Page 66 of Installment Immortality

When I returned to the sidewalk, the chill of that forest clung to my skin, seeming to worm its way down toward my bones. I shook it off, trying vainly to warm myself, and turned to scan the street for the van. I didn’t find it, which made no sense.

I’d gone looking for the van, and I’d appeared here, which meant logic said that it should have been nearby. I turned again, this time making a full circle, and still saw no sign of it. Frowning, I closed my eyes and tried to move myself toward the van.

When I opened them, I was still in the same place, outside a perfectly normal, boring suburban house. I paused, blinking, and then walked toward the closed garage. I reached out with one hand, cautiously touching the garage door, allowing my fingertips to skate just under the surface of the wood. Nothing tingled or bit at my flesh: there were no traps, at least not as far as I could detect.

I took a deep, unnecessary breath and walked through the door into the garage.

And there was the van, as unremarkable as ever, doors closed and engine off as it idled. I eyed it like I would a dangerous animal, circling it carefully. I could feel the Mesmer cage like static in theair, a containment unit for ghosts whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The garage was empty except for the van. None of the tools or piled-up boxes of holiday decorations that I would have expected to find. I frowned and started for the house. A single wooden step led up to the door, with no welcome mat or attempt to soften the transition. When I got close, I could smell fresh lumber, like someone had sawed off a plank to make the step.

No one lived here, then. This wasn’t even an Airbnb or a boardinghouse like Phee’s; it was an empty home, maybe owned by the Covenant, maybe belonging to some unwitting local realtor who had no idea what they were currently playing host to.

I touched the door to inside, testing it with my fingertips to be sure it wasn’t trapped, then turned intangible and stepped through it into the hall beyond. I was visible for one dizzying, nauseating second before I managed to will myself otherwise. Only then did I begin making my way quietly deeper into the house.

I found Nathaniel in the first room I checked, sound asleep and looking younger than I’d assumed when I saw him before. He snored, but delicately, like he’d been chastised for it so often that he’d somehow learned to control it, refusing to give up even that much control. I looked at him for a moment, wishing it didn’t feel like it was already too late for this to end in any way other than him joining me in death, and then moved on.

Chloe was in the next room. She was snoring substantially louder, passed out on top of her bedcovers with a mason jar clutched in her arms. I moved closer to see what it was, and jumped, almost turning visible, as the ghost inside pressed itself against the glass and screamed silently. I didn’t feel nearly as bad about the thought of killing her. Maybe that makes me a bad person. I think it just makes me a person with an eye for harm reduction.

The room after that had two beds, one occupied by the man from the van, the other empty. All three rooms had this in common: they were virtually empty, except for suitcases and, in the case of the third room, computers.

The missing man bothered me, though. I worried over the thought of his location as I left the room and moved deeper still.

I found the fourth member of the team in the living room. Heitor was asleep in an easy chair—or so I thought. I paused to watch him sleep for a moment, then turned away. And as I did, he sighed and said, “I know you’re there.”

Shit. I froze, still invisible, trying to figure out how that could be possible.

“I always know when ghosts are there,” he said. “I knew you were there in City Hall, but you were taunting Nathaniel, and I thought it might do him a little good to be reminded that he doesn’t know everything. He’s so damn cocky because he’s been with the Covenant since he was born, like that matters when he’s never been in the field before? Benedita and I were recruited when we were in our teens, and we’ve been in the field ever since. We were hunting iara and pishtaco when we were sixteen, and we weregood.Then my sister’s head was turned by a haunt, and she let herself be hunted. She let herself be led astray. Now she dances to the midnight tempo, and she’ll never come home again.”

He sighed, opening his eyes, and looked right at me. “Are you stupid, little ghost, or simply tired of your existence?”

I gasped, dropping back into visibility in my shock. Heitor looked at me as calmly as if this was something that happened every day. And abruptly, it all made sense. Why he was with a European Covenant team on a ghost hunt. Why they knew so much about catching ghosts.

Why they had a Mesmer cage.

“You’re an umbramancer,” I said, and my voice didn’t shake, and I had never been more proud of anything in my life. “Why didn’t I see it before?”

“You’re an American ghost. You learned your tricks and techniques from other American ghosts. We do things differently in Brazil. You ward off the dead with salt water, for tears and the sea. We do it with freshwater, for survival and the river, which knows us far more closely than your oceans can ever know you.” He hooked the chain around his neck upward with his thumb, showing me the small vial of water he had dangling there. It was clear, save for half an inch or so of sediment at the bottom. “The Amazon travels with me, and protects me from the eyes of the dead when I don’t want them to perceive me.”

“Do the Cunninghams know?”

“Those children?” He scoffed. “They believe all witchery is the same as their loathed witchcraft. They would call for my destruction as soon as they would work alongside me. No, they don’t know.”

“Then why…?”

“Did we join the Covenant? Money. Boredom. To prove a point. My sister and I loved each other dearly, and our parents were dead, and we needed to protect each other. Then the Covenant came to call, and they told her witches were wicked and evil and deserved to be destroyed. We were afraid, Benedita and I, that these strangers would realize what I was, and we decided the safest place for us was in the shadow of the beast. Their attention turned outward, so we burrowed inward, and we found safety, and we found purpose, and I have never regretted our decisions. Not even here. Not even now.”

“I see.” I wanted to blame him. Him being an umbramancer explained so much about how they’d been able to find and contain the ghosts they were systematically destroying. He had made all this possible.

And yet, hadn’t I done the same thing when I joined the crossroads? Maybe I’d been less aware of what I was doing, since I’d been a dead child at the time, but Heitor had been in the field at sixteen, which implied him having been younger when he was first recruited. He’d put his own survival above the survival of others,and that had been the right choice for him, and for his sister. He wasn’t a malicious man. He wasn’t even necessarily a bad man. He was just a man who’d chosen himself over the rest of the world.

That didn’t mean I could forgive him for the people he’d killed and the ghosts he was killing even now. But it meant I could understand, a little better than I necessarily wanted to.

“Are you going to hurt me?” I asked.

“I should,” he said. “I should put you in my pocket to save for later, suck the marrow from your soul a drop at a time and savor it. But no. I’m tired, and you’re dead, and if you’re stalking us, you must know the other phantoms of this city, so I’m willing to offer you a deal. Bring me my sister and I’ll go. Bring me Benedita.”

“And the ghosts you’ve already captured?”

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