Page 6 of Aftermarket Afterlife

I don’t know what I was thinking when I insisted on “family” rather than “father” during my negotiation with the crossroads, beyond “I don’t like being told what to do,” but I suspect part of me was thinking of my mother. She died two years before I did, of an untreatable cancer that ate her alive one bite at a time, until she was little more than a shadow tucked into a hospital bed, and as soon as I understood what it meant to be dead, I went looking for her. I combed the twilight and the starlight both, I searched the graveyard and every corner of our house, but she was nowhere to be found. Like my father, Mama died and moved on the way people are supposed to.

Not me. I didn’t get to have much of a life, so I’ve been busying myself with having as awesome a death as I can when constantly responsible for a family of passively suicidal cryptozoologists who get into trouble the way ducks get into water. I’ve seen a lot of movies, read a lot of books, attended a lot of concerts, and ridden a lot of roller coasters. You know. Normal stuff.

And I make a killer waffle.

• • •

The mice were racing away with the last fragments of their waffle when Sam shambled into the kitchen, still in his natural form, which was what he normally wore around the house, and always wore to sleep—unlike most therianthropes, who default to “human” when not making an active effort otherwise, his default form is the one with the tail.

Kevin has some theories about that. Mostly, he believes the furi were better positioned to avoid the Covenant of St. George’s periodic pushes into Asia, and thus didn’t undergo the unnatural selection process so many therianthropes were subjected to. For a lot of species, once the Covenant came to town, the ones who couldn’t hold human form effortlessly and for extended periods wound up as statistics. I have another theory. I think an adult furi is roughly five times stronger than an adult human, and any Covenant operatives who made contact stopped being a threat immediately thereafter.

Not that Sam was a threat, especially not early in the morning, when he was just sort of wandering around the house with his eyes half-closed, hoping to stumble into food. Or Annie, who was frequently near the food, and thus a good target for his bleary questing.

He collapsed into the chair next to hers, wrapping his tail around her lower leg before his head hit the table.

“Good morning to you, too,” said Annie, sounding amused.

Sam made an incoherent grumbling noise.

“How you people ever survive field work is entirely beyond me,” I said, walking over to put a coffee mug in front of him, already doctored to suit his preferences, which were at least less ridiculous than Annie’s. Sam reached for the mug, making the grumbling noise again, but this time with a lilt that sounded thankful. Unlike Annie, he blew on the contents before he started drinking. Then again, unlike Annie, he was still sensitive enough to heat to scald himself.

“Why are you making so much breakfast?” asked Annie. “Did I forget a birthday?”

Sam lifted his head to stare at her in patent disbelief. I dropped a new batch of bacon into my frying pan and swallowed the urge to burst out laughing. It wasn’t easy. There was something charming about Annie’s confusion. But a fireball wasn’t going to do my breakfast prep any favors, and so I managed to resist.

“Not quite,” I said. “Either of you want some eggs?”

“Sunny-side up, please,” said Sam.

“Are you just doing eggs, or is this an omelet day?” asked Annie.

“Omelets,” I said.

“Trash omelet for me, please, with extra cheese.”

“Got it.” Eggs aren’t like waffles and bacon. It’s better to cook those to order than to pile them up to get cold and rubbery. I turned back to the stove, the better to not see Annie’s face when realization sank in. There was no possible way I could see that happen and not start laughing at her.

“Oh,” she said, with dawning understanding and horror. “Oh,fuck.”

“Yes,” Sam gravely agreed. “Oh fuck.”

I did laugh at that, breaking an egg into my frying pan. At least everyone was on the same page now. I was in the kitchen cooking before most of the house was awake because three members of our family were already in motion, tucked safe in an airplane as they flew over from Las Vegas, where they’d been for the last week while Uncle Al—not a real uncle, and not a family member in the sense of my weird ghost powers—set up impeccable new fake IDs for the two of them who hadn’t been maintaining a presence on Earth for the last few years. Or, in Thomas’s case, decades.

Today, after so many years that it felt like forever, Alice and Thomas Price were coming home. I gave it fifteen minutes between the front porch and the first fistfight, which was why I was doing everything in my power to calm the mood of the house before things could get ugly.

Kevin staggered into the kitchen, glasses slightly askew where they perched on his nose.

“Do I smell cinnamon rolls?” he asked.

I smiled.

Two

“Some of my best friends are dead. Not ‘some of my best friends have died,’ although I guess that’s true too. More ‘some of my best friends were dead when I met them, and we became friends anyway.’ Life’s too short to be picky.”

—Juniper Campbell

Still in the kitchen of a small survivalist compound about an hour’s drive east of Portland, Oregon

---