Page 20 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“My parents, my brother, the carnival...” said Evelyn, looking faintly distracted by the scope of the list.

“I can call Rose, but there’s no guarantee she’ll make it here in time, and I don’t think they have good internet on the Ocean Lady,” I said.

“It’s fine,” said Kevin. “If this gets bad enough, the road will inform her soon enough.”

Alice stood. “All right. I’m going to go out and find the kids, then. Mary, dear, can you fetch Jane and Theodore?”

“I’m on it,” I said. Because what I love doing most of all is trying to convince Jane, when she’s in a justified bad mood, to come and play nicely with the rest of her family. It’s fun for me. No, really.

Since she wasn’t actively calling for my presenceandshe wasn’t one of my current charges, being in the same house was about as close as I was going to get. Faster to walk than to try appearing and disappearing and count on hitting my target. I started deeper into the house, heading for the library.

Kevin and Jane were both born in the family home in Buckley Township, Michigan, and raised by the Campbell Family Carnival, which moved around constantly—as carnivals are wont to do—but wintered in Florida, resulting in both of them developing a strong desire to settle somewhere and not live in a house on wheels anymore. But Michigan had been out of the question. The house was too haunted by the things that had happened there, the losses that had already been suffered, and the occasional flitting form of Alice as she passed through on her endless journey. Living there wasn’t an option.

Kevin had been the one to hit on the idea of making a place where the whole family could live, forever, and never need to worry. He’d chosen Portland because while the family had no specific allies there or ties to the area, they didn’t have enemies, either, and there was a healthy-enough resident cryptid population that fitting in wouldn’t be as much of an issue as it would be in some other places. It was outside the Campbell Family’s normal circuit, which meant they’d be safe if the Covenant ever came sniffing around; less to tie them to the family was better, as far as Kevin was concerned. The carnival was friendly to the cryptid community, and several of their members were representatives, but they were also relatively defenseless. The kind of cryptids who choose to travel with human carnivals aren’t normally your heavy hitters.

So Kevin had pooled his resources, borrowed money from various people who’d been interested in seeing the Prices settled and reasonably stationary, and purchased a large piece of land outside of Portland, one that had been previously developed for logging and farming interests, then abandoned as the economy of the state began to shift. Clearing the old structures off the land and designing a compound that could work with the natural features of the land had been the work of several years, and had been aided by the local cryptid population, many of whom had been deeply curious about their new neighbors. And bit by bit, Kevin’s dream had taken shape.

One main house, with enough bedrooms that even now the entire family could come together, extras and recent adoptees included, without being stacked on top of each other. The guest house was only half as large, which still made it large enough to be a permanent residence for two separate families of five, with guests and room to spread out. The barn was reserved for doing horrible things to horrible things, and the training facility had won two family votes—by a landslide—as “structure most likely to get us flagged as a militia by the local government.” It was a large, boxy building that contained a full basketball court and flat roller derby track, suitable for most forms of physical conditioning that didn’t require a swimming pool or a horse.

We didn’t have either of those things. Kevin had been building his childhood dreams, not his childhood unreasonable wish-fulfillments, and while the compound couldn’t be called “reasonable” by any normal standards, it was small enough to manage. Mostly.

The main library was close enough to the living room that it was a fairly short walk, and I slowed as I approached the door. It was open. While people might use the library for semi-private meetings, closing the doors simply wasn’t done unless it was a matter of life or death. The library was where we kept all the publicly accessible field guides and biology texts, and without them, people could find themselves getting seriously hurt.

I could hear low voices coming from inside, not loud enough for me to make out words or individual speakers, but enough to give me tone. The conversation was relatively calm, no shouting or raised voices. I still gathered a fistful of my own hair, holding it up and shaking it as I stepped into the room.

“White flag,” I explained, before letting it fall back down around my shoulders. As expected, Ted and Jane were settled in two of the library’s overstuffed reading chairs, Jane perched on the very edge of hers, resting her knees against his. They were holding hands. Somewhat more surprisingly, Elsie was also there, leaning against the nearby wall, arms crossed and expression mulish. None of them looked particularly surprised to see me. I’ve always been the family peacekeeper.

I suppose it’s a natural extension of my position as babysitter. When you’re babysitting, keeping the kids in your charge from killing each other is a large part of the job. If you can’t do it, you’re not going to have a job for long. Or kids to take care of, for that matter.

Jane had been more temperamental than her brother basically from the start, and knowing Alice as well as I did, I sometimes thought their antagonistic relationship had always been inevitable; even if Alice had somehow been able to stick around, she was hard-headed enough that she and Jane would have been clashing from basically day one. Instead, they’d clashed in absentia, and the mother Jane railed against was a more idealized, less human version of the woman who actually existed. Jane knew that. She just couldn’t seem to stop. She looked at me with weary resignation.

“I guess you’re here to tell me I’m not being fair, because she came back and really, that’s what I always used to say I wanted,” she said. “For Mom to admit that we were more important than running around chasing a ghost.” She paused before adding, “No offense.”

“None taken,” I reassured her, and moved to one of the open chairs. “And no, that’s not why I’m here. You’re a grownup. If you want to keep hating your mother, that’s up to you. I wouldn’t, if I were you, but I’m not you, and so I don’t really think I get a say. Now, if you were still my responsibility, I’d send you to your room to think about how we talk to people in this house and not come out until you could be civil, but you took yourself to another room when you needed to, and that shows solid emotional regulation. I’m proud of you for that.”

Jane perked up a bit but didn’t change positions. Elsie scowled at me. I tilted my head back, meeting her eyes.

“Something you wanted to say?” I asked.

“I don’t understand why no one else is mad at Sarah for what she did,” she said, choosing her words with slow precision. “I get why they weren’t mad in the beginning, when we didn’t understand how much damage she’d actually done—we were all just so relieved to have him home again that we couldn’t see past it. But whatever she slammed together isn’t my brother.”

“Elsie,” said Jane, disapprovingly.

“What? You see it too. He doesn’t like the things he used to like, he doesn’t sound the way he used to sound—he’s not thesame, Mom, and that’s not even going into his weird ‘call me Arthur’ routine. That’s not Artie.”

“Maybe it’s not,” I agreed. “Maybe he’s somebody new now, because you can’t experience death of the psyche and come back unchanged. But that’s not Sarah’s fault, and based on what everyone says about what happened—including Arthur, and including the mice—she didn’t do anything on purpose. He touched her when he should have known better, and she wasn’t in control of herself at the time. It’s like when your mother was eight and shot Kevin with her slingshot. The ball bearing went clean through his arm. He still has the scar. But he wasn’t in her field when she lined up the shot, and it’s not her fault that he decided it would be funny to run into the way when she was already pulled back and in the process of releasing. Sometimes we hurt each other, and it’s always our responsibility, but it’s not always ourfault. You can be mad at Sarah if you want to. I won’t blame you. But I wish you could stop blamingherfor something she didn’t do on purpose.”

Elsie’s scowl deepened. “She’s dangerous.”

“We’re all dangerous, El. She’s not special just because she’s dangerous.”

“Why does no one want to see what I’m saying?”

“Maybe because she’s family, and we love her.”

Elsie screwed her eyes shut in frustration. “That isn’tfair.”

“Maybe not, but it’s what we’ve got.”

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