Page 25 of Installment Immortality

Elsie sniffled, and the first tears rolled down her cheeks, fat and round and obviously too long in coming. “I hate this. I hate it so much. Why doIhave to lose my mother? I already lost my brother, and Dad may as well not be here with Mom gone. He’s just… It’s like he’s gone inside himself and slammed the door.”

“He’s Lilu, and she was a remarkable woman,” I said. “I don’t think he ever had to question whether or not she was with him because of his pheromones. You know how rare that is.”

“I do,” Elsie admitted, sniffling. “I wish I didn’t, but I do. Sometimes I wish she hadn’t been willing to marry an incubus.”

“But if she hadn’t, I wouldn’t have you, and I’d be so much poorer for your absence,” I said.

Elsie mustered a wan smile. “You have to say that. You’re my babysitter.”

“Your babysitter who youdecapitated,” I said. “Since when are you in the habit of assaulting anyone who knocks?”

“Since my mother died and my brother started unraveling like a badly programmed chatbot, and my babysitter—the dead woman, who was supposed to be indestructible and never, ever leave me for any reason, ever—went and got herself blown up on a mission with the same woman who broke my brother,” said Elsie. “I felt like I needed to get a little more aggressive about self-defense, and I still haven’t seen anything to indicate that I was wrong. I’m sorry about the whole head thing. You startled me.”

“And I guess if you thought I was gone, no one would be sticking their head through your door on a regular basis,” I allowed. “Rose maybe.”

“Not so much. Since she’s gone and gotten herself promotedto Fury, she doesn’t have as much time to just drop by and bother us. Even if she did, she’s solid by default a lot more when she’s interacting with the land of the living, and she tries not to be an asshole. Pretending to be you when she knows I’m grieving your loss would qualify.”

“You knew I wasn’t Rose because acting like me would have made her an asshole, and she isn’t an asshole, got it,” I said.

Elsie shrugged. “So Rose isn’t going to be imitating your voice and coming into my room without an invitation.”

“In that case, you can stop apologizing,” I said. “Just please don’t cut my head off again. That was very startling, and I didn’t like it.”

“Deal.” Elsie looked at me, eyes wide and bright with unshed tears. “Are you really here?”

“Really-really,” I said. I shifted position to kneel rather than sitting flat on the floor, and opened my arms, inviting her in for a hug. “I was injured about as badly as a ghost can be injured, but not so badly that the anima mundi couldn’t put me together again, and now I’m back, and I’m not leaving my family any time soon.”

Elsie all but threw herself into my embrace, wrapping her arms tightly around me. I was suddenly, painfully grateful that the anima mundi had returned my control over my solidity. I could tell from the way she shook as she clung to me just how desperately she had needed this hug, and I was glad to be able to oblige.

When she finally let me go, her eyes were still bright, but her cheeks were wet, the tears she’d been threatening having finally managed to fall. She wiped her face with one hand as she sat back, and laughed unsteadily. “Sorry,” she said. “Not very cool of me.”

“Who told you I cared if you were ‘cool’?” I asked. “I don’t need you to be ‘cool.’ Never have, never will.”

“But…” She caught herself, stopping.

“But what?” I asked.

“Antimony’s cool.”

“Annie’s more than moderately terrifying,” I said. “She’s probably the culmination of all the traits the Covenant was breeding for when they introduced your grandmother’s grandparents.” That was easier than trying to get the number of “greats” correct, and it got my point across all the same.

Elsie laughed, but I wasn’t kidding. The Covenant of St. George has many appalling qualities, and one of them is the tendency to treat their members like show dogs, pairing them according to a vast and complicated breeding program that’s supposed to eventually get them the best possible field operatives. Annie was smart, ruthless, physically skilled, and a sorcerer—all things that made her absolutely deadly in the field, and would have made her an incredible asset for the other side if she hadn’t been so dedicated to the family cause. And then she’d gone and fallen in love with a cryptid, a therianthropic shapeshifter who spent as little time passing for human as he could get away with.

The Covenant was never going to lure her away from us now, not with Sam in the picture, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t grateful for that.

“She’s still cool,” said Elsie stubbornly.

“And this matters why?”

“You spent so much more time with her than you did with me when we were kids.” She shrugged. “I always just figured you liked her better because she was cool, and if I could be cool, you’d choose me instead.”

I blinked. “Oh, sweetheart, no. It was never about her being cooler than you. It was always down to age. I’m the babysitter. I focus on the youngest children because they need me more. That’s the only reason.”

“But you stayed focused on her even after she was as grown up as the rest of us.”

“Because reaching adulthood didn’t change the fact that she was the youngest in your generation, and I needed to keep babysittingif I didn’t want the crossroads to start pulling me away even more than they already did. Besides, I thought you liked it when I gave you space. Weren’t you the one who was always trying to chase me away when I tried to babysit?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t, I didn’tmeanit!” she said, almost in a wail.

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