Page 62 of Aftermarket Afterlife

I paused to take a deep breath, choosing my next words with care. “But it would have been cruel to ask him to stay. Most ghosts aren’t as flexible as I am. Or, to put it another way, most ghosts aren’t nearly as good at playing alive as I am. They’re one-dimensional, defined by their unfinished business, and over time, it warps them into something they would never have asked to be. Jane didn’t want to make you watch her go through that. She didn’t want to stay if it was only going to cause her family pain.”

“So why did you stay?”

I stiffened. “You’re in pain, so I’m not going to take that as badly as I would otherwise, but when I died, my father had no one else. Jane knew you’d have Elsie and Arthur and the rest of the family. This isn’t one of those cases where the widower gets bounced out the door as soon as he’s not married to a living relative, and you know it as well as she did. You’re stuck with these weirdoes, forever, and that’s not going to change. I stayed because he needed me, and because I was a child, and I was afraid, and the crossroads offered me a way to do it. I won’t say I’m sorry I stayed, because it gave me this family, but I wouldn’t have done it if I’d had a better understanding of what I was getting into. Jane made her choice because she understood the situation. She didn’t want to go. She didn’t mean to die. Implying that I should have forced her to turn herself into a haunting is unkind. It’s unkind to her, it’s unkind to me, and it’s unkind to yourself.”

“Mary, I didn’t mean...”

“Yeah, you did. But that’s okay. We all mean something terrible sooner or later.” I took a step back. “I’m so sorry for your loss. At least I was able to bring her body home.”

I winked out again then, vanishing and shifting myself elsewhere on the property. Olivia was likely to be in her room upstairs, and so I appeared there, unsurprised when Evelyn rose to meet me, Olivia bundled warm and drowsy against her hip.

“Mary, dear,” she said. “Were you able—?”

“Jane’s in the barn, although someone needs to get her off the floor; I couldn’t lift her on my own. The tracker’s somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. Sally says I was gone for about two hours?”

“Closer to two and a half.”

Meaning the Covenant would have arrived already if they’d been able to home in on their tracking signal before I blipped it out of the land of the living. I relaxed, just a little. “Any sign of them?”

“The Covenant? Yeah.” She bounced Olivia on her hip, causing the girl to yawn and stretch. “Some of our allies in Seattle have seen the field teams showing up. They’ve declared a general lockdown, and they’re doing their best to get everyone out of harm’s way.”

“Meaning they got as far as ‘the West Coast’ before they lost it,” I said, grimly. “What are we going to do?”

“We’re well outnumbered, so we’re not going to shoot them all,” she said. “I’d say we had to make North America too expensive for them, but they’re mostly sending their low-ranking soldiers and recruits over here. I think we could kill everyone that they have on this continent without costing more than they’re willing to pay.”

I paused, standing up a little straighter. “We have to find a way to make the fight too expensive. We have to escalate our own assault.”

“How do you suggest we do that?” Evelyn bounced Olivia again, then carried her over to the bed and lowered her down to the mattress. Olivia went without protest, rolling onto her side and closing her eyes.

“I don’t know yet,” I said, somewhat glumly. “It’s a concept in progress.”

“Well, I hate to be a nagging Nancy, but you need to conceptualize faster if you possibly can,” she said, voice still the same serene lilt that it always was. I shot her a surprised look. “I know you know how bad this is, Mary. I won’t insult either of us by pretending that you don’t. Jane’s dead. Ted’s basically useless, and most of us can’t go within fifteen feet of him without the fear of doing something we’ll regret. Kevin’s holding together as best he can, but he’s going to fall apart the second the pressure’s off. Sarah...” She sighed heavily. “Sarah’s not well. Sarah hasn’t been well for some time. She may never be entirely well again.”

I couldn’t argue with any of that, much as I wanted to try. Sarah’s current condition wasn’t any sort of secret. It hurt to see her this way. That didn’t mean we didn’t have to factor it into any plans.

“Basically, until we find a good way to break this stalemate, we’re fighting a holding action at best, a slow loss at worst,” she continued. “We may have gotten them to aim themselves elsewhere for the moment, but how long before Annie and Elsie head for Seattle looking for a little payback?”

“We can’t scatter farther than we already are,” I said. “It’s bad enough that we’re distributed across three different locations, with allies in half a dozen more.”

“Makes us harder to take out with one hit,” said Evelyn.

I straightened. “I need to talk to Annie,” I said, and vanished.

I found Annie in the attic, sitting cross-legged on the floor with mice from Jane’s priesthood sitting on her knees and looking at her gravely. She jumped when I appeared, and the knife she had produced from inside her shirt whipped through the space my head seemed to occupy, imbedding itself in the wood of the wall. I crossed my arms, looking at her silently.

“Sorry, Mary,” she said.

“What have I told you about throwing knives at everything that startles you?” I asked.

“That it’s antisocial and doesn’t make me a very good neighbor,” she replied.

“And what did you just do?”

“Threw a knife at my babysitter.”

“Uh-huh.” I nodded, taking in the scene in front of me.

The compound’s attic had been built with the mice in mind, and never used for storage. The walls were a series of in-built shelves and cubbies, which the mice themselves had long since filled with their residences and structures, constructing homes and temples out of raw materials supplied by the family. Their streets were lined with glass stones from the craft store and highly polished pennies and dimes, pressed into modeling clay as a sort of cobblestone trail. Everything was made to their scale, but there were patches of floor, such as the one Antimony was sitting on, intended for use by the human-sized members of the family. There was even an armchair in one corner, surrounded by mouse construction but not covered by it, that had been put in place during Evelyn’s first pregnancy, to allow her to visit when she could no longer sit on the floor.

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