Page 77 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“Your other charges not available?”

The question was mild, but I could hear the subtext loud and clear. I looked him dead in the eyes. “Some of them are,” I said. “Some of them aren’t. Some of them are going to be with me while I’m setting the explosives, both to anchor me to the location and because they have goals of their own to accomplish. Alex and Kevin I can safely expect to be stationary.”

Uncle Mike blew out a heavy breath. “Yeah,” he said finally. “I can get the bombs to whatever location you think is best, if you can deliver them to the target from there.”

“Thanks,” I said.

The children were still clinging to each other and crying. Much as it pained me to ignore them while they were distressed, the sound of their cries had been enough to keep us from being overheard. I stepped over to the kitchen chair that they were sharing, even though it was rapidly becoming too small for the two of them at the same time. The pillows they were sitting on had been knocked entirely askew and were on the verge of falling to the floor.

Charlotte reached for me when I was close enough. “Mary,” she wailed. “Mary, Mary. Daddy’s sosad.”

“I know, pumpkin,” I said, scooping her up and bracing her against my hip with one arm while I offered the other to Isaac. He shook his head and stuck his thumb in his mouth, shrinking back against the pillows.

Cuckoo powers work better when there’s skin contact. He was old enough to be figuring that out. While he probably didn’t find Charlotte’s thoughts overwhelming with as much as they lived in each other’s heads, wanting to avoid touching someone else made sense. He was old enough to have the beginnings of bodily autonomy, while also being too young to have fully grasped what it meant for me to be dead; he didn’t know that my thoughts would never get any louder, and I wasn’t going to push the issue.

“Uncle Mike will stay here with you,” I informed him. “Is that all right?”

He nodded as he sucked his thumb, tears running down his cheeks. He’d only met Jane twice, but the size of Alex’s grief was enough that he had no defenses against it. Poor kiddo. The perils of having a baby telepath around the house.

Charlotte firmly on my hip, I followed the path of Shelby’s flight to the living room, where I found her kneeling next to Alex, who was seated on the couch with his glasses shoved up onto his forehead and his hands pressed over his eyes. Charlotte immediately whimpered and reached for Shelby, who was rubbing Alex’s back with one hand.

“Can you take her?” I asked quietly, looking at Shelby.

She glanced up at me and nodded. “Of course. Come here, mite.” She reached for her daughter, who transferred willingly into the safety of her mother’s arms as I sat down next to Alex on the couch.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

He shifted positions, pressing his face into my shoulder as he dropped his hands, and sobbed like the child he’d been during our time together, like he had never known anything in this world but grieving. I stroked his back with one hand and his hair with the other, making quiet shushing noises as I tried to lend what comfort I could. Shelby, bouncing Charlotte to soothe her, took a step back and watched us.

My relationship with my adult kids is an interesting one. I’m not a parent—I’m the childhood nanny who never grew up, a strange combination of Mary Poppins and Peter Pan. But that means they all turn to me for comfort in times of stress, often over their own spouses, and that’s something the spouses in question have to learn to be comfortable with. It’s sort of the second test, after “Can you handle a colony of talking pantheistic mice?”—“Can you handle the fact that my babysitter is still around?” In Alex’s case, I had also been his first crush, even if he’d never done much beyond blushing and stammering and handing me toads.

They’d been some pretty nice toads, too. Thankfully for everyone involved, Shelby took my existence, and everything it included, in stride. She was generally a pretty mellow person until she had a reason not to be, and she wasn’t threatened by the resident dead girl. She just watched as I stroked Alex’s hair and murmured nonsense syllables, waiting for him to calm down enough to speak to me.

Eventually, he raised his head and met my eyes, tears still running down his face. “She’s dead,” he informed me, as if I might somehow not have known. “She was...and now she’s gone.”

For an instant, a pang of terror lanced through me, making me question whether I mightnotknow, whether he might be talking about someone else. But when I reached for the network of my connections to the family, everyone else was strong and stable. Dominic and Jane were the only missing pieces—and “only” felt like a misnomer there, a terrible attempt to downplay something that couldn’t be downplayed, to minimize a loss too big to focus on.

“I know, baby,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Was she...” He stopped, not quite able to continue, and I sighed.

“I was there. She was scared, but it was all very fast, and she didn’t have time to suffer.” I said. “I saw her, after, down in the starlight, and she said she knew she had to go. She wasn’t going to stick around and haunt people when her time was finished.”

“How do I tell themice?”

That was a question I was getting pretty good at fielding. “Just tell them. Whatever you say is going to be repeated to you forever, but you have to tell them. Especially if you have any members of her clergy here. They deserve to know.”

Alex nodded, a pained expression on his face. “I guess I have to.”

Charlotte’s sobs were tapering off, replaced by hiccups, as Alex got his grief under control and Isaac stopped bouncing it to her quite so loudly. She clung to Shelby, not yet to the point of reaching for her father, and he sighed, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.

“It’s always been a risk,” he said, pulling his glasses back into position. “We go out into these fields, we do these—sorry for the language—these damn stupid things, and we just count on luck to keep us safe, but luck doesn’t hold forever. Everybody has a bad day. Eventually, I’m going to have a bad day, or Shelby is, and then where will we be?”

“You’d think for a family that has proof of life after death, we’d have less existential fear of dying,” I said, and bumped his shoulder with my own. “Where you’ll be on that unlucky day is on the other side of the twilight, and then you’ll call my name, and I’ll come, and we’ll decide together whether you want to stay or go. If you want to stay, I’ll do whatever I can to help you figure out how that’s going to work, what it’s going to look like, what kind of haunting you have it in you to be. And if you want to go, I’ll carry your final message back to your family, and tell them you’re at peace, and that this was your choice. Luck isn’t forever. The babysitter is.”

“When you die, you’d best move along, you wanker,” said Shelby, with her customary lack of anything resembling sympathy. “I intend to remarry rich, and be able to buy half the privately owned land in Queensland so I can set up a proper wildlife sanctuary. Hard to do that with my dead husband’s ghost haunting my underwear drawer.”

“Yes, dear,” said Alex, and actually cracked a smile.

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