Page 65 of Installment Immortality

“How do you know? Have you ever dealt with clurichaun ghosts?”

“Most nonhuman ghosts spend their time on a different level of the afterlife than I do,” I said. “Picture it as sort of like a multilevel apartment building, all stacked together. I can be on the second floor directly above you, and we’ll never see each other. Only it’s more like papier-mâché, where every layer is built on top of the one beneath it, so they get gradually bigger as you go along. And if you look at it that way, clurichaun ghosts would be at least two layers down from where human ghosts tend to be.”

“Interesting.” She sipped her tea. “You saying human ghosts inhabit the highest position in the afterlife?”

“Not like that, no. There’s more of us than anyone else, so we have the outer layer, I guess, where there’s the most room. And honestly, it’s good for us to be separated. Keeps us from running roughshod over everyone else.”

Phee nodded gravely. “I can drink to that. You find your Covenant coveys?”

“I found the strike team, yeah. They’ve definitely been catching and confining ghosts—and not just here, unless Worcester is the most haunted city in the world. A lot of local towns are going to be missing their resident hauntings. I’m hoping some of them will be able to go back once we release them.”

“Why only some?”

“Because the Covenant’s been torturing them, and some of the ghosts they have are already past saving.”

Phee sipped her tea again. “Then why are you sitting here having a cuppa, and not off saving your people?”

“My people are the two Lilu asleep in your guest rooms. Not every ghost is my responsibility.”

“Ah, but you feelsomeresponsibility, or you wouldn’t be doing this. So why aren’t you out there playing hero?”

I frowned. “You have some sort of problem with me? Because this doesn’t feel like a very friendly cup of tea.”

“You served the crossroads for decades, Mary Dunlavy, and no one has your whole story, but bits of it have been circulating for years, and I know enough to know that I don’t trust you aroundmypeople. You’ve done a lot of damage in your master’s name. You’ve cut a lot of stories short. Now you show up here with two scions of a turncoat family and you call yourself redeemed. I don’t know that I care to buy what you’ve been selling. It seems a trifle too convenient to be worth the cost.”

She sipped her tea again, giving no sign that she was bothered by either the heat or the fact that it was half alcohol by volume. She just sipped, swallowed, and looked at me steadily, waiting for my response.

I sighed, putting my own mug aside. “Right. I guess we’re doing this. Yes, I served the crossroads. They recruited me as soon as I died, and they didn’t tell me what I was choosing when I agreed to work for them. While I’m sorry I served them for as long as I did, I can’t regret taking their original offer. Them grabbing me was what kept me from settling properly long enough that I could become a caretaker ghost for the Price family, and now I’ve been raising them for generations.”

“Oh, so it’s your fault they’re like this.”

“Sure, if that’s the way you want to look at it. It’s all my fault. That’s a blame I’mgladto carry. Because they’re good people.They help people who can’t help themselves, they set things right whenever they can, and they deserve a chance to grow up safe and healthy. I can give them that. I take care of them.”

“What makes them so special, that they deserve that sort of loyalty?”

I paused. “Nothing,” I said. “They were in the right place at the right time, that’s all. Sometimes the world can be kind even when you don’t ‘deserve’ anything. I take care of them because they’re mine, and they’re mine because when I needed something to hold on to, they were offered to me, in the form of one little girl who needed a sitter.”

“And now you’re here, in my space, getting ready to bring the Covenant down on our heads.”

“Not if I can help it.”

She eyed me mistrustfully. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t believe you.”

“That sounds like an order.”

“Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but I don’t believe you either way.”

“Fair enough.” The thought of drinking more tea brought me no pleasure. I stood. “I guess I’m off to track down the Covenant again, now that I have a better sense of where to begin. We won’t be bringing them down on your head. Don’t worry about that.”

Phee gave me a flatly disbelieving look. “Really. And how can you be so sure of that?”

“I can’t. You’ll just have to trust me.”

And on that note, I disappeared, reaching across the silence of the void for the shape of their van. I didn’t normally move around by looking for inanimate objects, but I had some experience. When the kids were little, they’d been forever losing some favored, beloved toy or other, and being able to find them quickly had been the only way I had of keeping the peace. I could find Alice’s taxidermy jackalope or Alex’s favorite plush alligator as quickly as I could findthe actual children. Faster, sometimes, since the toys didn’t tend to keep running off when I was looking for them.

I blinked and Phee’s kitchen was gone, replaced by a suburban street a lot like the one outside her place. It was dark, and most of the lights were out in the nearby houses. As far as I could see, I was the only person moving on the sidewalk. That was good. It’s hard to be seen when there’s no one there to see you.

Just to be sure, I flickered, dropping momentarily into the twilight before pulling myself up again. There was no one watching me there, either. Actually, there was nothing there. No suburban street, no dark houses, no sidewalks. Just primeval forest stretching out as far as the eye could see, the memory of a continent as it had once been, sleeping peacefully in the shadows, waiting for the day it would be called to walk the world of the living once again.

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