Page 92 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“Sarah should have just come through, with a semi-conscious Pliny’s gorgon,” I said. “I need to go to them.”

Once I was sure Megan was all right, I could go home and wait out the rest of the time before my bombs were available with my kids. Even if there was more drama than I necessarily liked at the homestead right now, being around that many members of my family would be restorative, and would hopefully help me put back some of whatever energy the anima mundi had to expend to let me do the things I did.

The woman blinked, very slowly, color draining from her cheeks. “Yes,” she said. “You really should.”

“Okay, what am I missing?” I asked. “Because you’re reacting to me as if you’d just seen, pardon the expression, a ghost. Iama ghost, but I don’t normally get that level of ‘Oh no a spookiness has occurred,’ especially not here. What’s going on?”

“Miss Zellaby arrived yesterday with Miss Rodriguez,” said the woman, folding her wings tight against her back in her anxiety. “She seemed to think you would be here immediately after, and when you weren’t, she became quite agitated. She’s sleeping now, but we weren’t sure...”

“Oh,” I said. From my perspective, I hadn’t even been in the wheat for an hour. Clearly, I was going to have to talk to the anima mundi about how incredibly attached humans were to the linear and consistent flow of time. “Can someone take me to them?”

“Yes, of course.” She pressed a button on her desk, and the doors behind her opened, a petite woman in nursing scrubs emerging and approaching the Caladrius, who looked at her with clear distress, and said, “Miss Dunlavy is here to see Miss Zellaby and Miss Rodriguez.”

“Come with me,” said the woman. She flashed me a sunny smile, and beckoned me to follow her back through the door into the hospital halls.

There was a certain lightness in her step, a buoyancy that implied a lower-than-standard density. I walked a little faster to draw up level with her. “Sylph or spirit?” I asked.

“We don’t have any hospital ghosts in residency at the present time,” she said. “Sylph.” Then she flashed me another smile. “Most people can’t spot us that easily.”

“I babysit for someone—human—who has a very close friend who’s a sylph.”

“Fascinating.” The woman stopped in front of a closed door. “Miss Zellaby locked it from the inside, but I don’t anticipate you’ll have any issues with that,” she said.

“No, I shouldn’t,” I said. “Thank you for your—” But she was already walking briskly away down the hall, heels clacking against the linoleum with every step. I turned back to the door. “—help,” I concluded, to no one at all, took a deep breath, and stepped through the wood.

• • •

The room on the other side was fairly generic. It wasn’t the room I’d found Sarah in before, thankfully; Mark wasn’t here. Instead, the bed at the center of the room held Megan, now connected to an array of beeping monitors and machines, bandages swaddling her arms and head. Sarah was sitting next to the bed, one of Megan’s hands held in her own, their fingers twined together to maximize skin contact. I stopped before coming any further.

“Hi, Sarah,” I said.

She didn’t look around. “You weren’t here,” she said.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“I got Megan to the hospital, and I was very tired, and I needed to go lay down until my head stopped ringing like a bell that had just been struck, and you weren’t here to explain what was going on.” Her voice took on a sharp, childish edge. “I didn’t like that.”

“You can’t threaten to wish me away to the cornfield right now, Sarah, I just got out of the wheat.”

She did lift her head at that, turning to blink at me in bewilderment. “What?”

“The anima mundi wanted to have a chat with me about tricking the universe into treating Megan as one of my charges. Apparently I’m not supposed to do that sort of thing.” Which didn’t stop me from feeling just a little smug about having figured it out. Megan might be direly injured and on some sort of complicated life-support system, but the key word there was “life.” She was alive. She had survived her captivity, and would have the opportunity to recover.

“Oh. And she got the math wrong for traversing the fourth dimensional axis.” Sarah’s expression melted into one of thoughtful relief, and I realized for the first time just how much reined-in anger she’d been swallowing before. It was a daunting revelation.

“Sure. So I’m sorry I wasn’t here sooner, but she nabbed me as soon as I left Seattle, and I couldn’t exactly tell her that wasn’t a good time.”

“No, I suppose not,” said Sarah. “I’m glad you weren’t late because you didn’t care.”

“Honestly, Sarah, does that sound like me? How’s Megan?”

“According to Dr. Morrow, she suffered blunt-force trauma to the torso and abdomen, and bruising of her internal organs. Did you know lungs could be bruised? She will recover. She just needs rest, and time. She’s currently in a medically induced coma to assist with that recovery.”

I glanced at Megan’s bandaged head. “Those snakes didn’t look like blunt trauma.”

“Ah. No,” said Sarah. “That was very sharp trauma in most cases, although the surrounding serpents tell me that a few of their fellows were crushed before they were decapitated, to add to Megan’s distress. Dr. Morrow is working to regrow the lost appendages.”

I blinked repeatedly. Caladrius are among the greatest healers the world has ever known, which is part of why we have so few of them left; they were hunted down, butchered, and sold as panaceas for centuries, and formed much of the basis for Christianity’s obsession with angels. Pretty people with big white wings who can cure the sick will do that, but I had never heard of them sparking regeneration.

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