Page 4 of Aftermarket Afterlife

There were days when I missed the kids’ school years. From the time Alex turned five until Annie turned eighteen, the house had started waking up at six, kids tumbling everywhere as they looked for books, backpacks, and breakfast—not necessarily in that order. We were far enough from Portland proper that it had never been possible for them to take the bus to school, and so until they’d started hitting their teens and getting their licenses one by one (and stopping there, since Annie had never seen the point of learning how to drive), Kevin had also been up by six, bleary-eyed and slouching as he bundled them into the family minivan and drove them off to learn the things the state wanted them to know.

Maybe it’s cocky of me to admit it, but I was proud of the fact that none of my charges ever skipped school. I’d officially been Annie’s babysitter by the time the older children started hitting the age where skipping school was actually something that could happen, and not just something the big kids did in the movies, but that wasn’t enough to keep me from keeping an eye on the rest of them. Elsie was the only one who’d ever complained.

“It’s not fair that we have a phantom babysitter following us around and keeping us from getting into perfectly age-appropriate trouble,” she’d complained one day, after I “happened” to wander into the bathroom where she was trying to bum a cigarette from an upperclassman. Even as a sophomore, she’d been eager to get in good with the seniors, and utterly shameless in her flirting. “No one else has to deal with that.”

“That’s true,” I’d agreed, easy as anything. I’ve looked sixteen since the day I died, and I’ll stay sixteen until the day I decide it’s time to move on and see what’s on the other side of eternity, but there’s one big difference between me and an actual teenager, or me and a lot of ghosts, who tend to freeze emotionally and intellectually at the moment of their death. The crossroads needed me to be capable of growing and adapting, adjusting to the world as it changed, and so I had retained the flexibility I’d had as a living girl. In short, I have slightly more emotional intelligence than a brick.

Elsie had promptly started to stand up straighter and puff out her chest in triumph.

“I’ll just tell your mother you’ve asked me to leave you alone during the school day,” I’d continued. “I’m sure that won’t lead to any additional scrutiny of your activities or homework.”

She’d sagged immediately, glaring at me. “Dirty pool, Mary.”

“I’m the babysitter,” I’d replied sweetly, and vanished, off to check on Antimony before her school day ended—the high school and middle school had been on staggered timing back then, to let the buses get between them. I didn’t know if that was the case anymore. It had been several years since I’d needed to worry about the social lives of public-schoolers, and it would be several more before I needed to start worrying again. Charlotte and Isaac were just reaching kindergarten age, but they were likely to be homeschooled by the Bakers, since both of them were fairly profoundly speech-delayed, and dropping a telepathic child in a normal classroom was only going to end in tears.

We’d have to work on that eventually. Isaac was a cuckoo, one of the last in this dimension, and while he’d had the ancestral memories that inevitably caused cuckoos to murder everyone around them removed, it was still unclear how he would interact with a large group of humans. The closest thing we had to a test group for him were Morag, Ava, and Lupe, all of whom lived in Ireland with Morag’s grandmother, and none of whom had ever set foot inside a public school.

There was still some discussion among the rest of the family as to whether the trio of cuckoo girls could be considered our responsibility after what Sarah had done to them, but as none of them had started to appear on the weird sort of “ghost radar” that told me when a member of our family needed me, I was counting them on the “not my problem” side of the scale. Isaac had been on the radar, so to speak, since the day Angela announced her intention to adopt him.

Olivia was four, gleefully rampaging her way through a makeshift preschool full of dragon children her own age, and what happened with her was going to depend largely on where Dominic and Verity eventually decided to settle down. I’d be there for her no matter where they were, but I had to admit it would be easier if they chose either Oregon or Ohio.

No pressure.

When I first made my deal with the crossroads, I’d been insistent that my family would come before anything they needed from me, and they’d agreed to those exact words. My father had been the only living member of my family in Buckley at the time of the incident, but I’d had the feeling, even then, that I was being railroaded; the crossroads had been in such a hurry to get me to agree to their terms that pushing back had been the only real form of resistance I had left. It had been a last flash of teenage stubbornness.

It was the exact wording that had saved my afterlife. Because Frances Healy had called me to come and babysit for her only a few months later, unaware that I was dead—no one had been aware back then, not even my father, and he’d been living with me. As a living woman she’d called, and the money had been something we could really use, which meant answering her call was a service to my family, and as a living woman she’d put Alice in my arms and asked me to be responsible for her. As a spirit, I’d agreed. Neither of us had known what that moment meant. I’d started to figure it out, just a little, about a year later, when Alice had fallen and skinned her fleshy toddler’s knee on the gravel driveway. The blaze of her distress had flashed across my thoughts, and even though I’d been nowhere near the Healy house when it happened, I had been there an instant later, helping her up and dusting her off.

She was my family. Accepting that seemed to make it all the more true, and in short order, the same could be said of all the Healys: I knew when they needed me, I could hear them call my name, and while it was only Alice who could pull me away from the crossroads if I was working when she called for me, I always understood where they were. The crossroads had given me the power to go to my family when they needed me, and oh, I did.

And then, a few years later, my father’s tired old heart, broken by my mother’s death and further weakened by his drinking, had finally given out in the middle of the night. He died without ever knowing I had died long before him, and when he stopped showing up for work, people got concerned. Eventually someone called the Healys, since everyone knew I was Alice’s babysitter, and Fran had come to the house to check on him.

What she’d found was a corpse, and a terrified, traumatized ghost girl absolutely convinced she was about to be exorcised, or that the loss of her father would mean the bargain she had with the crossroads was no longer in effect. He was her only family after all, right?

I’d still been a teenager in every sense of the word back then, sixteen years alive and three years dead adding up to leave me young enough to scare easy. Fran had seen that, the same way she’d seen I was no threat to Alice, that being dead didn’t make me a bad person. She’d arranged to have my body recovered from the cornfield where I’d left it, and buried it behind the house in Buckley, laying my bones down easy in a grave she’d dug with her own hands, giving me a chance to rest. Solidifying my place with the family.

I became an honorary Healy because I was Alice’s babysitter. To keep the position, I’ve been babysitter to every Healy who followed, and every Price, and every Harrington. Even a couple of stragglers from other families who got absorbed into ours. It’s a chaotic position to hold, family babysitter for a group of cryptozoologists with minimal common sense and no capacity for self-preservation.

I wouldn’t give it up for anything.

At the moment, it was ten o’clock in New York and Ohio. Olivia was having snack time with the dragon children of the Nest where she lived with her parents, and Charlotte was at the park with Isaac and their mutual grandmother. I didn’t know exactly what they were doing there, but there were no signs of distress coming from that direction, and so I figured Angela had it all under control.

In the beginning, there was only Alice. As long as I could keep her alive, I was doing my job, and doing it well enough to call myself a good babysitter. But I’d done my job too well, and she grew up and got married and had two kids of her own, both of whom I needed to keep alive. Then both of those kids had grown up and had kids—five total—and then the adoptions had begun. Sarah Zellaby was Evelyn’s baby sister, adopted by the same people and then adopted by my family as a cousin. So that was one more for me to look out for. Then the new generation of kids had started growing up and going out into the world, and coming home with significant others—three so far—children of their own—two, three if we counted Isaac, who was Sarah’s little brother—and adopted siblings they refused to put back where they’d come from. The count on those, by the way, currently stood at three, although we didn’t know yet whether Mark was going to register as a member of the family to my weird ghost radar when he finally woke up. If he ever woke up. There was every possibility he wasn’t going to.

But with the actual children taken care of for the moment, I was free to come to Portland and make breakfast. Cooking is fun. I enjoy it. Best of all, I’m dead, and unlike some ghosts, I’m not particularly hungry—oh, I like chocolate as much as the next girl, but I’m not constantly haunting diners and hoping someone will buy me a burger, to give a suspiciously specific example. Not being hungry means I never rush, never get distracted by the smell of what I’m making, and never find myself running out of something because I’ve been snacking without noticing it. Even better, when the bacon starts to sizzle and throw little drops of grease into the air, they go right through me.

If I hadn’t been a babysitter, I could have had a very happy career as a line cook, is what I’m saying.

I had shown up in the kitchen at seven on the dot, and now that eight was looming and all my ingredients were prepared, I was ready to put my evil plan into action. Dropping four slices of bacon into a skillet, I poured a serving of batter into the wafflemaker at almost the same time, then leaned over to flip the coffeemaker’s “on” switch into position.

A variety of enticing scents began to fill the kitchen, even before I opened the pre-heated oven and popped in the tray of cinnamon rolls I had ready to bake. When trying to attract the herd, it’s a good idea to bring out the serious bait. Bacon, coffee, and baked goods are about as serious as it gets.

Indeed, I didn’t have to wait long before Annie came wandering into the kitchen in her Pokémon pajama pants and an old Slasher Chicks shirt she had repurposed for sleeping in after it got too tattered to wear out of the house, her hair snarled and sticking up in all directions. She made an incoherent grumbling noise. I blew her a kiss.

“Good morning, fireball,” I said blithely. “Coffee’s ready if you want some.” She was already opening the cupboard to take down a mug, which she filled halfway with miniature marshmallows before pouring coffee over them, resulting in a sticky, half-melted mess that bobbed to the top of the liquid almost immediately. She didn’t bother to stir before she flopped into one of the seats at the kitchen table, taking a noisy slurp.

Annie takes after her paternal grandfather, Thomas Price. She’s an elemental sorcerer, with the ability to both create and control fire. I’m not sure who was more surprised when she started striking sparks in her sleep, her, me, or the mice. Her because she was the one whose hands were actually on fire. Me because I’d still been working for the crossroads back then, and I was well acquainted with their generalized hatred of sorcerers, which could sometimes extend to trying to influence the people around them to make deals just so they’d have an excuse to get the sorcerer out of the way. The mice because they had always assumed, in the absence of other evidence, that if Thomas passed his genes for sorcery on to any of the kids, they’d know. They’d expected signs during childhood, or a tearful confession to the clergy. Instead, Annie had waited until her late teens to start with the pyromancy, and had managed to hide it well enough to get herself sent undercover with the Covenant, a decision I disagreed with at the time, and one that we were still paying for today.

The trouble with living in the present is that we’re always acting on the information we have available, and we never have the whole picture. In hindsight, it should have been obvious that when you’re dealing with something that passes through family lines and have five living candidates for inheritance running around, at least one of them is going to come up a winner. It should also have been easy to figure out that maybe infiltrating the headquarters of a paranoid organization of monster hunters that already has your whole family on the “kill on sight” list was not as good an idea as people thought it was. But we’d needed information and we’d been desperate, and Annie had agreed to go.

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