This seems like a good time to take a second to explain the Price family.
See, up until five generations ago, we were good, obedient members of the Covenant of St. George, an organization I’ve mentioned a few times, dedicated to wiping out all “unnatural” life on the planet. The Covenant defines “unnatural” as “not appearing on the Ark,” which is both narrow and arbitrary, since no one’s ever heard of an actual list of what may or may not have been on a boat that may or may not have existed. My great-great-grandparents, Enid and Alexander Healy, quit the Covenant and moved from England to Michigan when they realized how arbitrary it was. Since they had a lot of guns, the Covenant mostly left them alone after that.
Note the word “mostly.” My grandfather, Thomas Price, was sent to Michigan to check on the Healys several decades later, where he promptly met and fell in love with Enid and Alexander’s granddaughter, Alice. They got married and had two kids, he got sucked into a hole in the fabric of reality, and she dove in after him. Just your ordinary love story, right?
Alice and Thomas’ daughter, Jane, married Theodore Harrington, a nice incubus with surprisingly pure intentions. They have two kids, Elsinore and Arthur—my cousins Elsie and Artie. We get along, mostly.
Alice and Thomas’ son, Kevin, married Evelyn Baker, my mother, who’s sweet, friendly, and was raised by her adoptive parents in Columbus, Ohio. Her mother, Angela, is a cuckoo, the same sort of telepathic cryptid as Sarah. Her father, Martin, is a Revenant, a sort of amalgam of resurrected people parts. Or, as I like to call them, Grandma and Grandpa. Since cuckoos and Revenants can’t have children—something about cuckoos being giant telepathic wasps who just look like humans, and Revenants being, y’know, partially dead—they adopted all three of their kids. Mom came from a human orphanage; Uncle Drew had been orphaned by a gas leak in the bogeyman community where his parents lived. Cousin Sarah joined the family much later, when Grandma found her in a storm drain. Totally normal, right?
Anyway, Kevin and Evelyn—aka, “Mom and Dad”—had three kids. My big brother Alex, was currently finishing up an assignment in Ohio and would be home inside of the year; my little sister Antimony, who had yet to leave home, and had become weirdly territorial about her spot on the couch; and me. Our family tree was more of a bush, but it was a really stubborn bush, like a blackberry bramble. We stuck together, even when we didn’t like each other much, and we refused to be uprooted.
Anyone who tried was going to learn all about our thorns.
Dad was extracting a waffle from the waffle maker when Dominic and I entered the kitchen. Mom was sitting at the table, a cup of coffee in one hand and a newspaper in the other. She likes to get her news the old-fashioned way, since it’s hard to donate a website to the mice to shred as bedding. These are the adjustments necessitated by sharing your home with a colony of talking rodents.
They looked up and smiled at the sound of our footsteps, although Mom’s expression was more guarded. She was raised by cryptids, and didn’t consider herself human until well after her marriage and move to the West Coast. For me to come home with a former member of the Covenant of St. George was, well . . .
Again, there were multiple reasons we stopped in Vegas to get married before continuing on to Portland. Mom not burying Dominic in the backyard was one of them.
“I didn’t expect to see you up and about for a few hours,” said Dad, putting the waffle he’d just finished down on a plate on the counter. The mice waiting there hoisted the plate onto their shoulders and marched away with it, stopping in front of the microwave, where they began hacking it into more portable pieces.
“You’re one to talk,” I said, walking over to give Mom a kiss on the temple. “You weren’t home yet when we went to bed.”
“Your father decided pulling an all-nighter was better than being groggy during his conference call with the university,” said Mom.
“Ah,” I said, understanding.
“Want waffles?” asked Dad.