Page 71 of Installment Immortality

“’S’up?” I said, with forced nonchalance.

Benedita blinked, looking between the two of us, before stepping away from me and demanding, stridently, “What thefuckis going on?”

“Um,” I said. “You know how I used to work for the crossroads?”

She turned to stare at me, then bolted into the trees, running as hard as she could. The anima mundi sighed.

“Mary, that was poorly handled,” they said.

“What? I didn’t expect to wind up here! I wasn’t prepared,” I objected. “I’ve been being very careful about how much energy I use, and I’m really not in the mood for a lecture.”

“This isn’t a lecture, this is a congratulations,” they said. “You’ve done quite well by finding the midnight beauty and bringing her so neatly to heel. Once this is all concluded, you should be able to return to your family, and not darken my door again any time soon. Unless…”

“Unless?”

“Unless you wanted to serve me as you once served the crossroads. I won’t force you. A service forced is barely a service at all.”

I blinked at them. “I just got free to spend more time with my family—a family, by the way, that’s having kids again, which means they’re going to need me more than they have in years. Why would I come to work for you when that’s going on?”

“Because I could keep your restrictions lightened if you did,” they said. “And because you’ve been very insular for a very long time, Mary. You’ve served two masters, and spent as little time among the dead as possible, lest they envy or reject you. But the crossroads did no curation of my lost children. Ghosts like the boy are more common than you may care to know. He never got to become what he should have been, and he lingers without place or purpose. You could help him, either to move on or to find ghosts like him, to form a more secure haunting. If you agreed.”

That did sound appealing. There were too many ghosts like Jonah, stranded and unable to move on with their afterlives,because there was no one explaining the rules to them, no one making sure they understood what they were supposed to be becoming. “Do I need to answer right away? We’re still kind of in the middle of the last job you gave me.”

“No,” they said. “You can have a bit of time to consider our offer.”

“What, exactly, are you offering me?”

“What you have now, in terms of movement and flexibility. What the crossroads offered you once, before me—the freedom to put your family first, to choose them whenever a choice must be made, without censure or blame. And all the afterlife as your playground.”

I frowned. That soundedrealappealing, which meant there was bound to be a catch somewhere that I couldn’t see just yet.

Before I could answer them, Benedita came running out of the trees, looking back over her shoulder as she came, which made me suspect that the anima mundi had bent space around her, causing her to run in a loop. She hooked one high-heeled foot over a rock and went sprawling. The anima mundi looked at this and sighed.

“You needn’t be afraid, child,” they said. “I’m not going to hurt you, and if I were, there would be nothing you could do to stop me. Fear serves no useful purpose, only wearies you when there is no cause.”

Benedita scrambled to her feet again, turning to glare at the anima mundi. “You can’t trick me,” she snapped. “I was trained by the Covenant of St. George. I’m smarter than your games!”

“How did that work out for you?” I asked sharply. “Did you enjoy your time with the monster hunters? Are you enjoying the fruits of your labors?”

“To be honest, it kind of sucked,” she said. “I did it because I needed to dosomething,and they said they would pay us. And for a long time, the money was good enough that I didn’t really care all that much what they had us doing. But then I died andmy own brother said I was a monster, just like all the ones we’d hunted through the years, so I started reallylookingat the monsters. And you know what? Most of them weren’t. Most of them were perfectly normal people who just wanted to be left alone so they could get on with their lives. Why were we hunting them? Why were we hurting them? And why was my brother, who said he loved me, why washesuddenly huntingme? It wasn’t right.”

“If you came back to life right now, does that mean you wouldn’t rejoin the Covenant?” I asked.

Benedita shook her head. “I wouldn’t. I swear, I wouldn’t.”

“Well, then, you’ve learned something from being dead. Too bad it’s not Halloween.” Under the right circumstances, ghosts can use Halloween night to come back to life. I know people who’ve done it. I’ve never really been tempted. My world faded into history a long time ago, and I don’t really feel like becoming a fish out of water for the sake of growing up.

The anima mundi sighed. “I called you here to tell Mary she had done well so far, and was on the verge of discharging her duties to me, and to tell you that you’re not at fault for your brother’s actions. There was no way you could have predicted how he would handle your death. Umbramancers never leave ghosts behind. Their close kin almost always do. It’s like they’re such black holes for the dead that they can’t conceive of coming back once their time is done, but that same position bathes the people around them in the power they channel. It suffuses them, and when the time comes, they rise. They always, always rise.”

“You saying it’s my brother’s fault I’m like this?” demanded Benedita. “I would have been normal if not for him?”

“Ghostsarenormal,” said the anima mundi. “You’re a part of the cycle of sapient life. But yes, if he’d been other than he is, the chances are very good that you would never have risen, for you would have been less tied to the lands of the dead.”

“And you brought me to a coffee estate to tell me that?”

“I brought you here because Mary was in transit, and that made it easier for me to redirect her.”

Benedita looked bemused. That was fine. I wasn’t feeling all that much more sure of what was happening around me, and I’d at least been here before. Although in my defense, it was normally a field of wheat.

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