Imaginary Numbers Read online

  Praise for the InCryptid novels:

  “The only thing more fun than an October Daye book is an InCryptid book. Swift narrative, charm, great world-building . . . all the McGuire trademarks.”

  —Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times-bestselling author

  “Seanan McGuire’s Discount Armageddon is an urban fantasy triple threat—smart and sexy and funny. The Aeslin mice alone are worth the price of the book, so consider a cast of truly original characters, a plot where weird never overwhelms logic, and some serious kickass world-building as a bonus.”

  —Tanya Huff, bestselling author of The Wild Ways

  “McGuire’s InCryptid series is one of the most reliably imaginative and well-told sci-fi series to be found, and she brings all her considerable talents to bear on [Tricks for Free]. . . . McGuire’s heroine is a brave, resourceful and sarcastic delight, and her intrepid comrades are just the kind of supportive and snarky sidekicks she needs.”

  —RT Book Reviews (top pick)

  “A joyous romp that juggles action, magic, and romance to great effect.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “That Ain’t Witchcraft tells the kind of story that all series should be so lucky to have: one with world-bending ramifications that still feels so deeply personal that you don’t question if this could have been someone else’s book to narrate. McGuire has honed her craft over a decade-plus of writing, and if you call yourself a sci-fi or fantasy fan, yet haven’t picked her work up, you’re doing yourself a disservice.”

  —Culturess

  “Discount Armageddon is a quick-witted, sharp-edged look at what makes a monster monstrous, and at how closely our urban fantasy protagonists walk—or dance—that line. The pacing never lets up, and when the end comes, you’re left wanting more. I can’t wait for the next book!”

  —C. E. Murphy, author of Raven Calls

  DAW Books presents the finest in urban fantasy from Seanan McGuire:

  InCryptid Novels

  DISCOUNT ARMAGEDDON

  MIDNIGHT BLUE-LIGHT SPECIAL

  HALF-OFF RAGNAROK

  POCKET APOCALYPSE

  CHAOS CHOREOGRAPHY

  MAGIC FOR NOTHING

  TRICKS FOR FREE

  THAT AIN’T WITCHCRAFT

  IMAGINARY NUMBERS

  CALCULATED RISKS*

  SPARROW HILL ROAD

  THE GIRL IN THE GREEN SILK GOWN

  October Daye Novels

  ROSEMARY AND RUE

  A LOCAL HABITATION

  AN ARTIFICIAL NIGHT

  LATE ECLIPSES

  ONE SALT SEA

  ASHES OF HONOR

  CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT

  THE WINTER LONG

  A RED ROSE CHAIN

  ONCE BROKEN FAITH

  THE BRIGHTEST FELL

  NIGHT AND SILENCE

  THE UNKINDEST TIDE

  A KILLING FROST*

  *Coming soon from DAW Books

  Copyright © 2020 by Seanan McGuire.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover illustration by Lee Moyer.

  Cover design by Adam Auerbach.

  Edited by Sheila E. Gilbert.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1846.

  Published by DAW Books, Inc.

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been stolen property and reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher. In such case neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Nearly all the designs and trade names in this book are registered trademarks. All that are still in commercial use are protected by United States and international trademark law.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780756413798

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

  pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  For Alexis.

  I got some math in your math.

  CONTENTS

  Praise for the InCryptid novels

  Also by Seanan McGuire

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Family Trees

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Epilogue

  Bonus InCryptid Novella: Follow the Lady

  Price Family Field Guide to the Cryptids of North America

  Playlist

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Illusion, noun:

  A false or misleading image or perception of reality; a sham.

  Mimicry, noun:

  A close resemblance to another organism.

  Intentional imitation of another person.

  See also “ambush predator.”

  Prologue

  “No one deserves to be the only living example of their own kind. No one should be that alone in the world.”

  —Angela Baker

  On the road from Florida to Ohio, passing through the Virginias

  Twenty years ago

  IT HAD SEEMED LIKE such a good idea at the time.

  Take the grandchildren and go to Lowryland. Sure, it was a thirteen-hour drive, but what was the point of having an RV if you didn’t use it to go on an adventure every once in a while? Martin loved to drive—one of the men he’d been before he died had been a long-haul trucker, and some of the old instincts and habits still lingered in the long muscles of his legs and the subtle cant of his spine. Angela wasn’t as fond of sitting behind the wheel, but her presence caused the worst of the folks they shared the road with to decide to go and drive like fools in someone else’s lane; the traffic police could probably have charted their route by looking for the odd reduction in accidents.

  The trip down to Florida had been as perfect as a two-day road trip with a six-year-old, a nine-year-old, and a twelve-year-old could possibly have been. They’d lost Verity up a tree at one of the rest stops, and had needed to give Alex permission to sho
ot her with a slingshot in order to get her down; they’d had to dissuade Antimony from following the bright lights of a traveling carnival across the highway and onto private property.

  (Angela understood why the girl had been lured. Like her father before her, Annie had already spent a summer with the Campbell Family Carnival, and probably assumed anyone who owned a Ferris wheel was a friend of the family. Not being interested in explaining why she’d allowed one of her human grandchildren to run away to join the literal circus, Angela had been forced to lure Annie back to the RV with promises of candy, soda, and another play-through of her favorite Raffi CD. They were all going to have “Baby Beluga” stuck in their heads for the rest of their lives.)

  Lowryland had been, as expected, wonderful. Verity had scaled the geodesic wall before any of the security guards on duty had realized what was about to happen; Alex had managed to catch sixteen different species of frog, snake, and lizard, all within the Park proper; Antimony had been able to take her picture with several princesses and a very confused Goblin King, all while consuming her weight in cotton candy. Thirteen hours each way was a small price to pay for five days of grandchild bliss.

  Well, thirteen hours each way and a fairly substantial amount of money. The wonders of Lowryland didn’t come cheap, and that was before souvenirs, food, and all the other little pins and needles that accompanied a theme park stay. But it was worth it.

  Angela looked approvingly at her grandchildren, who were sleeping peacefully on the RV couch. The three of them were tangled together in a rare moment of sibling peace, Alex at one end with Verity’s head on his shoulder, Annie curled up with her own head in Verity’s lap. All three were sunburned, wearing Lowryland T-shirts, and completely at ease with the world, trusting their grandparents to keep them safe no matter what happened next.

  Angela knew they would lose that peace soon enough. They were being trained as soldiers in a war they’d never asked for any part of, and while their parents would never force them to fight, she already knew they would never walk away of their own volition. They had too much family involved in the conflict. She could never leave. Neither could Martin, or Drew, or their Uncle Ted, or their cousins. As long as humans hated cryptids, cryptids would have to fight. As long as cryptids fought, the Prices wouldn’t be able to get away.

  She was considering going to fetch her camera when the pain began.

  It lanced through her head like a bolt of lightning, sudden and intense and agonizing enough that she gripped the nearest piece of furniture to keep herself from falling to the floor. It pulsed, rising and falling like a wave, filling the inside of her skull with static, making it almost impossible to keep her balance.

  Slowly, the pulse began to resolve into words. Help. Help me. Help. Help me.

  Angela’s expression hardened. Another cuckoo. One who was broadcasting so loudly that they’d been able to break through her natural barriers against telepathy. She couldn’t pick up simple thoughts the way most of her kind could—it was all out and no in, for her—but if someone really wanted to scream, she could occasionally hear them.

  The pain would pass. Even the most powerful telepath in the world didn’t have an infinite broadcast range, and there was no way she was lingering here, not in another cuckoo’s hunting grounds.

  Angela was all too aware that she was an aberration among her own kind, a freak of nature. She’d been reminded of that fact every time she’d been forced to interact with another cuckoo. It was a miracle she’d survived—something must have had her mother running scared when it came time to select a nest for her defective offspring, something big enough that she hadn’t noticed when Angela failed to acknowledge her telepathic commands. In a species of people who could bend others to their wills, Angela was weak, and cuckoos didn’t tolerate weakness.

  The girl—she thought it was a girl—screaming in her head certainly wasn’t weak. She was loud enough to make Angela’s teeth ache, to make every muscle in her neck lock up in sympathetic agony. They needed to drive faster. They needed to get away from here before the psychic screaming attracted something dangerous.

  Please, please help me, wailed the girl, and Angela went cold.

  Cuckoos didn’t say “please.”

  Oh, they understood the meaning of the word—they heard it often enough. They just didn’t believe in it. “Please” was something victims said. “Please” meant the fun was just beginning. But this girl, this cuckoo-child who sounded no older than Verity, also sounded like she meant it. Like she was in trouble, and terrified, and reaching out in the only way she knew how.

  Angela Baker was a defective cuckoo who had spent her entire life running away from the species of her birth, putting as many miles as she possibly could between herself and the rest of her species. Her desire for isolation had landed her in a sleepy neighborhood in Ohio, where no cuckoo could hope to find anything to benefit from, had led her to keep herself even further below the radar than her natural inclination. And now there was a cuckoo girl, a child, screaming for help inside her head, in the place that had always been hers, and hers alone.

  She had tried to be a good person. She had tried to rise above the inclinations of her species, to choose the better way. She had tried so hard to put her family above herself, to measure her desires against her needs, to get along with the world. And now there was a child screaming in her skull.

  Angela Baker was many things. Cuckoo, accountant, monster . . . mother. Mother, and grandmother, and when she heard a little girl crying, it didn’t matter where they came from or what they were. She needed to comfort them.

  Head still pounding, she pulled herself up straight and turned toward the cab of the RV, opening the small door between herself and the driver. Martin was still focused on the road, humming along with a classic rock CD he had slipped into the player as soon as the children had gone down for their nap. He didn’t seem to realize that anything was wrong. Well, of course, he didn’t. He wasn’t a telepath.

  Angela tried to speak. Nothing came out. She licked her lips to moisten them, and finally managed to croak, “We need to take a detour.”

  Dowsing for a terrified child when the driver couldn’t hear her screams and Angela couldn’t focus enough to be safe to drive was terrifying. She sat in the passenger seat clutching her temples and occasionally whimpering out an instruction, all of which Martin dutifully followed as soon as he was able. Sometimes she wanted him to turn in places where there was no road, following the telepathic signal as the crow flies, rather than as the highway administration drew the maps.

  They’d been driving for an hour and half (including one brief stop for McDonalds when the kids woke up and started whining for fries), leaving the highway far behind. They were cruising along a small backroad just outside Roanoke, Virginia, when Angela abruptly sat bolt upright, throwing one arm out and across Martin’s barreled chest, like she thought she could stop the entire RV by pushing the driver deeper into his seat.

  “We’re here,” she whispered. Then, louder, she repeated, “We’re here. Stop the RV, Martin! Stop the goddamn RV!”

  Profanity was unusual, where Angela was concerned. Martin slammed one meaty foot on the brake, bringing the whole RV to a shuddering halt. Voices were raised in the back as the children protested this unusual stop. Angela barely noticed. She was already slamming the door open and leaping down, not even bothering to check for traffic as she darted across the road and began slogging through the tall grass on the other side.

  “Angela, wait!” Martin turned off the ignition and lumbered after his wife.

  He was almost across the road when he heard the back door of the RV slam. He winced. It had been too much to hope that the kids would stay inside when no one had explicitly told them to. It was even more unlikely to hope they’d listen if they were told to turn around.

  “Try not to get hit by a car. Your mother would kill me,” he called.
/>   “Yes, Grandpa,” they chorused dutifully, and kept following him.

  By the time their motley little procession reached Angela, she was on her knees in front of a large, muddy storm drain, not seeming to either notice or care about what it was doing to her jeans.

  “It’s all right,” she said, holding out both hands in a beseeching gesture. “You’re safe now. I promise, you’re safe now.”

  “You’re not my mother!” shouted a thin, terrified voice from inside the drain. It sounded like a little girl; it sounded like she’d been crying. “Don’t you try to say that you’re her!”

  “No, I’m not your mother,” Angela agreed. “I heard you calling for help.”

  There was a long pause. “I didn’t say anything,” whispered the girl.

  “You didn’t have to,” said Angela. “I’m the same as you are. I’m the same kind of person. I could hear you, even though you didn’t make a sound. I’m not your mother. We’re still family.”

  There was another pause, even longer than the first. Then, very slowly, a child crawled out of the storm drain and into the light.

  She was very pale, with a milky complexion that should have been flushed, with as hard as she’d clearly been crying, but was washed-out and waxen instead, like something had stolen all the blood from her body. Her eyes were blue, and her cheeks were clean, all the mud having been washed away by the tears. She had twigs and leaves tangled in her long black hair, which was almost identical to Angela’s. Everything about her was almost identical to Angela, like she was a carbon copy of the woman, cast in miniature and dressed in a muddy velvet dress that had probably been quite nice before she’d dragged it through an ocean of muck.

  There was a tear in the knee of her muddy tights, and she was missing one of her sensible black flats.

  “Who died?” blurted Alex. At twelve, he was the best of the trio at picking up on small details, and the worst at keeping his mouth shut about their implications.