Page 5 of Aftermarket Afterlife

I couldn’t even say it had been all bad. Going undercover with the Covenant had forced Annie into hiding for a while, which naturally meant she’d gone and taken out a cabal of evil magic-users operating out of a major amusement park, whose actions had probably been hurting if not killing hundreds of people on an annual basis. She had ended up in Maine, eventually, and came home with a boyfriend, an adopted brother, and the blood of the crossroads on her hands. Yeah. My old employers? Annie killed them, which should have been impossible, since they were an ageless, timeless, staggeringly powerful cosmic force outside true human comprehension. Killing them had involved some time-travel shenanigans that Istilldidn’t understand, and had restored the Earth’s anima mundi, the true spirit of the living world, which is what should have been there all along.

We hadn’t known I’d be able to survive past the destruction of the crossroads when Annie effectively challenged them to single combat, but they’d been mad enough at me by that point for not somehow keeping her under control that they’d been well on the way to erasing me from existence. I’m a ghost. “Killing” me won’t exactly work. But something that’s big and nasty enough could absolutely unmake me, and the crossroads qualified as both big and nasty. By the time Annie had gone off to beat the crossroads into the ground, no one could blame her for thinking I was well and truly done for.

But I wasn’t, and I was glad for that. I pulled the first waffle out of the wafflemaker and plopped it onto a plate, carrying it over to drop on the table in front of her. She made a grumpy, agreeable noise—a neat trick—and managed to smile at me through the tangle of her hair.

“What do you want on your waffle?” I asked. “I have all the usual toppings.”

“Not banana,” she mumbled.

“Three-syllable word before you finished your coffee,” I said. “Not bad.”

She glared, momentarily focusing on drinking.

Annie’s live-in boyfriend, Sam—who I expected to come along any second now, since he could be kind of on the “clingy” side, and would notice soon that she’d been gone too long to just be using the bathroom—is a furi, a kind of yokai, which is the catchall term for the Asian cryptids. His natural state is a lot more simian than human, prehensile tail and all. He’s not a big fan of monkey jokes, and the fastest way to piss him off, culinarily speaking, is to offer him a banana.

This doesn’t stop the mice from referring to him as the “Large Monkey Man,” having not yet reached the conclusion the rest of us have, that he’s never voluntarily leaving, and thus not given him his godly title. I can’t wait to see what that’s going to be. Surprisingly, Sam accepts it from the mice, saying it’s different when it’s one cryptid talking to another.

Somehow the fact that science considers ghosts a form of cryptid—by the strict definition of the term, which is “a creature whose existence has not been proven to science”—is not enough to give me monkey privileges. I’d sulk, but mostly I’m too busy snickering.

Annie slurped more coffee. I looked at her expectantly.

“Allthe toppings?” she asked.

“It’s a special occasion, so yes, all the toppings,” I said.

She hesitated for a moment, then said, “Bacon, vanilla ice cream, strawberries, and chocolate sauce?”

“Pushing your luck, huh?” I retrieved her plate and moved to fix up her waffle while I popped the next one out of the machine and poured in a fresh batch of batter. The trick to a successful breakfast for this many people is all about the assembly line. The more continuous you can make it, the more you’re likely to accomplish.

Annie smiled sleepily as I set the waffle back down in front of her. “Always,” she replied. “What’s luck for if not pushing?”

I laughed, turning back to my bacon, which was sizzling and spitting and ready for transfer—minus the two slices I’d already put atop Annie’s waffle—to the paper towels to drain. There was a smallclinkas she picked up her fork, followed by mice popping out of holes all over the kitchen, their whiskers pushed forward and their noses quivering.

Putting the second waffle onto a plate, I slid it down the counter. “In exchange for staying out of the cooking area,” I said.

The mice cheered and descended, and everything was peaceful and normal and chaotic, just like it was supposed to be. Just like it could never be for very long.

• • •

As you have almost certainly gathered by now, my name is Mary Grace Dunlavy, and I am really quite sincerely dead. Have been for coming up on a hundred years, which is longer than most ghosts choose to hang out and haunt the living. Before Annie killed the crossroads, it wasn’t like I had a choice—serving as a crossroads ghost isn’t one of those afterlife assignments that come with an exit strategy—but after she killed them, I could have chosen to move on. I didn’t, because my family needed me. My family will always need me.

The Price-Healys may be terrifyingly effective killers to the cryptid world and traitors to the Covenant of St. George, and I won’t argue that they’re not good at their jobs, but to me, they’re sort of like a nest of adorable coyote pups or bobcat kittens. They hiss and fuss and show their claws, but at the end of the day, they’re effectively defenseless. Only unlike puppies or kittens, they keep making more babies, even more defenseless ones. They can’t be trusted to take care of themselves.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the starlight, the level of the afterlife just below the one most commonly frequented by human ghosts, and talked to a lot of people, both dead and never living, about my situation. After all, I was a crossroads ghost, and then I wasn’t anymore, but I still existed, which should have been impossible. Well, it turns out ghosts are like anything else. Old forms die out, and new ones are born. It would be perfectly reasonable to assume that made me something new.

But it didn’t. It made me something very, very old. See, once, people had lived more isolated lives, and once, it had been common for a caretaker—sometimes a grandparent, sometimes an unmarried woman, sometimes a nanny—to have virtually full responsibility for raising a child. And sometimes those caretakers had been so wrapped up in their feelings of duty and obligation that when they died, they’d kept right on doing their jobs. From there, things could go one of two ways, one very good for the ghost, one very bad.

If the nanny ghost was allowed to keep taking care of “their” child, the kid would grow up safe and loved, unusually lucky, and then, when they got old enough to have kids of their own, either their nanny would move on or would keep taking care of the family children. Some families could get three or four generations of care out of the same nanny, and in some communities, a phantom nanny was seen as a good thing, a sign that the family was special or blessed in some way.

But if, on the other hand, the nanny was denied access to the child they’d been taking care of before they died, they would begin to twist and turn vicious. A lot of them turned hostile, and some even started attacking their children, trying to keep them from growing up. A thwarted nanny could be viciously possessive, to the point of homicide. Maybe that’s part of why they fell out of favor, as well as a growing social pressure to raise your own children, not hand them off to someone else. Living nannies got less common, and nanny ghosts all but disappeared.

“Nanny ghost” sounds a bit too much like “nanny goat” for my comfort. I prefer to be called a caretaker, which is a lot more general, and encompasses both the beginning and end of a person’s life. The kids I care for are my responsibility forever, no matter how adult they may become, and when they need me, I’m there. I’ve nursed Alice back to health before. Now that she and Thomas have finally agreed to get old together, I fully expect to sit with them both on their deathbeds. So “caretaker” it is. A new name for a very old thing.

As a caretaker, I have an option I didn’t have as a crossroads ghost: I can quit. Any time, I can quit. I can walk into the starlight and let go of the tether that keeps me here, and find out what’s on the other side of the afterlife, which isn’t the same thing as eternity. Back when I was alive and needed to sleep, I used to love the period between getting into bed and drifting all the way into dreams. It was warm and safe and my thoughts would quiet, worries fading into silence for the only time in my waking life. Being a ghost is sort of like taking a long pause in that moment, an in-between state that isn’t awake and isn’t asleep, just existing.

You can’t stay in that pause forever.Ican’t stay in that pause forever. But I figure I’ve got a nice long time before it’s going to feel like it’s time to go, and I have a lot of waffles to make.

I liked babysitting when I was alive. It was a good way to make a little extra money, and I was good at it. The kids liked me. And it was a job a girl could do without damaging her reputation, which was important when I was alive. My daddy worked at the factory, and he didn’t make much money. What he did make, he had a tendency to drink. He wasn’t a bad man. He was just a broken one, trapped in a dead-end job in a little town where everyone remembered the face of his dead wife, and where he couldn’t escape feeling judged for not being able to save her.

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