Page 74 of Aftermarket Afterlife

It worked. I appeared on the back-porch step of an unassuming duplex apartment that looked exactly like every building in the row around it. The door was closed, but through the glass panel at eye level, I could see the dining room and a slice of the kitchen. There was no one there, which just supported the decision to appear outside. Inside, the motion detectors were probably on, and while the home security system had no defenses that could do me actual harm, that didn’t mean I wanted to set them off. Instead, as solid as a Girl Scout hoping to unload a backpack full of Thin Mints, I raised my hand and rapped on the glass.

Motion on the other side of the glass answered me almost immediately, as a short, curvy woman with blue streaks in her brown hair came pounding down the stairs with more speed than a simple knock deserved, all but throwing herself into the kitchen. Her left bicep was heavily bandaged—an affectation, since her body was even more on the “mostly water” side of things than your average human. She slowed as she approached the door, slicking back her hair with one hand and composing her face into something that wasn’t quite so grim. She still looked like she was going to attend a funeral; she just looked less like she was going to facilitate the need for one.

Then she saw me through the glass and the grimness bled away completely, replaced by surprise and concern. She hurried the last six or so feet to unlock the door, pulling it open. “Mary! You could have just come in, you know. We don’t have any shielding against ghosts.”

“I’d be concerned if you did, since I don’t think I’ve given you reason for it,” I replied. “It’s good to see you, too, Lea. I figured after the attack on the Carmichael, you’d have brought any extra defenses the house had online. Is Mike in Ohio at this point?”

“He left as soon as Alex called,” she confirmed. “I convinced him I should stay here. I’m more useful by the lake than I am in a landlocked area.”

Aunt Lea is an Oceanid, a sort of plasmoid shapeshifter that can move between liquid and solid forms. In their liquid form, they’re all but indistinguishable from water, but are actually more like extremely large, impossibly complex amoeboid life forms, capable of dissolving their own cellular walls for the sake of losing unwanted rigidity. In their liquid forms, they have a degree of control over the water around them, which makes them terrifying opponents when they’re anywhere near a decently sized body of water. Like, say, Lake Michigan, which was less than a mile away.

Oceanids like Lea who choose to live near freshwater tend to be smaller and more human-like than saltwater Oceanids; the lack of salt means they can only maintain coherence up to a certain size in their liquid forms. That also means they’re more likely to live among humans, as she had quite dramatically chosen to do when she married Mike Gucciard and settled with him in a suburb of Chicago.

No, I don’t know how any of this works, and I don’t care enough to try to figure it out. I’m a dead babysitter with a high school education. I’ll leave the complicated questions like “How does a puddle get a social security number, an accounting degree, and a husband who doesn’t mind her needing to sleep in a bucket?” to the members of the family who care about that sort of thing, and I’ll just focus on trying to keep the rest of them alive.

“I was hoping that would be the case,” I said, and watched her flip a switch that appeared to do nothing. That, I knew, would shut off the motion detectors in the kitchen and make it safe for people like me, who didn’t know exactly where to step to avoid setting off the alarms. If I did set off the alarms, they would send a message to Uncle Mike, and I really didn’t want to cause him another panic attack after the day he’d already had. “Him leaving, not you staying behind. How did you convince him, anyway?”

Her smile was thin and cruel and filled with the bodies snarled in the weeds at the bottom of the lake. “I pointed out that if the Covenant tried to come to the house, I’d punch them with the lake. As many times as I had to. Ever been punched by a lake?”

“No,” I said.

“Good. Keep it that way.”

“Sometimes I forget how terrifying you are,” I said. “Everyone okay at the Carmichael?”

Her face fell. “The hotel was seriously damaged, and the Covenant knowing it exists means we have to seriously question whether it can stay open. We lost three gorgons and a pair of bogeymen who stood to fight rather than running to their rooms.”

I grimaced. “I’m so sorry. And I’m sorry to have to ask you this, but how long ago did Mike leave?”

“He called to tell me he was at the house twenty minutes ago,” said Lea. “Not that I don’t enjoy your company, but Mary, what are you doing here?”

“I don’t have a phone, no one in Ohio is currently calling for me, and you seemed less likely to freak out if I suddenly showed up than most of them did,” I said. “Can you please call Uncle Mike and ask him to summon me?”

She gave me a sympathetic look. “Aim’s not getting any better?”

“It took me three jumps to get here.” It didn’t help that Uncle Mike and Aunt Lea were only satellite family members—I couldn’t sense them the way I could the core of the family, and while I’d hear if they called for me, the summons wouldn’t have the same burning need to reply that I got when it was one of my kids.

“That’s better than it was last year,” she agreed. “Do you think it’s going to continue to improve?”

“I definitely hope so, but for right now, much as I enjoy your company, I need to get to Ohio, and that means I need them to know I’m coming, and to call me there. Please.”

She blinked, then nodded. “I’ll call him. Come inside.”

I stepped into the kitchen. It was, as always, meticulously clean. Uncle Mike and Aunt Lea liked everything to be just so, perfectly in its place and never askew for longer than it took to use. It was part of what made them so excellent as organizational allies. It was also part of why I was glad neither of them had ever wanted children. Biological children were impossible for them as a pair, of course, but adoption would have been an option, if they hadn’t recognized that it wouldn’t be healthy for anyone involved.

Lea moved toward the phone. They still had a landline, for whatever reason, and it was reassuringly familiar as she picked up the receiver and dialed, then waited for an answer. After a moment, her face relaxed into a smile.

“Mike, hey,” she said. “All is well? Good. Yeah, all’s well here too, no sign of Covenant activity. I’m at home, and I have Mary here with me. Could one of you give her a summons so she can get to Ohio without bouncing all over the Midwest? That would be fantastic.” She paused. “Love you too, see you when you get home. All the alarms are on. I’m staying in unless I get a distress call or have to go out for groceries.” She hung up, then turned to me. “He’s going to call.”

“Great.”

“Now be honest—were you aiming for Chicago? At all?”

I shook my head. “Nope. But once I hit the downtown Whole Foods, you were the closest family member, so I came here before I went any farther. Thanks for calling him.”

“Any time.” She looked at me searchingly. “You wouldn’t have shown up here by mistake if you hadn’t already been thinking about us. What do you need?”

“I was worried about the Carmichael, and I need Uncle Mike to get me a bomb.”

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