Page 56 of Installment Immortality

“Impressive, aren’t they?” His hand was still on my waist, holding me in place, barely shy of possessive.

I glanced back at him, trying to figure out how I wanted to play this. I never had a lot of practice flirting. When I was alive, I was trying to keep my father above water, and once I’d been dead, I’d also been busy. Somehow, sorting out the confusing mess of human sexuality had never seemed to matter half as much as keeping the crossroads from swallowing my chosen family whole. I was pretty sure I didn’t like his hand on me, didn’t have any interest in the half-formed thoughts I could see coming together in his eyes; you don’t need to be a telepath to read certain intentions.

My choices were this man, the door I might not be able to get through on my own, or the rack of screaming, desperate spirits. I took a half-step back, so that the back of my thigh was pressed against the side of his, and let my voice get high and anxious as I asked, “Whatare they? Those can’t be real ghosts, not really. Ghosts aren’t real. I don’t like them. I don’t like the way they’re looking at me.”

“Maybe ghosts aren’t real. I don’t think they’re the spirits of dead humans. But whatever they are, they’re what we’ve always referred to as ‘ghosts,’ and they exist. My friends have been catching them all along the coast. We go to old places, or places like this city hall that were built with materials taken from old places, and we catch what we find there. I’m new to the organization, so I don’t get to help with the hunting, but I handle the research.” A certain pride crept into his voice there. “I look things up, I find the places with stories we might be able to chase down, and I track construction records to find out where all the stained glassfrom that demolished church that supposedly had a holy spirit wound up going.”

“But… but if they’re ghosts following the pieces of their homes around, and not hurting anyone, isn’t it wrong to bottle them up like this? Isn’t it like—like torturing people?”

“They’re not people anymore. They gave up the label of ‘people’ when they died.”

“How is that fair? What makes a ghost, anyway? Not everyone can become a ghost, or there would be so many of them that there wouldn’t be any room left for the living.” I stepped away from him, breaking the connections between thighs and waists and hands, and turned to give him my best, time-honed glower. “We have laws against desecrating graves and bodies because those things still represent people, even if they’re not people anymore. Why would we protect ghosts any less, if we knew for sure that ghosts existed? Most people don’tchooseto die. So you’re saying that because something happened to them, all these ghosts don’t count as people anymore, and don’t deserve the protection of basic human decency?”

“Not when they might hurt the living,” he replied.

“Oh, comeon.There must be thirty jars here! If thirty ghosts were hurting the living every year, we’d know for sure that ghosts are real. There wouldn’t be any question. You know all these ghosts haven’t been hurting anyone.”

I turned again, this time toward the van doors. As I did, I pulled as much solidity into myself as I could, mimicking humanity the way I would when I needed to take the kids to a public park, the sort of place where we’d run into human parents who could see through every weakness.

I don’t borrow life from the living the way a hitcher does. I take my substance from the world itself—from the pneuma, probably, which meant this was probably one of the expensive things the anima mundi complained about me doing. In the moment, Ididn’t care. I needed to know whether I could be solid and real andaliveenough to trick a Mesmer cage.

I grasped the handle on the van door. I said a silent prayer to whichever of the various deities I knew might be listening. I opened the door.

I stepped outside.

There were no sparks or flashes of light, or anything else that might indicate I’d beaten the Mesmer cage. There was just the Covenant’s data man, looking at me with disappointment but without surprise. Then I closed the door, shutting him inside, and even that was gone.

I vanished, leaving the van at the curb and the roll of toilet paper in the street.

One nice thing about doing fieldwork on the East Coast: for once, the time zones were in my favor. I vanished in Massachusetts, and I reappeared in Oregon. Specifically, I reappeared in Antimony’s bedroom, where I promptly shouted and threw one arm up to cover my eyes.

Annie and Sam were even faster. Sam scrambled away from her, hauling most of the bedding with him, and wrapped it securely around his waist and torso, creating a makeshift toga of sorts. He didn’t bother shifting back toward human. He remained visibly Furi, with faintly simian features, ears that were slightly larger than the norm, and a sinuous tail as long as he was tall, which he was using to hold part of the toga in place.

Annie tugged her nightshirt back down over her hips and gave me a sullen, baleful look, pulling the remaining sheet around herself and settling back into her pillows, of which there were at least six. She’s always liked her pillows, that girl, and it was a good sign that there were so many of them. When her flames firststarted manifesting and she started setting the bedding on fire, she’d removed most of the pillows from her bed in the interests of keeping them unburnt. If she had this many, she wasn’t setting things on fire in her sleep.

Of course, from the way she was glaring at me, she was currently contemplating how flammable ghosts might be. Sadly for her, the answer was “not very.” If she tried to burn me to death (killing me for the second time? Or would that be third? I never thought “How many times have I actually died?” was going to be something I needed to keep track of) we were both going to have a very bad night.

“Mary,” she said, voice so cold that it could almost have extinguished the flames she was so close to calling. “There’s this thing called ‘privacy,’ if you’ve heard of it? I’m an adult now. I’m allowed to have some.”

“Sorry,” I said, lowering my arm. “I didn’t see anything I haven’t seen before, if that helps?”

“You changed my diapers. It doesnothelp.”

“She, uh, didn’t change mine,” said Sam. “And the one time she popped in on me while I was in the shower, she was very careful not to see my junk. So I think I’m going to take ‘no new landmarks’ as a win. Hi, Mary. What’s going on?”

“Your dick is not a landmark,” said Annie.

“That’s not what you said last night.”

She hit him with a pillow. He stood there and took it like a man who was already committed to marrying into the family, and understood that dodging every missile just meant more flung objects in the future. Sometimes the people I’ve raised are predictable in ways that make me question what I’ve done to them.

Raised them all to be adults Frances Healy, the Flower of Arizona, would recognize and adore, that’s what. They’re happy, and that’s what really matters as far as I’m concerned.

“I am a grown, mature ghost, and I am not going to join thisconversation in any meaningful way,” I said. “I’m here because I need to ask Annie some questions about her time with the Covenant, and I popped into the bedroom because I don’t really want toanswerany questions just now. Which you know your parents will probably have for me.”

“You came back from the double-dead, kidnapped my cousins, and fucked off to who-knows-where,” said Annie, sitting up straighter against the pillows. “Yeah, I’ll say we have questions.”

“I didn’t kidnap anyone,” I said. “I needed someone solid, who had hands and could do things I couldn’t always, and Elsie volunteered.”

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