“The Precise Priestess said, upon your return home, ‘Oh, Thank God, At Least With Barbie Back In The House, I Won’t Have To Do Every Single Ritual,’” said the lead mouse, fanning out its whiskers. “Was she so wrong?”

Aeslin mice have an eidetic memory for everything they see and hear, and it’s against their religion to misquote their gods—i.e., us. Which meant Antimony was definitely at the end of her patience. Also that she had definitely called me “Barbie.” I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. “She wasn’t wrong, no, but I can’t do it today,” I said. “I have to make some phone calls, and you know the cell service in the woods sucks. It’s important. Sorry. I’ll do the next one.” None of the rituals were actually dangerous for the humans the mice recruited to act them out. Sometimes slimy, and occasionally embarrassing, but the mice would never hurt us. They loved us too much for that.

“As you say, Priestess,” said the head priest, ears drooping.

I sighed. The jury’s still out on whether the Aeslin mice guilt trip us intentionally, or whether they’re just really, really good at it, but the fact remains that every time we say “no,” they react like the world is ending—and there’s only one way to fix it. “Meet me in the kitchen in an hour,” I said. “Cheese and cake will be provided.”

The priest looked back to me, suddenly hopeful. “May we cheer, Priestess?”

“Yes, yes, let them cheer,” muttered Dominic, not pulling his head out of the pillow. “It’s not like I was going to get any more sleep this morning. What’s a little cheering after a dinosaur and an alarm clock?”

“It wasn’t a dinosaur,” I said automatically, before telling the mice, “You can cheer.”

The racket that went up was better than a cup of coffee for clearing my head. I blinked.

“Whoa. Um, okay. And on that note, I invoke Bedroom Privileges. Get out.”

“Yes, Priestess!” squeaked the mouse priest, now in much better spirits. The crowd dispersed with remarkable speed, vanishing under furniture and through the holes cut into the baseboards.

(If we ever tried to sell the property—which we wouldn’t; Dad would burn the place to the ground before he let it leave the family—we’d have some explaining to do when the realtor saw the tiny, geometrically perfect mouse holes cut into every interior wall. In the case of long walls, like hallways or the living room, there were multiple holes, at least one every six feet. Of course, that was nothing compared to the explaining we’d have to do if the realtors decided to look inside one of those walls, and found the intricate network of stairways, portrait galleries, and rooms the Aeslin had built there, working around the insulation and wiring. Some houses have a mouse problem. We have a mouse utopia.)

Dominic left his face buried in his pillow. I planted a kiss at the back of his neck and slid off the bed, heading for the desk on the other side of the room. Getting there required me to weave around piles of boxes, which reinforced my determination to be completely moved out of this room by the end of the week. After spending a year in someone else’s apartment, followed by six months in a U-Haul, I was ready to stop living out of boxes.

The power strip on the desk was connected to four phones: mine, Dominic’s, and two burners. I picked up one of the burners, checked its charge, and took a deep breath before unlocking the screen and keying in the number for the production offices.

I didn’t want to sit on the bed while I made the call, so I sat on the desk, crossing my legs and trying to focus on thoughts of serenity and calm.

The phone rang once; twice; three times, and I was starting to think I was calling too early in the day when there was a click and a generically pleasant female voice said, “Adrian Crier Productions, how may I direct your call?”

I took a deep breath. When I spoke, my voice was light, breezy, and half an octave higher than it usually was: the voice of a woman whose greatest concern was figuring out how she was going to pay for a new tango costume. “Hi, this is Valerie Pryor, I got a message saying you wanted to speak with me?”

“Miss Pryor!” Suddenly, the woman on the other end of the phone sounded like she was actually invested in talking to me. That was . . . odd, and a bit disturbing. “Mr. Crier is expecting your call. Can you please hold while I check to see if he’s available?”

“Sure,” I said. I’d barely finished the word when there was a click, and pleasant classical music began to play in my ear.

There was a creak from the direction of the bed. I turned to find Dominic staring at me, a bemused expression on his face. He was shirtless. I smiled and took a moment to admire the view.