Page 86 of Aftermarket Afterlife

She was clearly unconscious, only kept in place by the straps holding her to the chair. She was also taller and broader than I was, meaning I wouldn’t be able to support her if I undid the straps. She’d fall. I turned her face toward me, and while her eyes stayed closed, lids not even fluttering, a few of the snakes that were her hair stirred themselves to lift their heads and flick their tongues at me, testing the air. Their eyes were dull, and more than half of them weren’t moving. As my eyes adjusted to the lack of light, I realized their motionlessness was due to something far more dire than mere unconsciousness; several of them were missing their heads, while others had twisted, bloodied lips, showing the raw places where their fangs had been extracted.

Rage bubbled up inside my chest, the kind of rage that could motivate a girl to go full poltergeist on the nearest targets. Gorgons don’t regrow their snakes, or their fangs; Megan would be dealing with the consequences of her captivity forever. If we could get her to Dr. Morrow, he might be able to seal over the stumps where the heads had been removed, and either amputate the remaining portions of their bodies or stabilize them such that they wouldn’t rot away to nothing. I didn’t know enough about gorgon biology to say what the solution was going to be.

I was suddenly very glad that Megan was still unconscious, even as I cast around the room for some sign of where we were. There were no helpful signs or abandoned pieces of mail with the address written clearly on the front. Scowling, I started toward the door.

—and stopped dead, again, no pun intended, as my left foot stuck to the floor. I stumbled back and looked down.

I was standing in a Seal of Solomon. To the living, it would have looked like a geometric doodle on the floor, but to me, its silvered lines gleamed, glittering from within with the brutal strength of their intent. It had been painted with a mathematical precision that made me suspect stencils had been used in setting this trap. It didn’t matter. The Seal of Solomon is one of the ghost-hunting tools that don’t hinge on intent—it’s all about the crispness of your angles, the precision of your lines. A machine can catch a ghost as well as a mesmerist can, if they’re given the right instructions.

With my feet stuck inside the Seal, I couldn’t go more than about a foot in any direction—the distance from the center to the edge. I tried to vanish, to put myself back beside Megan, and nothing happened. That was another change. I used to be effectively immune to any ghost trap that didn’t need a human sacrifice to set up properly; even if I got caught, I could always dip and go to the crossroads, who were big and bad enough to supersede whatever it is that powers things like Mesmer cages and Seals of Solomon, But the crossroads were gone, and I was caught.

Even as that terrible truth was sinking in, something moved in the far corner of the room, where the shadows had been too deep for my eyes to adjust. A figure rose from a sitting position and moved toward me, becoming more visible with every step.

“Hello, ghost,” said Leonard Cunningham, tone almost mocking. “With as often as you’ve interfered, did you really think we hadn’t factored you into the equation?”

“I hoped,” I said, standing up as straight as I could and trying to look intimidating. Not easy for a sixteen-year-old stuck to a circle. “And the name’s ‘Mary,’ not ‘ghost,’ unless you want me to call you ‘asshole.’”

The jibe didn’t appear to bother him. “Ah, yes. Mary Dunlavy. You would never have been among our priority targets, but your association with my sweet Annie meant researching you began to seem like a good idea. We already had your name from the reports filed by a former field agent of ours, Gwendolyn Brandt? She seemed to think you were in a relationship with Thomas Price, which clearly wasn’t the case, as dead women bear no children and Annie is very much his, but what she left was enough for us to track you down. We know your name, where you were born, where your parents’ bodies were buried—all the information we could possibly hope for. And we know how many people you’ve hurt.”

I blanched. “What are you talking about?”

“You’re a greater monster than any I’ve ever hunted, and I don’t know how you were able to fly beneath the surface of our surveillance for so long. Do the people you claim to care for know what you are? What you’vedone?” Leonard’s voice was calm and evenly modulated, the voice of a man asking a simple question, not the voice of someone hurling unfounded accusations. “We can make a guess at when you died, based on how old you look and when the stories started, but your death has never been confirmed. Did you know that? They still list you as a missing person in your hometown.”

I said nothing. Anything I said could be used against me.

“But you started to pop up all over the world, for the people who know how to look. Brokering deals with the crossroads, leaving devastation in your wake. You were single-handedly responsible for hundreds of ruined lives, and uncountable deaths.”

“That was the crossroads. I’m just the babysitter,” I said. “I’m here for Megan. You have no right to hold her captive.”

“She’s a monster who had the audacity to go among humans as if she belonged there,” snarled Leonard, his mask of calm reason dropping for a moment. “Horrible deceitfulthing. Nothing we can do to her balances out the damage she’s done.”

“There’s nothing you can do to me,” I said, voice cracking at the end of my sentence. Leonard took another step forward, smiling, and I fought to stand my ground rather than shying back to the outline of the Seal. Two things were clear in that moment:

He was a true believer in the cause of the Covenant, and like all true believers, he thought anything he did in the pursuit of his cause was justified by the sins he had accepted to be true. Worse, at least for me, he genuinely thought he was doing the right thing.

“Annie is a good person,” he said. “Loving. Kind. Devoted. She’s got a huge amount of potential when it comes to helping humanity cleanse this world. It was always meant to belong to the human race, and with her by my side, it will finally be ours. She’s being held back by the monsters around her, but she’ll be glorious when she’s free. All we have to do is release her.”

“You’renota good person,” I spat. A little childish, maybe, but it felt like something he might actually acknowledge, as opposed to the many things he was happy to just gloss over.

“True enough,” he said instead, “I’m not. But then, neither were you.”

He pulled a small black box from his pocket and pressed a button at the top of it. Speakers around the room came on with a hiss of static as Latin chanting began to fill the air, sonorous and archaic. I smiled.

“The Christians may have stolen the idea of the exorcism, but that doesn’t mean Latin is the language of the dead, no matter how much you try to make it happen,” I said. “Latin isn’t even going to give me a headache.”

“Wait for it,” he suggested, sounding far too smug about the situation. The chanting transitioned to Hebrew, with a contrasting voice providing a fluid line of ancient Sumerian. I didn’t understand a single word. It didn’t matter. Every one of them hit me like a flung stone, bruising and shredding my spectral flesh. I screamed but couldn’t blink away, couldn’t vanish, couldn’t do anything but cover my ears and drop to my knees, struggling to remain coherent.

“I’ll tell Annie you quit,” said Leonard serenely, and then I was gone, breaking into a thousand pieces, into starlight, into silence.

Into silence.

Seventeen

“It never does much good to decide ‘oh this is who I am, this person right here’ and try to hold yourself to it. Everybody changes. You’re dead if you stop changing.”

—Enid Healy

Who even knows anymore? Somewhere, presumably. Something is happening

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