Page 71 of Aftermarket Afterlife

I said nothing, just allowed my mask of normal, living girl to slip, cheeks going hollow, eyes sinking, and hair beginning to lift up from my shoulders in a spectral wave. My eyes, I knew, would be terrifying without me making any attempt to hide them, all those empty miles stretching out into infinity. I moved closer to the trio, and was gratified when they fell back at my approach, making space for me to step closer still.

“You are not welcome here,” I said. “Not on this rooftop, not in this city, not on this continent. This is not your place, and it never will be.”

“Phantom,” snapped one of the agents. “Everyone, as you were. It’s just a ghost.”

“Just a ghost?” I asked. “Justa ghost?” I moved closer and closer, until I was looming and they were pressed against the elevator house, staring at me like I was the nightmare they’d been having since they were children huddled in their beds, waiting for the sun to rise on another day of Covenant indoctrination. “Howdareyou.”

“Depart, spirit,” said the agent.

“I shall be there when you die,” I responded. “And I’ll see you very, very soon.” I disappeared into invisibility, winking out like an extinguished candle without moving from my position, and watched as the trio began to argue, squabbling about what my appearance could have meant, what I was doing there, what they might have done to offend the local ghosts. I made note of their location, and moved on to the next spot Verity had identified as a potential ambush.

All four of the locations she’d given me had Covenant teams waiting. Two were like the first one I’d encountered, clearly half-trained and out of their depth, scared out of their minds by the thought that they might actually see combat today. The other two were like the team she described meeting with Dominic, older, better armed, and clearly prepared for a fight. One numbered five, the other seven. The Covenant didn’t get lucky. They gotprepared.

I didn’t harass the other three teams. The first one had been correct that I couldn’t do anything to them, and while I might have haunted them anyway on another night, for the fun of it all, right now, that felt less important than getting back to Verity. I let go of my position atop the last building and willed myself back to the alley, appearing to find myself alone.

Verity wasn’t there, despite promising to stay. For a moment, I thought I might have blinked back into the wrong place, but as I turned to look at the walls, the bloodstain was still there, still exactly as it had been before. I moved over to where I’d left her. The place where Dominic’s body had been was surprisingly devoid of blood, probably because he’d lost so much of it while he’d been falling; there hadn’t been much left to pool on the ground. I still crouched down, scowling at the pavement like it was somehow going to tell me what had happened.

In a way, it did. While I was glaring at the ground, there was a scraping noise behind me. I whirled around. A manhole cover was sliding slowly out of the way. I straightened and walked toward it, peering down to see Kitty, Verity’s former employer, looking up at me, concern and sorrow written on her grayish face. Like all bogeymen, she was long-limbed by human standards, with impossibly spindly fingers marked by extra joints. As long as she wore foundation makeup and kept her hands behind her back, she could have passed for human.

At the moment, she wasn’t even trying. “Mary,” she said, with some relief. “Verity told me you’d be coming back here. Come down?”

I have nothing to fear from a sewer. I walked over to the manhole and released solidity, dropping through the street and into the tunnel below. I stopped when my feet would have passed through the sewer floor, and waited there as Kitty pulled the manhole back into place and descended the ladder.

“The dragons have been compromised, and we’re out of aboveground bases, but the bogeymen have remained secure, and hidebehinds were willing to let us share their tunnels for the time being,” she said, stepping onto the sewer walk and gesturing for me to follow. “We can get almost anywhere under the city if we’re clever about it.”

“About the dragons...this is all about William, I’m almost sure of it,” I said. “The Covenant needs a big showpiece to prove that the world still needs them. What better than a living dragon?”

“That’s our assumption too,” said Kitty. “We’re trying to find a way to move him, but it’s hard. He’s been under the city for a long, long time, and there aren’t any openings large enough. Still, we’re on our guard.”

That might need to be good enough. “If you’re that secure underground, why were Verity and Dominic on roof patrol?”

She made a complicated face. “Partially habit, and partially because some of the locals refuse to go underground. They have their homes—some of them have rent-controlled apartments—and they have biological needs that require access to the open air. The harpies have been running a sort of sanctuary for the city griffins, getting them into aviaries before they can run afoul of the Covenant, and you can’t keep griffins underground. They go wild and will injure themselves trying to get free.”

I thought of Alex’s beloved lesser griffin, Church, and nodded. “That makes sense.”

“They’re still part of the cryptid population, even if they’re being stupid about a bunch of birds,” said Kitty. There was a bitterness to her voice that told me she was speaking more out of grief and fear than actual anger. She glanced back at me, and we kept walking. “Verity and Dominic went out to make sure they were clear to fly for tonight.”

“But the Covenant was waiting for them.”

“Yes.” Kitty made a sound, half-choked, that I was pretty sure counted as a smothered sob. She put a hand over her mouth, ducking her head a little even as she kept walking. “Dominic was a bigoted bastard when Verity first brought him home. He’d been raised to think that people like me weren’t people at all. That we were monsters, and deserved to be treated like monsters by therealpeople—a category that conveniently enough included him, and just about everyone he loved. Not that he loved many people. They raised that boy like a rabbit in a hutch, or a dog on a chain. The Covenant never taught him how to be anything but a weapon, and then they pointed him at Manhattan and let him go, figuring he’d bring them back a few trophies for their wall, a few kills for their sacred books, and maybe not die in the process. Instead, he didn’t come back at all, because Verity stole him.”

“She did,” I said. “She gave him everything they didn’t, and she taught him how to have a home, not just a place he happened to be living. She found him, she liked him, she took him, and the Covenant never got him back.”

“No, but they broke him so no one else could have him, either.” Kitty stopped at a section of wall that looked just like everything around it, pressing her hand flat to the concrete. There was a grinding sound. The wall slid inward several inches, and she pushed it with more force, sliding it to the side and revealing an opening a little bigger than a standard door, leading into a long, dark tunnel. “Come on,” she said, stepping through.

I followed.

We walked through the dark for a long, long time, Kitty occasionally making a turn or opening another hidden door. They were simple machines of a kind, weights and pulleys, carefully balanced pressure points, and they slid back into place behind us as we continued onward, continually closing off the path in our wake. It would be difficult verging on impossible for someone who didn’t already know the way to follow us, and Kitty never paused or faltered. She moved with the ease of someone who knew exactly where they were at all times, and the darkness didn’t slow her down.

It wouldn’t. Bogeymen are almost entirely nocturnal and don’t require much light to see perfectly well. Full daylight is painful for them, rendering them virtually blind, and as a consequence, their communities are almost entirely underground. Like everyone else, they need money if they want to live in or around human society, and that means bogeymen like Kitty, who own businesses in what most people consider the “human world,” are not uncommon. They’re just almost always cash businesses that allow them to keep the hours that are the most comfortable for them, meaning they rarely have to be in the office while the sun is up.

Some witches have found a way to make darks for bogeymen who need them—the magical equivalent of lights, but instead of illuminating a room, they cast it into total darkness that can’t be pierced by most natural means. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out the hidebehinds had installed some of those down here, concealing them among the more-ordinary lights to dissuade sewer workers from doing maintenance. Any tunnel with a healthy hidebehind or bogeyman population would be meticulously maintained without the intervention of human authorities. The city was probably safer because they were here.

“Almost there,” said Kitty’s voice, reassuringly. It’s a little odd to think of a bogeyman in the dark as something comforting, but my existence has been a little odd since I failed to get out of the path of an oncoming truck on Old Logger’s Road. This was nothing new.

A door opened in the dark ahead of me, letting a slice of watery light into the tunnel. The outline of Kitty stepped through, beckoning me to follow her, and I did, moving quickly to stay close. The door shut behind me, leaving us in a cavernous chamber filled with shadows and lit around the edges by flickering candles. Clusters of bogeymen occupied the space, all turned to watch us. Other figures seemed to move in the shifting candlelight, and I didn’t try to look too hard at them. Those were the hidebehinds, one of the more reclusive types of cryptid.

We suspected they existed but weren’t actually sure until a sewer worker dropped his phone and the hidebehind community discovered the internet. They quickly turned out to be friendly and gregarious people, just unwilling to be seen by outsiders. It seemed to be somehow biological, like the weight of a non-hidebehind’s eyes was crushing to them. Given that gorgons can petrify with a gaze, it wasn’t as farfetched as it might have felt at one time. They were just people, people who didn’t want to be seen and deserved the respect of having their wishes honored.

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