Page 76 of Aftermarket Afterlife

I shook my head.

“Then I can call and keep myself together enough to stay useful,” he said, rising from the table. He paused to kiss Shelby on the temple. “I’ll be right back.”

I doubted that, but I didn’t say anything as he walked out of the room. This needed to happen, and then it would need to happen again, after Verity called home. Sometimes, knowing things is hard. I still generally like it better than the alternative.

“Lea said you were looking for me,” said Uncle Mike. “What’s up?”

I walked over to stand near him. “I need a bomb.”

He blinked. So did Angela and Martin. Only Shelby looked unflapped, as if me looking for heavy explosives was the most reasonable thing in the world. She seemed more concerned about Alex, glancing after him before looking back to me. Isaac, who had been contentedly pulling on Crow’s wing, looked up and focused on me, saying, “Mary sad. Why Mary sad?”

“WhyisMary sad, Isaac,” I replied. “Use your verbs.”

“It’s a struggle getting him to use his words at all,” said Angela. “I’ve never dealt with a cuckoo as young as he is. He makes me wonder how any of us normally learn how to talk. He finds it so much easier to just communicate telepathically with Charlotte, and then both of them expect us to read their minds the same way he can read hers.”

Isaac was still looking at me with earnest, faintly glowing eyes, waiting for my reply. I sighed. “Mary is sad because it’s been a very hard day, Isaac. I’ve seen a lot of bad things happen, and I’ve seen some people get hurt.”

Shelby sucked in a sharp breath, clearly making the connection between my telling Alex to call his mother and people getting hurt. She leaned toward me.

“How bad is it?” she asked.

“Pretty bad,” I said. “Terrible. It could be worse, but I’m not exactly sure how.” Except that I was sure how, and all the ways I could think of involved even more bodies hitting the ground. The Covenant was still active in New York, and Verity was going to be a lot less careful now, a lot more inclined to rely on her luck and her momentum to carry the day. We still didn’t have accurate damage reports for the Fringe or the other carnivals, and it sounded like Leonard might have Megan locked up somewhere.

It was bad enough. It didn’t need to be any worse to break my heart.

As if on cue, Isaac started crying. Charlotte followed suit, barely a moment later. The two children reached for each other, latching on and holding tight as they cried, sobs escalating into wails in a matter of seconds. Shelby looked at them, her eyes growing wide, then launched herself from her seat and ran after Alex. Angela and Martin rose in turn, walking more decorously after her.

“What just happened?” asked Uncle Mike.

“Alex called his mother,” I said. “Now, about that bomb.”

“Right.” He focused on me. “What do you need?”

I explained the layers of the afterlife to Uncle Mike a long time ago, and once he determined that he and Aunt Lea would go to different places without my help, he got a lot more eager to help me out with whatever issues I might have. Normally, I didn’t like to exploit that. These weren’t normal circumstances. “I need an explosive device, non-nuclear, large enough to do as much damage as possible, small enough for me to lift it,” I said. “I don’t have to be able to physically carry it anywhere, as long as I can pick it up.”

“What are you trying to level?”

“Big, very old building.”

“How old?”

“British, pre-World War II.”

“Can you get belowground?”

“I should have access to the basement. And someone to call me so I wind up in the right spot when I get there.”

“That’s the important thing. A lot of buildings survived the Blitz because the bombs weren’t ground-piercing, and those places were built sturdy as hell. They’re supposed to stand up to centuries. You want to take them out with an explosive, placement matters more than almost anything else you can come up with. You’d be better off with more than one.”

“Can yougetme more than one?”

“It’s going to take some doing. I’ll have to pull some strings, burn a few IOUs that I was saving for a rainy day, but—yeah. Give me three days, and I can get you either three or four Mark 81s. They’ll each weigh about two-fifty, but you should be able to budge that for at least a few seconds.”

“I should,” I agreed. It was going to hurt like hell, and I was probably going to do the dead-girl equivalent of pulling a muscle, but there was no reason I couldn’t grab one bomb, jump to where Annie was calling me, and then return for another one, as long as I had someone on that end to call me back. I would ping-pong from my starting point to Penton Hall and back again, and we’d blow those fuckers to hell. “Is there any way you can get them delivered either here or to Portland? Because I’m going to need a family member to summon me in order to come collect them—I could probably show up on my own, but the keyword there is ‘probably,’ and we’re going to be on a countdown as soon as I say go. I need the anchor to be sure.”

“Guessing I wouldn’t be good enough?” he asked, without any rancor. He and I had discussed my ties to the family in the past, and which ones I heard the most loudly. He was so focused on operational security in most situations that it was important for him to know exactly what he was working with. I think he was the happiest person in the family, apart from me, to hear that I was no longer obligated to answer when the crossroads called. My connections to an incomprehensible, presumably hostile intelligence had never sat well with him.

“Sadly, no,” I said. “I need someone I’ve officially been the babysitter for. Alex could do it, or Kevin.”

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