The apartment’s bathroom made the kitchen look spacious, and made me deeply grateful for the fact that I possess the sort of flexibility only achieved through years of hard physical training. I’m probably one of the few people in the world who doesn’t have a problem showering while standing on one leg and pointing the toes of my other leg toward the ceiling. Drying off still required straddling the edge of the half-sized tub and praying I wouldn’t slip. The entire process was enough to make a girl dream of human dry cleaning, and wonder how in the hell the apartment’s usual super-sized occupant ever managed to fit into the stall.
The steam fogging the mirror kept me from needing to face the bags under my eyes until it was time to apply enough foundation to keep me from looking like I was actually dead. I have the sort of farm-girl complexion that tans fast and pales even faster, which means my current nocturnal schedule leaves me looking like I’m a little under the weather all the time. It’s all part of the standard family genetic package, along with the cryptid mice and the generation-spanning blood feud. Price Girl version twelve, now with real salsa-dancing action. I’m five-two, with blue eyes, white-blonde hair, and a cheerleader smile—just your basic girl next door, assuming your girl next door comes spring-loaded with seventeen ways to kill a man. Which implies a pretty interesting neighborhood that most people probably don’t want to visit.
Seventeen ways to kill a man is an average, by the way. I only have about six ways to kill a man when I’m fresh out of the shower, and I’m an underachiever in that regard. Antimony usually has twenty-six ways to kill a man, at least last time I checked.
My little sister is special.
The glass and gummy bears were gone by the time I finished getting dressed, putting on my makeup, and working enough gel into my hair to keep it from getting out of control. Even cropped punky-pop-star short, it has a mind of its own, probably because I have to shove it under a wig whenever I attend a dance competition. But that’s the deal I made with my folks: Verity Price will never have a dancing career. Valerie Pryor, on the other hand, can dance as much as she wants, as long as the real work keeps getting handled. When it’s cryptids versus the cancan, the cryptids win, or I go back to Oregon.
The mice had disappeared along with the mess. Hopefully, that meant they were taking their religious holiday into the hall closet where it belonged. What was the point of converting a Barbie Dream House for them if they weren’t going to
Muffled cheering came from the closet. I let out a relieved breath. The colony would stay occupied for however long their celebration was slated to last, which meant I could worry about food instead of worrying about them.
The fridge was divided into two distinct sides: mine, and the mice’s. My shelves were essentially empty, holding a half-empty bottle of store-brand cola, a package of stale tortillas, two containers of takeout Chinese from the previous week, and a stick of butter I was pretty sure was there when I moved in. The mice, on the other hand, had an assortment of imported cheeses, several jars of Mom’s homemade jam, and—most tempting of all—half a chocolate cake from the bakery down the block.
I stared longingly at the cake before muttering a curse, grabbing the tortillas, Chinese food, and butter, and slamming the refrigerator door. The mice have a sixth sense when it comes to cake. They’d swarm if I so much as touched the plate, religious observances temporarily superseded by the desire to demand baked goods. No amount of cake was worth that sort of chaos this soon after getting out of bed.
Buttering the tortillas and filling them with aged sesame noodles and sweet-and-sour chicken produced a passable, if bizarre, form of fajita.
“It’s the thought that counts,” I said, shoving the second half of my “fajita” into a plastic baggie that would hopefully keep the sweet-and-sour sauce from staining my coat. I put the baggie in my pocket.
If it was the thought that counted, maybe I ought to think about buying groceries. Food was easier at home, where Mom did all the shopping and Dad did the bulk of the cooking. Living at home came with a lot of bonuses that hadn’t been visible until I moved out. The cheering in the closet rose in volume again. I winced. Bonuses like the mice having their own sound-proofed attic.
“I’m leaving for work now,” I called, unlatching the kitchen window. A week of careful oiling and counter- weighting had rendered it incapable of standing open on its own. It would slam closed as soon as I let go. “Try not to break anything else today, okay?”
Distant cheering seemed to be the only answer I was going to get.
Choosing discretion as the better part of valor, I hoisted myself onto the windowsill, careful to keep a firm grip on the edge of the window itself. It was only a three-story drop to the unlit courtyard, but I knew from studying it during the daylight that it was narrow and cluttered with a wide variety of convenient ways for me to get hurt, ranging from trash cans to the ever-popular “rusty chain-link fence.”
It was dark enough that I couldn’t even see the window of the apartment across from me. The ambient glow of the city lights illuminated the sky, but none of it seemed willing to penetrate the space between the buildings.
Sliding my legs out the window, I pushed off from the windowsill and fell into the dark.
Three
“Pass the dynamite.”
IT HAD ONLY TAKEN AN AFTERNOON for me to memorize the layout of the courtyard, although keeping the dimensions straight in my head had required bouncing off the fire escape twice and coming within a single missed handhold of breaking several major bones. Learning the layout of the neighborhood had taken a little longer. It had been almost three weeks before I could make a full circuit of the block without needing to remove my blackout goggles at least once, and I still wasn’t willing to cross streets when I couldn’t see the status of the light. That would come later.
“Remember, Very,” Dad used to say when I whined about the goggles, “if your opponent has night vision and you’ve never bothered to learn the local landmarks by anything but sight, you’re going to be in a bit of a pickle when it’s time to avoid getting disemboweled.”
Truer words have doubtless been spoken. If they were spoken in our household, they probably had something to do with causing—or surviving—severe bodily harm. Other kids got chores and teddy bears; we got gun safety classes and heavy weaponry. Normal’s what you make it.
I fell about four feet straight down, building momentum, and grabbed the bottom of the fire escape just before the fall could get out of my control. Swinging myself around, I hit the corner of the building with both feet and shoved off, translating the energy of the impact into a leap that carried me across the five-foot gap and onto the building across the way. I was off and running, leaving mouse holy rituals and semilegal sublets behind me as I started accelerating in the direction of work. I could make it on time if I managed to avoid any rooftop traffic jams.
None of my teachers in elementary or high school thought there was anything weird about the way I ran home after school for “lessons.” Most of the kids I knew had some sort of “lessons” to go to, although most of them were also more willing to explain what they were learning. It was probably a good thing that no one ever asked me. The early classes would have seemed normal enough—a lot of little girls take gymnastics and ballet—but they were
