Page 37 of Aftermarket Afterlife

Jane stopped, glancing back over her shoulder at me. “Yes?”

“I don’t know what happens if you decide not to go back up to the daylightanddon’t keep a firm grasp on the starlight,” I said. “I have no idea what comes after this.”

“So it’s a mystery to both of us,” she said, and smiled, bright as anything. “Isn’t that fantastic? You were a great babysitter, Mary Dunlavy, and I think you’re probably one of my favorite people in the whole world. I’m glad I got to be part of your unfinished business. Whatever comes after this, I’ll try to hang out there long enough for you to catch up, all right?”

This time, when she turned away, I didn’t call her back. She started walking toward the exit, and every step she took seemed to carry her infinitely farther away from me. The entrance stayed where it was, and she just...dwindled into the distance, like she was walking down a road I couldn’t see. As she was reaching the horizon, so small she was almost a mirage, she turned and looked back at me. Then she walked onward, and was gone.

I put my hands over my face and cried.

Eight

“Dead’s dead for everybody else. I don’t know when we got to be so sure that we were somehow the exception.”

—Frances Brown

Inside a somewhat damaged carnival tent surrounded by a bloodbath, just outside of Boise, Idaho

IREAPPEARED INTO SILENCE.

Alice had rejoined the others inside the tent, and someone—probably Alice, judging by the blood on her hands—had lifted Jane’s body onto one of the picnic tables, covering her with a dusty tablecloth. Jane would have appreciated the symbolism, I was sure. The carnies were gone, probably off to reunite with their children and start preparing to tear down as much of the show as could be rapidly salvaged. There were so many bodies outside. They might have survived the day, but it was going to cost them everything.

Annie turned toward me as soon as I was there, her cheeks now streaked with actual tears, her eyes wet and wounded. She rushed toward me, grabbing for my hands. “Did you find her?” she demanded, grabbing for my hands. “Did you?”

“I did,” I said, and looked down for a moment. “She doesn’t feel like she has any unfinished business she needs to be here to handle. She’s already moved on.”

“What?” Antimony stared at me. “No, that can’t be right. Go back and tell her that isn’t right.”

“Annie—”

“Aunt Jane can’t just move on, she’s supposed to be here. You have to go and get her.”

“Baby, I can’t.”

Annie started crying again, hard, doubling over as she did. The sounds she was making were nearly enough to break my heart, or would have been, if I hadn’t been so numb with the weight of my own grieving. It had been so long since we had to deal with a funeral. We were going to need to find a way home now, another routewitch or...or something. Maybe one of the carnies could loan us a car.

But if we borrowed a car, we’d be driving the traditional way, and we’d be spending seven hours on the road with a human corpse. Even in good air conditioning, that was going to be miserable. Nothing fun about road-tripping with a dead woman. Not that ‘fun’ was the descriptor for literally anything that had happened today.

New York, and then the carnivals. Had the Covenant been prepared to hit anywhere else? What was their goal here? They wanted a war, that was true, and that had always been true, all the way back to the beginning. Oh, maybe not the absolute beginning. Maybe when the first group of brave knights rode out to slay a dragon, they’d just wanted to survive. But then they slew the dragon, and they became heroes.

It’s a nice gig if you can get it, heroism. Worship, adulation, and all the maidens and mead you can handle. Somewhere along the line, the Covenant got addicted to being heroes, and they lost the ability to understand what it was that enabled them to be the good guys. Kill monsters, get glory. That was what they remembered. Only they’d done too good a job, and the modern world no longer recognized the need for monster hunters. Would wiping out one family really change that?

Killing the Prices might let them get a foothold in North America, but it wouldn’t change the fact that their time was over, hadbeenover for a long time. They were relics, just as much as William . . .

I stopped. William. This had been about William the entire time.

What good are monster hunters without a big, impressive monster to hunt? They’d wiped out all the really iconic monsters centuries ago, but it all started with the dragons. If they could produce a dragon in a major metropolitan area, that would reestablish them as necessary for humanity’s safety. Kill the Prices—or recruit, I guess, in Annie’s case—and take out our network of allies, and then there’d be no one to interfere when the Covenant “heroically” unearthed William.

He wasn’t normally a threat. But oh, he’d become one if the Covenant threatened his wives and children. Given how willing they were to kill humans, I had no doubt they’d be willing to butcher any number of dragons to get William angry enough to become the monster they needed him to be.

“We have to get back to New York,” I said, voice small.

Annie glanced at me, still crying. Alice didn’t take her eyes off of Jane. She was standing next to her fallen daughter, hands resting on Jane’s arm, shrouded as it was by the tablecloth. She had recovered her mother’s gun at some point; they were both in their holsters, snug against her hips. Unlike Annie, she wasn’t crying. I didn’t feel like that said anything about the depth of her grief. She was clearly shattered. She just wasn’t someone who cried that much when she was grieving.

I cleared my throat and forced my voice a little louder as I looked at them. “Where are Sam and Sarah? We have to go to New York.”

“Sam’s getting the children back to their parents,” said Annie. “The Ferris wheel didn’t fall, but we don’t want to leave them up there any longer than we absolutely had to.” She dragged the back of her hand across her nose, snuffling hard at the same time. “Fuck, I wish I had a tissue.”

“Sarah...I don’t know where Sarah is,” said Alice, glancing up again. “I don’t hear the hum.”

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