Page 6 of Installment Immortality

“Perhaps we’d prefer it if you took her home the ordinary way.”

“All right.” I shrugged. “Just keep in mind that I’m a teenage girl, on foot, and I can’t take any shortcuts. I don’t have any money, and you’ve just promised not to pull me away from her when she needs me, you could be without an interlocutor for a while. You’ll have to call in one of your backups. Maybe Carlton would be good for the job?”

Carlton was another crossroads ghost, based out of Wisconsin. He was a lot more experienced than I was and argued a lot harder for his petitioners. Rumor was that he’d actually won a few times, convincing them to leave without taking a deal. The crossroads didn’t like that.

“… fine,” said the crossroads, sullenly. “We’ll call next time you’re free.”

And then I was back in the Healy family living room, Alice in my arms, her new rock still clutched firmly in one hand. The mice cheered as I put her down and she ran off down the hall, presumably to do something unfathomably inappropriate with her rock.

I sagged. The mice knew we’d been gone. That meant they were going to tell Fran and Jonathan, and that meant there was no way I could get out of explaining the situation. Oh, well. It had been fun while it lasted.

Resigned to my impending doom, I followed the sound of Alice’s laughter down the hall.

Only I hadn’t been met with doom. I’d been met with surprising understanding and a new gig as Alice’s exclusive babysitter, which had suited everyone involved. More importantly, that was the moment the crossroads had come to accept Alice as my family and, through her, each and every one of her descendants. From Kevin to Olivia, they were mine, and I was theirs, and nothing was going to split us up.

Not even Alice growing up and falling in love with a man who made a deal with the crossroads to save her life after she’d been bitten by a dangerous cryptid whose venom went ripping through her body, shredding cells like they were nothing of any consequence. His name was Thomas Price, and he’d paid dearly for her life, finding himself locked in to a world growing steadily smaller while she thought he didn’t care. Until finally, explosively, they’d figured out how much each of them cared, and gotten down to the business of making more kids for me to babysit.

Kevin had come first, followed by Jane, and I’d been a major part of their upbringing. The family babysitter who never had other clients, or conflicting appointments, or caught a cold. Who never got any older. I was the cool older kid when they were little,and then I was a peer, and when they looked at me and saw a child, they would graduate from my care.

The years between Kevin and Jane being too old to need a babysitter and them having kids of their own had been among the most unpleasant I’d known since I died. The fact that they were family enough to call me away from the crossroads was a source of constant irritation for my real owner-employers, and there had been a brief period when I’d been afraid that the crossroads were going to find a way to kill them both, stopping the family line in its tracks and taking away my one excuse to hold on to my humanity.

But Kevin and Jane had been born with the same bizarrely coincidence-based luck as their mother, and more importantly, their living guardian had been a woman named Laura Campbell, Alice’s childhood best friend and—most importantly of all—an umbramancer doing her best to masquerade as an ambulomancer.

Both umbramancers and ambulomancers are types of road witch, close cousins to the routewitches. Ambulomancers are about half as common as routewitches, unusual enough to be worth remarking on, but not so rare as to be intimidating. Umbramancers, though…

There’s a lot of confusion about where umbramancers get their power. This much is absolutely certain, though: they’re living humans who can traverse the twilight for short distances without dying, they can see the future in limited ways, and they can speak to the dead, even the dead who are too weak and distanced from their origins to manifest visually or audibly. They’re good at wards and seals. Most umbramancers will spend their whole lives trying not to be noticed. I know Laura did. She wanted to be taken for a walking witch, to be left alone and ignored.

And then she’d found herself the custodian of Alice and Thomas Price’s two children, which meant she had the attention of the crossroads from the very beginning, and would have the attention of the Covenant if she wasn’t careful. (We haven’t reachedthe Covenant of St. George yet. Be patient, I’m getting there.) She’d needed to do some things she really didn’t want to in order to protect herself and the children, and the whole time, Alice had been slipping in and out of our lives on her endless search for Thomas, never staying long enough for her children to know her, never slowing down enough to let herself ask what was going to happen if she failed.

It had been a dark period for all of us. Laura had been spending more and more time trying to perceive an ever-shifting future, reaching deeper into the midnight, the deepest layer of the afterlife, with every reading. And then one day she’d pulled me aside, and told me, in a voice as empty as an unfinished tomb, that she knew what had to happen next.

“There will be children,” she’d said. “They’re coming, sooner than you think, if not as soon as I’d like. I’ll see the first born to each of them, and no more than that.”

“What’s going to happen to you?”

“I’ll be going away. I can’t tell you where, only that it’s for everyone’s safety, and that they’ll be able to have me back someday. I’m not going as far as Tommy went, or Alice.” She’d smiled at me then, and her eyes had been older than even my own. “Don’t worry so much, Mary. It’s bad for your heart.”

“I’m dead,” I’d replied. “The only good part about it is not needing to worry about my blood pressure. Where are you going?”

I would remember her sigh for as long as I lived. “Away. Somewhere you can’t follow. Somewhere none of you can follow. And I’ll see you when the time comes, when you have to come and find me, but if I’m still here, the future changes in some ways that it’s better we avoid.”

“Jane’s not going to like this.”

With Alice gone, Laura was more her mother than her biological mom had ever been. She even called Laura “Mom” sometimes, although Laura tried to dissuade her. Jane and Alice werenever going to have a very traditional relationship, but Laura felt it was important for Jane to remember where she came from, and Laura was normally right about that sort of thing.

True to Laura’s word, both Kevin and Jane had gone off to college, met the loves of their lives, and gotten married. The children had followed a respectable time later. The first, Alex, had been welcomed with a smile and a kiss on the forehead. The second, Elsie, had been met with the same, and with a slim book of predictions that related to the kids. Laura had handed it off to Kevin and returned to her trailer.

Two days later, she’d been gone, wherever it was she’d vanished to had been too far away for even me to reach. Not that there’d been a lot of time to look for her—after being abandoned by their own mother, neither Kevin nor Jane had been willing to leave their kids alone while they went on a wild goose chase. The trail, such as it was, had been given years to go cold, and by the time we started searching, it was far too late.

I had no doubt that Laura had planned it like that. She was always good at covering her bases. But there had been children to focus on and worry about—first Alex and Elsie, and then Verity, Artie, Antimony, and finally Sarah, who was older than Verity but didn’t become a proper part of our family until three years after Antimony was born. Bringing her into the family had been enough to confirm that adopted children were exactly the same as biological ones in the eyes of whatever cosmic law managed my debt to the crossroads, because I’d been able to hear her calling me from the beginning.

One child in the first generation I was responsible for, two in the second, six in the third. It seemed like I would have a place and a purpose forever. The crossroads saw it too, and they didn’t approve; they wanted me away from my family, fully under their control. But when they tried to press the issue by targeting the youngest of my charges, Antimony, she’d responded by tappingin to the same sort of power the routewitches used to control distance and turned time against them, going back to the point where the crossroads had entered our world and driving them away before they could take root.

Thanks to her, the crossroads had never existed. Thanks to the tangled web of reality refusing to be undone outside of the metaphysical side of things, I continued to exist. I was just defined as a full-time babysitter rather than a part-time servant to an unspeakable force infinitely greater than myself.

And the timing had been pretty good, since that was also right about when the family started acquiring kids again, both through the “make your own” method and via the “if you can’t make your own, store-bought is fine” route. Antimony adopted another brother, James. Alex’s girlfriend got pregnant. Verity got pregnant. Sarah’s parents—who were also Evelyn’s parents—adopted a little boy, and Alice and Thomas came home from the abyss with a new daughter in tow. The family had never been larger, I had never been busier, and everything would have been perfect, if not for the Covenant.

Which means it’s time to explain the Covenant, because as I said, this is the recap to make sure we’re all on the same page. Not easy, sometimes necessary.

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