Page 47 of Aftermarket Afterlife

Megan was still at med school, still playing human, still feigning a reality that wasn’t her own for the sake of getting the training her species really needed her to have. Gorgons are synapsids, not reptiles, and a surprising number of human diseases have shown the ability to spill over into their population. This, combined with their forced proximity to human civilization, means that trained doctors are forever at a premium among their communities. Any education Megan received would be carried straight back to the gorgons and built upon.

Assuming she survived to graduate, which was far from guaranteed. And if the Covenant was tracking us down through our allies, she could be in serious trouble. “Alex, do you think Dee will take your calls?”

“If she knows what’s good for her, she will,” he said.

Shelby, meanwhile, was prodding the nearer corpse with the toe of her boot. “D’you think whatever they took will make the animals sick if we take them to the zoo?” she asked. Meaning she wanted to go with the time-honored local method of body disposal, “Feed the dead assholes to the occupants of the reptile house at the zoo.” If forensics ever took a serious look at the fecal waste that place produced, they’d become convinced a serial killer was hiding in central Ohio.

“It might,” said Alex. “Better to bribe the guards down at the crematorium.”

Shelby sighed heavily. “Right. We’ll tuck them down in the basement until Angela’s available to go over with me.”

Angela wasn’t a receptive telepath, but she could project, meaning she could convince people to do almost anything she wanted. They’d take care of the corpses easily enough. I looked to Alex.

“I need to get back to the kids,” I said. “You want to call Dee while I’m taking care of them? I can go over with you if she says you need to come to her.”

“Sure,” he said, and frowned. “Shouldn’t you be heading back to Portland? Verity’s going to freak if she thinks you’re not taking care of Livvy.”

“Verity’s going to have better things to worry about, and so are you, so go ahead and make your calls,” I said, and vanished.

Technically, as the youngest, Oliviaismy primary charge. But no one would fault me for making sure Charlotte and Isaac were okay before I went back to her, and they might fault me if Ididn’t. All children are important, always.

I reappeared in the nursery the pair shared. They were still where I’d put them, clinging to each other. Charlotte sniffled when she saw me.

“Bad mans go?” she asked.

“Bad mans gone,” I agreed, moving to scoop her into my arms. Isaac’s eyes were no longer shining white, and as I watched, he rolled onto his back, staring at the ceiling. He looked exhausted, poor mite. I walked over to stroke his head with my free hand, holding Charlotte against my hip with the other. “You did really well, buddy,” I informed him. “Good job keeping everyone safe.”

He looked up at me and smiled the weary, innocent smile of a child, then closed his eyes as he slipped quickly into a doze. I turned my attention back to Charlotte.

She beamed at me, fear apparently forgotten, and locked her arms around my neck. I squeezed her in answer, taking a moment to enjoy the warm solidity of a child. She and Isaac were both seriously behind expected milestones in terms of verbal development, but that seemed to be due to Isaac’s being able to translate most concepts telepathically. When Sarah transported all the cuckoos on Earth to a dimension filled with giant spiders—just roll with it—she met quite a few cuckoo children, including a girl named Morag who was being raised by her cuckoo grandmother in Ireland. The grandmother, whose name was Caoimhe, was in regular contact with Angela these days, the two of them sharing parenting tips and experiences, and between the two of them, they had determined that vocal delays were common in this sort of situation.

Mark and his sister Cici had probably experienced something similar, his semi-controlled childhood telepathy reaching out whenever she needed something, and the two of them growing up in a symbiotic tangle of ask-and-answer. Looking at the two of them, it was hard to lend any credence to Shelby’s claim that they couldn’t stay forever. I thought the whole family would be moving to a larger house before they’d be able to separate the children who were, effectively, siblings, and probably about as psychically entangled as it was possible for two small children to be.

“You’ll have to talk more soon, though,” I informed Charlotte, and kissed her forehead. “You’ll be starting school before too much longer, and when you’re around human kids, they’re going to need you to use your words.”

She reached and patted my cheek. “Mary,” she informed me.

“Yes, well done. I’m Mary.”

The nursery door opened. Charlotte squealed in wordless delight, reaching toward the person who’d just come in.

“There’s my little ankle-biter,” said Shelby happily, swooping over to pluck Charlotte from my hip and cuddle the child to herself. Charlotte squealed again, snuggling into her mother, as Shelby looked at me over her head.

“Alex would like to speak with you before you head out,” she said. “If you wouldn’t mind.”

“Of course I don’t mind. Where is he?”

“The kitchen.”

The living room was directly beneath us. I nodded and stopped telling the world that I was a solid person who could stand on a solid surface. Promptly, I dropped through the floor to the room below, where I informed the world I was solid again before I could fall farther down and wind up in the basement. I landed with a thump and was briefly, smugly pleased with myself. That sort of trick is advanced ghosting. Baby ghosts can’t drop through the floor unless they want to walk back from the center of the Earth.

There are no dinosaurs down there, by the way. Or giant caverns filled with amethyst crystals, no matter what Sarah’s favorite bad science fiction movies might try to tell me. Just all the different colors and varieties of molten rock the world has to offer. There are far too many, and none of them are fun to trudge through. I did see some cool fossils, though. Not worth the trip, but still, pretty nifty.

One of the living-room windows had clearly been jimmied open from the outside. It was closed now, but the frame was ever so slightly askew, and the lock hadn’t been flipped back into position. I willed myself invisible and moved closer to the window.

There was a van parked across the street. It claimed to be from a local tree service, but I’d been haunting this neighborhood off and on for years—ever since Kevin and Evelyn got married—and I’d never seen that service before. The font looked more like something you’d find in the Birmingham area than in Columbus. There aren’t rules about local business font choices, but they tend to cluster, and most people can recognize a local business by the shape of the lettering on their signs, even if they couldn’t articulate exactly how they know. Everything about this van said “not from around here” to me, even though there were no major flaws in its camouflage.

Maybe more damning, there were no workers. If they were a tree service, there should have been workers. Maybe not many of them, maybe just a few men with trimmers or rakes, but still, a van, sitting alone, wasn’t going to get any work done. Hmm.

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