Page 12 of Installment Immortality

“Rules are different for your clergy, because they started worshipping you after you were already dead.”

It made exactly the sort of sideways sense I had learned to expect from the Aeslin mice, and so I nodded, stepping closer to her and offering my hand. “Well, then, I’m sure they’ll be thrilled when their faith is rewarded.”

“Are you kidding? They’re going to throw the kind of festival that means no one in the house gets any sleep for a week.” She took my hand firmly in hers. “Welcome home, Mary. We missed you.”

I couldn’t exactly say the same, since the past six months were a gaping void for me, and so I just smiled at her and squeezed her hand, letting her lead me toward the house.

Inside, Thomas had gone back into the kitchen, and I could hear Sarah and Sally talking in the other room. Alice let go of my hand and moved to the side, letting Thomas step forward and embrace me. It was getting a little weird. I’ve never been the huggiest person, not even where my kids are concerned, and they generally respected that. Having everyone I knew suddenly want to hug me was jarring.

“I told Alice you weren’t dead,” he said, then paused, catching himself. “Well, no, I didn’t say that, as it would have been patently untrue and she would have been well within her rights to laugh at me had I tried to convince her of something so ridiculous. I told her you weren’t gone for good, that no matter what had happened, you’d find your way back to your family.”

“That includes you, you know,” I said.

He grinned in answer. “And don’t think for a moment that I don’t appreciate that. Welcome back, Mary. We missed you.”

“I’m getting that impression,” I said. I nodded toward the living room. “That Sally I hear? She still comfortable with signing herself up for this circus?”

“We’re a carnival family,” said Alice primly. “I thought you’d know that by now.”

“Oh, very funny,” I said. “That joke certainly didn’t get old thirty years ago.”

“I mean, I didn’t, so why would my jokes?” countered Alice.

That time, I had to groan.

“What happened, Mary?” asked Thomas.

So that was how this was going to go: I was going to visit all the members of my family one by one, and they were each going to expect me to explain myself, repeating the story of the past six months over and over again until it became just so much nonsense, the words blending together to form a tapestry of sound that didn’t make any sense at all. I took a deep breath, preparing to explain. It wasn’t like I had anything better to do.

Instead, a small voice at the edge of my awareness saidMary, come back. We need you.

I held up a hand. “Sorry,” I said. “Sarah can fill you in. Right now, the anima mundi needs me. I’ll ask them to drop me back here when they’re done.”

Then I closed my eyes, and I was gone.

When I opened my eyes again, I was in the middle of a field of wheat under a beautiful twilight sky, painted in a dozen shades of blue, black, and purple. That was one of the biggest changes to have come to this in-between domain since the anima mundi took it over from the crossroads: the corn was gone, taking its ergot and its whispering leaves with it. Instead, the fields grew gold with grain, and the anima mundi moved through them, reaping as she needed to reap, scattering seeds where she walked.

This was a more balanced place now than it had ever been before, and that balance was echoed in everything around me, even the sweetness of the wind and the glitter of the stars above. The anima mundi’s domain was adjacent to the rest of the afterlife, not necessarily connected, but I felt like it was probably closet to the starlight, if that mattered at all.

There are three levels of the afterlife accessible to Earth’s dead, even if very few ghosts can travel through them all. The twilight is the closest to the lands of the living, and most human ghosts will be found there. It’s rich in road ghosts and household hauntings, specters and haints and all manner of the restless dead. Few of them linger for long, and those that do are either very powerful or very dangerous or sometimes both. My sort-of friend, Rose Marshall, is both, and she calls the twilight her home.

The twilight has never been super friendly toward the crossroads, since they used to exploit the routewitches to get their victims to them. Their servants and playthings always dwelt a layer down, in the starlight. The starlight is primarily a place for nonhuman dead to exist without needing to worry about unpleasant encounters with monster hunters. A dead monster hunter can’t kill a dead dragon a second time, but they can make things unpleasant, and nobody needs that sort of thing. If I was existing in the afterlife, I was generally down in the starlight.

Below that, where no sensible ghost goes, is the midnight. That’s the deepest part of the afterlife that a human ghost canhope to access, and I’ve never gone there voluntarily. A few times under duress, yes, but if I never have to go that deep again, I won’t be mad about it.

The anima mundi’s patch of the afterlife—if thiswasthe afterlife; she was the living spirit of the collective world, she could just as easily have been sowing her crops on the pneuma itself—was brighter and less oppressive than the midnight, and felt comfortingly like home. It would have been easy to stay here forever, if not for the fact that my family needed me.

I turned slowly, looking around. The anima mundi themself was a short distance away in the wheat, a scythe in their hands, frowning as they studied a particularly thick clump of stalks. As always, they looked like a tall, feminine human, a composite of every woman in the world. Their skin was a brown averaged out from every skin tone among the living, and their hair was a glorious riot of curls comprised of strands in every possible color, natural or unnatural. They generally looked human, because I was looking at them with human eyes, but sometimes they would turn their head just so and I would see a streak of scales on one cheek, or the delicate tip of a horn poking upward through their hair. They were the ideas and ideals of every living, intelligent thing that lived within their slice of the universe, and sometimes I was glad they tended to wear long, voluminous skirts. I didn’t really want to see what they looked like from the waist down.

They turned their head in my direction, and I raised one hand in a careful wave, staying where I was. They weren’t a predator the way the crossroads had been, but they were close enough that I tried to be careful around them, when I wasn’t smarting off to their face. Self-preservation has never been one of my strong suits, a tendency that’s only been exacerbated by decades as an untouchable phantom. If you want to teach somebody not to be a mouthy brat, it’s a good idea not to render them immune to most forms of harm.

They smiled, slight and sweet, and swung their scythe in a careless arc, much like a cheerleader might swing a baton. As soon as that gesture was complete, they were standing directly in front of me, skipping over the space between us like a bad film splice.

“Mary Dunlavy,” they said, their voice a harmonic choral blend of a million voices all speaking at the same time, in virtually perfect synchronization. “We had hoped you would listen the first time we called you. We didn’t want to call again.”

“I try not to ignore cosmic forces when I have a choice in the matter,” I said. “You rang?”

“We have need of you, Mary Dunlavy.”

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