Page 46 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“Ah, you mean my grandmother-in-law?” asked Shelby amiably. “She’s one of those cuckoo-bird people you lot like to go on about. Not a big fan of them as a species, me, but I’m quite fond of Angela as an individual, since she’s not charging us rent to live here with her. Can’t stay forever, but for now, it’s really quite pleasant.”

“Ma’am,” said the first operative. “We’re going to have to ask you to come with us.”

“Don’t think so,” said Shelby, and hit the ground just as Alex, who had come up behind the pair while she kept them distracted, stepped forward and pressed the handguns he was holding to the backs of their necks. He had one in each hand, giving him plenty of leverage to bring them both to a frozen stop.

“I could shoot her,” said the one who’d already raised his gun.

“You could,” agreed Alex. “Don’t think I’d like that much. Don’t think I’d be able to keep myself from returning the favor as soon as you pulled the trigger. You wouldn’t even have time to see if you’d hit.”

There was a terrible pause before the gun sagged toward the floor. Shelby bounced back to her feet and stepped forward to grab it and its twin, yanking them away from their former owners.

“I’ll have those,” she said, accent dropping back to a much less exaggerated level. “Mary, I’m guessing you’re why the kids stopped howling? Thanks for that.”

“The silence was actually what woke us up, before the gunfire,” said Alex.

I quirked a very faint smile, allowing my appearance to slide back toward my normal. “Spoken like a true parent,” I said. “What are we going to do with them?”

But one of the operatives had already stiffened, head tipping back until the barrel of Alex’s gun had to be digging painfully into his neck. The other was drooping.

Then they both collapsed, spasming, to the floor.

Alex sighed and kicked one of them. “Verity warned me about this,” he said sourly. “When they send out small teams, they send them with poison pills, just in case they’re taken. Especially if there’s a chance they might encounter a cuckoo.”

“They can’t be wearing proper anti-telepathy charms, or Isaac wouldn’t have picked up on their presence,” I said. “So they’re prepared to die, just not to survive?”

“Imagine having the kind of numbers where you can treat your own people as cannon fodder,” said Shelby with disgust, and prodded the closer operative with her foot, then knelt and removed their face mask, revealing a pale, unbreathing man with dark hair. His eyes were closed, and foam marked the corners of his mouth. He’d done a good job swallowing most of it. They were disciplined, these Covenant people, even if they weren’t used to encountering monsters that actually fought back, even a little.

“The children are all right?” asked Alex.

I nodded. “Isaac started yelling for me as soon as he picked up on the intruders, and he shushed Charlotte when he realized there was real danger in the house. He should probably get extra dessert tonight.”

“I will bake that child a tomato pie,” said Shelby fiercely.

“How did they even know to come here?” I asked. “You’ve always been careful not to lead trouble home. But they were already in the house when I showed up.”

“The Fringe,” said Alex grimly. “They hit it this morning, shortly after we all got off the call. Dee called to tell me she wouldn’t be coming to work.”

“How does that give them your address?”

“How did they get the address for the Fringe?” countered Alex. “According to Dee, the elders were convinced I must have sold them out to save my own skin. She was doing her best to talk them down. Hopefully the fact that the Covenant came here too will convince them that I didn’t give out their location.”

“Who knows about both places, but isn’t here?”

“Sarah,” said Shelby.

I shook my head. “I was just with Sarah. She’s in New York. Even if she were inclined to betray her own family to the Covenant, she wouldn’t be in New York if she had.”

“Plus she’s still too emotionally fragile to have gone through with something like that,” said Alex. “Making the decision to betray your family takes time and thought and effort. She’s been a little too scattered for me to believe she’s capable of that just now.”

No one was foolish enough to say that Sarah would never do such a thing. Almost anyone is capable of almost anything, under the right circumstances, and pretending otherwise wasn’t going to do us any good. If the Covenant operatives hadn’t committed suicide upon being cornered, they would have been dragged outside and shoved into the trunk of a car before being driven out into the woods and shot. You don’t leave enemies standing when you’re in the middle of a war, no matter how much it offends your sense of being a good person to eliminate them.

“There’s one other person I can think of,” I said slowly. “Who might have been a target for known family associations, and would be able to lead people to both the Fringe and the house. Has anyone spoken to Megan recently?”

Neither Alex nor Shelby said a word.

The Fringe was an off-grid community of Pliny’s gorgons who had gotten tired of lurking at the edges of the human world, never putting down roots or sure of where they’d be tomorrow. Instead, they’d taken the money they’d been able to earn by working under the table and off the books for people who needed odd jobs done, and used it to build their own settlement on land they actually owned, where they farmed, raised livestock, and did their best to raise their families away from prying human eyes. It was almost Amish in some ways, and blazingly modern in others. Dee, Alex’s assistant at the zoo, was a resident of the more-transient community that existed outside the Fringe, but her brother was its founder. Her husband served as doctor to both groups, seeing them through injuries, illnesses, and childbirth.

And her daughter, Megan, was a medical student who had roomed with one Antimony Price at Lowryland. Annie had been going by the name “Melody West” back then, but she’d attracted the attention of the crossroads even so. The crossroads, and the cabal of human magic-users who’d been secretly using the Park to harvest luck from unwitting tourists, stripping them bare and tipping them out into the world with no way of knowing how ugly their lives were about to become. It had been a tidy little racket, right up until Annie wrecking-balled in and destroyed the whole thing.

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