Page 41 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“Still sailing on steak and platelets?” she asked, and the car made sense, and I managed not to recoil. Barely, but still.

Modern routewitches are what happens when human magic adapts to the changing environment. Road witches have always existed. It’s only in the last few hundred years that they’ve been moving as quickly and consistently as they do in this modern reality. People aren’t the only things that have managed to adapt.

No one really knows for sure where the sanguivorous cars came from. Some people think they’re a form of giant leech. Other people think they escaped from some other layer of reality, down deep in the midnight or from the other side of the crossroads. They look like cars. They drive like cars...assuming they like their drivers, that is. Because if they like you, you can go forever on a couple of pints of blood once every six weeks or so. And if they don’t like you, you’ll get to experience exsanguination the hard way.

Darius saw the way I was looking at his car and smiled almost apologetically, walking over and unlocking its trunk to reveal a cavernous black space that he had already lined with plastic. “She’s not hungry right now,” he said. “And she knows we don’t eat passengers. Cars who eat passengers don’t get treats.”

I didn’t want to know what a vampire car considered a treat. Alice walked around to where Darius stood and carefully, almost reverently, lowered Jane into the trunk. She paused before straightening again, brushing Jane’s hair out of her face and making sure her arms were straight, not bent at odd angles. The trunk was almost large enough to let her stretch the body out fully, and in the end, only Jane’s knees were bent slightly to the side.

Darius frowned as he watched this. When Alice did straighten, he asked her, in a sympathetic tone, “Relative of yours?”

“Daughter.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

Alice’s eyes welled up with tears, and she was silent for a moment before she nodded and said, “I don’t think it was my loss as much as it was everyone else in the family’s, but I appreciate the sentiment. Is there room for Mary to ride with us?”

“Actually, I think I’m going to try figuring out where Sarah went,” I said. “You all have a good drive. Annie, call me when you get back to Portland. I want to be there to grieve with the rest of the family.”

“Of course, Mary,” she said, and pulled away from Sam long enough to lean over and give me a firm hug. “This isn’t how we wanted things to go, but I’m glad you could be with her when she went.”

“I am, too,” I said, and pulled away, vanishing.

Sarah wasn’t actively calling me. If anything, Sarah was actively hoping not to be found. But my connection to the family isn’t on the same signal as her telepathy, and she wasn’t able to block me out entirely. I could find her general vicinity, if not her precise location. I focused, and the carnival was gone, and I was standing in a hospital waiting room.

There were no windows. Instead, vintage-style informational posters covered the walls, situated between large potted plants, reminding anyone who read them in large, cheerful letters to “MAINTAIN SECRECY” and to remember the “SIGNS THE COVENANT MAY BE WATCHING YOU.” None of the colorful cartoon figures who presented this information were visibly human; they closest they came was a blonde who could have been a dragon, whose shadow confirmed it, forming the shape of a large predatory reptile behind her.

The chairs were the thinly padded plastic sort endemic to hospital waiting rooms everywhere, and were currently unoccupied. I turned a slow circle, trying to get my bearings back, finding no signs of Sarah. If she was here, I’d managed not to arrive on top of her.

The reception desk was currently unoccupied, but seemed like my best bet for finding out what was going on. I walked over, leaning across it to look for an on-duty nurse, and when I found no one, dropped back to the flats of my feet and hit the little bell labeledring for service. The chiming sound almost seemed to fill the room.

And no one came.

I stepped back, hugging myself, refusing to extend my sense of where the family was. It wouldn’t get me any closer to Sarah, but if it picked up on one of the smaller children experiencing some momentary discomfort, I might feel myself seized with the need to do my duty. Family members don’t always have to summon me, precisely. It’s just hard to resist the young ones, especially when the things they’re crying for should be easy to fix.

And no one came.

Depending on how fast Darius could coax that car of his to go, Alice and the others were probably somewhere in Oregon by now. Bending space is child’s play for a good routewitch, and anyone who could control a vampire car was definitely going to qualify as a good one. Using routewitches to shortcut distance is one of those things you can’t do forever; it will inevitably come back to bite you if you cheat too much, like the universe itself recognizes the inherent unfairness of bending the real world like folding a map. The more you do it, the more the Ocean Lady will come to see you as an investment, and I don’t mess with gods. Too many years in service to the crossroads to be able to trust them in the slightest. The best way to live a peaceful life—or enjoy a peaceful death—is to keep them from noticing you for as long as possible.

And no one came.

I debated ringing the bell again, but decided against it. I knew Sarah was nearby, or I wouldn’t have ended up here; I didn’t know that she was the reason the hospital staff seemed to be missing, and forcing them to come pay attention to me while they were doing actual hospital things would be the height of bad manners. I abandoned solidity instead, walking through the desk and turning toward the swinging doors that would lead me into the hospital proper.

Time to go hunting.

St. Giles’s Hospital is the only cryptid-inclusive hospital in New York state, and covers many of the surrounding states as well, providing healthcare, surgical services, and even pharmaceuticals to the cryptid community. I say “inclusive” rather than “exclusive” because the staff at St. Giles’s has provided care to several members of the Price family when necessary. Theycanhelp humans; they just prefer not to, since their resources are already thinly stretched, thanks to their somewhat unique position.

I’m not a hospital administrator. I don’t know how a hospital is supposed to work. I never spent much time in them when I was alive—a few terrifying visits while Mom was dying, some checkups with my pediatrician—and I’ve spent about the same amount in them since I died, usually when a member of the family was having a bone set or giving birth to my next responsibility. So maybe this was all perfectly normal. I looked back at the desk, giving the things on top of it a cursory glance.

The computer was much newer and sleeker than I would have expected if this place had been publicly funded, the sort of cutting-edge nonsense that could do everything in the world but demanded an active internet connection if you wanted to play solitaire. There was an open appointment book next to the keyboard, and from the pencil scratches and cross-outs, it was used more extensively than the computer.

Ah, well. Everyone gets comfortable with modern technology at their own pace, and it wasn’t like I was some sort of dead computer wizard. I paused to look at the calendar box for today. There was nothing written there.

Emergencies don’t normally do you the favor of calling ahead. Remaining intangible, I turned and walked through the double doors that would lead me deeper into the facility.

On the other side was a long white hallway that could have been stolen from the backstage of any medical drama in the world. It looked perfectly generic, probably in part because it had been built by people whose only model was those dramas. Real hospitals were complicated and variable, but this one, while it was real, had been constrained by the space in which it was being constructed more than by budget. A place where an oviparous biped could get proper prenatal care was worth a lot: even the dragons had willingly invested in the construction of St. Giles’s, and continued to pay more of its operating costs than most people would have believed.

Iwouldn’t have believed it, if it hadn’t been explained to me in detail by Dr. Morrow himself while he was looking over Isaac, after Sarah and the others had returned from their cross-dimensional excursion. But he’d been surprisingly forthcoming about the challenges of running an underground hospital, keeping it staffed and funded, even in the face of threats like the lurking Covenant strike teams, who had been less of a danger then but had always been on the mind of every sensible cryptid living anywhere near humanity.

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