Page 61 of Aftermarket Afterlife

The lumberjacks were all still gathered on the porch, and came back inside when I opened the door and beckoned them, John proceeding to the table where he scooped Jane back into his meaty arms. She dangled there, an empty vessel that would never be filled again, and I finally allowed myself to look away.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s take her home.”

Twelve

“There’s no fate. There’s no destiny. No one’s chosen. It’s just a matter of who’s standing in the right place at the wrong time and catches the attention of the universe.”

—Apple Tanaka

Hauling a corpse back into the lands of the living, since it’s not like I can leave it in the land of the dead

THE BARN WAS EMPTYwhen I dropped back into it, arms and back aching in a way that seemed entirely unfair, considering I was already dead. I couldn’t hoist Jane back onto the table without help, so I lowered her gingerly to the floor and blinked out again, transiting through the space between like a stone skipping across a lake to reappear on the coast of Maine, standing on the edge of a high cliff. New Gravesend was only a few miles away, the town where the crossroads died and the world changed forever, even if most people didn’t know it. I pulled back and flung the tracker into the sea, watching it fall to disappear into the waves below. This accomplished, I vanished again, heading for home.

No one was actively calling me. That silence was still jarring. It used to be that either the crossroads were calling me or one of my kids was, almost always. I got very little in the way of self-guided time, because the crossroads didn’t want me to. Now, unless the kids needed me, I was almost always free. I would probably get used to that eventually. Not yet, though.

Bringing Jane out of the twilight had just been a matter of getting her body back to where we’d arrived and then flipping us into the daylight. Getting myself back to the compound was more difficult. No one actively needed me, which meant I couldn’t precisely control my arrival. I blinked in next to the firepit, where James and Sally were still seated, although someone—probably Annie—had come along and lit the fire for them at some point. Sally was sitting as close to it as she could manage, eyes closed and a beatific expression on her face, while James watched her with the air of a man whose prayers had all been answered, and was waiting for the bill to come due.

I knew that face. It was the face of far too many people who’d made their bargains with the crossroads, and only knowing he couldn’t possibly have done that kept me from rushing over to him in a panic. The rest of us were in freefall, but he’d just been given everything he’d ever wanted, and he was still drunk on the reality of it all.

Sometimes the world is kind, even if that kindness never seems to last. I looked toward the obstacle course. If Sarah was still up there with Greg, she had shifted positions such that I couldn’t see either one of them; she might have gone inside, or she might just want to be left alone.

“How long have I been gone?” I asked, voice surprisingly loud in the quiet air.

Sally turned to look at me. “Annie came tearing through with her hands on fire about two hours ago,” she said. “Said something about a tracking device? She wasn’t making a lot of sense.”

“That sounds about right,” I said. “You two doing okay?”

“A little stressed, and a little guilty about not being as worked up as everyone else, but for the most part, yeah,” said Sally. James nodded, but didn’t speak. “You?”

“Exhausted. And we’re not done yet. Call if you need me.” I turned and walked toward the house, then through the back wall into the family room.

Ted was the only one there, sitting on the loveseat with his shoulders pressed to the cushions and his head tilted all the way back, leaving him to stare at the ceiling. I stopped.

“Hey, Ted,” I said. “Where is everyone?”

“Annie came inside a few hours ago, said the Covenant had placed a tracking device in Jane’s body and you’d taken it away to the ghost world.” He paused long enough to swallow hard. “Kevin and Evelyn are in the security room, watching for any sign that the signal was picked up before you took the tracker out of range. Alice and Thomas are patrolling the perimeter, with Annie and Sam for backup. Arthur said he was going to take a nap, and Elsie went with him. Did you...did you bring...” He stopped there, apparently unable to continue any further.

I nodded, moving to stand beside the loveseat. “I brought her back,” I said. “I found a doctor in the twilight who was able to remove the tracker, and I threw it off a cliff in Maine, right into the Atlantic. If taking it into the twilight didn’t short it out, the Covenant can say hello to a kraken or two. They probably got enough information to tell them West Coast, but they’d be here already if they’d picked up much more.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll all get swallowed by the horrors of the deep,” he said, and chuckled, thickly, the sound turning into a sob as he folded forward, put his hands over his face, and started to cry again.

That explained a bit of why he was sitting here alone, and why James and Sally were staying outside. As an incubus, all Ted’s bodily fluids had the potential to cause people to experience extreme and uncontrollable physical attraction in people who had the potential to find his gender sexually attractive. Which is a really convoluted way of saying “If Ted cried in front of James or Sally, he might find himself getting pursued by someone who didn’t want to be pursuing him, any more than he wanted the pursuit.” Sally, I knew, identified as a lesbian, but if she had any latent bisexual tendencies, an incubus’s tears would drag them out of her in a way none of us were going to enjoy.

Direct blood relatives of Frances Healy had a degree of resistance inversely consistent with how far removed they were from her. Alice could probably have comforted him for hours without a twinge of arousal, while Kevin would succumb much more quickly. But it was a complication we didn’t need right now, any more than we needed to be telling Ted not to mourn.

I put one hand on his shoulder, doing my best to lend what comfort I could, and he grabbed my wrist, holding it tightly enough that it would probably have hurt if I’d still been something that couldbehurt in that way. He made a noise that was somewhere between a sob and a bray, a broken sound of grief that would have been comic if not for the circumstances surrounding it. I started to rub his back in small, concentric circles, trying to lend what comfort I could.

Ted raised his head and looked at me. “I want to hate you,” he said. “It would be soniceto hate you.”

I blinked. “Come again?”

“You’re a ghost. You were one of the first things Janey mentioned when she was trying to make me understand how weird her family was—not the missing parents, not the talking mice, you. Because you made her feel safe, and if we ever had kids, you’d make them feel safe, too. So she told me about her ghost babysitter, and how wonderful it was to know that she’d be taken care of, no matter what happened. You died, and you still got to stay.”

I knew what he was going to say next even before he said it. I knew, and there was nothing I could do to stop it, or help him stop feeling that way. So I just took my hand off his back and stepped backward, giving him room for his uncoiling rage.

“Why?” he asked. It was a small word, quietly asked, the question of a child. I still winced. “Why did you get to stay, and she has to go? Why are you still here, and my Janey isn’t? How is that fair?”

“It’s not, Ted,” I said. “When my father died, even though I had stayed for him, he didn’t stay for me. To be fair, he didn’t know I was dead, and he’d never asked me to stay, but that just means he died and left his supposedly living teenage daughter all alone. It broke my heart. Daddy dying was worse than when I’d died, because I had time to grieve for him.”

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