My Last Name by Seanan McGuire

Author:Seanan McGuire [McGuire, Seanan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-03-05T05:00:00+00:00

Dominic sat very still on the living room couch, his hands resting on his knees, looking at my father with an expression which seemed neutral, but I had come to recognize as the face he would probably wear if he ever had to face a Covenant firing squad.

“Sorry about the mess,” said Dad, sweeping a dozen throwing knives off the coffee table and into the laundry basket he’d been using to collect weapons from around the room since we walked inside. “Verity didn’t tell us she’d be arriving today. You can tell from the absence of a six-course dinner taking up most of the kitchen.”

“He’s exaggerating,” I said, giving Dominic’s shoulder a reassuring pat. He didn’t look reassured. “Mom’s probably just going to make spaghetti and maybe bake a cake. Unless she gets home super late, and then we’ll have takeout. Where is Mom, anyway?”

“She’s working,” said Dad, with a pointed look at Dominic.

I swallowed a sigh. Mom was sort of a cryptid field medic. She wasn’t a doctor; she couldn’t perform surgery or anything like that. But she knew more about non-human biped physiology than anyone else I had ever met, and her “folk remedies” could often accomplish things that actual medicine couldn’t, at least when the patient was a harpy with mites or a bogeyman with a skin condition. Sometimes her work could take her away from home for days at a time. There weren’t many people, cryptid or otherwise, who could do what she did.

Maybe it was petty of me, but there were times when Mom would be away on work and I’d wonder if Dad realized that he had taken his model for the ideal woman from his own mother, my Grandma Alice: pretty, blonde, occasionally violent, and almost never there. I never said it out loud, of course. I loved both my parents very much. I wasn’t looking to make trouble.

Even though I never said it, sometimes I thought Dad already knew what I was thinking. He looked at my face, sighed, and said, “She’ll be home tonight. It’s a local client, not one of her distance jobs.”

“That’s good,” I said. “Annie?”

“Roller derby practice. Elsie picked her up about an hour before you got here. We’re expecting her before midnight, but not by much.”

It was oddly disappointing to hear that my sister wasn’t going to be home any time soon. We didn’t always get along—we didn’t usually get along—but she was my sister, and I loved her. It would have been nice to have her there to welcome me home. “Well, I guess I could show Dominic to my room—”

“No,” said Dad hastily, cutting me off before I could go any further. “I don’t think that’s a good idea just yet.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Price, but have I done something to offend you?” asked Dominic. “I thought Verity had informed you of our relationship.”

“She did,” said Dad. “She told us when she met you, and when she started dating you, and when you left the Covenant. She didn’t tell us you were traveling with her.

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