Page 51 of Installment Immortality

Worcester, Massachusetts, in the lobby of City Hall, preparing to play bait for a bunch of Covenant ghost hunters

WE APPEARED IN THE DARKlobby of the city hall, Jonah’s hand tight on mine, his face pale and pinched in the light coming in through the windows. I looked down at him, relieved to see that he wasn’t measurably glowing. Homesteaders don’t, usually, but again, he’d already done things his type of ghost wasn’t meant to do. A broken caddis could be capable of just about anything, and I wouldn’t necessarily know about it. It was a complication I didn’t need, with ghost hunters lurking around every corner and two—two—divinities watching over me.

The lobby looked like the lobby of every other city hall I’d seen in the last decade. Modern design sensibilities had a way of pressing things into the same mold, homogenizing them one curved desk and brass seal at a time. Even the air had the cool, dry, dusty smell that I associated with government buildings, perfectly generic, perfectly neutral.

Jonah released me. “This is where they took Martha,” he said. “I have to go.”

“Will you go back to the others?” I asked. “I can find that place now, since I’ve been there. I’ll come when I’m finished here.”

“You promise?” There was a world of mistrust and damage in his eyes as he looked at me.

I nodded. “I promise,” I said, and he was gone, leaving me alone in City Hall.

Clicking my flashlight on, I started for the hall that would take me deeper into the building. I needed to find these people.

Once out of the lobby, I could hear the distant sounds of motion, of living people trying to navigate in the dark. I nodded to myself and started toward them, flashlight high. The longer I could keep them from getting a clear look at my face, the better my chances would be. I walked, and tried to figure out whether I was being clever or foolish. I was walking straight into danger, but that was the only way I was going to know what that danger really looked like.

Elsie and Arthur were with me so I’d have backup, but they weren’t immortal, and I wasn’t making ghosts out of any more of my charges. I might have, if I’d known they would linger; I’m not too proud or too ethical to admit that the temptation was occasionally there. A lifetime ago, when Alice was wounded in the Galway Woods, I tried to convince Thomas to back out of his bargain with my employers and let Alice slip into the afterlife, with me. I’d been trying to save him, yes, but I’d also been thinking of myself, of binding Alice to the crossroads so she could never leave me.

I’m not Peter Pan, but I’m the Wendy Darling who never left Neverland, who never stopped playing mother for children who would inevitably outgrow her and slip away. Sometimes I get lonely. Sometimes I wish they’d die young enough to keep needing me forever. And every time that thought pops up again, I push those shameful pieces of myself down as hard as I can, burying them under obligation and understanding that dead is very rarely better. It’s not their fault they still have lives to lead,while mine is incontrovertibly over. So I was going to risk my own unlife before I asked my kids to come and risk the only real lives they were ever going to have.

Besides, they were probably eating dinner by now, Elsie possibly flirting with Amelia, Amelia possibly flirting with Arthur, everyone laughing and a little bit uncomfortable at the same time as they tried to work out how serious everyone else was being. Phee seemed like the sort who’d set a warm and welcoming table, the kind of place where everyone felt comfortable and no one walked away hungry. It was better this way. Let me do the legwork; let them enjoy being young and alive and together for just a little longer.

I turned a corner, and there they were, three living people in a place that should have been left to the ghosts at this hour, the taller of the two men positioned in front of the single woman, a flashlight of his own in his hands. She was carrying a large mason jar, the lid already removed, the interior painted with sigils in silver paste of some sort. Crushed rosemary filled the bottom inch or so. I could feel it calling to me, pulling at me across the distance between us. A second man lurked a bit farther back, this one the dark-haired man who’d made Benedita scowl so, and his hands were empty, which meant he was the most dangerous of the three, or would have been, if I’d been a living opponent. He was ready to go for a weapon.

Weapons are bad. For me, in the moment, the open spirit jar was worse. “Hello?” I said, trying to make it more of a demand than a simple question. Youwillanswer me, youwilltell me what I want to know. You won’t turn and run away, even though it would be the sensible thing to do. “You can’t be here.”

That seemed like a very security-guard thing to say, and I was momentarily proud of myself before the man in the lead replied, in what sounded like the same British accent I’d heard from Aoi, now stripped of its Boston undertones: “Oh, no, miss, we have permission from the mayor.”

“No one told me about any permission.” True, if incomplete. No one associated with the city was likely to be telling me anything. “Why do you have permission from the mayor? To do what? And if you’re allowed to be here, why are you creeping around with the lights out? That’s creepy-cakes territory, and I don’t like it.”

“We’re ghostbusters,” said the woman with the jar, keeping her voice light, bright, and measured, like she thought she was auditioning for a children’s television show about creeping around municipal buildings in the dark. I couldn’t imagine it was going to get particularly good ratings, although I’ve been wrong about that sort of thing before. “We’re taking care of that pesky haunting you’ve been dealing with.” Her accent matched the first man’s perfectly.

“We’ve caught two of the ghosts so far,” said the man. “Tell us, do you know where the little boy normally manifests?”

If he was smart, in the courtyard by the fountain, or the strip-mall basement where his friends were. But the two Covenant operatives who’d spoken were looking at me with too-bright eyes and artificial smiles, while the third watched the hall behind them, keeping an eye out for ghosts who might want to sneak up and get a little revenge.

Not that I’d blame any ghost who wanted to kick these people in the throat for what they’d been doing, but it would a wasted effort for most phantoms. Very few of us are capable of interacting concretely with the material world, and touching actual, living humans was beyond even most ghosts whocouldfloat a rock or slam a door when they wanted to. He was keeping an eye out for nothing.

“Ghosts don’t exist,” I said, crossing my arms. “Did Davey put you up to this? Nerd. Just because I got freaked out atThe Blair Witch Projectone time, he thinks he can prank me withScooby-Doostories any time he wants to.” I pitched my voice louder,not quite shouting. “Not funny, Davey, you hear me? You’re not funny, and I’mnotgoing to prom with you, no matter how many times you try to scare me into saying yes.”

The nonexistent Davey didn’t reply. The three Covenant operatives flinched, moving a little closer together, while the man at the front turned his flashlight on my face, shining it directly into my eyes.

I was suddenly, fiercely glad that the anima mundi had stolen the graveyard from my eyes. You can bluff even trained killers like these Covenant operatives, if you do it the right way and with absolute confidence. But I didn’t think there was a bluff in this world that would stand up to them looking into my eyes and seeing the impossible.

“I assure you, miss, ah, Eloise, ghosts are very real,” said the man smoothly. “We’ve been moving up and down the coast hunting for them, and we’ve managed to collect quite an assortment. When we heard that your city hall was home to not one but three spirits, we knew we had to intervene.”

“So where’s the TV cameras?” I asked. “If you’re saying actual real ghosts exist, and you can actually for reals catch them, you should be filming it and making, like,allthe money.”

“We’re doing this for our own reasons,” said the woman. “We don’t want to be famous.”

“Oh yeah? What reasons are those?” I didn’t actually like how long this conversation had been going on. The longer we talked, the more chance there was that they’d realize something was wrong with me, or that an actual security guard would come along. No matter how smooth they were about claiming to have permission to be here, I didn’t buy it. They were getting nervous, although they were covering it as well as they could.

Not for the first time, since I’d been in New York when things were just starting to get bad, I was struck by howyoungall of these operatives were. So far, I had yet to encounter a Covenantagent who was older than my kids, and sure, my kids were reaching the age where they settled down and had kids of their own, but still. I never saw any Covenant elders, none of the people who supposedly ran the show. Were they all in hiding, or were they all dead?

If the Covenant was putting on a good show of still having a coherent leadership in place when they were really just a bunch of kids trying to keep the monsters away from their doors, this all might come to a much easier end than we were afraid of. I would like that. My kids would like that. And we probably weren’t going to get it, because nothing is ever that easy, not really.

“A ghost—a very dangerous ghost—damaged our family home,” said the woman, earning herself a sharp look from the man who was probably her brother. “We don’t know exactly how. Poltergeists aren’t supposed to be that powerful. But the ghost managed to cave half the building in on top of itself, and our mother was killed.”

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