Page 75 of Installment Immortality

—Enid Healy

Worcester, Massachusetts, the sidewalk outside a house being rented by the Covenant of St. George

AOI WRENCHED THEIR ELBOW OUTof my grasp as soon as we reappeared on the sidewalk, taking a step away and glaring at me with my own eyes.

“You have tostopdoing that!” they said.

“Can you please take off my face?” I asked, scrubbing at my own version of it with one hand. “I’m tired and I’m upset and my charges are in danger, and I don’t like looking in a mirror all the time.”

Aoi blinked, and their facial features began melting back into the smooth expanse of nothing that seemed to be their default. “Sorry,” they said, voice no longer a blend of mine and their own. “Where are we?”

“This house is where the Covenant is holed up,” I said, concealing a shudder as I indicated the modest suburban home in front of us. Watching my own face melt was not a fun experience. “They’re apparently just about out of money after what happened to their main stronghold, so they don’t have a lot of backup. Beyond, apparently, the people we thought were on our side.”

The unfairness of Jane being dead was trying to rise up and overwhelm my concern about her children. She would have been absolutely overjoyed to have both a cryptid social issue to resolve and a traitor to take apart, one shrieking, miserable piece at a time. But Jane was gone, and I was going to save her kids. There was nothing else I could do.

The lights in the living room were on now, when they hadn’t been before. It was difficult to say whether that was a good thing. “The Covenant has four people, and they have my two kids,” I said. “Benedita was in there when I came to get you, along with several dozen jarred ghosts. I don’t know how much support they have that isn’t already in the building.”

“I’m afaceless ghost,” said Aoi. “What the hell do you think I’m going to do against the Covenant of St. George and a bunch of ghosts in jars?”

“To be honest, I have no living clue, beyond the fact that the anima mundi says you can access more power than you normally could while those ghosts are cut off from the twilight,” I said. “I’m just the babysitter. This is way above my pay grade.” Oh, but I hoped. Linger in the twilight as long as I have, you get to see a lot of people achieve more than they think they’re capable of. “Now come on. Let’s haunt these motherfuckers.”

I strode toward the closed garage door, a small part of my hope shifting toward hoping I wasn’t about to bounce off of some kind of complicated ghost ward and find myself locked outside. But locking me out of the house wouldn’t have served the revenge they’d come here looking for. Maybe they hadn’t been expecting the ghost who leveled Penton Hall to come looking for them in return, and maybe they had been; either way, if they wanted to face me, they needed to first let me inside.

I reached the garage door and walked through rather than bouncing off, finding myself in the virtually empty garage. The van was still there. I assumed that was a good sign.

I still couldn’t feel Elsie or Arthur. They were justgone,excised from the world, the way Annie and the others had been when they went to another dimension. They could have died there—Artie did, in a technical but very real way—and I might never have known. Artie’s death, such as it was, never registered with the part of me that knows those things. He just left and sent a stranger back in his place, whatever that meant for his place in the family.

So this was all fairly terrifying, and didn’t get any less so as Aoi walked through the garage door behind me, still faceless, turning their head from side to side like they were looking at everything around us with the eyes they didn’t have.

“Okay, this is creepy,” they said.

“Not going to argue with you there. Don’t get too close to the van.”

“Why not?”

“There’s a Mesmer cage drawn across the inside. I was able to get out earlier because I’m virtually indistinguishable from the living when I want to be. If you’re not capable of becoming that level of material and solid, you could get stuck inside.”

“Huh.” They turned their head toward the van again, and I got the feeling from their posture that they were looking at it with deliberation. “Could your people be inside there, do you think?”

“It’s possible, but a Mesmer cage weak enough for me to walk out of it under my own power doesn’t feel like it would be enough to cut off the connection between a caretaker and their charges. Wherever they’re holding my kids, I expect it to be deeper in.” I gestured toward the door to the rest of the house. “This way.”

“Got it.”

“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”

“Oh, now she tells me I’m free to go.” Aoi threw their hands up. “Wow, if I had just realized that sooner, I might not be here now.” They let their hands fall back to their sides. “Benedita is my friend. You have those, don’t you, caretaker?”

I nodded. “I do.”

“When I died, my face melted off my head, and I was terrified. She was the one who found me in a nightclub in Miami, haunting the bathrooms and terrifying the janitorial staff, and told me what I was now and how it was going to work moving forward. Without her, I’d still be there, thinking I was never going to be good for anything but scaring people ever again.”

“What was your…?”

“My unfinished business? Fucked if I know.” Aoi shrugged. “I was murdered, if that helps at all, but if every murdered person turned into a ghost, we’d be up to our armpits in the restless dead, and I just haven’t seen any evidence of that. I figure I’ll find out eventually, but until that happens, I’m happy to keep clubbing with Benedita, hang out with the kid, and try not to get put into a jar. The jar thing seems to really, really suck.”

“It does,” I said. “Well, I’m sorry you got killed, and I’m sorry your face melted, and I’m glad you want to help your friend, because I wasnotexcited about the idea of doing this alone.”

“Somehow, didn’t get the feeling you would be.”

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