Page 78 of Installment Immortality

“Mary,” croaked my mother again, reaching for me. I reached back, moving closer to the bed, and just before her hand would have closed on mine, I was back in the whirlwind, tornado buffeting me with stinging air and cascades of salt from all sides. I felt suddenly less solid, less anchored in the memory of my own bones than I had been before the iron bar slammed through me. I looked down, and there was no injury.

Of course there wasn’t an injury. You can’t wound the dead.

The wind kept flinging me around like a rag doll, and thenthere was a woody branch flying toward me, one which I recognized as a spring of rosemary the size of a great broken bough. I tried to twist away from it, to no avail, and it caught me in the throat. There was the same terrible tearing sensation, and I was standing at the crossroads, the sunlit physical manifestation of my own employer, the place where they took their penitents to negotiate their terrible bargains.

The hot sun baked down against my exposed neck, and the air was filled with the lazy drone of locusts—only these were no locusts that had ever existed on the Earth. These were the droning wings of something from another reality, ones that had become a terrible intelligence that preyed about the Earth for years without number. And I had been its servant.

No, wait. I was its servant. Any illusions of a world where I didn’t belong to the crossroads were just that: illusions. Nothing was ever going to defeat them. Certainly not a descendant of the girl who lay on the ground in front of me, her eyes closed and her breath coming so shallowly that I could almost believe she was already gone.

Not that she could die. Not here, in this time out of time, this place out of place. No one ever died when they stood before the crossroads. That was part of the point. Sometimes the people who came looking for deals really just wanted a place they could stand while they came to terms with the fact that they were already past saving anywhere else but here.

Alice hadn’t brought herself here, of course. She wasn’t the petitioner. She was the prize.

The man walking slowly toward me through the heat haze of this eternal summer afternoon, he was the one who was coming to sell his soul to the proverbial Devil in exchange for everything he’d ever wanted—a concept which took the form, currently, of a gangly teenage girl with hair the color of a dragon’s prized possession, theskin on her leg already softening and breaking down as the venom the bidi-taurabo-haza had pumped into her bloodstream broke her down on a cellular level. She was going to die soon, unless the crossroads intervened.

And the crossroads weregoingto intervene. I could almost taste their eagerness, their panting desire to have Thomas Price for their own. He was one of the last true sorcerers in the world, and if he served them, he couldn’t hurt them. They’d be safe from whatever threat a sorcerer was destined to one day offer them. They’d be safe.

He wouldn’t be.

I clapped my hands over my mouth. “Thomas, what have you done?”

He was suddenly directly in front of me, not down the road and coming closer. “I’m ready to bargain with you, and with your employers, for the life of Alice Enid Healy. This isn’t how she dies. I refuse to allow it,” he said, and his voice was heavy with understanding and hobbled with grief. Grief for the girl dying on the ground; grief for the life he had been building for them every night when he slept, when he forgot their happiness was impossible and started turning it into something shining and secure.

His accent was so much thicker in those days, and even then, it was thinner than it had been when he first came to Buckley. He sounded like the children whose mother I would eventually help his grandchildren kill, like the Covenant coming home.

He sounded like a future that was never going to be.

“I’m here for the same reason,” said a second man, this one behind me. I turned and there was Jonathan. Poor, dear Johnny, who’d never deserved the number of funerals he attended: his son, his wife, and soon, his daughter. He’d been trying to found a legacy, and all he’d done was become a ballad.

“I asked first,” said Thomas sharply. “I have prior claim.”

I didn’t want to have any part in this. I wanted to vanish, to leave them to fight for the fate of a dying girl who I loved more than I loved anything else in this world. But I had a job to do. I was going to do it. “My employers aren’t bound by your human ideas of fairness or waiting in line,” I said. “Fortunately for you, I am. And as your representative in this negotiation, I get to choose who speaks first. You’re dismissed, Johnny.” He made a wordless sound of unhappiness. I looked at him, face hard and cold. “You have nothing left to lose worth taking away, and a sorcerer is a better prize by far.”

I knew—Iknew—that this was a memory. This all happened long ago, and there was no taking it back or changing what had happened on that sundrenched road, the sound of locusts hanging heavy in the air. Thomas had traded his freedom and his magic for Alice’s life, and she’d lived. Oh, how she’d lived. She’d lived, and she’d found her way back to him, and they’d had two children before the crossroads ripped them apart, and with those two children, they had founded a dynasty. It was still going, and I was going to do what I could to keep it going forever, because those children were my home and my heart and it had all started here. Could it have gone differently? Yes. Should it have?

That was harder to say.

I turned to Thomas, inhaling to speak, and I was back in the whirlwind, being thrown carelessly back and forth, the rosemary bough no longer embedded in my flesh. I felt even less solid, and when I looked at my hands, I could see right through them to the other side. The spirit jar was unmaking me, unraveling me one trauma and trial at a time. The gray fog around me looked like it was getting thicker all the time, and I was willing to bet without proof that its increased thickness was my substance, unraveling but with no place else to go.

The jar shook again. This time, when I saw the jagged piece of broken mirror flying toward me, I didn’t even try to dodge. Therewas no point. I stayed where I was, spreading my arms, and it slashed through me in a white lance of pain and penance.

I don’t know how long the man from the van kept shaking the jar that held me, mixing and remixing its contents, before he finally stopped. I just know the shaking continued for another half dozen traumatic flashes of my life, things I’d seen and said and done swallowing me alive and digesting me, one layer at a time, until I was stripped bare and defenseless. That had to be how a spirit jar broke you down. It showed you the parts of your life that had hurt the most, and it carried them away, but the pain never stopped. Combine that with the gnawing loss of self, and it was no wonder that ghosts who spent too much time in spirit jars became unsettled and irrational.

I pulled myself back together as best as I could, collapsing to what felt like the bottom of my prison. The gray mist still swirled around me, but it was thinning, settling as the lack of motion allowed it to return to a more neutral state. I felt myself growing more solid, or at least more coherent, and sat up, hugging my knees to my chest.

Being a ghost means always being a disembodied entity trying to trick the universe into treating you like you still exist. I didn’t have knees to hug, and so I wasn’t hugging them; I didn’t have a behind to sit on, and so I wasn’t sitting. My whole body was a phantom limb syndrome, and I was just occupying it. I knew that, but the habit of being human is hard to break, and so I felt myself doing the things I thought I was doing, trying desperately to be small and compact and contained.

The mist settled farther, until I could see through it and out the side of the jar, into a distorted world viewed through thick, uneven carnival glass. I was looking at a large room of somesort—probably the attic, based on the slope of the walls and the boxes shoved against them. Large glass jars were stacked on every flat surface, every one of them filled with a familiar swirling mist.

But that was less important than the bodies sprawled on the floor, with the boneless carelessness I associate with small children and the deeply unconscious. Elsie was on her back, face pointed toward the ceiling, while Arthur was on his stomach; they were equally motionless. But I could see that Elsie was breathing, her chest moving in long, slow inhales and exhales. Neither of them had any visible injuries, which was something. I didn’t know how long secondhand aconite would knock them out; were the moths poisonous to humans at this stage? Or was it just the Lilu sensitivity that was keeping them under?

I stood, trying to rush for the glass, and got nowhere. The distance inside the jar remained unutterably vast, and no matter how hard I tried, I could never quite get anywhere. In the end, I sat back down, trying to collect myself and think of what I might be able to do next.

Fact: they had dozens of ghosts captive in these jars and were working at turning us all into weapons. I didn’t know how many of us might alreadybefully weaponized, but I did know none of the jars could be safely opened in the daylight. Even the twilight might be too close. Ideally, I’d be able to get out of this one, and start grabbing the others and transporting them down to the starlight, where I could find someplace to safely let the ghosts inside them out.

Or maybe I could take them to the anima mundi, who might be able to help them heal.

Or maybe I was just telling myself stories, because I was as trapped as any of the spirits around me, and I was never getting out of here.

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