Page 45 of Installment Immortality

“Ha ha,” I said, waving my knife carelessly in front of me. “Once they hit legal age, I don’t care what they do behind closed doors. It’s not my business. I’ll prevent teen pregnancies, solely because their parents expect it of me, but beyond that, I don’t tell my charges who to get busy with.”

“Nah, I was thinking of the new boy,” said Amelia. “He gives off that shy-but-sexy vibe I like.”

I nearly dropped the knife.

Amelia laughed. “So much for little Miss I Don’t Care. I knew you cared. You have that look about you. I’m not sure when the last time you didn’t care about something was. You’re a serial carer.”

“Guilty,” I said. “Look, if you’re going to flirt with Arthur, there’s something you should—”

“Nah,” said Amelia. “I was kidding. The girl’s more my speed. I like a lady with fluffy technicolor hair.”

“And we’re back to me not caring,” I said, putting down the knife. I glanced at the window, where the sun was more than halfway down in the sky. “Close enough to dark that I can get started, and there’s no reason for me to stay for dinner, what with the whole ‘I don’t need to eat’ aspect of my existence.”

“I’ll feed your Lilu,” said Phee, waving a ladle before she started stirring the sauce. “You have fun with your genocidal maniacs.”

“I always do,” I said, and disappeared.

When all else fails, find a haunting.

All ghosts can locate other ghosts, if we’re given sufficient time and good-enough reason to deal with one another. Most hauntings are fairly territorial. The reason we haven’t lost Baltimore or some other major metropolitan area to a massive ghost vortex is because we can’t stand each other for long periods, or sometimes at all.

Road ghosts are more social than the rest of us. I guess when your haunting is a mobile one, you sort of have to be able to tolerate the presence of other ghosts every once in a while.

I’ve never been as bothered by other ghosts as some of my kind are, maybe because caretakers are another type of mobile haunting. We don’t stay with a place: we stay with the people who make it relevant to us. That makes me unusually suited to dealing with other hauntings, and I tried to hold that firmly in mind as I appeared on the outskirts of a city park, green grass around my ankles and half-lit buildings all around. I was deep enough into the city’s commercial district that most of the things around me were closed; the living had all gone home for the night, leavingthis place to the inhuman residents of the city. Including the dead ones.

Everything in me was screaming that there was a ghost near here. I turned in a slow circle, breathing in the night, trying to feel for the spirit I could halfway sense. When I didn’t find anything more precise than “nearby,” I started walking into the park, crossing the grass with long, careful strides.

Something whistled behind me, sounding almost but not quite like the wind. I turned. Behind me, lit from below by spotlights, was the great white box of City Hall, recognizable as a major civic building even before I saw the signs. I turned back the way I’d been facing. In front of me, beyond the grass and in the middle of a brick courtyard, was a pink marble basin topped by a bronze statue of a young boy standing behind a sea turtle.

“Public art issoweird,” I said, and kept walking.

As I got closer to the statue, I heard the whistling sound again. I stopped to look behind me, trying to find its source. There was nothing. Still, there was nothing.

The night and the noises were beginning to make the back of my neck itch, which was a fascinating reminder of the fact that no matter how dead I got, my spirit still remembered what it was to have had a body. Sometimes the autonomic reactions I no longer really had would kick in and make things weird, muscle cramps and sneezes and itches and other things that dead girls shouldn’t need to worry about. I turned steadfastly back toward the statue and resumed walking faster, heading for the boy and the turtle like they had been my destination all along.

The statue got stranger and stranger-looking as I drew closer, making me question who would have sculpted such a thing, much less installed it in a public park. Then I was right up on top of it, and stopped, squinting at the placard that identified it as the Burnside Fountain. There was no water.

“Go looking for ghosts, find weird-ass statue,” I said, eyeingthe boy with the turtle. This close, it was difficult to find an innocent explanation for the pose they had been sculpted in, with the boy behind the turtle, holding it by the sides of the shell and pulling it back against his groin. The turtle looked startled and unhappy. The boy looked pleased with all his life choices up until this point. “Massachusetts is officially freak central.”

“Why would you come here, then?” asked a voice, from directly behind me. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end, and I turned to find myself facing a boy about the same age as the one in the statue, maybe twelve, maybe thirteen. He was faintly transparent, with dark, messy hair and bare feet, wearing a nightshirt in a style that had been outdated and forgotten before I was a child. There was something distinctly old-fashioned about his face, although I couldn’t have identified it exactly if you’d been offering to pay me.

“I’m pretty freaky myself,” I said, mind racing. Child ghosts aren’t as rare as I’d like them to be, and they mostly sort into one of two categories: the majority are ever-lasters, the ghosts of kids who haunt schools, trying to finish their trek to the strange, distant country of adulthood before they move along to their rewards. They’re the only ghosts that naturally age, getting older as they learn. It can take them centuries, but theywillgrow up if you give them enough time.

The rest of the child ghosts fall into a big bucket I like to call “trouble.” They died too young, and they’re pissed about it. They tend to become poltergeists and hostile hauntings, the sort who wind up with opportunistic filmmakers making horror movies about them.

This kid didn’t look like an ever-laster.

As if he’d read my mind—which was impossible; I’ve never heard of a telepathic ghost, much less met one—he looked me up and down, then smirked. “You look like you’d get freaky.”

I folded my arms. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those kids who’sbeen dead for so long that you think you get to be gross about things you didn’t live long enough to properly understand,” I said. “It’s not funny, it’s not cute, and it’s not going to change anything.”

He looked faintly disappointed. “You’re no fun.”

“I’m lots of fun. I’m just age-appropriate fun, and it’s late. You should probably be in bed.”

“I can’t be in bed,” he said sourly. “I’m dead.”

“That’s never stopped me.” Not entirely true, but good enough for this encounter. At least I’d managed to find a local ghost. “So are you haunting this park, or this weird-ass fountain?”

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