Page 31 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“I don’t need to beredeemed,” she spat. “I’m already the good guy here.”

“It’s all a matter of perspective, I assure you.”

“Why did you attack the carnival?”

“Oh, we didn’t only attack this one,” he said, calmly.

All of us blinked. Jane spoke first, demanding, “What?”

“Her little background was too meticulous for her not to have spent time with a carnival,” he said, eyes still on Annie. The rest of us were apparently so much background noise to him. I couldn’t entirely blame him—the girl with the fists on fire was definitely a more immediate concern than anyone else—but I also couldn’t see the wisdom of dismissing Alice, ever. It seemed like a good way to take a bullet to the head. “So we just tracked down the North American carnivals that fit the profile closely enough to be a possibility, and staked them all out. It’s a dying game, you know, this carnival life. We only found five shows that could have sheltered you. You led us straight to them.”

Annie snarled, the fire around her hands getting brighter as it shifted from red into yellow. Sam actually took a half-step away, repelled by the heat that was rising from his girlfriend.

“So when we judged you’d had enough time to have been informed about the events in New York, I ordered my teams to hit the carnivals.”

“Oh, and I’m supposed to believe you just happened to be at the one we came running toward?”

“Give my research more credit,” said Leonard, voice cool. “Of the five possibilities, this one was the most likely. It fit all the geographic markers for places where we knew your family had been seen, and it had the resources to have given you the training you demonstrated in your time with us. I have teams at the other four locations, taking care of the wreckage.”

It was Sam’s turn to snarl, lips drawing back to show strong, square teeth.

Leonard gave him a disdainful look before he focused on Antimony again. “Thisis what you’d choose over me? This...mockery of the human form?”

Jane had had enough. She stepped forward, bumping Annie out of the way and narrowly avoiding her fists as she stalked toward Leonard, shoulders tight and lips thinned. She looked like every mother who’s ever raged, and he pulled back, clearly confused by what this soft-featured, apparently unarmed woman could be thinking.

Jane stopped right in front of him, reached out, and poked him in the chest with one finger, rocking him backward.

“I— What?”

“You, sir, are an arrogantasshole,” Jane spat. “You attacked people because, what? You thought it would attract my niece’s attention? You think she’s going to leave a boy who spentyearswaiting patiently for her to come home because you flex your boarding-school biceps and say ‘Oh I organized a terror campaign to make you like me’? Does the Covenant not teach logic anymore, or did they figure out that teaching your baby terrorists how to think for themselves just leads to more of them leaving the fold? Prejudice very rarely survives long in the face of actual reality.”

“Madame,” said Leonard, with every scrap of pride he could gather in the face of her furious onslaught, “who are you?”

“Jane Price,” said Jane, leaving off her husband’s last name as a means of keeping him out of this. If necessary, Theodore would still be able to run. It was never going to happen, but at least the possibility was there.

“How many of you peoplearethere?”

“More than enough,” said Alice. “Drop the gun.”

He gave her a dismissive look. “I think I know which one you are. As you were clearly clever enough not to come alone, what makes you think I did?” He returned his attention to Antimony. “The offer’s still on the table, my dear, but it won’t be for much longer.”

The fire around her hands paled again, staying yellow but shifting from deep to very, very light, verging on white.

Leonard took a step backward, looking toward Alice, who was the only person with a drawn weapon. “You can fire,” he said. “You can shoot me now. It won’t end the Covenant. It will just enrage my father, and stoke their rage against your traitorous family to even greater heights. But you can kill me. And as soon as you pull the trigger, my people will cut this tent to ribbons.”

The carnival survivors who had been sitting in frozen silence through all of this gasped, and some of the children started to cry. Leonard shrugged, apparently unmoved.

“The choice is yours,” he said, and took another step back.

As soon as he had exited the tent and could no longer see me, I blinked out. I reappeared at the edge of the field, where Bon had dropped us to begin with, and looked toward the carnival.

Leonard had been telling the truth. I could see at least twenty people arrayed around the intact tent, all armed, all of them clearly prepared to fire. He’d never said theywouldn’tshoot if he was allowed to leave unharmed; he’d just made it clear that the timeline on them opening fire would be severely reduced if he went down. What the hell was their game, anyway?

Attacking the carnivals to draw the Prices out of hiding wasn’t the worst plan I’d ever heard. Sam’s grandmother wasn’t currently on the road; her show had been severely damaged during a previous encounter with the Covenant, and was still in the process of rebuilding. We didn’t need to worry about her. The fact that only five shows had been identified as possible targets made a depressing amount of sense. For a show to be a match to the background Antimony had given the Covenant, it would need to be of a certain size and age, independently owned, with enough in the way of performance acts—rather than just rides—for her to have been trained there.

When I was an actual teenager, there might have been dozens of shows like that operating around the country. But time had whittled them away, and it was almost surprising to know that as many as five had managed to survive this long.

No telling how many would still exist tomorrow. Carnivals that fit the profile would be as likely to attract cryptids as the Campbells were, and that would make them prime targets for a purge. And it’s relatively easy to purge a carnival, when compared to actual locals. There will always be people who say “think of the children” like it’s a commandment, right up until it’s applied to a bunch of carnie kids.

---