Page 10 of Installment Immortality

“Don’t even start that,” I said firmly. “I was intangible and incapacitated. All you could have done was put yourself and Annie in harm’s way, and I’m the babysitter here. I’m the one who takes care of you. You follow me?”

“Yes,” said Sarah.

“Good.” I looked back to Evelyn. “The explosion was big enough to blow me out like a candle. Bombs don’t normally hit ghosts that hard. I guess me transporting them through the twilight made them a little more effective against phantom targets.”

Evelyn sat up straighter on the couch, eyes going bright with curiosity. “Do you think that would work with all sorts of weaponry?” she asked. “Could we enhance our bullets that way?”

“Are you planning to fight an army of the dead?” I countered. “Maybe it would work and maybe it wouldn’t, but I think if I started becoming an anti-ghost arms dealer, the rest of the afterlife would get pissed at me, and I have enough problems right now without adding more to the pile.”

“No,” Evelyn admitted. “Sorry. That’s just not an area where we know as much as I’d like, even though you’ve been around for all this time.”

Until the anima mundi had taken over as my employer, there had been active rules against my telling my family anything the crossroads didn’t want them to know—which was virtually everything. Most of what they knew about the laws that bind the dead had come from other hauntings, and it had been a bone of contention for years that I refused to confirm or deny all the details. Not pissing off the crossroads had been a full-time job in its own right, which left me with three jobs, total, and the constant desire to smack my head against the nearest wall.

The anima mundi didn’t have any such rules, but looking at the thinly veiled eagerness in Evelyn’s face, I wasn’t sure I was going to tell them that. Evie may have married into the family, but she’s still a Price, with their unending need to knoweverythingabout the world around them, even the things she would be better off not knowing. Even the things I didn’t want to explain.

“You know why that is,” I said gently.

She sighed, some of her excitement dimming as she slumped back into the couch.

“The blast shattered me into pieces and scattered me across the layers of the afterlife,” I said. “Under normal circumstances, I would have dissipated completely, but the anima mundi pulled me back together and held me that way until I could heal on my own. It took the last six months. When I woke up, she told me I could move on if I wanted to. The crossroads are gone. Any claim they had over my soul went with them. She doesn’t want to own people the way they did.”

“I’m guessing from the fact that you’re here that you said you weren’t ready?” said Evelyn.

I stroked Kevin’s hair with one hand. “I thought my family might still need me,” I said.

He made a hiccupping sound and squeezed me briefly tighter.

“We just got Mom and Dad back, and then Jane and Dominic died, and you were gone, and I’d never had to consider a world without you haunting the house,” he said, raising his head and looking at me.

I offered him a small smile. “Hey, kiddo. No one who’s currently alive in this house has the authority to fire me. You’re stuck with me. I’m just sorry I missed the funerals.”

“They were unpleasant,” said Sarah. “Everyone was trying their best not to blame anyone else, and not to project their grief too loudly, but most people aren’t sufficiently practiced at controlling their minds, and it was like standing in an amphitheater full of people shouting about how unhappy they were. Uncle Ted had to leave Aunt Jane’s funeral before the service was done. Everyone else’s misery was too heavy, and it was smothering him. Arthur lasted longer, but in the end, he was unable to understand too many of the feelings around him, and he had to excuse himself. I managed to stay.”

“I’m not surprised.” I’ve never met anyone as good at punishing herself as Sarah is. For her, staying in a room full of people who were devastated and grieving would have been like immersing herself in a vat of lemon juice right after rubbing her whole body with sandpaper. And that meant there was no way she would have left until she’d finished soaking in every bit of blame and recrimination she could hold.

It wasn’t her best attribute. It was one she’d developed to keep herself from turning into a monster, from becoming the kind of cuckoo who shrugged off other people’s pain as a necessary side effect of living her life the way she wanted to. The people she cared about wished she’d stop hurting herself, but she never did. I wasn’t sure she even could anymore.

“And now I’m back, and I didn’t miss the baby, so we can just move forward from here, yeah?”

Kevin finally let go of me and stepped back a bit, toward the couch where Evelyn was sitting. “Sarah told you about the baby?”

“Yeah, and now that I know what I’m looking for, I can feel him. He’s already family.” I paused. Better to tell them now, I suppose. “Speaking of which, I can still feel you all, so I know that part of the caretaker’s connection is still intact, but I don’t know what I can do right now, or how any of it works. I don’t seem to choose whether or not I’m solid, not really, and while the anima mundi said I’d be able to answer my family when they called for me, I don’t know how voluntary that’s going to be, and I don’t know whether I’ll be able to move between you when you’re not calling. They wanted me to chill out a little with the popping all over the place.”

It was a reasonable request, especially with the anima mundi trying to rebuild Earth’s pneuma. The pneuma was the living soul of the world, the source of all magic—and all hauntings. As a caretaker, I was well defined and easy for the pneuma to maintain. As a crossroads ghost, though, I had been a nebulously described creature and a constant power sink. The crossroads had probably liked it that way. Let their servants weaken the world just by existing, make it less likely that the anima mundi would ever be able to re-manifest and challenge their domination.

Then the anima mundi had returned, and found themself with custody of the strange hybrid creature that I was. They’d already been taking steps to limit what I was capable of before I’d gotten myself exploded and given them the opportunity to tinker with me. Whatever I was now, I had little doubt that it was less expensive for them to fuel.

“I can test this,” said Sarah, sounding relieved. Her eyes flashed white, and then she was gone, pulling space around her like a shroud and using it to transport herself somewhere else.

I blinked. “She’s getting better at that.”

“She is,” said Kevin. “It still makes me nervous when she does that. Living people shouldn’t do that sort of thing.”

“Neither should dead ones,” said Evelyn. “Begging your pardon, Mary, you’ve always been very respectful of our privacy, and you being able to go through doors was a lifesaver when Verity was in her locking phase.”

I smiled nostalgically. “That was a fun year.”

When she was six, Verity had decided the best thing to do with doors was to lock them at every opportunity she had, both when she was on the other side and—in the case of doors that could be locked, then closed without unlocking them—when she wasn’t. I’d been tapped to walk through doors and unlock them more often that summer than I had ever thought possible.

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