Page 8 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“She did,” verified Ted, coming in behind her. Unlike his short blonde wife, Theodore Harrington was tall and dark-haired, with a leading man’s bone structure and twinkling eyes. Before Annie came home with Sam, he’d been the tallest member of the family, and had only managed to lose the title by about half an inch, which he didn’t seem to resent in the slightest. As always, he was dressed to disappear in a crowd, grays and browns without a single pop of real color. For an incubus, he was committed to the idea of not attracting attention.

Everything Verity knows about the “making yourself look like someone else with the addition of a pair of glasses and a cheap blazer” routine she so excels at—calling it “Clark Kenting,” which is accurate enough, in its way—she learned from her Uncle Ted. That man could make himself look harmless with a shift of his posture, and he normally chose to stand that way.

Being big and slow-aging and supernaturally attractive would have been easy things for a less gentle man to take advantage of. Thankfully for everyone involved, Ted has never been that sort of guy. He and Jane met while in college, and only started dating because she wore him down with her constant requests for dinner and a movie. Even then, it might not have worked, except that all the currently living Price-Healys by blood are descended from a woman named Frances Brown, Alice’s mother.

Fran was an amazing woman. Kind, ridiculous, foul-mouthed, an incredibly practiced horseback rider, and an even better shot. And a devoted mother, although she didn’t get to hold that title nearly as long as all of us would have liked. What she never knew while she was alive, and none of us knew until long after she was dead, was that she wasn’t entirely human. One of her recent ancestors—probably one of her parents, given the circumstances under which Fran had been found and taken into the carnival that raised her—was a type of humanoid cryptid called a Kairos. Kairos manipulate coincidence more than pure luck, although the two things can look very similar from the outside.

Kairos are also resistant, if not immune, to most known forms of psychic manipulation, including both cuckoo telepathy and Lilu pheromones. Meaning Jane may have been the first woman Ted ever met who liked men but wasn’t impacted by his preternatural attractiveness. She’d been flirting like a sledgehammer because she was interested inTed, not because he was an incubus.

Not love at first sight, maybe, but definitely a solid, healthy relationship, and one I had been delighted to see Jane find for herself. Ted was good for her. Always had been.

Motherhood was also good for her, inevitable fussing about her weight in the aftermath of both births aside, and Jane had been there for both her children the way she had wanted Alice to be there for her. Elsie didn’t have a lot of what I might call “ambition” or “motivation” or desire to move out of her childhood bedroom, but she made up for it in sweetness and loyalty. There was no one better to have in your corner when things got rough, something that had always benefitted her younger brother, Artie, who was much more introverted and inclined to hide in his room with his computer and his comic books.

Or he had been, anyway. Before he took a trip to another dimension with a bunch of his cousins and wound up getting his entire personality deleted. It was an accident, and the cousin who did it—Sarah Zellaby, cuckoo, childhood best friend, and longtime unconfessed love—probably felt worse about it than anybody else, even Artie. He couldn’t understand why she was avoiding him so assiduously. Sure, she broke his brain, but she’d put him back together afterward, and everything was fine now, right?

Right?

Wrong. Everything was very, very wrong. What Sarah had done had pieced together a reasonable facsimile of the man we knew, but the cracks had started showing almost immediately. This current Artie was built from the memories other people had of him, not the memories he had of himself: his internality was gone, replaced by an amalgam of other people’s ideas.

As he stepped into the kitchen and moved to get himself a waffle, I couldn’t help but feel like I wasn’t the only dead person in the room. Although at least I knew my life was over. Artie—Arthur, as he had started asking us to call him—was still operating under the assumption that he was alive.

“There’s vanilla ice cream for the waffles,” I informed him, and he shot me a grateful smile, heading over to open the freezer and get out the carton.

“So when are they getting here?” he asked. “Mom’s been wound tighter than a jumping jack all morning long.”

“I have not,” said Jane.

“Have so,” he replied, sounding almost disinterested. “You yelled at Elsie for having a Diet Coke instead of coffee. And you yelled at Dad for not knowing where you left your house keys.”

Jane made a huffing sound.

Artie scooped ice cream onto his waffle, returned the container to the freezer, and moved to sit down next to Sam. The kitchen table, which was generally used for breakfast and small groups, was reaching capacity. I frowned, removing what would hopefully be the last waffle from the wafflemaker.

“We should probably move to the dining room, now that we’re all here,” I said. “There’s no room for anyone else to sit.”

“God forbid we inconvenience the incredible Alice Healy,” said Jane, tone bitter.

Kevin sighed. “You said you were going to behave today.”

“I said I wouldtry.”

“Well, you’re certainly trying.” He stood, taking his plate and mug with him. “Mary, you need help with anything?”

“I’m fine, Kevin, thank you,” I said.

The next ten or so minutes were a chaotic blur of motion, as we relocated all the people and their breakfast to the much more spacious dining room. We had just finished when I paused, cocking my head.

Someone was calling me.

“I’ll be right back,” I said, as reassuringly as I could, and disappeared.

• • •

As a caretaker, I can take myself to any member of my family in an instant, if they think to call for me. After as long as I’ve been doing this job, I’ve figured out some of the loopholes in that statement: for example, they don’t have to becallingme, just saying my name in conversation with someone else. Having a name like “Mary” means that even when they’re trying to be careful, almost everyone I’m supposed to keep an eye on invokes me on a pretty regular basis. It’s convenient.

I vanished from the dining room and reappeared in the Portland airport a moment later, thankfully on the “you’re allowed to be here” side of security. There wasn’t much chance of me being caught on the security cameras either way—ghosts tend to glitch out electrical surveillance systems, which is nice, since otherwise my range of motion would be getting narrower year after year. It’s not like there’s some grand conspiracy to hide the existence of ghosts from the living. It’s more just that...well . . . most of us don’t care, and those of us who do can give you whole lists of why knowing about us would absolutely wreck a lot of lives.

Life is short and death is long, so ghosts who aren’t terrible people do what we can to preserve the sanctity of the former, even if it means being a little cagey about the afterlife.

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