“Don’t worry, Alex, if he tries to start trouble with you, I’ll come to your rescue. I’m supposed to be his successor, after all. He listens to me.” Shelby leaned in and kissed me before I could point out the flaws in her logic. Her lips were soft and warm and tasted like beeswax lip balm, and I was kissing her back before I could remind myself what a terrible idea this was.

Shelby pushed herself closer still, sliding one knee between my legs as she did something clever with her hands that resulted in her shirt being hiked up to her collarbones. Her breasts pressed against my chest, nothing keeping her skin from mine.

Dim reason told me to make one more effort to keep myself from being murdered by a large Australian cryptozoologist, and was promptly shouted down by my libido, which was much more interested in the present goings-on. I tugged at Shelby’s shirt, and she obliged by leaning back long enough to let me pull it off over her head.

“I see you’ve got the spirit now,” she said, and then her mouth was back on mine, and there was no more conversation for a while.

Having sex with Shelby in a house that was, at least nominally, her parents’ was . . . strange at best. We’d been sexually active while we’d been living with my grandparents, of course, but neither of them was human, and neither of them cared, providing we used protection and didn’t do anything messy outside of our shared bedroom. The one time I’d tried to bring up the subject with my grandfather, who had at least started out human—before he died and was brought back to life by carelessly applied science—he had laughed in my face. “Alex, your generation didn’t invent sex, and we came to terms with the idea of our descendants getting intimate with other people when your mother called home and told us she was pregnant. We really don’t care.”

That had been the household policy ever since, and it was a good one. I doubted my parents would be quite as easygoing about premarital relations under their own roof, and I knew Shelby’s parents weren’t as easygoing. And somehow, once we got started, that just made it all the more exciting. Every touch, every kiss, it was all stolen, and we were willing accomplices in the burglary of one another’s bodies.

Time ceased to matter for a while. When we were finished, lying spent and sweaty on a bed that had seemed too empty before, and now felt perfectly full, Shelby dropped her head into the crook of my shoulder, sighed, and said, “Going to have to do a lot more of that, you know. We both need the stress relief.”

“What, you don’t find your family relaxing?”

Shelby snorted. “Do you find your family relaxing?”

“Point.” I sighed, running my fingers through her hair, and said, “It’s weird. When we got here . . . enough of the tactics you use, enough of the policies and procedures, are like the ones we use at home that I almost fell into the trap of thinking we were the same. That everything the Thirty-Six Society did would make sense to me. I mean, you have two sisters, one of them’s a misanthrope who likes video games, the other one’s in the arts; your mother’s friendly but deadly . . . your father is sort of where the comparison falls down. Mine’s tall, skinny, and academic.”

“I think all families have their similarities,” said Shelby. “Gabby’s a little less, well, willing to play along than your sister. I don’t think she’s going to give up opera in favor of coming back to the family business. And Raina wasn’t always so unpleasant to strangers. She doesn’t trust people she doesn’t know. Hasn’t done since we lost Jack.”

There it was. “Your brother?”

“Yeah. Raina was his favorite, you know? He and I weren’t close—too similar in some ways, we always wound up wanting to kill each other, and that’s no good for anyone—but the two of them were like ticks on a sheep. Where he went, so did she, always. She holds herself responsible for what happened with him.”

“How? Cuckoos can get to anyone. That’s part of what makes them so dangerous.”

“You know that, and I know that, and even your family knows that. Raina knows on some level, I suppose, but most of her just knows that Jack stopped calling, and stopped answering her email, and she didn’t sound the alarm. I don’t think we could have saved him at that point—it wasn’t really possible by then, you know? He was too far gone when he cut contact—but that’s not going to help her forgive herself.”

“No, it’s not.” I kissed Shelby’s forehead. “I’m sorry. I can’t imagine losing a sibling.” Except that was a lie. I had imagined it, over and over, for my entire life. The idea of the loss lasting after I woke up . . . that was the terrifying part.

“Done is done, you know? Jack was a good guy. I think you’d have liked him. I know he’d have liked you. He was going to take over for Dad someday. Now he’s gone, and the crown falls to me, and I don’t want it.” She sighed again, deeper this time, and nestled herself close. “Need to get some sleep now. It’s going to be a busy day tomorrow.”

“I was sleeping fine before you came in and woke me up, you know,” I protested. It was too late: her eyes were shut, and she had relaxed in that way that meant she wasn’t going to be talking anymore tonight. She couldn’t actually go to sleep instantly, but had learned to fake it at some point. It was probably a natural consequence of sharing a bedroom with two younger sisters.

For a little while, I just lay there and listened to her breathing. Then I closed my own eyes again, and let sleep come back to me.

“You’re both going to get murdered, and it’s going to be horribly messy.” The proclamation was made with incredible good cheer—“chirpy, treacle-y, Sleeping Beauty talks to the woodland creatures” levels of good cheer. I pried my eyes open and peered into the faintly bleary distance. Shelby was still asleep, her head tucked under one of the pillows and her right arm slung across my waist. That meant the tall blonde blur couldn’t be her.

It hadn’t sounded quite like her mother, and so I took a guess. “Gabrielle?”

“Oh, you are good. Yes, this is Gabby, I’m here because you’re about ten minutes short of sleeping through breakfast, and I volunteered to be the one who came looking because it would give you half a chance in hell of Dad not finding out Shelby had switched rooms in the night. If Raina saw you like this, it’d be game over.”