Page 94 of Aftermarket Afterlife

It’s rare for there not to be an Aeslin mouse in eavesdropping distance when you’re in one of the compound interiors, and this time was no exception. I had barely finished talking before three tiny heads popped out of a hole in the baseboard, their whiskers quivering with excitement. “Hail to the Phantom Priestess,” they chorused, in politely restrained unison. One of them pushed forward, a dark brown male wearing the livery of the Pilgrim Priestess. “Truly?” it squeaked, all but overcome with ecstasy.

“Yup.” I sat down all the way, resting my elbows on my knees. “I’ve been unintentionally out of the loop for days, and I need you to fill me in on what’s been going on around here.”

“Hail! Hail to the recitation of the recent events,” intoned the mouse.

I gave it a quizzical look. “Is there a reason you guys are so quiet?”

“Two of the faiths are in mourning, priestess,” squeaked another mouse, this one in the traditional attire of the Violent Priestess, Fran. “The litanies of the Silent Priestess and the God of Hard Choices in Dark Places transition now from cultivation to preservation.”

“Hail,” said all three mournfully.

“And did not the Thoughtful Priestess say, Love the Enthusiasm, But That Child Needs Her Sleep, So Keep It Down In Olivia’s Room or Else?” asked the third mouse, who wore Evelyn’s livery and recited her commandment with the zeal of a true believer.

“Good to know Evie’s on the case,” I said, and settled back to watch the rodent recreation of the last day.

Aeslin mice never forget anything, and as a consequence, they never leave anything out. Their recitations tend to unspool a little faster than real time unless they’re explicitly asked to slow down, and they skip over periods where nothing is happening—“Sleep Held No Surprises” is their usual phrase for that—but they still go through the minutiae in agonizing detail.

After I’d left to find Megan and Sarah, Antimony and Sam had come inside from the firepit to get some lunch for themselves and the rest of their group, and found Evelyn and Kevin weeping in the kitchen, having just gotten off the phone with Verity in New York. A family meeting had been called after that, to bring everyone up to speed with current events, including where people were and who was dead.

To be honest, I was a little glad not to have been there for that one. Family meetings that include funeral arrangements are never anything I would consider a good time. Jane would be buried here in Portland, of course; Dominic’s final resting place was a little more up in the air, and might be either here or in Buckley, where he could find a home among the bodies of our lamented dead. Either way, they weren’t with us anymore.

Olivia was now expected to be at the compound for an extended visit, and Evelyn was already drawing up plans to convert one of the guest rooms into a long-term bedroom for the girl, somewhere she could feel safe and secure and adjust to the difference between our wooded isolation and the city where she’d spent her life to date. Elsie had apparently suggested contacting the dragons in Vancouver to see whether any of their kids wanted to take the train down for a playdate, figuring Olivia might do better when buried in a pile of semi-identical blondes. I wasn’t sure she was so wrong about that.

As for Elsie, she was still profoundly sad, but she had gone home to sleep last night, and managed to convince her father and brother to go with her. Ted was brokenhearted and mostly sitting listlessly around the front room, moving to the library when he couldn’t control his tears and risked flooding the house with his pheromones. Unlike Arthur, who didn’t affect anyone he was directly related to, Ted was only a blood relation of his own children, and could send the whole household into a bacchanal if he wasn’t careful.

Alice and Thomas had mostly been out in the barn, drawing up tactical plans for the attack on Penton Hall and, one suspected, spending a few final hours with their daughter before she was taken away forever. They’d missed their chance with her. There was no way to pretend they hadn’t, not now that she was dead and gone. But at least they were trying to make up for it, in their own somewhat stunted way.

Arthur still wasn’t grieving. He didn’t seem to know how. He’d come back with his father and sister, more because he didn’t want to be alone than because he wanted to be a part of the planning, and had been moping around the fringes of the household ever since.

As for James and Sally, they had yet to let one another out of sight. She slept on the floor of his bedroom, and he snapped awake every time she got up to go to the restroom in the night, both of them seemingly convinced the other was going to vanish at any moment. That was something they were going to have to work on, but everyone needs a therapist when they’re living in a war zone. That’s just the nature of the situation.

On the whole, it sounded like things had held reasonably steady while I was gone. I waited for the mice to finish their accounting, then bowed my head with polite respect to the mouse in Alice’s livery, which I guessed as their senior.

“Thank you for revealing to me the mysteries,” I said, with deep formality. Then I looked around. “Where’s Livvy?”

“Did not the Thoughtful Priestess take the child of the Arboreal Priestess down to the Room of Life, that she might be enlightened as to the familial structure of sharks?”

“Oh, Verity is definitely going to thank her mother forthatone.” I stood up, leaving the mice on the floor. They waved after me, as happy to be left behind as they would have been to come along. That’s one of the things about Aeslin mice: they’re generally in good spirits.

And as none of these three had followed either Jane or Dominic, they had reason to be in good spirits. The colony would be in turmoil for the next few weeks, as they transitioned the now-finished faiths from “cultivation to preservation,” meaning there would be no new scripture, no new mysteries, only the endless study of what already existed.

It was a normal, natural part of Aeslin religious development, one that I had witnessed multiple times before, once for every lost member of the family (but not for Laura, never for Laura. Her faith, small and secretive as it was, remained in cultivation, eternally hopeful that their prophet would return). I had even witnessed the beginnings of Thomas’s faith being brought back to life, a slow, stuttering, utterly baffling process that currently seemed to involve the mice poking him daily with a pin, to verify that he was actually alive.

The mice would be fine. It was the non-rodent family I needed to worry about right now. I released my hold on solidity and sank through the floor, descending slowly down into the living room, where I turned solid again before I could get a tour of the basement.

Olivia was indeed sitting on the floor, raptly staring at the screen on which a small cartoon shark was swimming its little yellow heart out, pursuing a school of deeply concerned pink fish. Evelyn was sitting on the couch nearby, watching her granddaughter rather than the screen. She tensed when she caught my arrival out of the corner of her eye, one hand going to her waistband even as she turned to look at me and melted into relief.

“Mary!” she exclaimed, standing and striding over to sweep me into a firm, maternal hug. “Thereyou are! Where have you been? We’ve been worriedsick.”

“Sarah said she called to update you,” I said, hugging her back.

“Yes, and Sarah said that you were missing.” Evelyn let me go to step back and put air quotes around the word “missing.” “Forgive me for getting worried when one of the family ghosts goes ‘missing’ for no apparent reason.”

“Sorry,” I said, and truly meant it. Worrying Evelyn was almost never my primary goal. “The anima mundi wanted to have a little chat, so she grabbed me while I was in transit. And she doesn’t seem to have the best grasp of linear time just yet, so she kept me longer than I think she intended to before she put me back.”

“Excuse me?” Her eyebrows spiked sharply upward. “Are you saying that the living soul of Earth wanted to havea little chatwith you?”

“Yeah, pretty much. But she let me go when we were done, and now I’m here.”

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