Backpacking through Bedlam (InCryptid, Band 12) - Softcover

McGuire, Seanan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0756418917 ISBN 13: 9780756418915

Verlag: DAW, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Seanan McGuire's New York Times-bestselling and Hugo Award-nominated urban fantasy InCryptid series continues with the twelfth book following the Price family, cryptozoologists who study and protect the creatures living in secret all around us.

Reunion, noun:
1. The state of being united again.

Reconciliation, noun:
1. An act of reconciling, as when former enemies agree to an amiable truce.
2. The process of making consistent or compatible.
3. See also “impossible.”
 
Alice Price-Healy gave up her life for fifty years to focus completely on the search for her missing husband. The danger of focus like that is that it leaves little room for thinking about what happens after…and now that she’s finally managed to find Thomas, she has no idea what she’s supposed to do next. The fact that he comes with a surrogate daughter who may or may not have some connection to Alice’s recently adopted grandson is just icing on the complicated cake.

So the three of them are heading for the most complicated place in the universe: they’re going home.

But things on Earth have changed while Alice, Thomas, and Sally have been away. The Covenant of St. George, antagonized by Verity’s declaration of war and Sarah’s temporary relocation of an entire college campus, is trying to retake North America from the cryptids and cryptozoologists who’ve been keeping the peace for the past hundred years. And they’re starting in New York.

Alice and company have barely been back for an hour before the Ocean Lady and the Queen of the Routewitches are sending them to New York to help, and they find themselves embroiled in the politics of dragons, kidnappings, and of course, the most dangerous people of all: family.

Getting “back to normal” may be the hardest task Alice has undertaken yet.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Seanan McGuire is a Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award-winning author. The October Daye novels are her first urban fantasy series, and the InCryptid novels are her second series, both of which have put her on the New York Times bestseller list and the Hugo ballot. She is the first person to be nominated for five Hugo Awards in a single year.

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Prologue
 
“Being born to the Covenant means there was never a moment when I chose this life. It was chosen for me, before my parents were born, and it was chosen for my children, if ever I had them. Alice was the first person I met who actually believed we all got to have a choice. She
certainly did.” —Thomas Price
 
Just outside the Galway Woods, Buckley Township, Michigan
Sixty years ago
 
Alice Price-Healy, daughter of Jonathan and Frances Healy, married to Thomas Price of the Covenant Prices for exactly one year, backed up until she was pressed against the side of the rotten old barn at the edge of the swamp, cursing herself for a fool the whole time. It wasn’t an unusual occurrence, either the cursing or the foolishness, but the location was a bit out of the ordinary. Alice normally did the majority of her hunting and aimless wandering inside the Galway Woods, the forest of her childhood, where both her mother and grandmother had died.
 
(The fact that Enid had managed to make it all the way home before succumbing to the venom of the Bidi-taurabo-haza didn’t change the fact that she’d received the fatal bite while still inside the boundaries of the Galway. The forest had always done its best to protect the Healy women. Its best had never, not once, been enough.)
 
But today, oh. Today, Alice had been out doing the annual jackalope count—almost as many mature bucks in the colony this year there had been as last year, and that was a good thing, since the population was declining in most of the country— and she’d gotten off track on the way back, woolgathering about what she was going to do for dinner. It was her anniversary, after all. She ought to do something special. If she’d married anyone else, they’d be doing what Grandma and Grandpa had always done, putting on their Sunday clothes and heading into town for a meal at one of the nicer restaurants, the ones where they wouldn’t even let a lady in if she wasn’t wearing a decent skirt.
 
Sure, Buckley was small enough that they only had two places that nice, and she’d have been happier at the Red Angel or Bronson’s anyway, but that didn’t matter. Hell, if she’d married anyone else, they could have driven to Ann Arbor if they’d wanted to! Or they could have done like Mama and Daddy used to do, back when she’d been little and Mama had been alive to do anything with Daddy. Mama had never seen the point of fancy restaurants and putting on airs, called it a waste of time, money, and everything else a body had to waste. Fran had celebrated her wedding anniversaries in the shadow of the Galway Wood, sitting on a picnic blanket with her lovestruck husband and, after a few years, her continually active daughter, eating cold chicken sandwiches and laughing. That was probably what Alice remembered best about her mother. Her laughter, bright as a bell, and ringing all the time.
 
Well, her laughter, and what a damned good shot she’d been. Alice fumbled to reload her revolver, careful to keep her shoulders pressed against the barn. She could have used a damned good shot. Or a damned poor one. Anybody to help her get out of this stupid-ass predicament she’d gone and gotten herself into, letting herself wander without paying attention to where she was going until she had wandered straight into the swamp.
 
At least if she died out here, Thomas would know right away. Wouldn’t that be a hell of an anniversary gift? “Sorry, sweetie, you’re a widower now, but your deal with the crossroads is null and void and you can go wherever you want”? Maybe if she asked really nicely, Mary would help her stick around long enough to go by the house and deliver the news in person. Well, as much as the ghost of your dead wife suddenly appearing in the living room could be considered “in person.” Really, it probably wasn’t a good idea. She was pretty sure it could be taken as being intentionally cruel. “You weren’t there to save me, so I died, and now you get to go outside, aren’t you lucky.”
 
And there she went, woolgathering again. Maybe it was time she admitted that being married to a man who couldn’t even step far enough out the front door to join her on the porch was wearing on her. Oh, she loved him. She had never loved anyone else half as much as she loved Thomas Price, and that was probably for the best, because some days she felt like she loved him so much it might kill her. Some days it felt like it was verging toward the dangerous kind of love, the kind her Daddy’d had for her Ma, the kind that had eaten him alive from the inside out after Fran had died.
 
She figured love was a lot like the swamp bromeliads. Good and healthy in the right ecosystem, but invasive and destructive if it got planted out of place. As long as she remembered the way love had swallowed her father, she thought she could keep her own love pruned back enough to stay healthy. At least, she hoped so. As long as Thomas didn’t go dying on her or something ridiculous like that, she’d be fine. Probably.
 
As long as she didn’t go and do something stupid like dying here, with her back up against a rotting old barn and no one else human for miles. She was outside of Cynthia’s normal hunting range; the Huldra tended to take her prey a decent distance from the Angel, for the sake of keeping other predators from following her back to the bar, but even she didn’t go this far looking for a snack. Desperately, Alice loaded bullets into the gun and tried to review the territories of every local cryptid she knew, from Sunny the boo hag to Earl the Loveland frogman. None of them intersected with this slice of the swamp. Backup wasn’t coming.
 
Oh, someone would find her body . . . eventually.
 
That was assuming the swamp hags left any pieces of her to be found. They might not. Swamp hags ate a lot like hogs: they tore a carcass apart and swallowed every scrap. They were obligate carnivores, and if she’d been paying a lick of attention to her surroundings, she wouldn’t have let herself drift into their territory.
 
Swamp hags were amphibians, like Loveland frogmen, but unlike Earl, they weren’t intelligent beings or proper people. About as smart as the average frog, that was a swamp hag, but with the temperament of a wild boar and the slashing claws of a cougar. Size of a person, to boot, or bigger than a person if the person in question was someone like Alice, who had always been petite. She’d seen at least five of the slippery fucks before she ducked behind the barn.
 
At least their presence explained why the barn—and the associated dilapidated farmhouse—had been abandoned, despite being structurally sound enough to still be standing after years of neglect. Even in a place like Buckley, people mostly didn’t like to live where man-sized amphibious monsters were likely to slide in through a window and eat the kids in the middle of the night. Alice slotted the last bullet into the chamber, snapping it shut, and rested the barrel of the gun lengthwise against her forehead in a brief semblance of prayer.
 
“Mama, if you could help me out with this, I’d surely appreciate it,” she murmured.
 
Swamp hags hunted in colonies, if she remembered right— and years of working solo meant she always remembered right when it came to predators large enough to do her serious injury. For them to be as large as the ones she’d seen, this had to be an adult breeding colony, meaning she could be looking at, oh, twenty or thirty...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: DAW
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0756418917
• ISBN 13: 9780756418915
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 416
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland