Page 5 of Installment Immortality

I jerked around, eyes narrowing as I took in the empty outline cut into the air behind me. “Stay the hell away from her.”

“Oh, don’t worry. She’s too young to understand any bargain we might try to make with her, which means she’s off-limits until she gets a little older. Now, once she does, we’ll thank you for keeping her safe long enough to come to us. She smells of something we haven’t tasted in a very long time.”

“Alice is off-limits.”

“Is she?” The voice of the crossroads turned sharp. “We worry that you’re forgetting who you belong to, Mary Dunlavy. That you’re getting distracted by these frivolous duties you perform among the living.”

“You agreed that my family comes first,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking. “If you call when I’m with them, I don’t have to come immediately. I can fulfill my duties to them first. Well, Alice is my family, and I couldn’t safely leave her alone in the house. That means you broke the rules of our agreement by forcing me to come here.”

“You have no relation to this child.”

“I didn’t ask you for my relatives, I asked you for myfamily.A husband isn’t related to his wife—or shouldn’t be. An adopted child isn’t related to any of the people they call kin. Alice is my family. She belongs to me, and I belong to her, and you agreed when you claimed me that my family would come before anything else, even you.”

The crossroads hissed, a low, angry sound like a teakettle boiling over. “Semantics.”

“Everything you are is built on semantics. Those deals you take so much pleasure in making, they’re all semantics. You’re the one who taught me to look for the loopholes. You broke the rules by bringing us here, not me.”

“Do not test our patience, child,” said the crossroads, voice gone cold and dangerous.

“I don’t have anything else to test,” I said, and moved to scoop Alice off the concrete. She came willingly, holding her rock in both hands like it was some sort of treasure.

“I keep this?” she asked me, hopefully.

Her parents let her play with taxidermy and sticks. They weren’t going to object to a rock. “You can keep it,” I said.

She beamed. “Thanks, Mary!” she declared, and waved her rocklike a tiny orchestra conductor before squirming and saying imperiously, “Down.”

I released her again, and again she ran off to examine the wonders of our surroundings. She had almost fifty reliable words at that point, and it was a matter of pride for me that “Mary” had been among her first. I was her family as much as she was mine.

“Well?” I turned back to the shape cut out of nothing. “You wanted me to negotiate something for you?”

“The child makes you less imposing and thus less effective,” complained the crossroads.

“You brought me here against my will while I was babysitting,” I said.

“We could command you to stop.”

“You could try. I know you don’t have a boss as such, but I’ve always gotten the impression that you have to follow the rules. What’s the point of making a deal if you don’t adhere to the terms? If you punish me for keeping to the rules you negotiated, you’re breaking our deal, and word will get out. You want that to happen?”

Alice had found a stick and was poking it into a hole by the side of the road. I itched to swoop over and grab her before she could find some unfriendly local wildlife. Instead, I forced myself to stay where I was and scowl at the crossroads, which didn’t have a face but still managed to give the impression of scowling back.

“Our rules are our rules,” they said. “You aren’t meant to use them against us.”

“Oops.”

“Perhaps we were… hasty in demanding your attention.”

“Looks that way to me.” I shrugged broadly, looking around. “I don’t see anyone looking to make a deal.”

“Our petitioner is on the way.”

“Great. You have time to get another interlocutor on the scene.”

“We will agree that the girl is your family,” said the crossroads,sounding surprisingly sullen for an untouchable force of the universe. “We will extend that agreement to her blood relations. But that is theend,do you understand? We will acknowledge no others in such a way.”

“Works for me.” And it did—I’d been taking fewer and fewer jobs the longer I’d been dead. My hair had already gone from pale blonde to a bleached-out bone white that would have looked artificial if not for the fact that my eyebrows and lashes had paled to match, and my eyes were something unspeakable. Most of me could still have belonged to the living, but not my eyes. They were filled with cemeteries and screams. Adults mostly didn’t notice, or didn’t look closely enough to understand what about me they found unnerving, but children—I always wound up feeling bad when I met new kids. They had a tendency to meet my eyes and start wailing like they’d just seen the shadow of their own mortality and didn’t quite understand what it meant.

I crossed the intersection to Alice and picked her up for a second time, resting her on my hip as I turned to face the nothingness. “You can send us back now.”

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