Page 69 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“Tell your parents something’s wrong,” I gasped, looking at Antimony. “Tell them Verity’s in trouble.”

And then I was gone, hurling myself into the echoing absence of transit, following the sound of soundless screams.

I appeared in an alley, Verity nowhere to be seen, but a large bloodstain splashed across the bricks in front of me. I spun around, looking for a sign of her, and saw nothing but dumpsters and the sort of fire escapes that made her view New York as the ideal urban environment, perfect for climbing and leaping from.

She was still wailing inside my head, which made it virtually impossible to pick up on subtler sounds nearby. But unless my aim was getting suddenly and rapidly worse, she was here—she’d called for me, she had to be nearby. I walked toward the nearest dumpster, and was rewarded with a human foot barely peeking out from behind the corner.

It was a man’s foot, not Verity’s, larger and square and clad in a sensible black tactical boot, perfect for running or finding traction on slippery rooftop surfaces. There was no tension in it. The owner was either completely relaxed or profoundly asleep.

Or dead.

That was when I knew, really, but I didn’t want to admit it, even to myself. Verity’s heartbroken wails were still ringing in my head, making it hard to hear the absence of another family member. In that moment, there was no one but Verity. She was the sole member of my family remaining in the world.

I forced myself to continue forward, rounding the corner of the dumpster, and was heartbreakingly unsurprised to find Verity on the ground in her charcoal-gray tactical suit, clearly dressed for the sort of roof-running infiltration she excelled at, blood in her short-cropped hair and streaking her cheeks, sobbing as she tried, desperately, to pull the man in front of her into her arms. There was so much blood that her hands kept slipping on the sodden fabric of his jacket, leaving him to slump back against the wall.

Dominic had always been somewhat darker than Verity, with a naturally tan complexion. His skin was still lightly browned, but there was an ashen gray undertone to it now, leaving him looking almost waxen, like he was a badly sculpted replacement for the real thing. I moved closer, still struggling to fully solidify.

My intangible feet made no sound as I approached. Verity’s head still whipped around as she caught my movement out of the corner of her eye, and her shoulders dropped, some of the tension going out of them as her screams inside my head abruptly cut off, leaving me in a ringing silence. The small patch of family tree that belonged to Dominic was empty; if I’d been harboring any hopes that the situation wasn’t as bad as it seemed, that silence would have washed them away.

Verity must have seen my face change, because she looked back down at him, bending forward to slide one arm behind his head. She didn’t make any attempt to boost him up, just stayed folded almost double, her blood-matted hair hanging across her face, her shoulders starting to shake with the force of the wails she was working so hard to swallow.

I continued walking toward her, and discovered I could force myself solid enough to bend and rest my hand on her shoulder, trying to be a comforting presence. Instead, my touch seemed to do the opposite: she threw her head back and keened, a long, wailing noise that sounded like it had been physically ripped from her throat. She kept making that horrible sound until she ran out of air, then inhaled sharply and started again. I tightened my fingers on her shoulder, refusing to break contact. It wasn’t much comfort. A dead woman’s touch never is. It was the only thing I had to offer.

This time, when the keening faded, it was replaced with a series of harsh, sharp coughs, like she was attempting to expel the remains of the mourning from her lungs. She turned her head enough to look at me, bloody hair still hanging in her eyes, and in a small voice asked, “Is he gone?”

“Physically, yes,” I said. “If you mean ‘Has his spirit elected to remain,’ I don’t know. Do you want me to go and check?”

I didn’t want to. I really,reallydidn’t want to. People who die violent deaths almost never linger as anything good. When they linger, they tend to become poltergeists, or the sort of twisted apparition that gives all the other ghosts a bad name. They torment and they kill, and they resent the rest of the world for not being as dead as they are. I didn’t want that for Dominic. I didn’t want that forVerity.

Maybe most of all, I didn’t want that for Olivia, who was too young to truly remember her father as more than a beloved presence that had been there until one day, suddenly, it wasn’t there anymore, but who was still a Price. She was going to grow up to hunt the sort of thing her father would become if he stayed here. I wanted her to have a better future than that one.

“Yes,” said Verity, spitting the word with the force of a gunshot. “Check.”

“All right. Promise me you’ll stay right here, okay? Can you do that? Because I’m not going to go if you can’t do that.”

“I promise,” said Verity, almost sullenly.

“All right,” I repeated, and let go of solidity, let go of tangibility, and let go of the land of the living. The transition to the twilight was almost instantaneous, and I found myself standing in a funhouse reflection of the alley where Verity knelt over her husband’s cooling body. The bloodstain on the wall was even more visible here, rich red and dripping down the brick in thick rivulets, like the reaching tendrils of a hungry slime mold. The ground was covered in garbage and debris, broken glass and human waste. The ghosts of rats moved in the shadows of the dumpsters, unafraid.

What’s loved endures. What’s hated endures almost as long, buoyed up through the twilight by the sheer weight of the mental and emotional energy people pour into it. There are a lot of pockets in the afterlife like that alley, shadowy terrors drawn from real horrors, the ghosts of events and nightmares rather than once-living people.

What there wasn’t in this terrible place was Dominic, or any sign that he’d stopped for even a moment on his way out the door. I looked at the filthy ground. There were no footprints. No one had been through here in some time.

Which was more likely—that Dominic had died and immediately found the presence of mind to walk around the various puddles of ooze and goo, or that he’d died without manifesting in the twilight at all?

Just to be sure, I dipped down to the starlight, where the alley appeared in much better condition, ground free of unspeakable substances if still scattered with trash and debris, rats replaced by the skittering spirits of tailypo and basilisks. I looked around, satisfying myself that he wasn’t here, then bounced all the way back to the daylight in a blink.

Verity was still on the ground where I’d left her, cradling Dominic’s body against her chest. She wasn’t keening anymore, but tears ran ceaselessly down her cheeks, cutting channels in the blood.

“They caught us on the rooftops,” she said, seeming to sense my appearance—and maybe she could. It’s never been entirely clear to me where Fran’s gifts interact with the family’s day-to-day existence. “We were conducting a pretty standard patrol, just the two of us, watching for signs of Covenant teams. We met for the first time on that rooftop over there.” She jerked her chin toward a building that looked like all the others around us. “He’d set a snare, and he caught me. What an asshole.”

She laughed a little, the sound thick with snot and tears. “So we were running along, looking for traces, because the dragons are scared and the bogeymen are scared and hell, Mary, everyone’s scared.I’mscared. I swear we were paying attention to where we were going, but we hit a roof and everything went to hell. They were waiting for us behind the elevator house. A whole team. Five operatives. Dominic’s good. I’m amazing. That’s not arrogance, because it’s true. But they had us on the ropes from the moment they attacked.”

Verity turned to look at me, eyes wide and wet with tears. That Carew look—blonde hair and big blue eyes—definitely does lend itself to looking like a hopeless damsel searching for a savior. “Three of them went after me. They harried me and pinned me down, so I couldn’t get to Dominic while the other two engaged with him. And then one of them slashed him on both sides of his neck, and the other shoved him off the edge of the building. I killed them.”

The statement was made with the simple ease that someone might use to say “I made a sandwich” or “I didn’t like the play.” She made it sound like it was nothing of importance, like it was easy. “I killed all five of them. The three who were keeping me occupied didn’t know what to do when I got angry enough to stop fighting defensively, and the other two weren’t prepared for me to take them down.”

I could picture it so easily. Verity seeing her husband go down, and tapping into that vein of irrational love that seemed to run so hot and strong through the Healy line, using it to motivate herself to do the impossible. I’ve seen Alice when she loses her temper. I couldn’t imagine anyone who wasn’t braced for that to happen would be able to stand up before that kind of rage.

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