Page 106 of Installment Immortality

Something scraped against the hallway floor. I turned, watchingthe snakes on Roz’s head writhe in agitation, and kept watching as the worn, wet-looking figure of the building handyman shambled into view.

His eyes were still entirely white. That didn’t mean he couldn’t see us. Sarah’s eyes were frequently solid white, and she could see just fine. Cataracts could interfere with vision without cutting it off; was alkabyiftiris slime inside the eye like a living cataract? What would happen if Roz paralyzed the slime without paralyzing the host?

He shuffled closer. Roz took a step forward, turning so that there was no chance he could miss meeting her eyes. She took a slow breath, then hissed like the large serpent she almost was. His head canted slightly to the left, turning toward her like a flower turns toward the sun.

What happened next would have been comical if it hadn’t been so damned terrifying. His whited-out eyes widened fractionally, expression going from one of slack disconnection to confusion and even a sliver of fear. He began to shamble faster, moving toward her with singular purpose. The slime that was oozing out of his nose and the corners of his eyes ran thicker, tinted with red and seeming to writhe on its own as it escaped his body. Then, with a sharp upward jerk like someone touching a live electric wire, he just… stopped. His limbs stopped moving, and his eyes stopped twitching, and he pitched forward to land face down on the concrete hallway floor.

“Is it over?” asked Roz anxiously. She took a step toward his motionless body. “Can we be finished with this awful, nasty, scary thing now? Please?”

“Roz, move back,” I replied, eyes on the floor, where the slime that had escaped Carl’s body before it fell was pulling back, oozing together to form a larger puddle. It was about a foot away from her toes, and if it managed to acquire enough mass, it would easily be able to surge forward.

It wasn’t super acidic, to chew through her skin in an instant, but skin is an imperfect barrier, because the people who have and care for it are imperfect hosts. More, Roz had two cats. The odds were good that there was a break in the skin somewhere on her feet or ankles, an ingrown toenail or a little scratch that she had barely even noticed happening and was now blissfully unaware of. If the alkabyiftiris slime touched unbroken skin, it could be washed easily away. If it found a break…

Once it got inside the body, there were very few options. Most involved having access to a sorcerer, and we currently didn’t, in New York. Maybe Dr. Morrow would be able to help—Caladrius are supposed to be able to heal all illnesses. That was what we were counting on, with Carl. He was chewed up enough that I didn’t expect him to make it, assuming he was even breathing after getting a clear look at Roz’s eyes. But if anyone could save him, it was Dr. Morrow.

Roz began walking backward, apparently taking my tone for the warning that it was. She didn’t stop until she bumped into the wall next to the elevator doors, and I saw her raise her hands, putting her glasses back on, before she turned to face us. “What?” she asked.

“You froze the slime that was inside him and connected to his eyes,” I said. “You didn’t freeze the slime that was already out. It couldn’t ‘see’ you, because it didn’t have any ocular pathways to send the message along. You almost stepped in it.”

“Oh.” Roz blanched, which was an impressive sight, since the snakes atop her head also paled in the process. “That could have been bad.”

“Yeah, it could have,” I agreed. “Malena, can you come down from the ceiling?”

There was a thump as she dropped down behind me, horror-movie-style. I was getting awfully tired of people doing things horror-movie-style around me. I was definitely in the moodfor a few things done period-romance-style. Or maybe light-afterschool-drama-style.

Beggers can’t be choosers, I guess. I fished my cellphone out of my pocket. “One of us watches that pool of slime at all times,” I said, indicating the larger puddle that had escaped from Carl. It was continuing to pulse, but looked otherwise harmless.

That was a lie. Pretending to be harmless is how those things get you.

“What are you doing?” asked Roz.

“Normally, the solution for alkabyiftiris slime is ‘cleanse it with fire,’ so I’m calling the dragons,” I said, and lifted the phone to my ear.

In the dark, unpleasant basement, alkabyiftiris slime dripping down the walls, we waited.

“—going to have to pay the plumbertripletime to get the filters back in place when there’s a chance of alkabyiftiris slime in the water supply,” ranted Candice, pacing back and forth in the manager’s office and glaring at me like I had done all of this just to frustrate her.

I didn’t care. I was sittingdown,in the glorious old armchair we kept in the manager’s office for potential tenants. It was an unpleasant shade of cat-shit brown, and had that distinctive rotting-fabric smell that all old armchairs seem to acquire, no matter how well they’ve been cared for, and in that moment, it was my favorite thing that had ever existed. I wasn’t sure how I was going to getoutof it, since my feet had declared their independence from the greater state of Verity and my knees no longer believed they had any responsibility to bend, but that was a bridge I would cross when I got to it. For right now, everything was right with my world.

“I had no way of knowing that Carl had encountered the stuff,”I said, keeping my voice level and calm, and not allowing myself to whine the way I wanted to. By this point, I felt like I had definitely earned my bed, a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, and maybe a foot rub, if I could talk Malena into it.

But no, she was off helping several dragons transport Carl’s tarp-wrapped body to St. Giles’s, while Roz sat in her apartment with a fortifying shot of brandy and thought about rental applications for properties that didn’t have blob monsters incubating in the basement.

Good luck with that, Roz. Finding someplace rent-controlled that would let her have two cats and wouldn’t mind the part where she wasn’t actually human was going to be a tall order, and I didn’t expect her to be moving out any time soon.

“You knew what it was,” said Candice. “That implies familiarity. How did you not pick up on the signs?”

“Okay, first, alkabyiftiris slime moves fast. He probably picked it up two days ago at most, which brings me to second, why are we wasting time with this instead of notifying the underground communities of the threat? They need to know, Candy.”

“I already asked William to send word,” she said. “They’ll listen to him more quickly than they would listen to me.”

“Tell them—okay, this will sound silly, but—tell them they need to pour a mixture of white-wine vinegar and baking soda anywhere they think the slime may have accumulated. It’s weak without a host, and that mix will clean it out. Fire is also good, if they have a site they feel like they can burn. We’ll probably be dealing with small outbreaks for a few months, while it burns out the roaches and rats it’s currently hiding inside. They won’t last long. It’s going to be looking for larger hosts, because anything else will just fall apart.”

“We know all that,” she said. “What we still don’t know is how you missed Carl bringing it back here. I hired you to keep this place safe.”

“No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

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