Page 74 of Installment Immortality

“Hey, we’re all friends here,” she said, laughing a little as she raised her hands in surrender. “I was just getting a fresh cuppa, since it seemed you’d come back for the nonce. Who’s your friend?”

“You don’t get to know about my friends,” I said. “Where are they?”

“Who? The adults you made sure to stress could take care of themselves? That ‘they’? Because it seems to me a bit hypocritical of you to come here looking for them after you told me they’d be fine on their own.”

I ground my teeth together, stepping closer, and for a moment, allowed the pleasant masquerade of “virtually alive” to slip from my features. My eyes and cheeks sank inward, my flesh going waxen and slack as my bones strained to show themselves. I don’t enjoy looking like a corpse. Sometimes it’s the only way to get my point across.

“I’m a caretaker,” I said. “I always know where my family is.Always.Well, I can’t feel them right now. They’re gone. But they’re not dead, because I would know if they were dead. I last saw them in your house. Where are they?”

I hadn’t felt anything like this since Alice was in college and Laura was trying to ward off the spirits that constantly tried to get closer to her. She’d set up wards and runes and Mesmer cages, finally layering them together so tightly that she not only kept out the ghosts, she kept out my awareness of Alice. That had been a deeply unpleasant weekend, until we figured out what was going on and I managed to convince her to loosen her shields enough to let me through.

Heitor was an umbramancer who’d constructed at least one Mesmer cage for his Covenant allies. Could Elsie and Arthur be inside one of those, cut off from me but not dead, just outside my ability to detect?

Oh, I hoped so. I would have said there was no reason I’d ever hope for one of my kids to be taken into Covenant custody, but right now, it seemed like the best thing that could have possibly happened. If the Covenant had them, they were hostages against my eventual surrender, making them stuck but safe. They werejust… shut away for a little bit, and when I managed to bust the doors open, they’d be there, waiting for me to bring them home.

Phee stared at my withered visage, her own face going pale—although not as pale as Aoi’s had been earlier. Nothing living could be that pale. “I don’t know,” she said. “I swear, I don’t know, and I didn’t know your ducklings were gone until I came to use the loo and found the doors standing open. I thought they’d decided to sneak out without paying, that you’d judged my hospitality insufficient and stolen them away. I know you wanted them kept safe, and I did nothing to go counter to that. I’m not a combatant. I’ve been staying out of trouble for too long at this point to go looking for it now.”

“Well, you found it,” I snapped. “Did you let a couple of humans into your house by any chance? Just open up the door and let them stroll on inside?”

“She didn’t,” said a voice from the end of the hall. “I did.”

Aoi whipped around, looking anxious as a rabbit in a field full of foxes. They didn’t disappear, though, which was more than I could have asked of them, under the circumstances.

I shot them a reassuring look as I turned, and there was Amelia, watching me coolly. Despite that, I could see the anxiety in her eyes. I flickered, vanishing from in front of Phee and reappearing in front of Amelia. “Youwhat?”

“The habitat of my species is in our name,” said Amelia, voice still cool. She looked untroubled by my corpselike appearance. “We don’t have a lot of options when it comes to hiding from people who know we exist, and when those Covenant freaks hit town, one of the first things they did was send a message to our village elders. Watch over the local cryptids for them, or they’d come and ‘watch over’ our entire population.”

“You could always start expanding your population,” said Phee, moving toward us at a more leisurely pace. Aoi walked with her,mouth shut and eyes wide. “Buy houses near the coast, send your kids to Chicago for college…”

“Wecan’t,” said Amelia. “We get sick if we’re away from the swamp for too long, and we can’t reproduce, not even using IVF. Nothing we do gets us clear of the Hockomock. We evolved there, and we’ll go extinct there. I just wasn’t ready for it to be now.”

“What did you do?” I demanded.

“Nothing.” She looked at me, expression flat and resigned. “I just brought them a bedtime snack. Milk and cookies for the boy, cookies and a nightcap for the girl. Plenty of aconite for both.”

I managed, barely, to restrain myself from wrapping my hands around her thick neck and starting to squeeze. “Aconite isdeadlyto Lilu! And it’s not very good for humans, either.”

“I’m sorry, did I imply that I used pure aconite? My bad. I ground up purple-lined sallows and mixed them into the drinks. They’re a species of moth that feeds on aconite plants when they’re young, and when they’re powdered, they’re a classic defense against Lilu. They drug and disorient without killing.”

I already knew Elsie and Arthur weren’t dead, and that was enough to let her words work their way through the red fog of rage now threatening to overwhelm me. I swallowed hard, letting some of the life come back into my face as I took a half-step back. Aoi put a hand on my shoulder, bolstering me. “So you drugged them. Why? Why now?”

“The woman from the Covenant who’s been monitoring me called and said they thought the local ghosts were catching on to them. She asked if I knew of anything that had changed recently, anything that might have stirred up the spirits, and of course I thought of the three of you, the last caretaker and the two Price children. Oh, she wasveryexcited to hear about your little friends. Excited to hear about you, too, but I didn’t exactly have a way to hand you over, so we had to put a pin in that for right now.”

“I am going to see you dead,” I said, coldly.

“Are you?” asked Amelia. “I thought you people were all about conservation. Well, there are thirty-eight of us left, and I’m the only girl in my generation with multiple possible sexual partners whoaren’tsiblings or first cousins. So if you kill me, you could be responsible for driving a species to extinction. But no big deal, I guess.”

“You could have told us years ago that you were having issues keeping your breeding population large enough to be meaningful,” I snapped.

“Could we? Really? Because I promise you, we’re not unique.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I only knew that my kids—mykids,no matter how old they were—were in trouble, and they needed me to save them before things got even worse. I flickered back down the hall, grabbing Aoi by the elbow, and turned a hard stare on Phee.

“If they die, I’ll be hosting a Price family reunion in your living room, and your homeowner’s insurance willnotcover the result,” I said, and vanished, dragging Aoi with me. It was time to bring this whole messy affair to an end. Whatever that happened to entail.

Eighteen

“No one here cares whether or not you’re dead. You’re family, and that’s more than good enough for us.”

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