Page 7 of Aftermarket Afterlife

THE CINNAMON ROLLS WEREdone, out of the oven, and had been solidly decimated as member after member of the family came drifting in, lured by the scent of bacon, coffee, and carbs. Even James had eventually woken up and come down from his room, although he had refused my fresh homemade waffles in favor of blueberry Eggos from the freezer. I would have been offended, but given that he was wound so tight with anticipation that I wouldn’t have been surprised if he spontaneously froze himself into a block of ice, I figured he could be allowed a little comfort food.

He didn’t bother with the toaster, instead passing them to Annie to heat before he smeared them with a layer of whipped butter and began dipping them in his coffee. No one reacted. Every family has their weird food habits, and ours sometimes seems to have more than most. It’s better not to comment.

Kevin glanced at his watch. He still wore an old-fashioned one, gears and glass on a leather strap. It was a gift from Aunt Laura on his fifteenth birthday, and I was pretty sure he was never going to replace it. Laura. The thought was enough to make me grimace. She was Kevin and Jane’s honorary mother figure when they were growing up; losing her was the root of the infection that rotted the ground between Jane and Alice. Any day now, one of them was going to realize the crossroads no longer had the ability to stop my tongue; they could ask me what happened to her, and I could tell them.

I just didn’t know what I was going to say when that happened. As there was no sense in borrowing trouble, I was doing my best not to think about it, and not to let it show when Ididthink about it and realized the implications.

Some information needs to be shared. Some information wants to be shared. And some information should go unshared for as long as humanly possible, because no one sensible chucks a fox into the middle of the henhouse when they have any choice in the matter.

“Jane and Ted should be getting here any time now with the kids,” he said. “Mom’s plane is supposed to have just touched down in Portland, which means, with time for deplaning, picking up their luggage, and getting the rental car, they’re probably about two hours out.”

“I still say we could have picked them up,” said Evelyn.

“Mom insisted we not put ourselves out,” said Kevin. “I think she wants to just rip the band-aid off in one go, and not be meeting up with us one by one all day long.”

“Yeah, but if we’d picked her up, we could have had the whole drive to get to know Grandpa before Aunt Jane got here,” said Annie wryly.

“Your aunt promised me she’d be on her best behavior,” said Kevin.

“Uh-huh. And you believed her?” Annie took a long drink of marshmallow-topped coffee. She was on her third cup, and had moved on from the mini marshmallows to the freeze-dried Lucky Charms marshmallows she ordered off the internet in bulk. Sometimes I wondered how she could breathe, since her lungs were probably solid marshmallow fluff by this point.

Kevin opened his mouth, then paused and sagged in his seat. “Not entirely,” he admitted. “She’sgoingto lose her temper, and she’sgoingto start yelling. But being on her best behavior means she’s going to at least try to delay that for as long as she can.”

“Be nice to your aunt,” said Evelyn mildly, picking up a piece of bacon and giving it an experimental nibble. As a human raised by a cuckoo and a revenant, her food preferences can be odd even by family standards. Fortunately, it’s hard to make bacontooweird without eating it raw, and her human physiology means she can’t do that without risks, something her brother has always been happy to mock her for. (Her brother, Andrew, is a bogeyman. Also adopted, obviously, and immune to most human parasites, which simply can’t find a foothold in his slightly out-of-synch biology. Bogeymen aren’t obligate carnivores, but they eat a lot of rare and even raw meat, probably due to the fact that many of them have been driven underground, where “safe cooking” is a misnomer.)

“Not if she fucks up our chance to talk to an actual sorcerer,” replied Annie.

Evelyn sighed, but didn’t argue.

Annie and James were both sorcerers. Annie, as I’ve already mentioned, was a pyromancer, capable of creating and controlling fire. James was the same in reverse, a cryomancer who could create ice and snow and cause frostbite with a touch. He didn’t appreciate Elsa jokes very much, while she was perfectly fine withFirestarterreferences, which I suppose shows the difference in perceived coolness between a Disney princess and a Stephen King protagonist.

And neither of them had ever been given what I would call “proper training.” Sorcery, again, as previously mentioned, is genetic. Most types of magic use aren’t. Routewitches just happen. Ditto for umbramancers and the like. But sorcerers require at least one sorcerer ancestor, which is why the crossroads were able to do such a good job of eliminating them. I’m ashamed to admit that I played a part in that; through the bargains I brokered, the crossroads were able to eliminate more than a dozen sorcerous bloodlines from the world, and those were gone forever. Thomas didn’t have proper training either. He was self-taught, like most sorcerers. It was just that he was also decades older than Annie and James, and had been successful at both controlling his powers and figuring out their non-elemental applications. They were hoping they could convince him to train them.

Jane screaming in his face as soon as he came through the door wasn’t going to help with that. But then, Jane’s issues were and have always been mostly with her mother.

Kevin’s phone beeped. He pulled it out of his pocket, looking at the screen before he nodded. “Jane and Ted are at the gate,” he said. “Evie?”

“Yes, dear.” Evelyn, who was closer to the end of the table, stood and walked over to the intercom box on the wall, where she pressed the button to release the locks. A moment later, the intercom buzzed to signal that the gates were sliding open.

The level of security around the family compound can sometimes seem a bit excessive, but when you’ve spent several generations getting ready for an inevitable clash with the paramilitary organization your ancestors ran away from, it becomes a lot more reasonable. Every lock and every failsafe was installed to protect against a specific problem or suite of problems, even down to the ultrasonic pest-repelling units that Kevin had recently installed on the fence, intended to ward off cuckoo incursions.

Not that there were enough cuckoos left on Earth to mount a proper incursion. Sarah had seen to that. Still, there were other things that could be driven off with the right ultrasonic frequencies, and after James and Alex had both made modifications to the units, I was willing to bet they’d keep us safe fromsomething.

The front door slammed just before Jane called, “Hello? Anybody home?”

The mice cheered.

“We’re in the kitchen,” Kevin called back. “You know someone’s home, or the gate would never have opened to let you in.”

“You could have all hurried out to hide in the barn, I don’t know, maybe you had a vital dissection project in process,” said Jane, bustling into the kitchen. True to expectations, she looked to be in a foul mood already, as if she’d been pre-gaming her incipient anger since she woke up. She brightened a little when she saw the platter of waffles.

I waved my spatula at her. “Breakfast?” I asked.

“I already ate,” she said, which I hoped was true. Jane was the least physically active member of the family, having chosen to live inside the city of Portland proper, where her associations with the cryptid world were normally of the domesticated kind. She belonged to at least three cryptid book clubs that I knew of, and a support group for the parents of part-cryptid children, and several other organizations that kept her busy but didn’t keep her moving. That would have been fine, had she not come from a family of obsessive athletes who spent most of their time jumping off of buildings or skating around roller derby tracks.

And that still might have been fine, had we not come from a society where women’s value was frequently defined by their waistlines. Jane had flirted off and on with disordered eating for her entire life, no matter how much all the rest of us told her that her weight didn’t matter, we’d love her no matter what. Even coming from Ted, that hadn’t helped as much as we would have wanted it to, and Jane’s diets remained a frustrating, occasionally frightening constant. Add that to a tendency to skip meals whenever she got stressed, and I had to seriously question whether she had eaten that day.

Jane read the doubt in my expression, because she reached over and touched my arm. “Really, Mary, it’s fine,” she said. “Everything looks fabulous, but I didn’t know you were going to be making breakfast, so I had some oatmeal before we hit the road.”

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