Page 27 of Installment Immortality

That seemed to be as good as I was going to get right now. I nodded quickly, and blipped back to Elsie’s room—or tried to, anyway. Nothing happened.

I turned back to the anima mundi, hoping the look on my face would be sufficient to communicate my confusion. They looked calmly back at me.

“You cannot keep coming to us asking for favors, Mary Dunlavy,” they said. “We have extended you the greatest favor we are capable of granting, by allowing you to resume your frivolous ways. You are an expense we do not need, going forward, and you would do well to remember that.”

“I do,” I said, as sincerely as I could manage. “I know I’m not something vital to keeping the world turning. But I’m something vital to my family, and I hope you’ll remember that, while you’re making decisions about what to do with me.”

“We would say that the needs of a single family are insufficiently strong to stay our hand, were it not for the one who saved us,” said the anima mundi gravely. “If you see Antimony, be sure to give her our regards, and remember, it is only out of our debt to her that we are willing to fund your ongoing existence.”

I was abruptly back in Elsie’s room, which was still oddly devoid of mice. I frowned and went snooping while Elsie was off notifying her father of our plan.

The mouseholes behind the bed had been stopped up with plaster and caulk. It was an inexpert repair, but it was sufficient to make the barrier obvious. At some point in the past six months, she’d decided to hang the “keep out” signs on her private space. That was unsettling. In all my time dealing with the Prices, I had never known one of them to shut the mice out so completely. Get frustrated by them, yes. Exile them, no. Never in a million years.

I tapped the plaster. It made a dullthunksound, clearly thick enough that the mice weren’t going to break through by mistake. The fact that they hadn’t broken through already meant she must have negotiated some sort of temporary restriction on their presence. That, too, was unprecedented, and I didn’t entirely like it.

I sat down on the edge of the bed, then flopped over backward, folding my hands behind my head. This wasn’t the outcome I’d been expecting when I popped over to Portland—if anything, I’d come by the house as a courtesy, so Elsie and Artie could honestly say that they’d been invited and chosen to stay home before I went and got some of the more action-oriented cousins. I hadn’t anticipated that Elsie would be this eager to get payback for her mother, or how much having her come along would complicate things.

I couldn’t invite Annie to join us—not when she’d been there to witness Jane’s death without being able to stop it, and not when Elsie so clearly resented her for it. This wasn’t going to be easier ifmy backup was fighting the whole time, and depending on how much of the drive we had to make according to normal physics, there might be a long time for things to be harder than I wanted them to be.

The door banged open and Elsie came bounding back into the room, hauling a mid-sized suitcase with her. “He’s not thrilled, but he’s not going to try to stop me,” she announced, tossing the suitcase onto the bed. She flipped it open and bounced across the room to start yanking out dresser drawers and throwing fistfuls of clothing, toiletries, and weapons into the open case. It was a ridiculous jumble. I sat up to watch her.

“How many knives do you think you’re going toneed?”

“Either one more than I have, or all of them,” she said. “I’m aiming for the option where I’m not caught under-armed in the middle of a fight.” She produced a handgun from the bottom of the drawer and placed it in the suitcase, then moved to unlock the safe in the wall next to it and start pulling out boxes of bullets. “Are we going to be fighting any ghosts?”

“I hope not, but right now, I can’t say for sure what we’re going to be up against,” I said. “Covenant operatives, definitely. What else, I have no real idea.”

“Check,” she said, and tossed what looked like a spirit jar into the suitcase.

“Elsie.”

“Yeah?”

“Why do you have a spirit jar?”

She must have caught the unhappiness in my tone, because she paused and looked at me. “You said the Covenant’s been hunting these ghosts on the East Coast.”

“Yes.”

“And could these ghosts have had friends?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” If I was being completely honest, I’dnever spent all that much time with more-ordinary hauntings. They didn’t tend to like crossroads ghosts very much for some reason—probably related to the fact that “can you let me talk to my dead relative of choice” was one of the more common requests the crossroads asked me to arbitrate, which could result inmorehauntings as the person who’d made the bargain withered and died or committed suicide—and when I was doing my other job, I didn’t have a lot of time for a social death. Maybe stationary haunts had friends and communities, and maybe they didn’t. Her guess was as good as mine.

“If they did, they might not be too happy right now, which means I want to be at least minimally armed against grumpy ghosts who have no good reason to like the living very much, if that’s cool by you.” She added a pair of brass knuckles and a skin care kit that looked to have been modified to include a tiny hammer to her suitcase, then started stuffing things down and adjusting them to guarantee that it would zip. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to bottle you up for later consumption.”

“Ha ha,” I said, still uncomfortable. “See how chill you are when I start painting sigils to contain succubi on everything.”

“We both know those don’t work.”

“Yeah, but spirit jarsdo.And don’t think I didn’t notice how you danced around telling me why you had the thing to begin with.” This seemed like as good a time as any. “Hey, Elsie—why are the mice locked out of your room? And why did they think you were at roller derby practice when you were in your room?”

It was her turn to look deeply, profoundly uncomfortable. “Can we not talk about that right now?” She hoisted her suitcase, then moved toward the door. “It’s bad enough that there were a couple in Dad’s room, so they know I’m leaving.”

“Elsie, did something happen with the mice?”

“No.” She paused with her hand on the bedroom door. “Yes.I don’t know. They’re just being the mice, I guess, and I can’t be too mad at them for that—they are the way they are, always have been, and it’s silly of me to expect them to change.”

“This is about them not letting your mother’s theology go into the archives, isn’t it?”

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