Discount Armageddon

Covenant promptly sent a man to check on them. The family sent him packing and moved inland, to Michigan. The Covenant sent another man to check on them. They didn’t send this one packing. Instead, my grandmother married him.

The family stayed put for a few years, largely due to issues involving a contract with a demon, an open dimensional rift, and preschool, but once the demon finished doing its thing, the survivors weren’t that keen on Michigan anymore. They moved to Oregon. According to the mice, the whole family originally lived in the house where I grew up, which was selected for reasons of geographic isolation and ease of potential defense strategies. I find that concept horrifying. Putting Dad and Aunt Jane in a room together on the holidays is bad enough. Making them share a house should have resulted in homicide. Dad went to Cleveland, met Mom, and brought her home; Aunt Jane went to Portland, met Uncle Ted, and settled down close enough to be a nuisance, yet far enough away that nobody dies.

We don’t really have a family tree at this point; it’s more like a family branch, given the way people keep getting themselves killed or sucked into alternate dimensions that may or may not be capable of supporting human life (the jury’s still out on what happened to Grandpa Thomas, although Grandma Alice insists he’s alive, and my mother raised me never to contradict anyone who regularly carries grenades).

It’s always been assumed that my siblings and I will settle in the Pacific Northwest. It’s not empty nest syndrome: it’s practicality. We’ve lost a lot of family members since Alexander and Enid Healy decided to move to America, and none of their tombstones say things like “died peacefully in her sleep” or “lived a good long life.” If we don’t stick close to home, we don’t make it home.

And people at school used to wonder why I laughed when they tried to tell me how weird their families were.

* * *

“Can I help you?” That was all. No hello, no “this is the Price residence, Antimony speaking,” nothing that might encourage the person on the other end of the phone to keep talking. My baby sister wasn’t being rude; that’s how we were taught to handle unexpected callers. There was always the chance that cold call might be someone from the Covenant. Paranoia as a family tradition: it’s not a good one, but it’s ours, and we’re fond of it.

Sarah once asked why we didn’t just change our surname and go all the way into hiding, rather than screwing around with unlisted phone numbers and keeping our heads down. Sarah’s a cryptid, and the concept of not letting the bastards win wasn’t something I could explain to her. She understood hiding. What she didn’t understand was being willing to be found, as long as it was on your own turf and your own terms.

“Hey, Timmy. Is Mom there?”

“Don’t call me Timmy,” said Antimony, the words carrying the distinct stamp of reflex. “Mom’s not home.”

“Not home where? Will she be back soon?”

“Uh, no.” Antimony is three years younger than I am, but what she lacks in age, she constantly makes up for in insulting my intelligence. “Did you miss the part where there’s a big planetary alignment going on? This week is going to be one of the only times of the year where there’s half a chance in hell of getting into, y’know, Hell.”

I groaned. “Mom’s spelunking the Underworld with Grandma, isn’t she?”

“Mom’s spelunking the Underworld with Grandma,” Antimony confirmed.

“Crap.”

The dimensions align between six and fifteen times a year, depending on the position of the stars, whether or not the groundhog saw his shadow, and lots of other mystical crap I’ve never bothered trying to understand. When that happens, there’s an even chance my grandmother will show up demanding ammunition, additional grenades, and a shower. Thanks to the time dilation that happens in most of the layers of the Underworld, she looks like she’s about my age, which gets a little weirder every year, and means she’ll probably still be making these little visits when the house belongs to my grandchildren.

My mother’s unique skills can come in handy in the various layers of the Underworld, and they’re most required when attempting to navigate the Netherworld, a confusingly named subdevelopment that Grandma Alice is convinced borders on the Christian version of Hell. She’s been trying to find her way into that dimension for the past twenty years. There is no cellular network that extends beyond the first three levels of the Underworld. Mom would be out of touch until she got back.

At least Grandma’s field trips were usually entertaining. But it always took weeks to get the smell of sulfur out of my hair.

“Well, if Mom’s in the Underworld, can I talk to Dad?”

Antimony paused. “Verity? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Everything. I don’t know. Is Dad there?”

“Do you need me to come out there? I can be on the next plane.”

The image of Antimony in Manhattan was enough to bring me stuttering to a horrified stop. She considers pit traps and high explosives the appropriate solution to almost every problem. There was no scenario I could envision where putting her in contact with the Covenant would improve the situation. Elevate it to explosive new heights, possibly, but improve, no.

“I’m good for right now, but I really need to talk to Dad.”

“But—”

“Dad.”

“Oh, fine,” said Antimony, pouring every ounce of scorn she could muster into the word. Putting a hand over the receiver, she shouted, “Dad! It’s your other daughter!”

There was a clunk as my father picked up the extension. “Thank you, Annie. You can hang up now.”

“But I want to know why she’s calling.”

“I’ll brief you later. Hang up now.” He went silent. An old trick: he was waiting for the sound of Antimony hanging up her end of the line. After a few seconds, a click signaled her doing exactly that, and he said, sounding only a little concerned, “Now what’s this about, Very?”

“What makes you think I’m not calling to bask in the loving warmth of my family?” Silence greeted the question. I laughed, more from exhaustion than anything else, and said, “Okay, you win. Dad, do we know anything about a ‘De Luca’ family?”

“Covenant, Spanish branch, joined up about three hundred years after the Healys,” he said, without hesitation. One advantage to having a history nut for a father: if it’s ever encroached on the supernatural world, he probably knows its pedigree. “The last recorded encounter with a member of the family was your great- grandmother, Fran, when she met Jacinta De Luca during a routine sweep of the naga breeding grounds outside Albuquerque. Jacinta was in the process of destroying several nests when—”

“Dad?”

“—she was located, and requests that she—”

“Dad!”

“—stop were met with—what?”

One disadvantage to having a history nut for a father: sometimes it’s hard to keep him focused on what’s actually going on. “That’s not the last recorded encounter.”

“What do you mean?” I could practically hear him frowning. “It’s in her diary, and since there’s no mention in any of the volumes since then—”

“The last recorded encounter happened about a half an hour ago, on a rooftop in Manhattan, between Verity Price and Dominic De Luca.”

Silence.

“He was setting rooftop snares on my route. He may still be setting snares, although if he’s smart, he’s gone home to lick his wounds and write ‘here be dragons’ on his subway map. He killed an ahool! In my city! It wasn’t doing anything wrong! I mean, eventually, sure, but it hadn’t been given the chance!”

More silence.

“I didn’t kill him.”

“Well, thank God for that. Did he ID you?”

“Afraid so,” I said, leaning farther back on the couch. “I lost my temper. It’s hard to remember to play the