Page 36 of Installment Immortality

That was all the permission Elsie needed. She picked up her cheeseburger and took a quick bite, eyes going wide as she chewed and swallowed. Then she ripped in to the rest of the burger like someone was going to take it away from her, eating with the same enthusiasm as Arthur.

I gave Apple a hard look. She laughed, holding up her hands.

“It’s just diner food, I swear. Platonically perfect diner food, but diner food all the same. It can’t hurt them, although it may be a while before they can eat another cheeseburger. Once you’ve tasted perfection, it’s hard to accept anything less.”

“And I suppose that’s why you keep the crown,” I said.

Apple looked surprised. “No. I keep the crown because the Ocean Lady still loves me, and as long as she loves me, I belong with her. One day she’ll find someone she likes better, and I’ll fade into obscurity like the kings and queens before me. But for now, I’m comfortable in my reign, and I’m not in any hurry to get myself unseated.”

I frowned but said nothing.

“I guess you’re wondering why I came to meet you.”

“No, I figured you’d show up eventually, after I asked the anima mundi to find me a routewitch,” I said. “You do take a personal interest where I’m concerned.”

“You were there when my predecessor lost his position,” she said. “Makes this personal.”

“That’s not exactly how it happened—”

“But yes, the anima mundi approached my lady and told her you might need one or more of my subjects to help you get where you were going. I declined to help.”

“What? Why?”

“You were getting there just fine the ordinary way, and look at it from my perspective—you people are starting to usemypeople as a glorified taxi service, and that’s not what we are. We’re a culture and a community in our own right, and we don’t exist solely to make it easier on you assholes.” Apple took a sip from her milkshake. “Anima mundi did make one good point, though. Those Covenant fucks are killing innocent ghosts, and more than that, they’re capturing them.”

“Capturing them?”

She nodded. “Sealing them in spirit jars full of mercury, salt,and iron nails, then shaking them until the ghosts inside can’t stay out of contact with those components. That’s a quick and easy way to drive a bunch of spirits insane.”

“It’s a quick and easy way to do much worse than that,” I said, staring at her. Locking a ghost in a jar is bad. Locking them in a jar filled with things that hurt them and rip bits of their substance away is torture. Mercury shatters the substance of ghosts. Salt seals it away. And iron shreds their thoughts and memories, melting them, for lack of a better term, turning them into something viscous and thick that doesn’t want to go back to being a person.

The living have sometimes believed that subjecting a ghost to iron will drive them insane. We know better now. Insanity is a normal, natural thing. It can be harmful to the people it wraps around, but it isn’t infectious, and it isn’t so easily spread. A ghost who’s been shredded by iron hasn’t been maddened: they’ve been reduced to their component parts. What’s left after a few days of being shaken in a spirit jar full of iron isn’t even a beast—it’s a rabid beast, incapable of rational thought, made of nothing but hatred and hurting.

Apple nodded slowly. “True enough. The ghosts they capture are ticking time bombs, and there’s no telling who the Covenant might set them against, or where they might release them.”

Routewitches—Apple’s people—are the only living souls who can move semi-freely through the twilight. They use it as passage and pathway, and it’s part of how they can pull off such incredible feats of distance. A mile in the twilight might be twenty miles in the lands of the living.

But using the twilight as a shortcut means putting yourself in the path of ghosts, both friendly and less so. If the Covenant was jarring and weaponizing ghosts, they were in a position to start attacking the routewitches in a way they never had before, where there wouldn’t be a lot of defenses. It was a terrifying notion.

From the grim expression on Apple’s face, I wasn’t coming upwith anything new but joining her in a moment of terror already in progress. She’d been given the time to come to these conclusions already, and she didn’t like them any more than I did.

“So you’re here to help us reach the Covenant, then,” I guessed.

“Nope,” said Apple.

“But you just said…”

“The Covenant capturing ghosts is incredibly dangerous for me and my routewitches, especially since they’re here on the East Coast. If they were on the West Coast, they could get to the Rainbow Road, but she’s not a goddess yet: she’s a demigoddess at best, an avatar. The Ocean Lady is a goddess, and she’s a nonhuman intelligence, which means the Covenant wants to see her destroyed. I have to assume their jarred ghosts are going to be unleashed on her to do damage. And I can’t let that happen.”

“What do you mean, you can’tletit?”

“I mean that I am the Queen of the North American Routewitches, and that isn’t just a pretty title. It’s not just power and position. It’s a responsibility, to my people and to my lady. The Ocean Lady wants her routewitches to be safe. We wantherto be safe. She protects us in little ways every single day. Once in a while, we have to protect her in return. When a ruler of the roads fails in our duty to protect the Ocean Lady, she forsakes us, and we have to move along. I don’t want to move along. I can’t let the Ocean Lady be harmed by my insufficiency.”

“And you’re not going to help us reach the Covenant.”

“Nope.”

“So you’re going to do—what?”

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