Page 11 of Installment Immortality

“You say ‘fun,’ I say ‘periodically terrifying and definitely an incentive to handcuff my eldest daughter to things.’”

“Yes, but all that did was encourage her to get better at picking locks.”

“Which has served her well in her adult life,” said Kevin.

It was hard to argue with that. All three of Kevin and Evelyn’s kids had gone willingly into the field once they were old enough, and they thrived there. They liked the practical side of cryptozoology far more than they enjoyed the theoretical—even Alex, who never met a research paper he didn’t want to commit to memory, liked getting his hands dirty.

Kevin shot me another look, seeming like he couldn’t really believe I was here and real and negotiably solid. He hadn’t lost another member of his family after all.

But before he could say anything, I heard Sarah calling my name, distant but insistent, like an alarm clock pulling me up out of sleep. I blinked and turned toward the sound, which was moreofa sound than the calling of my family had ever been. The calling didn’t stop, but I was still in the living room, which answeredone question: I wasn’t going to find myself moving involuntarily like I had in my early days with the crossroads. I got to keep that much control.

“I need to go,” I said, and I was gone.

Three

“I worry a bit about you being dead, dear. You’re so young. You should be resting easy or enjoying your afterlife, not spending all your time keeping my granddaughter’s total lack of self-preservation from sending her into the grave with you.”

—Enid Healy

Appearing out of the afterlife into an unknown location, following the sound of one of my kids calling for me

ONE SECONDIWAS INa living room, and the next I was outside under a honey-mild afternoon sky so blue that it could have been a painting, trees to my back and a long, tangled field in front of me. If the trees hadn’t been enough to tell me where I was, a ramshackle house painted the color of mold growing on bone stood on the other side of the field, with windows that seemed to stare at me like furious, mindless eyes. The Old Parrish Place had a way of looming while still being completely inanimate. It was a nice trick.

So far as anyone’s been able to tell, the house isn’t haunted. It just doesn’t like most people, and how it manages to be hostile while not alive, intelligent, or possessed is anybody’s guess. But it liked Thomas Price well enough, and it liked Alice enough that when she and Thomas got married, she was able to live there without toomany nightmares, and most importantly, it liked me enough to let me come in to babysit.

Any house that allows the babysitter past the threshold can’t be all bad.

I looked around and, finding no sign of Sarah, sighed. I paused for the first time since my reappearance to take stock of my clothing. I was wearing faded blue jeans and a white peasant blouse with little white asphodel flowers and red pomegranates stitched around the cuffs in the sort of decorative pattern that had fallen out of favor in the late seventies. Old-fashioned, but not synchronized to any of my current kids.

At least I was decent, and should still be recognizably myself, even with the highway absent from my eyes. Before the explosion, I would have just popped myself into the house, away from the trees, which had never liked me half as much as the house did. Now, though, I didn’t want to take the chance that it wasn’t going to work. Instead, I took a deep, unnecessary breath and started walking.

The field wasn’t that wide, but it had been so long since I actually needed to walk anywhere that I was bored before I was halfway there. Each step was a chore, and it was difficult not to think of this as a punishment rather than what the anima mundi said it was: a necessary rebalancing of the way things worked. I’d been improperly restrained for too long, and it was time I started behaving like a civilized ghost who didn’t think the rules were for other people.

The back door slammed open when I was almost to the house. Alice appeared in the doorway, short and blonde and dressed in the sort of casual clothing she’d favored since her teens. At least these days, no one judged her for her fondness for shorts and tank tops. Both were easy to move in, and since she preferred guns over knives, unlike most of her descendants, the lack of places to hide thirty knives didn’t really impact her much. Backwhen she’d been a teenager, she used to get called all sorts of name by the people in town. The good old days only were for the people who naturally lived up to society’s expectations. For the rest of us, the present was a lot more pleasant. Not perfect, sure, but at least now speaking to an unmarried man without a chaperone wasn’t enough to ruin a girl’s reputation forever.

She stared at me for several beats before shouting my name and throwing herself down the porch steps at top speed. As she ran toward me, a tall, lanky man appeared in the door where she had been, sunlight glinting off his glasses. I thought I saw Thomas smile before all my attention had to be focused on Alice, who was pelting toward me as fast as her legs could carry her, hair streaming backward in the breeze and throat working hard as she fought not to hyperventilate.

Please stay solid for this,I thought sternly, and opened my arms.

A moment later, Alice slammed into them, and I held her close, and thought that maybe everything was going to be all right after all. She squeezed tightly, just as Kevin had, but let go a second later, stepping back.

“Are you really Mary Dunlavy?” she demanded.

“I am.”

“Prove it.”

I sighed. “Anything I can say as proof would have been overheard by the mice, meaning it’s all circumstantial at best. You have a living Greek chorus. That makes it pretty difficult to keep secrets. Oh, how’s this—you didn’t speak to me for almost a year after you caught me kissing Tommy, since you thought I’d been poaching behind your back and didn’t want to give me a chance to explain.”

Alice paled. “Mary?”

“Yeah, kiddo,” I said. “It’s me.”

“Sarah said it was you, but I didn’t want to—I was afraid that if I hoped she was telling the truth, I’d just get disappointed again.I don’t think my heart could handle it, not after everybody we’ve lost this year. I thought you were on that list. Your clergy is going to besorelieved.”

I’d been with the family for long enough to have been adopted as an honorary part of the Aeslin pantheon. They called me the Phantom Priestess, and most of their chthonic rites included me one way or another. I frowned.

“If you thought I was dead, shouldn’t most of them have shifted to another branch of the faith?” I asked delicately. It was “most” because the central clergy of any given god or priestess usually didn’t outlive them by terribly long. If they didn’t actively take their own lives, grief would do it for them, refusing to let them keep living in a world that didn’t include their divinities.

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