Page 17 of Aftermarket Afterlife

Verity grabbed my shoulder and whirled me around, and I let her, not allowing the shock to turn me insubstantial. I had just stolen her child. She was within her rights to be furious.

Instead, she jerked me into a hard embrace, hugging me close and resting her chin on my shoulder for several minutes before she let me go and stepped away. I blinked at her.

“Dominic told me where you’d gone,” she said. “I got back to the Nest, and the hall outside Livvy’s room was in flames. I couldn’t get through. I couldn’t get to her. I couldn’t even yell for her, because she wasn’t crying, and if she heard me, she’d start crying. The only thing I could do was cause her more distress when she was already in danger. Did you...Is she . . . ?”

I nodded, and Verity exhaled, sagging.

“You are the best babysitter in the entire world, and I am so sorry for everything I ever did to make your job harder than it absolutely needed to be,” she said. “I will never contradict you again.”

“There’s a promise I could have used when you were thirteen,” I said. “Olivia’s fine. Sarah took her back to Portland, and we already have her go bag.” I retrieved the blanket and stuffed elephant from where they had fallen when she embraced me. “Do we know what happened yet? And have you been able to get the flammable people out of the Nest?”

“The dragons are taking their time clearing out all the valuables, and they’re not planning to leave until the firefighters start coming into the building,” said Verity. “Officially, no one lives there, so the fire department’s letting the structure collapse while they control the blaze, rather than putting firefighters in danger for a piece of real estate.”

“I wish that didn’t make sense,” I said. Even if the building was officially uninhabited, there could have been squatters, people who just needed a warm place to sleep, and who didn’t deserve to be left to burn to death because they didn’t have the money for something better. But in this case, the policy was working in our favor: it was better the firefighters not break into the Nest, with its clear signs of habitation and dragons still gutting the place. “Was anyone hurt?”

Verity nodded, expression genuinely miserable. “The Madhura have been building a hive in one of the old storage rooms at the very top of the Nest. Big windows, lots of sunlight, all the things they need for healthy larvae. The first hit took out half their roof, and the whole thing was on fire before anyone realized. We lost three of the adults and all but two of the larvae. I don’t know how they bounce back from this. One of the bogeymen was on the upstairs walkway when the bombs hit, and he didn’t make it. And Cara...” She paused, swallowing. “Dragons are pretty much immune to fire, but that’s the only thing they’re immune to. She was trying to get into the room where the dragon kids nap. Olivia would normally have been in there with them, but she’s at the age where she bites sometimes, and if she bites one of the boys he’ll bite her back, and boy dragons have much more dangerous teeth, so it’s better to separate them when she’s in one of her moods, you know?”

“You’re babbling, sweetie,” I said. “Focus.”

“Right, right.” Verity took in a sharp breath through her nose as Dominic approached across the roof to our right. “Cara was trying to get into the room where the dragon children were sleeping, to get them out. The hallway ceiling collapsed on her. She was crushed. The children were all fine; they’ve been evacuated now. Cara, though...”

“I’m so sorry.”

“So am I. How did those bastards even find us?” She looked at me, eyes wide and pleading. “We’ve been so careful since we eliminated their last set of strike teams. There’s been no whispering about us being followed, no signs that they had any idea where we were, and now they’re using some kind of missiles to take out our roof? What the hell? There werechildrenin there!”

“Not if you ask them, there weren’t,” said Dominic, stepping off the edge of the roof next to ours as he approached. There was only about a three-foot difference between the two, and it was a sign of how long he had been involved with Verity and her cavalier approach to gravity’s whims that he didn’t even blink, just dropped and carried on walking. His hips were going to regret that in a few years, but then, approaching things head-on was currently how he was giving himself the chance to get old and regret his youthful choices.

Verity shot him a quick frown. He continued toward us, stepping up behind her and sliding his arms around her waist.

“Cryptid young are not ‘children,’ and if they seem to resemble children, it’s only so they can more easily lure their prey,” he said, the weary disgust in his voice robbing his words of their sting. “And better for a child of traitors to die young and innocent, to have a chance of getting into the Kingdom of Heaven, than to grow old and irredeemable, working against the interests of their own species.”

“Did those three you took out have anything useful to say?” I asked.

“There were five of them,” he said. “I hunted down the other two after you left. The first three died too quickly to tell me anything. The last two were a little more communicative. They didn’t know for sure that the Nest was our headquarters, but their surveillance had flagged it as an anomaly, both in terms of power draw and traffic, and one of their teams had the brilliant idea of seeding the surrounding sewers with tracking devices. They followed a bunch of municipal workers home. They also got one of our bogeymen, or someone else who was using the sewer for transport. Whoever it was probably stepped on a tracker and didn’t even realize it. That, along with the anomalies they’d charted, was enough to make us a target.”

“I had four,” said Verity. “They set off their launcher just as I hit the roof. If I’d been a few minutes faster—”

“This wasn’t your fault,” I said, firmly.

“Wasn’t it? We’ve had plenty of chances to take the fight to the Covenant, and we haven’t done it. So they brought the fight to us. I’m going to have to stand up in front of Priscilla and William and try to convince them that we didn’t put the dragons in danger by turning their nest into a safehouse. Olivia could have beenkilled. . .”

“And she wasn’t,” I said. “She’s safe with her grandparents. Very, you have to breathe. This is terrible, and it’s not over, but it’s not your fault. Dominic, keep her from freaking out, and call me if either of you needs me. I need to get back to Portland.”

“Can Sarah bring her back here?” Dominic asked, abruptly.

I shook my head. “Sarah says it’s not safe for her to make the trip that many times in quick succession, and since we don’t have a rule book for how she works, I’m taking her word for it. We’ll get Livvy back to you just as soon as we can.” That didn’t feel like enough, under the circumstances, so I added, “Promise,” and disappeared.

Why does everything have to be complicated? Just once, can’t things be easy?

Four

“Eternal youth isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. Sometimes it’s a burden that doesn’t have a name, and there’s no way to explain it to the people who think you’re a lucky child who needs to stop complaining.”

—Apple Tanaka

The upstairs hall of a small survivalist compound about an hour’s drive east of Portland, Oregon

IN A FLASH OFdéjà vu, I appeared in another hallway, outside another closed bedroom door. This hall wasn’t on fire, which was a very nice change. Evelyn had apparently just come out of the room; her hand was still on the knob, and she jumped when she saw me.

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