Page 7 of Installment Immortality

Just about all the legends from all around the world are true, or based on truth. True enough to chew your face off if you get too close. Ghosts are real, obviously. Exhibit A: yours truly. The latest name for all the legendary creatures and spectacular monsters is “cryptid,” meaning a thing which is currently unknown to science. Dragons are cryptids. So are finfolk, and tailypo, and gorgons, and all sorts of other things that officially don’t exist. Most of them are as harmless as anything that wants to stay alive—no,you probably don’t want to get cuddly with a questing beast, but you don’t want to get cuddly with a bear, either. That doesn’t make the questing beast bad, just not domesticated or friendly toward humanity.

But some people didn’t see it that way. Some people saw it as humans vs. cryptids for control of the world, and viewed the fact that not all cryptids wanted to slink off and surrender their territory to humanity as inherently evil, like protecting their homes and families was wrong just because the creatures doing it weren’t the right species. And in those days, there were a lot more of the big flashy cryptids around, the ones you couldn’t exactly pretend didn’t exist when you were looking right at them. This was way before my time, of course, but I’ve heard the stories. There’s a reason “dragon slayer” used to be a reasonable profession.

So the people who thought humans shouldn’t have to share the world with cryptids got together, and they formed an organization called the Covenant of St. George. Now, in the beginning, maybe they were more reasonable than they sound now. Back then, dragons really did burn down villages and attack people for their gold. They were a problem. The Covenant was the solution.

Only after they solved the issue of the dragon in their own backyard, they decided to push the issue. They started solving the issue of the dragon in the mountains, far away from humans. And then they started solving the issue of the dragon that had been coexisting peacefully with the local humans, and then they started solving the issue of dragons existing at all. From there, they started on a campaign of solving the issue of literally anything they didn’t think had a right to exist. Ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties and things that went bump in the night. People like Alice, with her preternaturally good luck. People like Thomas, who didn’t want to follow their rules.

The Covenant had the best intentions when they got started,and they turned into the villains in their own story a long time ago. If they’d been content to stay there, we could have gone our merry way, but they wanted to be the villains inourstory, too, and they kept pushing the issue. To them, my family is made up of monsters, traitors, and monstrous traitors, people who have no right to exist in their perfect, human-dominated world. We’re a threat to be exterminated. Worst of all, we’ve been collectively keeping them from getting the kind of stranglehold over North America that they enjoy over Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. So after Verity accidentally revealed us to the Covenant on national television, they pretty much declared war.

The first big battle was six months ago. It ended with two members of my family dead, the rest traumatized to one degree or another, and me discorporated in a way we had all genuinely believed was going to be the end of me.

But the anima mundi, the living spirit of the Earth that had existed before the crossroads and was now reasserting its authority over the world, had gathered the motes of me that remained and reassembled them bit by bit into the spirit I’d been all along. She didn’t bring me back to life or anything. She just put me back together, with a few more limitations on what I could do—which was fair, really, since there hadn’t been a ghost like me before, and with the crossroads gone, there was never going to be one again.

I woke up from my six months of nothingness about an hour ago, and the first thing I wanted to do once I existed again was go home, a request the anima mundi had been kind enough to grant. Unlike the crossroads, they had no interest in forcing me into anything I didn’t want to do.

And that’s where we pick this back up as a “things that are happening” rather than a “things that have happened”: with me following Sarah, one of my charges, into the house in Portland, finally home, finally back where I belong. Sure, we still had a war to fight, but for the moment, I had never been happier.

Two

“Home is where you go to lick your wounds, set your bones, and find the strength to wade back out into the fray. You can survive anything this world has to throw at you, long as you have your home.”

—Frances Brown

Walking into the living room of a small survivalist compound about an hour’s drive east of Portland, Oregon

SARAH KEPT SHOOTING SMALL,ANXIOUSglances at me as we walked, like she expected me to disappear at any moment. That, or my newly blue eyes were disturbing her more than I’d realized at first. Coming back together and no longer belonging to the crossroads had removed the empty highway from my eyes, and left me looking closer to the living than I had in a very long time.

If that was the case, it was a little hypocritical. Sarah isn’t human. She’s a cuckoo, a member of an extradimensional predator species that’s closer to wasps, biologically, than they are to anything that evolved on Earth. She’s also telepathic, and when she uses her abilities, her eyes glow a remarkably bright white. You’d think she of all people might understand that eyes change colors sometimes.

Oh, well. Stepping into the house was like waking up on Christmas morning. It was warm, and the air smelled of popcorn, coffee, and something freshly baked that I couldn’t quite put myfinger on. It was probably an offering to the mice. Every member of the family learned how to bake at least a few simple things as soon as it was safe for them to operate the stove, because the mice demanded baked goods on a regular basis. You could virtually set your watch by their raucous cries of “cheese and cake,” and failure to provide what they were asking for could lead to disaster.

Even Verity, who could burn water if asked to boil it, knew how to turn boxed cake mix into something edible. At this point, the smell of baked goods was the smell of coming back to normalcy. I stuck close to Sarah, trying to smile every time she looked in my direction, and focused on not walking through the furniture. It was easier than it should have been.

The anima mundi had told me that I was going to be more limited now than I’d been before I toted several explosive devices to the other side of the world and blew myself up in the process of using them to demolish a major Covenant stronghold. I could tell I wasn’t somehow alive again; when I focused, I didn’t have a heartbeat, and when I stopped breathing, I didn’t have any particular desire to restart. I was just… solid, unusually so.

There would probably be some sort of downside to that, but for right now, it was just nice not to worry about finding myself standing in the middle of a coffee table. I’m usually pretty good about interacting with my environment. It’s just that sometimes, I forget.

“You missed the funerals,” said Sarah, in a very small voice.

“I didn’t mean to.”

“Where have youbeen?”

“It’s a long story.” It wasn’t, not really, but it was a complicated, confusing one, and I didn’t want to tell it more than once if I didn’t have to. “I’ll explain once we’re with the others.”

She nodded minutely, irises seeming to frost over around the edges. It wasn’t true frost, of course, but the delicate fractal pattern was similar enough, little spirals of white eating into the blue.

“Yes, reading my mind to get the full story would probably be faster, but counterpoint, I’d rather you didn’t do that right now,” I said, calmly. She jerked back, the white disappearing as quickly as it had come, and looked at me with wide, guilty eyes.

I sighed. “I’m notmad,sweetheart. I understand the impulse, and I know how frustrating it is when someone doesn’t want to explain what’s going on. I just want to get to the rest of the family. Who all’s home right now?”

“Evie and Uncle Kevin, Annie and Sam, James, and Olive,” said Sarah dutifully.

“And everyone else?”

“Alex and Shelby are in Ohio with Lottie and Isaac; Elsie and Arthur are in Portland, with Uncle Ted; and Grandma and Grandpa are in Michigan with Sally.”

For a moment, it felt like I had swallowed a sharp rock. “Where’s Verity?”

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