Page 18 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“What the fu— Oh, Mary. You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that.”

“Sorry, Evie,” I said, with less repentance than I was aiming for. “Any trouble getting her down?”

“She’s not going to stay down for long, if that’s what you’re asking; she was just about done napping when she got woken up. But she needs a little quiet time to adjust, and being downstairs wasn’t going to help settle her nerves any.”

“No, I can see where it wouldn’t,” I sighed. “They still going down there?”

“Jane agreed to stop yelling at her mother after you blasted through. She’s in the library with Ted, or was when Sarah popped in, dropped a small child on me, and disappeared again.” Evelyn smiled, but I could see the tension around her eyes, drawn tight and glaring.

“Verity’s fine,” I said, telling her what she no doubt really wanted to know. “There’s been a Covenant attack in New York, and they took out the Nest where our people have been holing up. Some casualties, Dominic and Verity caused at least half of them, and neither one of them has been injured. I just needed to get Livvy out of there before she got hurt.”

Evelyn visibly relaxed. “Oh, those poor kids,” she said. “And the dragons . . . ?”

“The Nest looks like it’s going to be a total write-off. But they’re dragons, so I have no doubt they have the best insurance on the market, and they’ll walk away better off than they started.” Well, not Cara. And not any others who might have been crushed or cornered during the devastation. But as a whole, the Nest would make it through this.

The dragons who have managed to survive into the modern, human-dominated era are masters of staying alive, no matter what. They’d be able to turn this situation to their advantage, assuming they could survive whatever the Covenant was getting ready to attempt.

“Did Sarah say anything before she”—I waved a hand, trying to articulate a complicated concept without words—“blipped out on you?”

“Oh, she didn’t blip this time. She just thrust Olivia at me, muttered something about breaking down crystalline matrices, and ran out the back door. I’m a little concerned about her, but I needed to get Liv down for her nap before I could go after her.” Evelyn sighed. “Have things always been this complicated, or have we just reached some sort of complication critical mass, where everything happens all at once forever?”

“Every person you add to a situation adds a whole new set of possible problems,” I said. “We’ve been acquiring new people at a record pace, even before people decided to start making babies again. The trouble with you and Jane deciding to get your babies out of the way when they’d be able to grow up together is that it means they all reached the stage of wanting their own within a few years of each other.”

And ithadbeen a tactical decision. Jane had never shared Evelyn’s love of field work, but she and Evie had both thought it would be good for the cousins to grow up together, giving them a built-in social group that was equipped to actually understand them. By the time Annie had been born and Evie was ready to go back to the field, Jane and I had been accustomed to wrangling all five of the little hellions, and no one had really been considering the population explosion that was waiting twenty-five years or so down the line.

Well, it was here, or the start of it was here, anyway; of the five cousins, only two had actually gotten around to having children of their own. Annie had stated her intention to never have children, and honestly, I wasn’t sure it would have been biologically possible with her current partner, or that Elsie or Artie would be able to reproduce if they decided to try, Lilu genes notwithstanding. Lilu can breed with almost anything, but no one had realized when Ted and Jane got married that Fran had been part Kairos. We’d always thought Elsie and Arthur were half-human. Human being a lower percentage of their DNA meant that it was possible even Ted’s Lilu genetics wouldn’t be enough to let them have babies of their own, assuming they ever wanted to. Sam and Annie were probably a genetic bridge too far.

Although if James and Sam were any indication, Annie was going to deal with her inability to extend the family tree in a traditional manner by going out and press-ganging people into becoming part of the extended clan. One thing was for sure: our numbers weren’t trendingdownward.

“Come on,” I said, and started for the stairs. “We should let everybody else know what’s going on out there, since I’m sure we’re going to get sucked into it sooner or later.”

“I don’t like that Verity’s out there without any backup,” said Evelyn, following me.

“Olivia’s here, which means Very can fight without worrying about her kid, and she has connections in the bogeyman and dragon communities that most people would kill for,” I said. “If the Covenant has reached the stage of mass daylight attacks, everyone’s going to start calling in allies.”

“Meaning Drew might already be on his way to New York,” said Evelyn, sounding relieved.

“Probably,” I agreed.

Andrew Baker—Drew—was Evie’s brother. Adopted, just like she was, and nonhuman, like Sarah and their parents. Unlike them, he was a bogeyman, and had been living with the bogey community in Toronto for the past several years, getting in touch with his roots while keeping an eye out for the Covenant. Drew would make sure the New York bogeymen didn’t put too much of the blame for their current situation on Verity’s shoulders.

Oh, a substantial amount of it was hers to carry. The Covenant wouldn’t have been herenow, looking for signs of cryptid activity, if Verity hadn’t gone on network television as part of a dance competition. She’d been unmasked when a giant snake burst through the floor, courtesy of a very poorly timed summoning by the local snake cult, and the Covenant’s interest in North America had been renewed.

Of course, the family had promptly made things worse by sending Antimony undercover at the Covenant’s English headquarters, Penton Hall. While there, she’d managed to attract the attention of Leonard Cunningham, heir apparent to the whole damn thing, and make an enemy of his sister, Chloe. So not only did the Covenant know Verity was alive, they knew she was part of a community. Not great if the goal was disappearing back into peaceful obscurity.

The living room was quiet as we approached, which meant Jane probably hadn’t come back yet. We came down the stairs to a much less crowded room than we’d been in before: Kevin was there, still standing next to Thomas, both men with tearstains on their cheeks, and Alice was sitting on the couch, Sarah next to her, the cuckoo having slumped all the way over, so that her head was resting in Alice’s lap. Alice was running her fingers through Sarah’s hair, slowly, a communal sort of comfort contact that looked like it was helping them both feel better.

I paused, frowning. “Where’s Sally?” I asked.

Thomas looked around, focusing on me. “She thought it would be better if she could have her reunion with James free from the prying eyes of honorary parents and authority figures, and went out to locate him on the grounds. I believe he’d gone off with Antimony and some of the others for ‘skating practice’?”

“Ah.” That made sense. I switched my attention over to Sarah. “Decided not to go back outside?”

“I can only stand the dissonance for so long, and I’m tired after crossing the continent twice in quick succession, especially after modifying the equations the second time so I could bring a second person with me. His mind is...not soothing.” Sarah sighed heavily, and closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, the white glaze that was so frequently in front of her pupils was gone, and her eyes were unfiltered blue. “It used to be soothing, and now it’s not, and feeling like it should be only makes it worse. So I can’t be around A-Arthur for too long, even if I should want to be.”

“It’s not your fault, Sars,” said Evelyn firmly. Sarah’s age made it easy to forget that she was actually Evelyn’s sister, but Evie never forgot. She was staunchly protective of Sarah, when she got the chance to be. “Everyone knows it.”

“Elsie hates me for hurting her baby brother,” countered Sarah, closing her eyes again, so she wouldn’t have to look at the rest of us. “She tries to say she doesn’t, but she does. She’s not good enough at hiding her thoughts from me to make it so I won’t know that. I can’t change her mind as easily as I could someone who’s not family, but I can read it. I don’t want to.”

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