Target Practice Read online

  “There probably is.” Enid cracked a smile. “But look: you’re speaking to me. So if you choose to turn me over to the authorities, I’ll go quietly, and feel that I have earned my punishment. What happened?”

  Alexander sighed, looking down at his root beer before he said, “Alice wasn’t quick enough getting home, and when she did get here, she’d managed to ruin another pair of blue jeans. Ripped the knees right out.”

  “I heard the shouting, and trousers can be patched.” Enid resumed her dinner preparations, hands moving automatically through the familiar motions. “How angry is he?”

  “He feels like we’ve all betrayed him, like Alice never had a chance to be normal. He doesn’t understand that she never wanted to be his kind of normal—and honestly, he doesn’t know what that word means. This is how he grew up. This is the only world he’s ever known.”

  “Maybe that’s what makes the alternative seem so appealing,” said Enid. “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Mind you, I always assumed that meant the other side of the fence was where all the bodies were buried, but that’s neither here nor there. He wants to keep her safe. He loves her. All of this is his way of trying to be a good father, and while I can’t say I approve, I can’t say I blame him, either. Not after what happened to Daniel. Not after what happened to Fran.”

  “There are plenty of bodies buried on our side of the fence,” agreed Alexander, and heaved a sigh. “He’s still on edge over Thomas. Afraid the man is here to kidnap Alice and drag her back to the Covenant for their judgment.”

  “As if a Price boy would go back on his word like that,” said Enid. She opened the oven, testing the heat with her hand before placing the roasting pan on the rack. “Tommy says he’s not here to betray us, and I believe him.”

  “But this is where having a Covenant upbringing becomes an asset,” said Alexander. “You know that no Price would break a promise that had been freely given, or change his mind once he had decided on a course of action. Johnny only has what we’ve told him.”

  “And for most of his life, we’ve been telling him not to trust the Covenant,” said Enid grimly. She closed the oven. “We couldn’t have anticipated this. I always assumed that if they sent someone after us, it would be an outright attack, not a quiet little spy. I was almost looking forward to it. We could have put a few bullets in the appropriate places, and been left alone for another thirty years.”

  “Unfortunately, sweetheart, the Covenant knows us as well as we know them,” said Alexander.

  Enid sighed as she walked over to sit down across from him. “Yes, they do. Their information is equally outdated. So Tommy’s presence makes Johnny even more paranoid, and all the while, Alice is getting older and less willing to listen to her father, especially when he insists on making damn stupid rules. How long before all this blows up in our face?”

  “Not long,” said Alexander. “Something’s got to change.”

  “I suppose that’s true.” She leaned across the table, grabbed his root beer, and took a swig before passing it back. “Can you keep an eye on the chicken, make sure that it doesn’t burn the house down? I think I need to go calling on our neighbors.”

  “I’m assuming that by ‘neighbors’ you mean ‘Thomas Price,’” said Alexander.

  Enid smiled. “You’re a smart man.”

  “You married me for a reason.”

  “Yes—you had a fabulous rear end when you were younger.”

  Alexander roared with laughter. Saluting his wife with his half-empty root beer, he said, “Just be careful, and take the truck. I don’t want you walking all that way alone.”

  “I’ll be home soon,” said Enid, and left.

  There were rats in the attic. Thomas hadn’t seen any, and his attempts at trapping them had all, thus far, come to naught, but he still heard them scampering about when he was trying to sleep at night. He’d try poison next, if it didn’t stop. Or maybe he’d set the tailypo among them.

  “You’re a carnivore,” he said to the long-tailed creature that was currently sitting on the kitchen table, peeling an egg with its unnervingly humanoid hands. The tailypo looked up, watching him unblinkingly. “I know you prefer hard-boiled eggs and whatever it is I’m trying to eat, but you must have hunted for yourself before you came here. You could catch the rats, couldn’t you?”

  The tailypo snuffled once and went back to peeling the egg. Thomas sighed.

  “This is how it begins, you know,” he said. “I’m speaking to the wildlife. Soon enough, I won’t even need an animal to talk to. I’ll just talk to myself, stop shaving, and go slowly mad from the pressure of seclusion. Never give the Covenant of St. George reason to punish you, all right? They’ll find the worst thing they can possibly do, and then they’ll make you thank them for doing it.”

  The tailypo, which had reached the yolk, didn’t look up again.

  The doorbell rang.

  Thomas turned toward it, instantly alert. He didn’t get many visitors, apart from Alice, and she had never used the doorbell. In fact, she had told him, on multiple occasions, that the doorbell didn’t work. Since he doubted she would lie about that—what would be the point?—it didn’t make much sense for someone to be using it now.

  “You stay here,” he told the tailypo. “Should someone attempt to murder me, you can piss upon them and then hide under the bed, as you are already inclined to do.”

  The tailypo made a chittering noise and went back to eating its egg.

  Thomas made his way from the kitchen into the living room, which was beginning to look lived in, if by “lived in” one meant “filled with stacks of boxes, books, and boxes full of books, all of which will eventually need to be unpacked.” The postman didn’t customarily deliver to Old Mill Road, which was considered sufficiently rural to require picking things up at the station, but Thomas had been able to bribe the man to drive out several times all the same, dropping off his worldly possessions one crate at a time. The weapons were stowed in the basement, by and large, where they wouldn’t frighten anyone who happened to drop by—although again, most of the “dropping by” he’d experienced thus far had come from Alice, and he doubted that she would be frightened by something as simple as a machete on the couch.

  The doorbell rang again. Thomas picked up the pace, and opened the front door to the edifying sight of Enid Healy crouched down, a screwdriver in her hand, putting the plate back on the doorbell.

  “You had a short,” she said, looking up with a broad smile. “It should work just fine now. Are you not a handyman, or had you just not gotten around to it?”

  “This is the first time I’ve had reason to concern myself with home repair,” he admitted, attempting to reconcile the woman in front of him with the stories he’d been told about the great betrayers. Alexander and Enid Healy were meant to be wicked, monster-loving masterminds who had turned against their friends and family to begin an orgy of destruction and chaos. That didn’t mesh very well with the couple he’d met on his first night in town. It certainly didn’t mesh with their cheerfully stubborn granddaughter, who seemed more like a disaster waiting to happen than she did the calculating villain in training painted by the Covenant. Everyone above him had wanted him to view the Healys as the enemy, worthy foes who would need to be constantly monitored and observed, lest they destroy the natural world.

  Instead, he’d found a family that just wanted to be left alone to make their own mistakes and live their own lives. And possibly lead dire boars to his back door in their spare time.

  “Well, then, you’d best get on it,” said Enid, making the screwdriver vanish back into a pocket as she got to her feet. “This place would be happy to come down around your ears if you don’t keep it in shape.”

  “I think the house is too malicious to collapse,” said Thomas. “Dump splinters in my oatmeal, certainly, but fall down? Not quite. To what do I owe the pleasure, Mrs. Healy?”

  “Oh, the usual.” Enid flapped a hand, indic
ating the essential unimportance of her reasons for visiting. “Johnny’s convinced that your presence is a sign that the Covenant is out to get us in general and Alice in specific, since she might still be young enough to be molded into a good little soldier. I wanted to get a sense of what was going on in your head. Also, Alice had let slip that your doorbell was broken, and I rather thought you might like to have it fixed.”

  “Ah.” Thomas took a step backward, holding the door wider open. “Would you like to come in? I can put the kettle on. The stove works. For the most part. When it doesn’t work, it doesn’t explode, so I feel relatively confident in using it.”

  “It’s good to see that nothing has changed back at the Covenant,” said Enid, and stepped inside. Thomas raised his eyebrows. She gave him a sidelong look. “What?”

  “Nothing. It’s just that, ah, Alice refuses to come in the house under normal circumstances. I wasn’t expecting you to agree so quickly.”

  “She might be showing common sense about being alone with an older man, but as I’ve met my granddaughter, I know she isn’t,” said Enid. “This house has something of a reputation with the local teenagers.”

  “Yes, so I’ve been told,” said Thomas. “She calls it ‘the murder house,’ and stays out on the porch when she visits—not, I hasten to add, that she visits often. That would be inappropriate.”

  “Don’t worry, dear, I’m not here to ask what your intentions are toward my granddaughter.” Not yet, anyway. Enid had seen the way Alice’s smile went soft around the edges when she talked about Mr. Price and his spooky murder house. Even if Thomas’s intentions were never anything beyond friendship and survival, Alice was nursing the beginnings of a crush—and a well-nursed crush had the potential to mature into a full-blown infatuation if it received any encouragement at all. “Alice goes where Alice will go. She always has. That’s part of the problem.”

  “I see,” said Thomas. He shut the door. “I assume that Jonathan is using that to support his ideas about what I’m doing here.”

  “You live near the woods and Alice has wound up asleep on your couch at least once; she came home today with the knees ripped out of her trousers, asking for a gun. He’s quite sure that you’re the devil.” Enid looked around with undisguised curiosity. “Still haven’t unpacked?”

  “I’ve been here less than a month,” said Thomas. “The postman only brought the last of my things on Friday. I think he’s relieved to be done with me.”

  “Most of these boxes would be…?”

  “Books. I was a researcher before I got assigned here. I’m planning to continue my work while I’m in exile.”

  Enid gave him a thoughtful look. “So you think you’ll eventually be recalled?”

  “I rather hope I won’t be, which means it’s virtually guaranteed to happen,” said Thomas. “Would you like that tea?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Thomas nodded and led the way back to the kitchen. The tailypo had finished its egg, and was ripping a piece of bread into bite-sized chunks. It looked up as the two humans entered, making a chittering noise and baring its teeth.

  Enid blinked. “Mr. Price, I’m not sure you’re aware, but there is a tailypo on your kitchen counter.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Thomas, continuing onward to the stove. “Alice found it while she was showing me around the woods. It had been injured, probably by something she called an ‘angler tortoise’—I’ve been trying to find one for reference ever since, but whatever they are, they hide well—and she brought it back here to be nursed back to health.”

  “Which she promptly conned you into doing, I see,” said Enid. “It looks like it’s healing nicely. Have you thought about returning it to the woods?”

  “Not quite yet,” said Thomas. He set the kettle on the stove. “If nothing else, it serves as a sort of company. It can get quite lonesome out here.”

  “I suppose it would,” said Enid. There was a kitchen table, flanked by two rickety-looking chairs. She gingerly sat, relieved when the aged furniture supported her weight. “Nothing like the Covenant here, is it?”

  “No, it isn’t,” said Thomas. “I was always reasonably solitary—most of the trainees from my year went into the field, and I was more interested in the research side of things, so I didn’t form many close alliances. Then I started following bad avenues of inquiry, and was sent away to learn the error of my choices. We can all see how well that turned out.” He grimaced, indicating the stained, peeling wallpaper. “At the same time, I never realized how comforting it was to be surrounded by people who would know what the hell I was talking about if I chose to speak to them. Er. Pardon my French.”

  “I was one of those trainees who went into the field,” said Enid, with a sudden, dimpled smile that made her Carew origins perfectly clear. “I was the best marksman in my class. If I wanted something dead, it was on the ground before it knew it was being hunted. If you really think a little mild swearing is something I’ve never heard before, they’ve gotten a lot better at sheltering you study boys than they were in my day.”

  “I know your reputation; they gave me files on both you and your husband before they sent me here,” said Thomas. “If you don’t mind my being candid, that’s a good part of why I don’t wish to offend you. I’m still not interested in being buried in the woods.”

  “I’d love to see those files,” said Enid. “What did you find that was so appalling that they had to send you here?”

  “Ah, you see, you have the cause and effect reversed,” said Thomas. He took down two mugs from the cupboard. “What I found to get myself banished from England was your husband, or rather, your husband’s notes. He had drawn some parallels between monster extermination and damage to the local settlements that I felt needed to be further explored—and then he sent in that write-up on the invasive thought-manipulators you encountered in Whiting. It took years for it to be declassified by our leadership and handed over to the researchers. Years.” He sounded suddenly furious. “We had been tracking Apraxis movements that whole time, for the sake of exterminating the things. When I looked at Mr. Healy’s statement, and compared it to our charts, I could intuit the presence of at least three of the thought-manipulators, maybe more. Frederic Myers calls the phenomenon ‘telepathy,’ by the by. It’s a good word.”

  “I like it,” said Enid. “So what, you confronted the leadership about withholding Alexander’s research? What did they say?”

  “That I was pursuing dangerous ideas, and needed to be reminded of why we do the work we do,” said Thomas. “They loaded me onto the next ship departing for the tropics. It was my job to assess the native creatures, determine how many of them were dangerous and unnatural, and make recommendations regarding future purges of those areas. They sent me to Hawaii, Australia, the Philippines—all the places they thought of as far off and terrifying. I suppose the intent was to frighten me into line. It…let’s say ‘backfired.’ That’s the charitable interpretation.”

  “And the uncharitable?” asked Enid.

  The kettle began to wail. The tailypo flattened its ears and hissed. Thomas turned off the gas and reached for the mugs, saying, “It exposed me to a wide range of people and cultures that I’d never expected to see. Did you know that the Ukupani of Hawaii are not only well-disposed toward humans, they don’t enjoy the taste of us? Their presence keeps actual man-eating sharks at bay. Yet the Covenant says sharks are God’s creatures and the Ukupani are not.”

  “What do you say?”

  “I say I passed a lovely evening playing chess with an Ukupani fisherman while his sons sat by the fire weaving nets and telling the sort of jokes that are universal to small boys, regardless of species. He brought his wife to meet me. She was a shark twenty feet long and white as polished ivory, and he stroked her gills like a man in love. I left their company, went back to my ship, and penned a report that claimed Hawaii was utterly devoid of dangerous creatures, and wouldn’t need a purge in our lifetime.” He grimaced as he
poured hot water into their mugs. “I might have gotten away with it, too, if I hadn’t tried to say essentially the same thing about Australia.”

  Enid raised an eyebrow. “You mean the island of deadly snakes and spiders the size of your face? Yes, I’d wager the Covenant would have known you were pulling their legs if you said Australia was harmless.”

  “Someone caught on, someone else reviewed all my reports, and I found myself labeled untrustworthy and possibly dangerous. So they shipped me here.” Thomas walked over to offer Enid one of the mugs. “I believe you’re a test. If I’m inclined toward turning traitor, you should push me over the edge, and then the Covenant can eliminate us all in one go.”

  “Oh, I would very much like to see them try,” said Enid. There was an unnervingly feral gleam in her eye. “And what if you’re not inclined toward turning traitor?”

  “Well, then, I suppose I’m expected to return to them with a full report on your movements in America, possibly after having assassinated one or more of you. In the best case version of that scenario, I’d have killed you all, drugged Alice—who is, as you say, young enough to be presumed malleable—and carried her home as a prize. Even if she could never be trusted in the field, she might be useful as a researcher. You know how the Covenant hates to lose anything that might be useful.”

  “That makes sense,” said Enid, and sipped her tea. “Which way are you leaning?”

  “Right now, I’m more focused on getting the leak in the upstairs bathroom to stop. It keeps me awake at night. Sometimes I wind up sleeping on the porch. Alice suggested I fix the swing. I’ve been thinking about doing just that.”

  “I’ll send Alex over to help you with that,” said Enid. “I don’t know that Johnny will ever come around to seeing you as anything other than a threat, but the rest of us can be neighborly.”

  “I don’t know that he’s wrong to see me as a threat, Mrs. Healy,” said Thomas gravely. “As I said, I still haven’t decided which way I want to go.”

  “You’re a Price,” said Enid. “You announced your presence because it was both the honorable and the sensible thing to do. If you decide that we’re going to be enemies, you’ll tell us, if only to save any possible confusion. I’ve liked every Price I’ve ever met, but you’re not what I’d call subtle.”