Page 72 of Installment Immortality

“I’ll think about your offer,” I said, to the anima mundi. “I’m not saying yes or no just yet. I’m also not finished with the job you already assigned to me. I’m willing to discuss new limits on where I can go, as long as you’re willing to listen when I tell you what my family needs. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” said the anima mundi. They offered me their hand. I took it, and the world turned gray as fog around me. Benedita grabbed for my other hand, holding on tight, and then the coffee farm dropped away, and we were nowhere.

Seventeen

“Always take the win. No matter how strange or subjective it might seem, always take it.”

—Frances Brown

Worcester, Massachusetts, the living room of a house being rented by the Covenant of St. George, becausethat’sa great place for a ghost to be

WE POPPED BACK INTO EXISTENCEin the world of the living, in the middle of the living room where I’d last seen Heitor. That was the good part. The bad part was that Heitor was gone. The chair was empty, the cushions having long since returned to their original level of compression. Benedita dropped my hand. “Where is my brother?” she demanded, whirling on me.

“Oh, he’s a little busy,” said the voice of the man from the van. I turned. He was standing in the doorway to the hall, leaning up against the frame like he had nowhere better in the entire world to be. He smirked a little as he saw the recognition flood my face. “Oh, come off it. I’m the guy in the chair. You think I haven’t been over every frame of the security footage from Penton Hall with a fine-toothed comb?”

Well, crap. I crossed my arms, trying to look like his words didn’t send every nerve I didn’t have into a state of high, janglingalert. “So you looked at some old home movies. Big deal. Why should that worry me?”

“Because your face is in them, clear as day and larger than life. Which is pretty funny, since you’re not alive, are you?”

I tamped down the urge to recoil, looking at him calmly. “I don’t know. Do I look dead to you?”

“Before these two whacked-out British kids came to me asking about ghost hunts and whether I was any good at reviewing security footage, I would have said no, of course not. Now, though? Now I know ‘dead’ isn’t always as obvious as people want to make like it is. Still haven’t seen any vampires, though. I want to, but no matter how hard I look for them, they just don’t appear.”

“That’s because there’s no such thing,” I said, and I meant it. Sanguivores—creatures that live on blood—exist, and sometimes people call them vampires as a sort of catch-all term for people with a liquid diet, but the classic Bram Stoker vampire isn’t real. There’s no such thing as a dead person who has a physical body all the time, sleeps during the day, turns into a bat and flies around at night drinking blood. Manananggal and similar creatures exist, but they’re not the same, and trying to cram them under the umbrella of a myth is just colonialist thinking applied to biology. It’s basically a way of saying “Things like this exist over here, so naturally, Europe must have something bigger, better, and similar.”

“You’re one to talk,” he said with a sneer, and turned his attention to Benedita. “He said you were something called a ‘midnight beauty.’ You’re not that hot. Six out of ten, tops.”

Benedita shrugged. “The beauty is individual, and not for you to name. I am what I am, and I do not deny it. She’s notdead.She’s been hunting me on Heitor’s behalf, and now that she’s managed to find me and bring me here to him, you’re concealing him from me.”

“I saw you appear,” he blustered.

She shrugged again, more fluidly this time, like she was trying to draw attention to the elegant line of her neck, the grace of her arms. “A gift of the dance. I crossed the land of the dead, and I pulled her in my wake, safe as a duckling following its mother.”

“Really.”

“Really,” she agreed.

“Every ghost I’ve spoken to has said that wasn’t possible,” he said. “That the lands of the dead are sealed against the living.”

Benedita scoffed. “Oh, because the ghostsyou’vespoken with have had such cause to tell you truth over lies. Tell me, do you always assume the terrified and trapped are speaking truly? Is the Covenant teaching you to believe those without hope will forever betray themselves to their own ends?”

“Take me, then.” He stepped forward, toward her. “If you can carry people through the lands of the dead, take me.”

“They survive only when I wish it,” she cautioned. “My brother would survive the experience, for I would wish it. You would not. If you wish to see the lands of the dead, die. I promise you’ll see them clearly on that happy day.”

He swung his head around to look at me. I spread my hands. “I can’t take you anywhere,” I said.

“Right. But I know what you are. I know what youdid.And I know that any moment now, Chloe and Nate will be back, and finished preparing to face you, and you’ll finally pay with everything you have to give.”

I stiffened, looking around. Heitor was still gone, and the chair where he’d been sitting wasn’t stained or damaged; if he’d been attacked, he hadn’t been sitting there when it happened. No one else seemed to be moving around. And yet…

We had an unaccounted-for umbramancer, and two Covenant operatives with good reason to hate the dead. And there’s no reason a Mesmer cage can’t cover an entire house.

There’s no point in maintaining a masquerade so hard that itgets you caught. I glanced to Benedita. “Where Aoi is,” I said, and vanished, hoping she would understand what I was saying.

I reappeared in front of the club a split second later, where the still-sober bouncer only blinked at me. “Change your clothes before I can let you in,” he said.

“Sorry,” I replied. “No time.” I rushed forward, passing through the still-clipped rope and into the club. The dance floor was alive with thrashing bodies and flashing lights, like a headache made manifest. I plunged into it, careful to stay solid, and pushed through the crowd, looking for a slender Japanese dancer of uncertain gender.

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