Page 60 of Installment Immortality

“I hope Amelia was flirting back?”

“She was,” said Arthur sullenly. “Big fun, being the third wheel at a table full of strangers. Did you find the Covenant team?”

“I did.” I sat down on the edge of the bed. “There are four of them that I know of so far, two from Penton Hall, one a local recruit, one semi-wild card. He’s got a Brazilian accent, and I know they’ve been able to get their claws into South America, so he could be a loyalist. He could also be a casual ghost hunter who got swept up in their mission. It’s hard to say. I don’t know how much institutional support they have for what they’re doing.” What I’d seen so far felt more like one of the family’s field missions than a proper strike team. But without knowing how much damage we’d done to the organization as a whole, I couldn’t say what that meant.

“Do you know anything about the ones from England?”

“Their older brother, Leonard, is the one who shot your mother,” I said. “He’s not here, or I’d be in Elsie’s room, begging her not to go on a suicide run.”

He looked thoughtful. “Maybe they can tell us where to find him. I look forward to asking.”

“They’ve been catching and torturing ghosts. They have at least two dozen of them currently captive. It’s not safe to go anywhere near them until we know how to neutralize all those spirits.” I shook my head. “They’re keeping them in a mobile Mesmer cage right now, which means they’re mobile, but also means they’re contained.”

“I guess that’s good.” Arthur frowned, looking at me. “You shouldn’t go out alone. If they caught you, we’d have no way of knowing it had happened. I look enough like Dad that I don’t think I’m much of a security risk, and Elsie doesn’t look like anyone except for Elsie. Never has.”

“I wasn’t planning to go out alone again unless I have to,” I said, trying to reassure as best I could. “I just wanted to see how many of them we were dealing with, and vaguely where they were. Now that we know, we can get started with the real work. Did Elsie’s flirting reach the point of anyone inviting anyone else back to their room?”

“Not quite.”

“Great. I’ll be right back.” I stood, walking toward the wall his room shared with his sister’s.

I was almost there before he called, “Mary?”

I stopped and looked back to him. “Yes?”

“You’re not going to get hurt again, are you?”

This was something we were all going to need to work on. I’d been dead long before any of these people were born, and it had led to a certain understandable tendency to think of me as indestructible, the one person none of us would ever need toworry about. Annie had been disabused of that impression when the crossroads had decided to punish me for helping her, a nasty, withering decay that still sometimes ached in the spaces where my soul believed I had bones. The rest of them had lost that soft self-deception in a blast in the basement of Penton Hall, when their beloved, immortal babysitter had been blown to bits for six long months of nothingness. He was just learning how to worry about me, while I had a lifetime of practice worrying about him.

So I looked over my shoulder and I did what babysitters have been doing for centuries, when their charges asked questions they didn’t know how to safely answer. I lied, with a smile on my lips and a bright twinkle in my eyes.

“Of course not, silly. These are amateurs. There’s no way they’re going to catch me in a box I don’t want to be in. We’re going to catch them, free the ghosts, and stop the hunt, and then we’re going to go home and make things right again. Now wait here. I’m going to get your sister.”

Before he could ask me anything else, I walked through the wall.

Elsie was in her room. No one else was, which was a pleasant surprise, even after Arthur’s reassurances. Not that I would have judged if she’d been having a little frisky fun time with a cute Hockomock Swamp Beastie—everyone has their own needs—but it might have startled Amelia enough to make this next part difficult.

Instead, Elsie was on her side on the bed, scrolling through her phone with practiced swipes of her thumb, liking pictures so quickly that it seemed impossible she could have fully registered what she was looking at.

Since she was mostly looking at adorable kittens and half-naked women, I guessed she knew enough not to need the details anymore. I circled around behind her, watching the endless scroll of soft, pretty things, and waited until she hit an ad before I said, “I’m back.”

Elsie didn’t jump. She did tense, shoulders going tight as she took more time to identify my voice than she had with any of the bikini models or white-faced Ragdoll cats. After several seconds, she lowered her phone and rolled over, focusing on me. “Mary,” she said, voice cool.

“What? Are you mad at me for not knocking? Because the last time I knocked, it didn’t go very well.”

“No. I’m mad at you for existing, and for going away, and for coming back.” She sat up, pushing her hair away from her face with one hand. “It’s too much, and it’s all stupid, and I just want to be alone and angry for a while. This is more time than I’ve spent with anyone since my mother died. I flirted with Amelia at dinner.Flirted,like my mother wasn’t rotting in the ground. Like I deserved to flirt. Like I deserve to do anything at all other than atone for letting her die when I wasn’t there.”

“Elsie, where is this coming from?” I moved to sit on the edge of the bed. She pulled her legs in, away from me, as she scooted herself into a more-upright position. That hurt, just a little, like she was moving away from me on purpose and not because it made conversation more convenient.

“My motherdied,” she said, like I didn’t know. “She went out into the field, without me, and shedied.Someone shot her in the chest, and shedied.”

“Not ‘someone,’” I said. “Leonard Cunningham, heir apparent to the Covenant of St. George. He’s not here, but his brother and sister are. Their mother died too.”

Elsie paused, blinking. “What?”

“Their mother? She died when we set off the bombs in the basement of Penton Hall. Does that make this feel any better? Does it make it easier to breathe?”

“How do you know how this—?”

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