Page 48 of Aftermarket Afterlife

I walked through the wall and started across the lawn toward the street. The trees in our own yard were positioned such that no one would have seen my little abuse of the laws of physics unless they were standing in the driveway, so from the perspective of the people in the van, I was just walking from the direction of the house. That was good. Maybe they wouldn’t try to drive away before I could get their license plate.

I changed angles as I got closer, to be sure I could do exactly that, taking note of the alphanumeric string and continuing onward, to knock on the driver’s side window. The man behind the wheel jumped, more than he should have if he was just a law-abiding citizen sitting in his tree service van, and turned to stare at me with wide eyes. Another junior operative. I managed, barely, not to roll my own eyes. The Covenant was either scraping the bottom of the barrel or completely underestimating the threat we collectively posed.

Or, third, and more terrifying possibility, the Covenant knew exactly how dangerous the family was, and was holding their heavy hitters back while their expendables sniped at our fringes, knocking us down and wearing us out. Anyone can seem bumbling when they want to, but they had managed to endure for centuries, and it would be arrogant to think that they did it by accident, or because they had the Prices and Healys on their side. We needed to stay careful.

I knocked on the window again, and motioned for the man inside to roll it down so we could talk. Somehow, I didn’t think pushing my face through the glass was going to make him a better conversationalist.

Haltingly, he did. “Can I help you, ma’am?” he asked.

“Whose trees are you working on?” I chirped.

He blinked. That was, apparently, not the answer he’d been expecting. “Uh...theirs?” He gestured to the house he was parked in front of.

“Yes, but what are their names? Where’s your crew?”

He glanced, involuntarily, to the house behind me. Well, yes. That was where at least part of his crew was located, at least until it was safe to move the bodies. Recovering, he focused on me, and said, “In the backyard, trimming trees, and I don’t like your tone, young lady.”

“Trimming trees, huh? These are those new sonic tree trimmers I’ve been reading about? The ones that don’t make any sound?” I craned my neck like I was trying to see around the house, then smiled at him. “They’re not inside the house across the street, looking for the occupants? I know there are cars in the driveway. That doesn’t mean everyone’s home.”

Again, that glance at the house, this time followed by a thinning of his lips and a measured gathering of his dignity. “I don’t know what you’re referring to, but I don’t like your tone.”

There are disadvantages of being a teenage girl forever. People assuming they can condescend to me because they’re older is one of them. This guy was in his early twenties at the most, chin still spotty and skin around his eyes still smooth and firm. He wasn’t that much older than I appeared to be. He was absolutely not older than I actually was. That wasn’t going to stop him.

“I’m referring to the two Covenant operatives in full tactical gear that you sent into our home looking for evidence of a cuckoo nest,” I said, with blithe sweetness. “They were very well armed, but ultimately unprepared for the babysitter.” Shelby would be annoyed that I was taking credit for her confrontation, but she’d understand once I pointed out that I’d only done it to keep the children safe.

The man paled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“And I don’t see your radio,” I replied. “Which means you weren’t a team of three. One second.”

I took a step backward, and he seized the opportunity to roll up his window. I had to wonder about the Covenant budget, if they couldn’t even provide their field team with a van new enough to have automatic windows. I flashed him a smile and a little wave, then turned and walked through the side of the van, emerging in the dimly lit back.

It wasn’t the clutter of seats and equipment that I would have expected to find if I’d been harassing a real tree service, which was something of a relief; I try not to be an asshole to Angela and Martin’s neighbors. They don’t need a reputation for being jerks, not when they already have something of a reputation for being giant weirdoes. Unavoidable, given them, not something I needed to make worse.

Instead, the back of the van had been gutted and rebuilt, transformed into a mobile computer lab, with monitors and screens taking up the walls. A brunette woman in charcoal gray was seated there, speaking into a headset, partitioned off from the front of the van by a noise-dampening wall. That was why I hadn’t been able to hear her before, and more, why she hadn’t been able to hear my discussion with her friend. Too bad for her. She might have appreciated the warning.

“—report,” she was saying. “I repeat, please report, over.”

“If you’re looking for your field agents, they’re not going to report,” I said. “They’re a little busy being dead.”

She stiffened, then slowly turned to face me. I smiled at her.

“Hi. I’m the babysitter. And you scared my kids.”

I’ll give her this: she was fast. Her hands moved almost too swiftly for me to follow, grabbing something from the desk next to her and aiming it at the center of my chest. I had time to register that it was a gun of some sort, and then she was pulling the trigger, sending a stream of water arching toward me.

I blinked as it splashed off my shirt, soaking in at the same time, then looked at her. “You know, most people answer ‘hi’ with a similar greeting, not by trying to initiate a wet T-shirt contest. Am I missing something?”

“Yes!” She lowered her water pistol—which was, of course, one of the deluxe ones that looked like a real gun, capable of really killing people, because why would the Covenant ever carry something that looked like atoy? It might undermine their overall aura of grim serious grimness. “That was holy water mixed with salt, thyme, and dill. You should be banished back to the hell you spawned from, spirit.”

“Maybe, if I’d been spawned from a hell.” As far as I know, there is no hell. There are various dimensions that people tend tocall“hells,” either because they’re full of things that humans recognize as imps and devils, or because they’re on fire all the time. But there’s no single level of the afterlife corresponding to “hell.” What would we even call it? The firelight?

Humans like naming conventions. We like them a lot. So that would probably be the name, and we’d all have to snicker every time we said it.

Right. Focus, Mary. I scowled at the Covenant woman. “I am not a demon. I am not a devil. I am a babysitter, and you endangered my charges with your reckless attempt to breach their home. I’m here to tell you not to do that again.”

“Or what, you’ll haunt me?”

“Yes,” I said, with surpassing calm, and waited for her own calm to visibly waver before I smiled a thin, razor’s-edge smile and leaned forward, finally allowing the water that had soaked into my shirt to fall through me to the van floor. “I’ll haunt you every day for the rest of your life. You won’t be able to receive a single piece of confidential intelligence without me being right there to hear it; you won’t be able to take a shit in peace. Everything you know, I’ll know, including what you ate for dinner.”

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