, left all alone in the world.

  In actuality, Alice was just distracted, and starting to think—not for the first time—about how much easier things would have been if she’d been born a boy. Not only would her father have been a lot less likely to try to keep her out of the woods the way he did, she’d have been able to make big, strapping farm boy friends who’d probably see “Hey, come out and help me dig Daddy out of his grave so we can get the demon wasps out of his corpse” as an invitation to good, clean fun. Girls weren’t supposed to rob graves. Girls were supposed to darn socks and do needlework.

  While Alice could certainly see where a steady hand and a lot of needles would help when it came to getting rid of the nymphs, that didn’t help her with actually getting her hands on the body.

  The first few greetings were hard. “I’m sorry” and “if there’s anything we can do” and “he was a good man” all seemed fresh and new, like they’d never been said before. She smiled fixedly, took the offerings as they were intended, and didn’t answer the nebulous offers of aid by asking people how good they were with a shovel. She did all right throughout the viewing, and through the brief sermon that started the actual ceremony. She was beginning, stupidly, to believe she might make it through the afternoon without breaking down completely.

  Then the eulogies began.

  Jonathan Healy had been a good man; he’d worked long and hard for the community, for the library, and for the improvement of the library; he’d always had a kind word and a helping hand for those less fortunate than he was; the list of his virtues went on and on, expanded on by every person that stood to speak. Jonathan Healy loved his wife, honored his father and mother, and loved his daughter, who had done him the honor of seeing him as close to home as she could.

  Alice had never in her life been so glad to be left sitting at the sidelines. She cried from the first word through to the last. By the time everyone had finished volunteering to speak, there’d been no time left for her to give her own eulogy, and that was just fine, because what could she have said? “I’m sorry I got you killed” didn’t seem appropriate, and neither did “be seeing you soon.” So she just wept.

  It might have been easier if Thomas had been there, or Mary, or even Cynthia who owned the Red Angel. But Thomas couldn’t attend, and Mary wasn’t answering when she called, and Cynthia wouldn’t have been comfortable at a human funeral. Alice had to muddle through on her own.

  They buried Jonathan Healy next to his wife. Alice threw the first handful of dirt onto the grave, along with a small bouquet of yellow flowers that only a few puzzled members of the crowd recognized as aconite. Then she turned and walked away, heading for that battered old white truck of hers, the one she’d insisted on driving, even though a dozen people offered to give her a ride to the funeral home. She politely declined the offers of a room for the night, a hot dinner, or just company until she felt better. She was fine, she said; she only wanted to go home and sleep.

  Once the last of the well-wishers had been waved off and she was allowed to get into the truck, she turned on the engine and drove out to Old Logger’s Road, where she parked just out of view of Thomas’ house—close enough to see the light from the windows reflecting off the trees, but not close enough for the man inside to see her—and put her head down against the wheel and cried herself to sleep.

  She stayed there until morning.

  9.

  * * *

  How does one relatively petite woman with an injured arm excavate six solid feet of earth, break through a cement grave liner, haul the corpse of a two-hundred-pound man out of the grave, replace the soil, move the body to a well-lit place, and still have the strength to deal with what could potentially be hundreds of demonic wasps in an unknown state of maturity? Almost as importantly, how does she do all of that and still retain the capability to dispose of the body afterward?

  Answer: she doesn’t.

  After a week of studying the problem from every angle she could think of and a few she probably shouldn’t have, Alice was forced to admit that she couldn’t see an answer. She’d called for Mary every night, seeking backup, and her phantom babysitter had never appeared, leaving her to puzzle things out on her own.

  The cemetery was too publicly situated to allow her to perform a simple grave robbery; she’d have to get in and out with impossible speed, even if she did it in the middle of the night. Heavy rains would have helped by softening up the ground, but the summer remained stubbornly dry. The wounds in her arm were healing, and no new nymphs appeared; that didn’t alter the fact that she’d sliced fairly deeply into the muscle, and her lifting power—which was never anything to brag about—was seriously impaired.

  Attempts to summon Naga had met with silence. The cryptid professor was probably off on another school trip, putting him out of range of her little pre-mixed hex bags. She had to face the facts: she was never going to get her father out of the ground. Even if some miraculously lucky series of events allowed her to manage it, she’d never be able to get the body back to the house or stay on her feet long enough to dig out all the nymphs. There was just no way.

  “I have to wait for them to hatch,” she said, leaning her elbows on her grandfather’s battered old writing desk and dropping her face into her hands, eyes closed. “I have to wait for them to hatch, and hope the ground slows them down enough to let me shoot them one at a time.”

  Once upon a time, she would have considered that an exciting challenge, something fun to do with her evening before she had to come home and put the dishes away. That was before she saw her father die. Things had changed.

  Maybe she would’ve been able to find something, anything that would work if there’d been anyone in a position to help her . . . but there wasn’t anyone, and there weren’t any other ways. It was going to come down to her, the new-hatched Apraxis wasps, and as many guns as she could carry to the cemetery. Who walked—or flew—away would be determined then and there.

  Two weeks to the hatching. That’s what the calendar said, and all the books seemed to agree. The Apraxis would gestate for twenty-one days before chewing their way free, with all her father’s memories and intelligence intact in the form of a newly-dispersed hive mind. “Because that’s not creepy or anything,” she muttered, rising to put the books away.

  The time for studying was done. Now was the time to put her affairs in order.

  10.

  * * *

  It took two weeks for Alice Healy to get ready to die.

  She began by formally requesting a leave of absence from her job. The library board was painfully willing to grant it, agreeing without hesitation to her carefully-worded offer to come back to work at the beginning of September. The children’s library was sparsely used during the summer, they said; most of the kids were at camp, or swimming in the lake, not spending their days indoors with the books. One of the interns would mind her desk while she was away.

  Alice smiled, thanked them for understanding, and took the files holding all the retired Monster Wall drawings out of her filing cabinet when she left.

  The library did hold one surprise: she’d expected the sketches on the Wall to be at least a week old, since she’d been gone that long. Instead, she found that the children had continued posting their monsters and had started posting hand-drawn “get well soon” cards right along with them. One particularly well-done sketch showed a sad-looking boogeyman trying to feed her chicken soup, with “fel better miss Heely” woefully misspelled underneath the picture. She looked at it until she felt herself getting ready to cry again and took it with her when she went.