Anyway, Kevin and Evelyn—aka, “Mom and Dad”—had three kids. My big brother Alex, was currently finishing up an assignment in Ohio and would be home inside of the year; my little sister Antimony, who had yet to leave home, and had become weirdly territorial about her spot on the couch; and me. Our family tree was more of a bush, but it was a really stubborn bush, like a blackberry bramble. We stuck together, even when we didn’t like each other much, and we refused to be uprooted.

Anyone who tried was going to learn all about our thorns.

Dad was extracting a waffle from the waffle maker when Dominic and I entered the kitchen. Mom was sitting at the table, a cup of coffee in one hand and a newspaper in the other. She likes to get her news the old-fashioned way, since it’s hard to donate a website to the mice to shred as bedding. These are the adjustments necessitated by sharing your home with a colony of talking rodents.

They looked up and smiled at the sound of our footsteps, although Mom’s expression was more guarded. She was raised by cryptids, and didn’t consider herself human until well after her marriage and move to the West Coast. For me to come home with a former member of the Covenant of St. George was, well . . .

Again, there were multiple reasons we stopped in Vegas to get married before continuing on to Portland. Mom not burying Dominic in the backyard was one of them.

“I didn’t expect to see you up and about for a few hours,” said Dad, putting the waffle he’d just finished down on a plate on the counter. The mice waiting there hoisted the plate onto their shoulders and marched away with it, stopping in front of the microwave, where they began hacking it into more portable pieces.

“You’re one to talk,” I said, walking over to give Mom a kiss on the temple. “You weren’t home yet when we went to bed.”

“Your father decided pulling an all-nighter was better than being groggy during his conference call with the university,” said Mom.

“Ah,” I said, understanding.

“Want waffles?” asked Dad.

“Please,” I said, and sat.

Holding down a normal job while serving the cryptid community can be difficult bordering on impossible, since there’s no way of predicting what kind of time will be required to, say, transport a plesiosaur from the city reservoir to a safer spot upriver. Some of us get around it by taking jobs within the cryptid community—Mom is basically a mobile first aid station, providing advice, medical care, and carefully researched remedies to anyone who needs her. Others find jobs that don’t require rigid hours. Dad is known throughout the academic community for his skill with ancient languages and ability to translate virtually anything. The academic community doesn’t know he accomplishes his linguistic feats by consulting with species who never allowed the languages in question to die out, and none of us see any reason to enlighten them. He gets paid, his presence on the books makes it easier to explain how the power stays on when people get nosy, and everything is fine.

(As a whole, our family doesn’t want for funds. Grateful cryptids who don’t place much value on human money have made substantial donations over the years. Dragons tend to pay in gold, which is always nice, and Aunt Lea is an Oceanid, which means sunken treasure. Between her and the finfolk, we could have been comfortable forever just thanks to things other people lost in the ocean. But there’s “not wanting for funds” and then there’s “being able to stay under the radar of the IRS.” We’re all more than willing to work occasionally, if it keeps the taxmen from our door. Nobody wants to negotiate an audit.)

Dad dished out waffles, bowls of strawberries, and—yes—more bacon, which Dominic promptly claimed in the name of the bottomless pit he called a stomach. Dad looked amused by this, and went to the fridge to get more. Feeding three growing, athletic teenagers had left both my parents with a very relaxed attitude about second helpings.

I waited until Dad had joined us at the table with another plate of bacon and a waffle of his own before I cleared my throat and said, “I had an interesting phone call this morning.”

“Oh?” asked Mom.

“The producers of Dance or Die are doing an all-star season. They want the top four dancers from the last five cycles, which means they want me.” I looked between my parents, trying to figure out what they thought of this idea. “They’re going to start filming in Hollywood in six weeks.”

“You can’t be serious.” I twisted in my seat. Antimony was behind me, headphones still around her neck, a disapproving expression on her face. “You said you were done. You said you weren’t dancing anymore.”