Page 103 of Aftermarket Afterlife

When she finally pulled back, I smiled, and asked, “Did you eat your veggies while I was gone?”

“I did,” she said. Then, with a blink, she said, “Your eyes...”

“Are they still bleeding?”

“No. They’re...blue.”

“Well, I’m still dead, so I guess the anima mundi just decided I didn’t need to carry the crossroads with me anymore,” I said, as lightly as I could. Patting Sarah on the shoulder, I asked, “Shall we go inside?”

She sniffled and nodded.

So we did.

Read on for a brand-new InCryptid novella by Seanan McGuire:

DREAMING OF YOU IN FREEFALL

“I was born in Italy, raised in England, and brought to life in America. I’m not a man without a country. I’m a man with all the world.”

—Dominic Price-De Luca

The morgue of the St. Giles’s Hospital in Manhattan, New York

Almost too numb to remember how to breathe

MARY BLEW ME Akiss, the same way she always did: by kissing the fingers of her left hand and then resting the side of her hand against her face, like she was telling me a secret and the secret was how much she loved me. I caught it in one hand, the wayIalways did, and she was gone, one less ghost in a place that felt like it should have been full of them, and I was alone, and Dominic was dead, and he was never going to wake up, or wrinkle his nose at the things I was willing to put in an omelet, or dance with me again.

I was alone.

I stared at the spot where Mary had been, willing her to come back without allowing myself to escalate to calling for her. Because she’d come back if I did, I knew she would; she’d answer my need the same way she always had, since I was a little girl who thought she was invincible and let that dictate half her choices. And calling her back right now would be cruel. She was trying to fix this. She was trying to end this war.

But there was no fixing this. Dominic was dead, and none of the ways we had of bringing people back were going to be anywhere near good enough.

If he’d been willing to stick around and play the phantom, he would either be here in the morgue, with me, or Mary would have hauled him in by the scruff of the neck and ordered him to get haunting. The only form of physical resurrection I’ve ever known to actually work is the sort that was performed on Martin, a sort of human taxidermy crossed with kintsugi, where the damaged flesh was replaced with undamaged pieces of another body, and all of it melded together with a science so far outside the bounds of my comprehension that it became a form of magic. But that form of resurrection only works on bodies that don’t have any scrap of their original inhabitants remaining, and it drives ghosts away.

Worst of all, it doesn’t preserve the people who were there in the beginning. Martin is made up of several men, and while he says he sometimes has dreams he thinks may hold hazy memories from the past life of the body that donated his brain, that’s it. The body that provided his heart, his lungs, his legs? It doesn’t get any part in who he is now.

I loved Dominic’s body, maybe before I loved his heart, because I saw him before I knew him, but that didn’t mean I wanted the flesh without the man. Dominic’s body without Dominic inside would just be a stranger who hurt to look at. I didn’t want that.

He was gone.

He was really, truly gone, and he wasn’t coming back to me. I hiccupped, starting to cry again, feeling the tears trickle slick and slow through the dried blood on my face, and I wanted to stop crying, because every tear that dripped off my chin to fall to the floor took another tiny fragment of Dominic away from me, and I wanted to shower for a year, until I had sluiced every bit of blood away, and those two desires were entirely incompatible, and nothing I did would make them stop. I allowed myself to look back at the shrouded form of the man who had been my husband, and the past tense in that sentence hurt like hell. “Until death do us part” wasn’t supposed to be an instruction.

“Guess you got away from my crazy family after all,” I said, and wiped my eyes, careful not to smear blood into them. “They really did adore you, you know. Not as much as I did, but no one ever adored you as much as I did. I love you, asshole. Even if you always did think you were Batman.”

Standing here talking to a corpse wasn’t going to get me any closer to that shower, or to snapping out of the shock I could feel settling over me like a warm, heavy blanket, smothering my senses and making my body feel alarmingly far away. If there’s one thing I’ve always been, it’s connected to my body. I know my physicality better than most people do, and I define myself by it. But now, I felt like I was wrapped in heavy cotton, dulling everything around me, making my limbs slow to respond to my commands, making everything feel very far away.

I wiped my eyes again. “I’m sorry I wasn’t faster,” I said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t better. I’m sorry you won’t be there to see our babies grow up, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry...” There was no chance I’d stop crying after that. The tears came hard and heavy, running down my face until it felt like they might drown me. My nose clogged up until I could barely breathe, which didn’t help my fear of suffocation, and my knees slowly buckled, leaving me to sink to the ground next to the platform where Dominic was lying, silent and shrouded.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I kept murmuring, until the tears were everything. The tile was cool against my forehead, and there was no air left in the slowly spinning room, there was only grief and the taste of salt, until I wept myself into unconsciousness, and even that was gone.

• • •

I hadn’t been dancing much since Olivia was born. Oh, I’d been doing what I could to stay limber and avoid losing too much strength—there’s no age where it’s really safe for a dancer to neglect their core, but past the age of twenty-five or so, any ground lost is ground that may not be regained. So I’d been practicing and training every minute I got, but I hadn’t beendancing, hadn’t been throwing myself into the music and the arms of a partner the way I wanted to. First I’d been pregnant, and then I’d been recovering from my pregnancy—which hadn’t been an easy one. People say you’ll “glow” and look back on those days with joy and nostalgia, but I’d mostly seen them as a long series of aches and pains, my body feeling less like my own with every unrequested transformation, swollen ankles and loosened joints, all capped off by gestational diabetes combined with an insatiable craving for frozen hot chocolate, which really wasn’t a compatible desire.

Honestly, I would have said that all those “easy pregnancy” stories were myths, designed to convince people to keep on having babies, if not for the fact that Shelby’s pregnancy had overlapped with mine, and to hear her talk about it, had basically been a vacation crossed with a trip to the spa. She’d been radiant, hungry, and horny, with no real medical complications, and a fast, easy birth, making my own unplanned C-section seem positively unfair. If not for the fact that Dominic had hauled me off to St. Giles’s as soon as I’d gone into labor, where Dr. Morrow had been able to heal my incisions in a matter of days, I would have beenlivid.

But Olivia made up for all the trouble she’d caused on her way into the world. Olivia waswonderful. I’d never been that excited about the idea of becoming a mother. If it happened, it happened, if it didn’t, it didn’t. Pregnancy isn’t great for a dancer’s career under the best of circumstances, and it’s not that much better for a cryptozoologist’s. Becoming slow and heavy is generally bad for a person’s chances of survival in the field, and sitting out nine months of my life for the sake of allowing someone else to leech calcium from my bones just didn’t seem like the best use of my time. And then the line on the pregnancy test had popped positive, and my nausea and aching breasts had taken on a whole new meaning, and the idea of a little person who was the best parts of me and Dominic mixed together had become more appealing than I could have believed possible.

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