Page 14 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“You want to talk about it?”

“Honestly, I don’t know where to start.”

I smiled a little, thinking of Sally and her frustration at the easy shorthand with which we tended to describe family history. “Start wherever you like.”

“My sister hates my mother, and I can’t say for sure that she’s wrong to hate her, but I don’t think she’s all the way right, and I know she’s armed, and they’re both about to be in the same house with three of my children.”

“That’s a good place to start, and a reasonable thing to be conflicted about, really.”

He sighed again, dragging one hand backward through his hair, making it stick up in the front like he was some sort of frustrated inventor out of a science fiction movie. “It was easier when we were kids. The worst Jane usually had was a slingshot and some knives, and I’m fast enough that even if she lost her temper, nobody got hurt. And Mom was...Mom was Mom. She showed up, wished us a happy birthday even if it was nowhere near our birthdays, dropped off a bunch of presents and promisedthistrip was the one where she would find Dad and bring him home,thistrip was the last one, for honest and for true.” He paused, looking at me mournfully. “But it never was. There was always just one more, and Jane got older, and they got farther and farther apart, and now it finallywasthe last trip, and it feels like there’s so much distance between them that it doesn’t even matter. She did the impossible. She found our father. That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“Are you unhappy that she did?”

“Yes! No. I don’t know.” He sagged. “Part of me is ecstatic. I’ve been waiting my whole life for him to come home. And part of me feels like we did our grieving a long, long time ago, and he should do us the courtesy of staying dead instead of coming in here and messing everything up.”

“I can understand that,” I said. “It’s okay to be conflicted. This is a big, confusing thing that changes way too many things about the overall family dynamic for it to rest particularly easily. Thomas is back now, and this is going to be confusing for him, too. He disappeared before you were out of diapers, and now you’re a grown man with children of your own. You pay taxes. How’s he supposed to adjust to that?”

“True...” said Kevin, with a hint of a smile.

“And Jane! I wouldnotknow what to do with Jane if I hadn’t watched her grow up. She’s brilliant, beautiful, and stubborn as a damn mule.” I shook my head. “And again, adult, children, taxes. He’s going to be so confused, and he’s going to be trying his best to hide it, but there’s disorientation and adjustment to be done on both sides of the equation. Just remember that. He’s someone who was trained all his life to cover up any weaknesses, but he’s just as out of his depth as you are.”

Kevin shot me an amused look. “Are you really trying to pull a ‘they’re more scared of you than you are of them’ on me right now?”

“Maybe. Is it working?”

“Maybe.” He laughed. “You always know how to calm me down.”

“If I can hit the buttons, it’s just because I installed a whole bunch of them,” I said. Then I paused, frowning. “Huh. That’s funny.”

“What is?”

“Olivia just woke up. But she should be asleep for another hour. It’s naptime.” I pushed my chair back and stood rather than vanishing from a seated position. It’s always awkward to transition while I’m sitting down. Unless there’s something for me to sit on where I appear, I can pop back into existence and fall down.

Oh, yeah. Learning how to be a ghost was a barrel of laughs the whole time.

“Babies wake up,” said Kevin, smiling fondly at the thought of his granddaughter. “I wish you could transport living people the way you do yourself. I’d love to see her.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Ghost rules say no carrying the living through the lands of the dead.”

“I know, I know. It would just be nice if you could.”

“I bet her parents would agree.” Verity hadn’t returned to New York intending to stay there in the long term, but now it looked like she was going to be on the other side of the continent until the situation with the Covenant was resolved, which could take years. I winced as Olivia began to cry. Crying is one of the ways babies and small children announce their need for their babysitter, in the days before the phrase “Mary I need you” is their first response to waking up alone. It had been a while since Olivia cried to get my attention. “Look, I have to go. Olivia’s really upset, and that means it’s babysitter time.”

“I remember how this works,” he said, with an easy smile. “Go ahead and take care of your charge, and tell Verity to call me.”

“You could always text your kid,” I said, and vanished to the sound of his laughter.

• • •

I reappeared into chaos.

Verity and Dominic had been living with the dragons of Manhattan in their aboveground Nest since the Covenant began seriously poking around the city. It was a way for them to keep an eye on one of the largest stable cryptid communities left in the area, and to remain flexible in case they needed to respond quickly to an attack. While the dragon community had faced some challenges, there had been no signs that the Nest itself was compromised, and the last time I’d checked, they had been discussing the possibility of opening themselves up to even more refugees. They had the space, and about a dozen non-dragon cryptids were already living there. It was a stronghold. It was a bolt-hole.

It was on fire.

Or at least the second floor was on fire, which was more than sufficient to qualify as a problem, since that was where I’d appeared. The Nest was built inside a repurposed slaughterhouse dating back to Manhattan’s past as a city trying to be completely self-sufficient: the walls were solid stone, the floors designed for easy drainage and cleaning. The second floor was more like a series of hotel rooms surrounding an interior courtyard than an actual residential space, in part because it had originally been offices and break rooms, not living space. There wasn’t much here that could burn. But it was doing its best.

Sometimes, being dead means I don’t react as strongly to life-threatening peril as I probably should. I was standing on a burning walkway, shouts coming from below me as the occupants of the Nest reacted to the situation, and all I could think about was how difficult it really was to get a building like this to go up in flames. Sure, it could be done, but it wasn’t the most efficient way to destroy the place. It was, however, likely to be the most terror-inducing. I looked up. A large chunk of the ceiling was missing, meaning someone had probably launched an antiaircraft missile at the place, blasting and igniting the masonry. The sound would have been enough to wake Olivia, and explained why she’d started crying instead of calling for me nicely, like a big girl. She was so proud of being able to use her words to get my attention that crying had become less common of late.

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