Page 88 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“Yes, ma’am, thank you, ma’am,” I said, with almost embarrassing eagerness. “Please, just send me back. I can handle all the rest.”

“See that you do,” she said, with utter mildness. She didn’t snap her fingers or make an arcane gesture with her hands. She just turned her back, leaving me alone in the endless wheat, waiting for a miracle.

There was no miracle. And then, without transition or preamble, there was no wheat. There was just a small, dark room with an insensate gorgon strapped to a chair, and no sign of Leonard. The Seal was still on the floor, but broken, rendered inert by a footprint across its lines. Guess he didn’t think he needed to worry about more than one ghost, or about the same ghost bouncing back from an exorcism.

I ran my hands quickly down the memory of my body, checking the phantom lines of my figure. Nothing had changed. I glanced down, and confirmed that my clothing hadn’t changed either. If the anima mundi marked me in some way, it wasn’t something I could find for myself.

Megan wasn’t moving, but she was breathing, and a few of her snakes twitched as I watched, verifying that she was still very much alive. Good. That gave me a moment before I unstrapped her. I turned myself half-solid to avoid noises if I bumped into anything and began to move around the room, searching my surroundings.

Leonard was Annie’s age, and this looked like it had been a corporate office before it received a horror-movie makeover and became a slaughterhouse-in-waiting. One fixture of the corporate office: the landline phone. Boxy, reliable, and so cheap that even when an office was emptied out, the phone would often remain. What’s more, kids these days don’t necessarily recognize them for what they are. I hate the phrase “kids these days.” It’s a beautiful combination of shame and regret that doesn’t do anyone any good under most circumstances—it says both “How dare you be younger than I am” and “Everything worth experiencing has already happened; you lost the game before you knew you were playing.”

But that doesn’t mean there’s not truth to the concept that every generation knows something new and forgets something old. I made my way over to the plastic-shrouded bulk of the desk and began picking around in the clutter beneath it, pawing through cast-aside staplers and hole punches until my hand passed through the solid black rectangle of an industrial-grade touch-tone telephone. I knelt, turning solid, and pulled it into my lap.

“Come on, universe, do a girl a solid,” I muttered, and lifted the receiver.

There was a dial tone.

I swallowed a shout of exultation that would have impressed even the mice, settling for punching the air and hissing a sharp “Yes” under my breath.

One fun thing about looking like a kid today but actually being an old lady: I still memorize the important phone numbers. I never got out of the habit, and it’s not like I can reliably carry a cellphone. Passage through the twilight kills things. That often includes batteries. Not always, which was why I couldn’t just blip Jane there and then back to kill the tracker, but often enough that it’s not really a safe option.

Settling on the floor where the desk would block me from view if Leonard came back, I tried to figure out where Sarah would have gone. She’d taken Greg with her, which meant it was likely to be somewhere rural or at the very least suburban; hiding a giant spider isn’t always an easy ask. But she’d been fleeing from Artie, which meant she didn’t want to be found quickly, and she hadn’t gone to Ohio.

She knew I was going to need her to get Megan out. Where could she have gone that was suburban enough to hide Greg but accessible enough that I’d be able to find her? I frowned, brow furrowing, before dialing experimentally and raising the receiver to my ear. The characteristic trilling ring of a landline rang out, soft enough that I could hope no one would hear me.

After the fourth ring, the answering machine picked up, and Uncle Mike’s gruff voice said, “If you called, you had a good reason. Explain it.” There was a loud beep, followed by dead air.

“Lea, it’s Mary,” I said, keeping my voice low. “I know you’re there, listening to the machine. I need you to pick up, please. This is an emergency.”

There was a click as the receiver was picked up on her end. “Mary? What’s wrong? Why are you calling?”

“You mean instead of coming over? Well, for one, I just got back from an exorcism, and I suspect my aim would be even worse than normal right now—I’d rather not appear in the middle of a park and scare the crap out of a bunch of nannies.” The kids would be fine, by and large. Children are much calmer about ghosts than adults tend to be. “For another, I’m in a room with an unconscious, beat-to-shit gorgon, and I’d rather she not wake up alone. Is Sarah there with you?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I was guessing,” I said, sagging with relief. “She’s not in Ohio, I don’t think she’d go to New York right now, but she’s always liked you, and you have an excellent basement for Greg to scurry around in like a big furry nightmare. Can I talk to her?”

“Hang on. I’ll ask.” There was a soft scuffing sound as she presumably covered the receiver with her hand, followed by the sound of her voice, muffled and indistinguishable. A few seconds passed, and then she was back, saying, “She’ll be right here.”

“Great,” I said. “Civility says ‘no rush,’ but I think we’re more in ‘big-time rush’ territory right now.”

“Got it. Where are you?”

“Seattle.” I looked around. “Looks like the upper floor of a hospital. Which makes a certain degree of sense, since Megan was doing her internship in a Seattle hospital. Grab her, drug her, haul her someplace where no one’s going to be looking for her, don’t worry about evading the security cameras to get her out of the building.”

“And based on what we’ve learned from Antimony, the Cunninghams have the sort of money that could make massive donations and buy themselves some freedom of movement around the building,” said Lea. “Here’s Sarah.”

There was a scuffling as the phone was passed hand to hand, and then Sarah’s voice was saying, “Hello? Mary?”

“Hi, Sarah. Needed a little time away from all those negative thoughts, huh?”

Silence, and a soft sniffle that told me I’d guessed close to the mark—but not exactly right. There was something more that I was missing, and it was going to bite me in the ass if I didn’t figure it out soon.

“I found Megan.”

“Antimony’s friend?”

“Yes. The one who must have told the Covenant where to find Alex and Shelby, and where to find the gorgons in Ohio. She’s here in Seattle, and I need to get her out. But she’s alive, so I can’t take her through the twilight. Can you find me?”

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