Page 53 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“No,” he said, simply, and squeezed her tighter for a moment. “I don’t think she really believed her family was mortal. Not the way most of us do. They do this ridiculous shit, and maybe they get hurt, but they walk away from it. Every time. That’s what Pricesdo.”

“That’s the Kairos that Franny brought to the family,” I said. “It doesn’t make them lucky, not the way we normally understand luck, but it makes themfortunate. When they flip a coin, it will coincidentally almost always come up the way they need it to.”

“So how did Leonard manage to get Jane with just one shot?”

“There’s a word in there that this family likes to pretend doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “‘Almost.’ A normal person might win the coin flip fifty times out of a hundred. Someone with Kairos ancestry could win it ninety-nine times out of a hundred, and start feeling like they can’t lose. But that hundredth time, they will. Jane just got unlucky with where she fell in the coin-flip order.”

Leaning over, I very gently stroked Annie’s hair with one hand. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’m so, so sorry. But I need you to pull yourself together enough to talk to me, okay?”

She sat up enough to crane her head around and look at me, not loosening her grip on Sam. “Leonard Cunningham killed Aunt Jane,” she said, voice dull. “I’m going to kill him.”

“Yes, he did, and I’m not going to stop you,” I agreed. “He’s a bad man, and the world will be better off without him in it. But Annie, I need to know: why was he able to shake off Sarah’s mental control?”

“He’s pretty high up in the Covenant,” she said. “Important enough that they actually care about him, in a way they don’t care about a lot of their foot soldiers. He’s supposed to take the whole thing over one of these days. I’m guessing that means he carries anti-telepathy charms, just in case.”

“That worries me,” I said.

Annie frowned. “Why?”

“Because Rose told me the Covenant hit Chicago when she answered my call in Iowa. And I was just in Ohio, and the Covenant went after your brother and his family—they’refine, we caught the intruders before they could do anything, Isaac heard them and called for me and no one was hurt except for the Covenant. But they knew where the housewas. They also attacked the gorgon community near there. So they know things they shouldn’t know, and they were looking for cuckoos.”

“I thought you said you were careful to make sure they didn’t see or remember Sarah when you were all in New York,” said Annie.

“We were. Which means they’re getting their information somewhere else. Have you heard from Megan recently?”

“No,” said Annie, slowly. “She was off at medical school the last time we spoke, but it’s been long enough since then that she’s probably graduated by now. If she’s not in Ohio, she’s going to be with another gorgon community, or near one. And it doesn’t matter, because she would never sell us out to the Covenant.”

“I didn’t say she sold us out, just asked if you knew where she was,” I said. “I don’t think Megan is their only source of information. But hitting two gorgon communities and Alex in the same day starts to paint a picture I don’t like. If she’s been compromised, or captured, she could be in danger, and they could be leaning on her to learn more about you.”

“These people are real assholes,” said Sam. “I hope you know that.”

I nodded gravely. “Oh, we’ve known for a long time that the Covenant was an organization comprised almost entirely of assholes. And now they’ve gone too far, and we’re going to have to make them stop, whatever that looks like.”

“But there are somanyof them,” said Annie. “I was at Penton Hall. I saw their resources. They have the manpower. They have the weapons. If they know how to find us, they’re going to pick us off one by one, and there’s not going to be anything we can do about it.”

“Optimistic,” I said. “But presumably inaccurate. Look, we’re not out to destroy the Covenant. I mean, it would be nice, but you’re right—they have the numbers, and they’re not going to go down easy. So we don’t want to destroy them. We just want them to agree to stay the fuck out of North America and leave us alone.”

Sam scowled. “My dad’s in China,” he said.

“We’re one family,” I said. “Asking them to concede a continent is about the limit of what we can hope to achieve. Even that’s going to be pushing things.”

“Why does North America get to be the one that’s spared?”

“Because that’s where we live, and where all our stuff is,” I snapped. “Technically, right now, there’s already one continent spared, and that’s Australia. If we want to do more than this, we’re going to need to focus. We’ve never had the numbers, or the freedom of movement. For a long time, only the Covenant thinking the whole family had died out made it even halfway safe to do silly things like ‘going to college’ and ‘having kids.’ Well, that’s over now. Now we start fighting in earnest.”

“This sucks,” said Sam.

“It does,” I agreed, and vanished, reappearing on the barn floor.

They had laid Jane out on one of the stainless steel work tables, still in her clothes from earlier, now with a sheet pulled up to her shoulders, covering the bullet wound in her chest. There was a little blood dried in her hair. Apart from that, she could have been taking an afternoon nap, serene and relaxed. I’d already seen her walk away into whatever waits beyond the various levels of light, but I was still hoping, in a distant way, that I’d find some trace of her when I approached. There was nothing. This was just a hollow shell, a place where Jane had lived for a while, but would never live again.

Ghosts—my kind of ghosts—don’t cry, but I swear I felt my eyes burn with the need to shed impossible tears, and I rubbed them as I turned away, looking up toward Annie and Sam at the same time.

“Well?” I called. “Are we going to deal with this, or what?”

Sam gathered Annie in his arms and jumped down. It was easily twenty feet from the hayloft to the ground, but he made it look easy, like everyone should be leaping whole stories like it was no big deal. He landed with his feet spread and his knees bent to take the impact, lowering Annie’s own feet to the floor.

She punched him in the shoulder as she pulled away. “Ow,” he said, with neither heat nor force. She clearly hadn’t hit him that hard.

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