Page 90 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“Keep your voice down,” I said. “I love all the children I sit for equally, but I won’t tolerate bullying, got it?”

Megan blinked, looking bewildered. The conversational ploys I use to calm misbehaving preschoolers tend to have that effect on people who aren’t used to them. If I had to call for quiet coyote, it was going to blow her dazed, possibly concussed mind.

“Sarah, can you help me get Megan loose?”

“You could have done this part on your own,” said Sarah, walking over to us, as serene as if Megan hadn’t just implied she’d wormed her way into our family by abusing her telepathy. “The buckles are fairly straightforward.”

“Yeah, but she’s bigger than I am,” I said. “If she starts to fall, I’m going to need you to help me hold her up. How did you get here?”

“I came to Seattle, and then eliminated hospitals by running a grid search for phantom minds,” she said. “I found several dozen haunts, but you were the only one with your particular frequency. From there, it was a simple matter of modeling the three-dimensional manifestation of the hospital itself, and coming into the room where I would find you.”

I blinked at her. “Oh,” I said. “Nice and easy, then.”

“Yes,” agreed Sarah, not catching my sarcasm—or maybe just ignoring it. “I was glad when you said you were somewhere well away from the compound. It allows me to avoid the weakened areas created by my tunneling that have not yet had time to recover. Further, it means both that the Covenant has not yet narrowed in on the rest of the family, and that...” She tapered off.

“That you didn’t have to go back yet,” I concluded. “No, honey. You don’t have to go back. You can go just about anywhere else you want to be. But right now, I need your help getting Megan out of here. We’re taking her to St. Giles’s.”

“My mom...” said Megan weakly.

“Understands that you need care more than she needs to see you,” I said. “I’ll make sure she knows where you are. All right? Sarah?”

Sarah cocked her head, apparently considering the situation. After an unnervingly long pause, she said, “All right. I can get her to New York, and you can meet us there.”

“Thank you,” I said, and eased Megan’s weight onto Sarah’s arm as we got the gorgon medical student to her feet. Sarah staggered, just a little, before she smiled and vanished, taking Megan with her.

I stayed where I was, waiting for the call to come. Only a few seconds later, I heard Sarah’s voice calling me across a continent to family and safety. I closed my eyes, let go, and followed the beacon of her voice.

Eighteen

“Everything costs someone. If you think it doesn’t, that just means you’ve never been the one who had to foot the bill.”

—Juniper Campbell

In the grain. Again. Which was not the idea, and is not terribly welcome

IAPPEARED IN Afield of grain, under a dark and star-spangled sky. Looking around in bewildered dismay, I did the only thing I could think of: I stomped my foot like the teenage girl I still appeared to be, balling my hands into fists, and wordlessly shouted my frustration into the void.

When I was finally exhausted enough to stop, a single star fell from the firmament above me, leaving a glittering trail across the dark as it dropped toward the horizon. I held up my middle finger, showing that glorious astronomical event exactly what I thought of its ineffable beauty.

“That’s not very kind,” said a chiding voice behind me.

“I was sort of in the middle of something,” I said, turning to face the anima mundi. She looked at me with amused patience, and I flashed briefly back to speaking to Megan like she was a child. The age difference between the anima mundi and myself was even greater; to her, all of us were children, bratty, badly socialized children raised in the time of the crossroads, and now in need of a firm hand to set us back on the right path.

“You were following your family from Seattle to Manhattan,” she said. “I pay attention.”

“Then you must understand why I need to get back.”

“Why are you in such a rush? You’ve been with them for decades without being in a position to be this active. Now you’re here, there, and everywhere, and acting like they can’t accomplish this without you. Don’t you think that’s a little arrogant?”

“I would have been this active from the start if I’d been able to,” I protested. “I haven’t been neglecting my duties because I wanted to. The crossroads kept me busy most of the time.”

“The crossroads was a cruel master, abusive and alien, and the things they asked of you were not things that should be asked of any spirit of the earth; I failed you in my absence, and it is because of that failure that we’re here now, which is why I would like to speak with you before I make decisions in which you have no say. When I look back along the line of your fate, I find a fascinating quirk. Do you know what that might be?”

I did my best to release my irritation without allowing it to morph into fear, as it so very much wanted to. “No, ma’am,” I said.

“When you died, Mary Dunlavy”—and she waved her arm and we were no longer in the grain under the stars; we were in the scrubby corn growing along the verge on Old Logger’s Road, the corn that no one loved or tended, and the sky was smudged yellow and gray with the impending sunset. I knew this cornfield, and this road, far better than I wanted to admit. This was where I’d died, and on the few occasions when I’d worked up the nerve to openly defy the crossroads, this was where they’d hurled me, leaving me to consider the mind-crushing nothing of haunting a cornfield for eternity. I shuddered, wrapping my arms around myself.

The anima mundi didn’t appear to notice. She simply continued, calm and serene: “There was nothing about you that should have allowed you to become any sort of manifest ghost. Oh, you had the love and the longing to anchor you to the land of the living for as long as you wanted to stay, but you should have been a shapeless haunt, a spirit of place and tragedy, wailing your grief to the wind as your humanity leeched slowly away on the prevailing winds. The crossroads offered you another opportunity—a bargain, if you will—and pinned you here through artificial means, making you over as something they could claim and control.”

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