Page 14 of Installment Immortality

I bristled a little. It stung to think of the Covenant as victims of anything. We’d been fighting back, not opening hostilities. “And?”

“And they have been fighting things they consider ‘unnatural’ for centuries. They know how to capture and destroy ghosts.”

I blinked, trying to understand what this would mean for me. Finally, after a long pause punctuated only by the rustling of the grain, I asked, “Do they have a method of summoning ghosts they want to destroy?”

“Yes,” said the anima mundi. “You’re in no danger. The channels they would use to summon you are stopped up by your family, but ties that strong to the living are less common now than once they were, and they can reach so very many of your peers. The Covenant is slaughtering the ghosts they call, the unliving, silent memory of the world. This needs to stop.”

“And how am I supposed to stop it, if you can’t?”

The anima mundi sighed. “We don’t know. But you’re quite innovative, Mary Dunlavy, you and that family of yours. We understand that you once used the spirit of a dead serpent to kill a woman who had wronged you. That shows both inventiveness and a certain core of essential cruelty. We believe you can do this.”

“I can barely decide whether or not to stay solid right now!”

“We are aware.”

“If you want me to work for you, I need to be less limited.” I glared at them. “I need to be able to move between my family members without being called, and I need to do it with the sort of precision that I had before the crossroads went away. And I need to be solid when I want to be, and intangible when I want to be.”

“Would you also like to be restored to the world of the living?”

“Given that everything I just asked you for falls under the umbrella of ‘wacky ghost powers,’ no, I would not like to be restored the world of the living,” I said. “I’ve been dead so much longer than I was alive that at this point, I’m a lot more comfortable this way. Can you give me what I’m asking for or not?”

“Will you stop the Covenant from killing our ghosts?”

I paused. “I thought you said hauntings were expensive. The older a ghost is, the more predictable they tend to be, and theeasier they’d be to hunt down. Those should also be the costliest ghosts to maintain. Isn’t the Covenant doing you a favor?”

“If only it were that simple,” said the anima mundi. “How nice it would be, for things to be simple for once in a long, long lifetime. But no. They do hunt and destroy the oldest ghosts, finding them easier to catch and more powerful on average, which means their goal of preventing another Penton Hall seems better served. And those old ghosts are more expensive, so removing them frees up our power for other things.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

“It would be, if we had decided to dismiss those ghosts of our own accord and in our own time. We didn’t. Without them, that power is feeding back into all the other ghosts nearby, unpredictably and without proper controls.”

I blinked, processing this. “Meaning they’re juicing up a bunch of immature ghosts without any warning, and leaving those ghosts on the loose.”

“Yes.”

That would just make it easier for the Covenant to create a situation where they could dramatically unveil the existence of ghosts to the world in some irrefutable way, and get funding and support for eradication efforts. For every person who’d be overjoyed at the idea that they might be able to see Grandma again, there would be two people who wanted the foul phantoms exorcised. The first time an amateur ghost hunter managed to suck a domesticate into a jar, we’d get to see war break out across the human race. Sure, to you, it’s just a ghost dog, but to the kid who was walking beside it, it’s Bruno, most beloved creature the world has ever known.

“This is bad,” I said.

“Yes,” agreed the anima mundi, blandly.

“This is really, really bad.” I turned away. “We need to stop this. Do you know where these ghost hunters are?”

“Most of them seem to be operating on the East Coast.”

“New York again?”

“No. That nest was well and truly eliminated. These are further up the coast, in Boston and in Portland.”

“Want a good haunting, aim for New England, I guess,” I said grimly. “All right, that makes a certain amount of sense. Lots of old hauntings in that area, and not that many of my kids. What do you want me to do about it?”

“We want you to find the Covenant killers who are behind this, and eliminate them,” said the anima mundi. “We don’t care particularly how you achieve it. None of them will linger in our afterlife. The twilight is closed to them.”

That was grim. Most people don’t linger after death—it’s not a super fun state to find yourself in, unless you have such strong ties to the world that you don’t have any other choice, and even those of us who have jobs waiting for us don’t tend to enjoy it. Happy ghosts are rare ghosts. Even so, most of the dead people I’ve met have been happy to know that they had a choice. They could linger, like I had, or they could move straight into the next stage of existence, but they got to decide, to some degree.

Even the ones who linger aren’t cut and dried. Most dead folks don’t have the strength to stick around for more than a few days if they don’t fall easily and immediately into some sort of defined haunting, like the drag racers who die and become Phantom Riders, or the kids who die and become ever-lasters, eternally returning to the classrooms where they studied in life, never reaching graduation.

There are a lot of sad stories in the afterlife. I mean, it’s where the dead people live, with a few terrifying exceptions, and death is pretty sad for most living things. Even if you linger, you’re not the same. See also “the anima mundi can set the rules of my existence without giving me a vote” and “that same anima mundi can apparently just decide that no one from the Covenant is goingto become a ghost.” There’s no discussion, no negotiation. There’s just the anima mundi, and whatever they decide.

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