Page 50 of Aftermarket Afterlife

The van’s rear door swung open, and the woman who’d been working the cameras sprang out, a new gun in her hands. Unlike the previous one, this appeared to be a real gun, capable of firing actual bullets, not over-seasoned holy water. She yelled as she charged out into the open, apparently thinking this was some sort of action film. I stepped in front of her. As I had hoped, she hesitated, trying to pull back in time to avoid a collision. Instead, she fell forward and passed cleanly through me, stumbling out the other side of my insubstantial form and right into Shelby’s fist, the Australian having emerged to join the family brawl already in progress.

Shelby hit her squarely in the chin, with enough force that I heard the crack of knuckles against bone. The woman went down like a sack of laundry, hitting the ground hard and insensate. I clapped, slow and deliberately halfway mocking, then looked to Alex.

“You got him?”

He nodded.

“Okay. I’m going to head back to Portland. Do you...do you have your phone on you?”

He blinked at me before he nodded again. “I do. Mary, what’s going on?”

“It’s not my place to say,” I said. “We’ll call you, I’m sure. Right now, you should call Uncle Mike. Get him out here, so you’ll have some backup on the ground.”

Then I was gone, not giving him the chance to say anything. There aren’t many things I would say aren’t my business, where the family is concerned—I may not have been a blood relative, but I’ve been around long and consistently enough that there’s very little that’s off-limits for me to tell a family member. I’ve done the sex talk and the puberty talk and the where do babies come from talk, but I’ve never done the “I’m sorry, your aunt is dead” talk. That was one I was going to leave to his parents, because I was caught up enough in my own grief that I couldn’t handle it.

You might think being dead would make death easier for me to deal with. You would be so very wrong. Being dead means I know exactly how much life matters, and how much it sucks to have it taken away. I didn’t even have the cold comfort of being able to visit Jane in the afterlife: she had gone somewhere I couldn’t follow and would never have been able to. She was as lost to me as she was to the rest of the family, and I ached knowing I would never see her burn pancakes or wrestle with her complicated thoughts about the family profession again. She had been a unique, complicated woman, and she was gone, and I didn’t want her to be.

As I had when facing the Covenant operatives in the hall outside the nursery, I felt a pang of longing for the crossroads. They had been horrible, and no one sensible would want them back. I didn’t want them back, not really, but I wanted the power they had given me—the power that would have allowed me todosomething to avenge my friend and charge.

The crossroads never gave anyone anything for free, but they were always very generous with me when what I wanted was to do harm. Seeing me give in to temptation and fall into the habit of hurting people seemed to delight them. I think they may have seen it as the gateway to me truly becoming their creature, breaking the ties that were holding me to humanity, and as I shifted myself across the country yet again, I didn’tcare. The Covenant killed Jane. They deserved to pay for what they’d done.

And theywouldpay. Theywould. There was no way the rest of the family let them walk away from this. They were hurting people all across the continent, and while their strike-and-retreat tactics might seem amateur, they were allowing them to test our defenses and weaken our reserves. They had us outnumbered, based on everything I knew about their current organizational status. If this was going to be a battle of attrition, they would win, in the end.

We just had to find a way not to let them.

No one in Portland was actively calling me, and so I landed outside in front of the house rather than next to anyone in need. That was fine. I took a deep breath to center myself and started toward the door, my clothes re-forming around me as I walked. By the time I reached the porch, I was wearing a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar and a knee-length plaid skirt, with polished black patent leather shoes and knee-length socks. A bit immature by modern standards but perfectly acceptable by the fashions of the day I’d lived and died in, and comforting in their vintage familiarity.

I reached for the doorknob.

“Mary!” called a voice.

I turned.

Sally was standing near the corner of the house, face drawn tight with anxiety, a spear in her hand. That made sense. Sally had spent years stuck in a brutal bottle dimension with Thomas, and during her time there, her favorite spear became something of a surrogate teddy bear. If things were tense inside, it was reasonable that she would have raided the armory for a polearm she could cling to.

She beckoned me urgently toward her, and after a momentary pause, I went, trotting through the ankle-length grass to her side. “What is it?” I asked.

“You don’t want to go in there.” She punctuated her words with a sharp, decisive shake of her head.

“Why not?”

“They’re all...well, they were all yelling at each other, and now everybody’s crying,” she said. “You were with them, right? At the carnival?”

“I was.”

“Did Jane really . . . ?”

I nodded.

“Dammit. I just met her, but she seemed okay, and James is pretty broken up about it.”

“Is he out here with you?”

Mouth making a complicated shape somewhere almost exactly between a smile and a frown, Sally nodded. “He wants to be upset about Jane, like everybody else is. He really considers himself a part of the family now, and the family is upset, so he should be too. But he’s all swallowed up by being happy that I’m here, and not really believing that I’m here, and giving me little pop quizzes about things that only Sally Henderson would know, which he expects Sally Price to have somehow miraculously forgotten—or more likely, never have known. It’s like he doesn’twantme to be real.”

“Oh, he wants you to be real,” I said. “He just can’t risk accepting that you are, and being wrong. If you’re not the actual, honest-to-God Sally he lost back in New Gravesend, then you’re going to break him, because he can’t handle losing you twice. If he’s being weird, that’s probably why.”

“That sounds about right for James,” she said, and sighed. “But anyway. Thomas is too busy being broken up over hisrealdaughter to want his surrogate one hanging around not being dead at him, and that makes him feel guilty, and that’s not good for him right now. James and I came outside because staying in there when we weren’t grieving like everyone around us seemed like a sort of asshole move, and now you don’t want to go in there unless you’re ready to be hit by a giant tsunami of people having feelings.”

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