Aeslin mice can make anything—anything—into a religious observation, and once they do, they cling to it for as long as the colony survives. The main body of the current colony has been with my family for seven generations. Individual Aeslin come and go, but the memory of the colony is very, very long.

“How long does this particular celebration last?” I asked, already afraid of the answer.

“Only the length of time between the leaving of the family home and the arrival at the graveyard, Priestess,” said the tawny mouse.

“You mean the family home back in Michigan?”

“Yes, Priestess.”

“Jesus.” That could mean anything between “an hour” and “three days.” Anything longer than three days is usually a festival instead of a celebration, but that’s not a hard rule. I straightened up. “Here’s what we’re going to do.” The Aeslin watched with their customary attentiveness, a tiny congregation of furry bodies hanging on my every word. It would have been creepy if I hadn’t been so used to it. “I’m going to take a shower.”

“Hail the shower!”

“When I get back, you’re going to have all this glass cleaned up, because if I don’t get something to eat before I go to work, I’m going to look into getting a cat. And not,” I held up my hand again, “because I want to provide meat for the next feast. Understand?”

“Yes, Priestess,” said the blue-streaked mouse, echoed by a half dozen others. That would have to be enough. I was powerless to stop the celebration—nothing short of nuclear war can stop an Aeslin religious observance once it starts—but they understand the need to keep their Priestesses placated. They’d have the kitchen floor clean by the time I got back.

Life as the chosen religious figure for a colony of cryptid mice can be a lot of things, but it’s definitely never boring.

The apartment’s bathroom made the kitchen look spacious, and made me deeply grateful for the fact that I possess the sort of flexibility only achieved through years of hard physical training. I’m probably one of the few people in the world who doesn’t have a problem showering while standing on one leg and pointing the toes of my other leg toward the ceiling. Drying off still required straddling the edge of the half-sized tub and praying I wouldn’t slip. The entire process was enough to make a girl dream of human dry cleaning, and wonder how in the hell the apartment’s usual super-sized occupant ever managed to fit into the stall.

The steam fogging the mirror kept me from needing to face the bags under my eyes until it was time to apply enough foundation to keep me from looking like I was actually dead. I have the sort of farm-girl complexion that tans fast and pales even faster, which means my current nocturnal schedule leaves me looking like I’m a little under the weather all the time. It’s all part of the standard family genetic package, along with the cryptid mice and the generation-spanning blood feud. Price Girl version twelve, now with real salsa-dancing action. I’m five-two, with blue eyes, white-blonde hair, and a cheerleader smile—just your basic girl next door, assuming your girl next door comes spring-loaded with seventeen ways to kill a man. Which implies a pretty interesting neighborhood that most people probably don’t want to visit.

Seventeen ways to kill a man is an average, by the way. I only have about six ways to kill a man when I’m fresh out of the shower, and I’m an underachiever in that regard. Antimony usually has twenty-six ways to kill a man, at least last time I checked.

My little sister is special.

The glass and gummy bears were gone by the time I finished getting dressed, putting on my makeup, and working enough gel into my hair to keep it from getting out of control. Even cropped punky-pop-star short, it has a mind of its own, probably because I have to shove it under a wig whenever I attend a dance competition. But that’s the deal I made with my folks: Verity Price will never have a dancing career. Valerie Pryor, on the other hand, can dance as much as she wants, as long as the real work keeps getting handled. When it’s cryptids versus the cancan, the cryptids win, or I go back to Oregon.

The mice had disappeared along with the mess. Hopefully, that meant they were taking their religious holiday into the hall closet where it belonged. What was the point of converting a Barbie Dream House for them if they weren’t going to use it? The stupid thing took up most of the closet, and that meant I had to hang my coat and half my stage costumes on a rack in the front room, which wasn’t any bigger than the rest of the apartment. Not that I would’ve resented the inconvenience if the Dream House would just do what it was supposed to do and keep the mice contained.

Muffled cheering came from the closet. I let out a relieved breath. The colony would stay occupied for however long their celebration was slated to last, which meant I could worry about food instead of worrying about them.

The fridge was divided into two distinct sides: mine, and the mice’s. My shelves were essentially empty, holding a half-empty bottle of store-brand cola, a package of stale tortillas, two containers of takeout Chinese from the previous week, and a stick of butter I was pretty sure was there when I moved in. The mice, on the other hand, had an assortment of imported cheeses, several jars of Mom’s homemade jam, and—most tempting of all—half a chocolate cake from the bakery down the block. Flourless chocolate cake, with bittersweet fudge icing.

I stared longingly at the cake before muttering a curse, grabbing the tortillas, Chinese food, and butter, and slamming the refrigerator door. The mice have a sixth sense when it comes to cake. They’d swarm if I so much as touched the plate, religious observances temporarily superseded by the desire to demand baked goods. No amount of cake was worth that sort of chaos this soon after getting out of bed.

Buttering the tortillas and filling them with aged sesame noodles and sweet-and-sour chicken produced a passable, if bizarre, form of fajita. I will eat something healthy for lunch, I promised myself, knowing full well that by the time I could swing a “lunch break”—sometime after midnight and before two, depending on the foot traffic at work—I’d settle for a platter of potato skins and some hot wings.

“It’s the thought that counts,” I said, shoving the second half of my “fajita” into a plastic baggie that would hopefully keep the sweet-and-sour sauce from staining my coat. I put the baggie in my pocket.