Page 55 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“It wasn’t a god, it was just a snake,” she snapped.

“Snakes do work their way into places where they don’t need to be, don’t they? Slither, slither, through the cracks, whether they’re cracks in reality or your defenses. Hard to keep them out, when you really get down to it.”

“Leonard, you’re a smug asshole, and I’m going to take great pleasure in putting a bullet between your eyes.”

“I wouldn’t make threats if I were you,” he said, voice dropping into something less playful, more serious. “Your window of opportunity for changing sides is growing narrower by the moment, and I think you’ll have some genuine regrets if you allow it to close while you’re still standing in the wrong position.”

“I was never going to choose your side, Leonard,” she said. “And then you started shooting my relatives. I take that personally.”

“That woman was Alice Healy, wasn’t she?”

Annie said nothing.

“She didn’t die, somehow, and she’s stayed young enough that I almost didn’t recognize her. I could tell she had the Carew look about her, but they bred like rabbits in their day—we still have plenty of Carews running around the place, bleeding on the floors and getting underfoot. Then she showed up again, and she didn’t like it when I shot the little blonde. She didn’t like it at all. There were always questions about the circumstances surrounding her death. If her children survived, which they clearly did, then why shouldn’t she have done the same? Dark magic explains the agelessness nicely. It also explains why we’re going to wipe you from the face of the Earth. You don’t deserve to live here any longer.”

“How are you notdead?” demanded Annie. “Grandma shot you. She doesn’t miss.”

“She did shoot me, and she didn’t miss,” said Leonard. “But she shot me in the chest, and unlike the relative of yours I apparently killed, I was wearing decent body armor. I stayed down because that beast you call a boyfriend was rampaging.”

“How. Did. You. Get. This. Number?”

“It was easy to copy from the screen of the phone next to me.”

Annie paled. “I swear to God, Leonard, if you hurt her—”

“You’ll what? Say more nasty things you don’t mean? Fuck your monster boyfriend while you think about me? Set some things on fire? You’re going to do all those things anyway.”

“She doesn’t have anything to do with this,” said Annie. “Leonard, please.”

“Oh, now you’ll demonstrate manners? When I might have a friend of yours in my power? I see how it is.” It was impossible to listen to him and not interpret his tone as mocking. “Take me off speaker.”

“I don’t think—”

“Take me off speaker right now, or I swear to God the abomination dies. Don’t test me on this, Annie. You know I won’t hesitate to correct the cosmic error of its existence.”

With a hopeless glance at Sam and me, Annie took her phone off speaker and raised it to her ear.

I didn’t hear what he said next. But I saw her pale further, and wobble like she was about to collapse. She grabbed Sam’s arm with her free hand, using him to hold herself upright. “Youwouldn’t,” she spat.

He said something else. She turned to Sam, expression just this shy of hopeless, and asked, “How long?”

A reply.

“That’s not enough time.”

Pause.

“I understand.”

She hung up the phone and turned to me, eyes blazing. Literally—they had lit up from the inside, like her pupils were suddenly aflame. “Mary, how much can you lift?”

“That is not a question I like,” I replied. “Why?”

“BecauseLeonardwanted to give me one last chance to pick the winning side in our little conflict. One last opportunity to cross no-man’s-land and save myself.” She turned his name into a curse, twisting each syllable into a mockery of the very concept of the name. It was a neat trick, and probably something she’d learned from the Aeslin mice. “But seriously, how much can you lift?”

“If I don’t have to carry it all that far, maybe eighty pounds. If I don’t have to carry it at all, a lot more.”

“Shit.” Her expression turned hopeless, the fire in her eyes not quite guttering out, but dying back to ash and embers. “The bullet Leonard used to shoot Aunt Jane had a GPS tracker in it.”

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