“So noted,” he said. “I love you, Alice Healy. Again, simply to prevent confusion in the future.”

  “Of course.” Smiling wanly, she stepped to the front door and put her hand on the knob. Pausing, she looked back at him. “Are you going to be all right?”

  “I think I can survive reasonably well without your company,” he said dryly. “If you mean, ‘Will you be all right with the fact that I’m clearly marching off to die,’ well, that’s a little much to ask of me.” He paused in turn, and then sighed, adding, “But I’m glad that you came.”

  “So am I,” she said, and stepped out the door, into the darkness.

  Thomas followed to the threshold—as far as the spell that bound him would allow him to go—and watched as she walked down to the driveway, climbed into the driver’s seat of her truck, and drove away. Then he stood there a while longer, just in case she changed her mind and came back. Just in case this hadn’t been a dream.

  When the white face of the moon rose pale and gleaming above the trees, he turned away, stepped back from the threshold, and closed the door. In the distance, gunshots sounded, coming fast and frantic . . . then stopping entirely.

  Alice had gone to Ann Arbor.

  10.

  * * *

  No one who felt like living a long and productive life went into a graveyard in Montmorency County after the sun went down. Even the teenagers, half-feral with hormones and testing the boundaries of authority, learned that lesson quickly; failure to catch on resulted in removal from the gene pool, and kept the things that prowled the graveyards relatively well-fed.

  Sometimes there is nothing at all romantic about “the circle of life.”

  Alice pulled up outside the cemetery gates with ten minutes to spare; not much time, when one considered the magnitude of what needed to be done, but it would hopefully be enough, and she had no regrets. Some things needed to be said before you took a seat on the last train out of town. Otherwise, they’d join the ranks of all the things you never said at all.

  She’d called for Mary several times during the drive, and Mary hadn’t come. She was doing this alone. Touching the spot where her mother’s necklace had been, she opened the driver’s side door, climbed out into the night, and got to work.

  The frickens sang in the distance, trading their cheerful back-and-forth chorus of chirps and trills. Alice found the sound deeply reassuring. She was sure they’d stop when the Apraxis nymphs started emerging from the ground; being tiny cryptid frog-chickens living in a place where everything occasionally wanted to eat you resulted in a highly-tuned sense of self-preservation. As long as they sang, she was as safe as any lone woman who didn’t have a tank had ever been in a Buckley graveyard at night.

  The first thing to do was get inside. The gates were, of course, chained at sundown; they were also left unguarded, since no one really considered grave robbery much of a threat in the modern world. One good blow with a crowbar, and the gates were spread to welcome her in.

  “I do so love modern technology,” she said, tossing the crowbar aside.

  Hauling her things from the truck to her father’s grave took longer than she liked, but at least the reasons were good. The Healy family plot was tucked into a far corner of the graveyard, well away from any convenient gratings, plots of unusual flora, or escape routes. Alice couldn’t help smiling as she doused her father’s grave with kerosene. She hadn’t been alive when the plot was chosen, but she’d seen the mice reenact the process of selection often enough in the sacred ritual of If We Get Buried There, Jonathan, Something Will Steal the Bodies and Reanimate Them, and How Do We Explain That To the Neighbors? Really, Try To Think For Once.

  “Only you, Mom,” she said, and patted her mother’s headstone lovingly before beginning the process of embedding road flares all around the still relatively-fresh outline of her father’s grave. The frickens were still singing. There was still time.

  She was carrying the last of the butane torches to the makeshift storage area she’d established behind her grandparents’ headstone when the frickens finally stopped. The animation went out of her expression in an instant as she dropped the torches, grabbed the first sniper rifle that came to hand, and crouched down to wait.

  The ground heaved, once, then twice, like the belly of a pregnant woman getting ready for birth. Then it went entirely still, an island of motionlessness in the silence of the night. Alice braced the rifle’s muzzle against the back of the tombstone, eyes narrowed, and waited.

  The first of the newborn Apraxis burrowed out of the ground at the base of the headstone, where the passage had been easiest. There were fragments of silk coffin lining clinging to its razor-edged wings, lending the thing a macabre carnival air. It twitched them once, twice, and then rose unsteadily into the air, testing its freedom.

  Alice blew its head off with a single muffled shot, and it fell back to earth without a sound.

  The next three went the same way; they emerged alone, rose from the ground, and died before they had time to make it more than a few feet from their point of hatching. Alice was starting to think this might be easier than she’d dared to hope when the fifth emerged.

  This one came up right next to one of the fallen. It paused, prodding the shattered carapace with a foreleg, before glancing around the area with what she could only refer to as wariness. She froze. Most insects could only really see motion. Alice wasn’t sure that applied to Apraxis—so few people had survived an attack that there had never been any good notes taken on their visual perceptions—but she was certain she couldn’t outrun them.

  Still soundless, the wasp turned and burrowed back under the ground. The rules had just changed. She’d known they would, but still, she’d hoped for just a little bit more time . . .

  Alice set the sniper rifle aside, still moving with patient, expressionless calm, and picked up her shotgun. It had a fairly wide radius when loaded with buckshot. The radius got better if you happened to mix the buckshot with magnesium, which had an unfriendly tendency to ignite from the force of being shot out of the barrel. There was a chance the gun would blow up in her hands, but at that particular moment, it was a risk she was willing to take.

  The ground heaved again. Alice crouched lower and pulled back the hammer on the shotgun, waiting.

  And then the surface of the grave split like a piece of rotten fruit, and the true battle finally began. The wasps swarmed up into the sky in a gleaming cloud, their wings humming in a tune that part of her wanted to drop everything and listen to. Only part, however; the part that had already gone to Ann Arbor. Part of her was still tangled in the sheets of a bed she’d never seen before, and that part, the greater part, was damned if it was going to die before it got the chance to go back and reclaim her mother’s ring. Eyes narrowed still further, Alice lined up her shot on the center of the swarm.

  “Oh, Alice,” buzzed the wasps, in her father’s voice. “You could never be a good girl, could you, my Alice? You could never be obedient, but you’re trying now, my dear, you’re trying. You thought I wanted this, didn’t you? The gunfire and the good death. No, Alice, no. Some things are better than ending. You be good now. You mind your father now.”

  Alice fired. Wasps showered down on the grave like rain, broken by buckshot, burning from the magnesium. The swarm scattered in all directions, and she grabbed her pistols, firing at every glint of motion that came close enough to threaten her. She never stopped to aim. If she had to aim, she was already dead.

  Something struck her in the shoulder, leaving behind a burning wound that felt all too familiar. She dropped the gun in her left hand and whipped around with a speed born entirely of desperation, grabbing the wasp before it could disengage from the bone and squeezing its center carapace until it shattered beneath her fingers.

  It died screaming in her father’s voice.

  “Alice, Alice, Alice,” scolded the swarm. “That’s no way to treat your father. Be good, now. Come with me. It only has to hurt if you let it. It can be pleasant. I can make it painless for you, and we can be together forever.”

  Alice might have laughed if she hadn’t been bleeding. “My father spent his whole life sending me away,” she said, trying to keep the swarm distracted as she fumbled for one of the sniper rifles. More wasps were emerging from the grave with every passing second. She had to stop them, or the town would be lost, whatever happened to her.

  “I was wrong. Let me make it up to you. Let us be together now, Alice. Let me give you the sky, and the night, and the freedom to fly.”

  “Golly. Do I get a little red wagon to go with that?” She found the rifle and double-checked the chamber before leaning around the edge of the headstone, pointing the barrel toward her father’s grave.

  Jonathan Healy had been thorough, dogged, and detail-oriented. He had possessed the Healy tendency to assume he could survive practically anything. But he’d never had the luck or level of creativity that his daughter inherited from his wife, and so the wasps that stole his memories didn’t realize what Alice was doing until the third shot was fired, and the first road flare burst into flame, and the grave began to burn. The emerging wasps caught fire as they spread their wings, and they screamed as they burned. Fire wouldn’t destroy any unhatched eggs. It would absolutely eliminate the newborn wasps.

  “Oh, Alice,” sighed the swarm, stolen voice tinged with anger for the first time. “I’m afraid you’ll have to be punished for that.” It rose into the air, wings glinting with light from the fire below.

  “I guess that means no on the little red wagon, huh?” said Alice, grabbing for her pistols once again.

  What came next was chaos. The wasps descended and scattered around her, forcing her to stay with single shots instead of the shotgun’s dispersion pattern. They made no effort to preserve individual lives, but instead took darting runs toward both sides at once, forcing her to choose which angles to defend. She was doing some of the best shooting of her life, albeit aided by the sheer number of opponents, and she was losing.

  Ann Arbor, here I come, she thought, after the second sting slammed into her left thigh, after she had crushed the offending wasp beneath her hand.

  “This shall not stand!” cried a small, indignant voice. Unable to believe what she was hearing, Alice turned to see the mouse priest standing on her father’s headstone, backlit by the dying flames. He was surrounded by a small circle made up entirely of the elder members of his congregation, mice long past their prime and moving toward the grave. “Blasphemy!”

  “Get out of here! It’s not safe!” she shouted.

  In the firelight, she almost thought the mouse priest smiled. “We have faith, Priestess.”

  “Little mice, little Aeslin, do not be here,” buzzed the swarm, sounding almost amused. “This is none of your concern.”

  “You are the Eaters of Souls and Knowing,” replied the priest. “Take us. All that has been the family you choose is in us. We know all things that should be known. Let our Priestess go, for if the line ends, we shall have no gods. But with you, we might be gods. That would be enough.”

  He was lying.

  Alice realized that even as the swarm began to turn, coming together, circling the grave. The mice were lying. They didn’t believe being eaten by giant evil wasps would make them gods; it made no sense. Their idea of Heaven included cheese and cake and all the Healys that had come before, not frozen preservation in the minds of the Apraxis. This was a lie. They had come to save her. They were old, and they would be honored forever for what they did tonight, if she had the strength to survive it.

  You zealous little fools, she thought, and reached for the grenades.

  “All things,” buzzed the swarm greedily, in her father’s voice. The promise of knowledge was something the Apraxis couldn’t resist. “All things.” And it descended, coming together in a great clump of wings and stinging barbs, obscuring the mice from view.

  There was no other way. Alice threw the grenades, two at a time, and watched the grave go up in flames. The screaming of the Apraxis was so loud she never heard the screams of the mice at all.

  She braced herself against the tombstone after the explosions stopped, listening for the sound of wings. There was none. Still, she took her shotgun, using it to lever herself to her feet, and walked to the smoking remains of her father’s grave, looking gravely at the pieces of carapace that littered the ground in all directions.

  “I’m not that easy to take advantage of, Daddy,” she said, only half-aware that she was crying, and turned away, beginning to gather as many of the intact bodies as she could find.

  The old priest’s kitten-bone staff was lying beside one of the nearby headstones, propped up so that she wouldn’t miss it. She cried harder when she realized what it was, dusting it off with the utmost care before she tucked it into her pocket.

  In the end, she didn’t get out of the graveyard until nearly midnight. That was all right; the police wouldn’t show up for hours.

  11.

  * * *

  Loading the truck took longer than it should have. She could barely use her left arm; there were three stings in the area of her shoulder, one of them cutting all the way to the bone, and another two in the forearm. She hadn’t bothered to count the punctures in her legs, back, and buttocks—it seemed like a losing proposition. She was going to live.

  For three days, anyway, at which point she would die horribly, unless she could find someone who felt like digging Apraxis nymphs out of her flesh. Somehow, she didn’t think that would be all that difficult.

  Alice climbed into the driver’s seat once the last of the guns were slung behind the seat, and the bodies of the intact Apraxis had been carefully wound in tarpaulins and tucked into the back of the truck bed. Putting her hands against the wheel, she stared dully through the windscreen and gave serious thought to passing out. The police had to have heard the explosion, but she knew they would be “mysteriously” detained from reaching the graveyard until well after the sun came up. The human instinct for survival at its finest.

  Really, she could close her eyes, go to sleep, and wait for the sun to come up.

  At which point you’ll be dead of blood loss, you dizzy cow, and what good is that going to do anyone? she thought fiercely.

  It would do all the good in the world, her body argued, on account of her not needing to move around once she was dead.

  “This is a stupid argument, and I want my little red wagon,” she muttered, put the truck into gear, and drove away from . . .

  . . . well, away from everything.

  12.

  * * *

  The drive from the cemetery to Thomas’ house would have taken approximately ten minutes, under normal circumstances. “Normal circumstances” assumed the driver would be using both arms, capable of focusing on the road, and not blacking out every mile or so. Alice was lucky; not only did she not drive entirely off the road, but she didn’t meet any other cars in her long, unsteady trip across town.

  Healy luck. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, and sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference.

  Thomas was sitting at his kitchen table, staring at the back door and wondering when he’d have the nerve to test the barrier. If she was dead—if she was truly dead—he’d be able to go outside. He could find her body and give her a decent burial. He owed her that much, didn’t he? But still, he couldn’t move, not until he heard the sound of a truck pulling into the driveway. The motor ran for a moment, then cut off. He glanced to the clock.

  It was almost five in the morning; the moon was still up. Just some tourist, then, or some drunken hunter who’d pulled up to the wrong house. A door slammed outside. Footsteps on the walkway.

  He was in the front room before Alice knocked—or, more precisely, before Alice thudded her forehead several times against the door, since her left arm was dangling uselessly, and her right was being used to keep her upright. His first impression upon opening the door was that there was more blood there than woman. What little of her wasn’t covered with dried or drying blood was still bleeding actively, and the whole of her stank of gunpowder and ichor.

  She’d never been lovelier.

  “Hi,” she managed, after a moment of mutual staring. “Forgot my coat.”

  “I was wondering if you’d come back for that,” he said as he offered her his arm. “So you’re not a lycanthrope, then.”

  “No—why did you think—? No, don’t tell me. I’m not a lycanthrope, but I’m going to bleed on your floor.”

  “I think I’ll risk it. Didn’t you like Ann Arbor?”

  “It was boring there. Nobody had any little red wagons. I have lots of Apraxis eggs in my back. And in my arm, and leg, and other places. Can you get them out for me?” Alice leaned heavily against him as he guided her inside. “I’ve lost a lot of blood—and mice. Lots and lots of mice. I can make more blood, but only if you get the eggs out. I won’t be able to help. I think I need to pass out now.”

  Somewhat alarmed, Thomas wrapped his other arm around her to hold her up. “There will be no Apraxis eggs when you wake up.”

  “Oh. Good.” Alice smiled and fainted.

  Three generations isn’t a bad run for a family of slightly feral cryptid hunters living in hiding and working without any real backup. Four generations, on the other hand . . .

  Well, that’s even better.

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