Page 72 of Aftermarket Afterlife

Kitty led me across the chamber to another door, and paused to murmur, “Open it carefully,” before stepping aside and letting me pass.

The door was unlocked, the knob turning without resistance. I paused, then let it go, glancing back to Kitty. “Or not at all,” I said, and stepped through, into bright white light.

I stopped just on the other side of the door, blinking as I waited for my eyes to adjust. It seemed unfair that out of all the things about a living body, this was one of the things my eyes insisted on emulating. But replicating eyes well enough for them to work meant replicating the musculature and retinal structures, and sudden bright light still burned exactly the way it had when I was alive. At least it wasn’t painful.

I finished blinking the brightness away, and saw that I was once again in the waiting room at St. Giles’s Hospital. A bogeyman was sitting in one of the hard plastic chairs, a makeshift sling holding his clearly broken arm to his chest, and a harpy was sitting in another chair with a large cat carrier in her lap, its occupant making loud squawks and croaks of protest.

A female Caladrius in nurse’s scrubs stood behind the desk. She perked up at the sight of me, waving for me to approach. I walked toward her.

“Miss Dunlavy,” she greeted me. “We’ve been expecting you.”

“Is Verity here?” I asked. It was no real surprise that the bogeymen had their own entrance to the hospital. Honestly, it would have been more surprising if they hadn’t. A special entrance meant they could bring their people in without exposing them to light if they were already injured. I had little doubt they had some sort of signaling system for when they needed to ask the hospital to dim the lights in advance, just to keep everyone safe.

Human hospitals have it easy. They just have to deal with one species. A cryptid hospital is more like a veterinarian that specializes in treating intelligent, communicative animals. Dr. Morrow had to know the anatomy and biology of a few dozen species of cryptid, and be flexible enough to deal when someone brought him something hedidn’tknow intimately. It probably helped that as a Caladrius, he had certain preternatural healing abilities, and could work around what he didn’t know. It was still a challenge most human doctors would never need to face, and might not be able to rise to if they did.

The woman behind the desk nodded. “She’s in the...” She hesitated.

“The morgue?” I asked.

The woman nodded again, clearly relieved. “Yes, the morgue. I’m sorry. I wasn’t sure if that was a sensitive word around posthumous people.”

“We prefer ‘ghosts,’” I said. “May I go to her?”

“Please do,” she said.

“Thanks.” I turned, then, and walked through the nearest door, heading deeper into the hospital.

Some cities have cryptid funeral parlors. Others have cryptid-friendly funeral homes, where people can take their loved ones for a respectful interment as necessary. Manhattan’s last cryptid-friendly funeral home closed down in the nineties, when even cryptid community funds couldn’t stand up to the rising tide of local real estate prices. So St. Giles’s fills the gap.

They have a mortician on staff who’s fully licensed to prepare bodies for burial in New York state, and can embalm well enough to prep them for transport all across the continent. He’s a ghoul, but no one holds that against him, and whenever he needs to eat parts of his clients, he takes the cost off his final bill. It’s very respectful, really, and reminded me a little of the Dullahan who’d taken Jane’s kidney.

Not many cryptids have a hunger for human flesh, but the ones who do try to find jobs that give them access, mostly because it’s easier than getting corpses the do-it-yourself way. Sure, some people enjoy murder, but it tends to have bad consequences when they inevitably get caught, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to become a mortician, or get a job in hospital janitorial, or any one of a number of other corpse-rich professions.

The halls were largely empty, although the lights were on above more of the doors than had been earlier in the day, and more of the nursing staff were bustling back and forth, some looking downright harried. The Covenant had been busy.

I continued onward.

My journey eventually brought me to the morgue, and I walked through the door into a cool room where the air tasted like dust. Stainless steel tables dotted the space, some of them occupied by sheet-draped figures. One such table was also occupied by the blood-streaked form of Verity Price, curled tight against the table’s shrouded and rightful occupant.

Right. Not surprising. Not great, either.

I walked toward her, taking in the absence of the morgue attendant as I did, and stopped a few feet away from the table before I said, “Hey, Very, that doesn’t look terribly comfortable.”

She didn’t move or respond.

“You know you can’t stay in the morgue all night, right? This isn’t a hotel.”

Still no response.

I sighed and walked over to rest my hand on her shoulder, turning intangible when she tried to shrug me off. “Sweetheart, I know you’re hurting right now. I know you don’t want to think about what happens next. But tomorrow’s going to come, and you’re still going to be here, and Olivia’s still going to need you. You can’t give up now.”

“What the hell do you know?” She finally turned her head to look at me, glaring viciously. “You died when you were a kid. You never fell in love. You never even dated. You don’t know what I’m feeling right now. You don’t know how much this hurts.”

“No,” I said, with artificial calm, trying to swallow how much her words stung. “I don’t know from experience, because I didn’t have the opportunity to learn. What I do know is that I’ve watched three generations of Healys and Prices grow up, and figure out who they love, and fall in love so hard it hurts, and stay in love even when it kept on hurting. I’ve watched you marry and I’ve watched you mourn, and nothing about this is new, and nothing about this is fair, and it’s not right but it’s the way things are. I can’t change it any more than I can go back and not get hit by that truck. I don’t even know if I would have fallen in love if Ihadn’tdied. I know a lot of ghosts who’ve fallen in love after death, and it’s just never happened for me. Not the way you mean. But I’ve fallen in love with your whole family. You’re my family. You’remine, in a way that words don’t really have the strength to describe. You make me feel like this world has a purpose. You make me feel like I’m still on this side of whatever’s next for a reason. You make me want to stay. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.”

Verity was crying again, tears following the channels already worn along her bloodied cheeks by the tears that had come before; her eyes and nose were red. She was normally a reasonably attractive crier, one of those girls who could weep without smearing her eyeliner or getting snot all over her upper lip. Not right now. Right now, she was a mess, and that was somehow well and good and entirely correct, because this was her time to mourn. Her grief would last after this, and probably for a good long time. It would never be this raw again. I wouldn’t tell her not to be sad, not when she had every right to be.

She sat up, putting one hand on the chest of the shrouded figure next to her, and looked down at him with tears dripping off her nose to pool on the shroud in a damp, red-tinged stain. “I never really fell in love before him, you know? I dated, and sometimes I thought I was in love, but it always went away the first time we fought. None of them ever understood me. Even Blake didn’t see why I didn’t want to come out of the field and join the normal world, and he was a cryptozoologist in training. We could have been good together, if he hadn’t been so determined to make me into someone else by loving me hard enough.”

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