Page 48 of Installment Immortality

A stunningly beautiful dark-skinned Latina woman in what looked like her early twenties shoved her way through the crowd toward us. She was wearing a halter top that looked like it had been sewn from pure liquid gold and a pair of denim jeans so tight that I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d died from cutting off the circulation to her entire lower body. She muttered something in Portuguese, tossing her long, auburn-brown hair and glaring at me as she hurried to put her arms around Jonah and pull him away.

“Hi,” I tried again. “You are?”

“Benedita,” she snapped, eyeing me like I was the most dangerous thing she’d ever seen. “You can go, you Mary you. Whatever you are, you stink of the living, and new ghosts don’t just appear in an area that’s dealing with an active hunting.”

I had never really considered how much “hunting” sounded like “haunting.” I swallowed. “You’re right,” I said. “Idostink of the living, and I’m not here by coincidence. I’m pretty sure the current hunt is at least partially my fault, and I want to stop it. Ihaveto stop it.” If I didn’t, I wasn’t sure what the anima mundi would wind up doing to me. Dealing with gods and godlike entities was still new, and I was increasingly sure that I didn’t like it one little bit.

“Why do you stink?” asked Benedita, lip curled. “You been haunting the wrong halls, prissy girl?”

“You’re a midnight beauty, aren’t you?” I countered, the pieces falling together in my head: her appearance, her accent, the almost-envy in her voice as she talked about me reeking of the living world. Midnight beauties—more properly “bela da meia-noite”—are party girls, pretty much always female, spending their nights in clubs and exclusive parties, shaking their groove things and reminding themselves what they’re missing after they die. The only other crossroadsghost I know of who survived the destruction of our boss, Bethany, was offered the chance to become a midnight beauty.

She passed, which was probably for the best. She was never much of a party girl when she was still working for the crossroads. She’s a reaper now, and I have to assume that’s going better for her than an endless Carnival would have. At the very least, if she’s had any complaints, she hasn’t felt the need to deliver them to me.

Benedita narrowed her eyes. “What do you know of midnight beauties, skinny girl?” she demanded.

“I know that the only one I’ve seen in a while seems bound and determined to be pissed off at me, which isn’t helping my mood much.” I crossed my arms. “You all hiding here from the ghost hunters?”

Various voices shouted confirmations from around the room. To anyone alive, it would just have sounded like wind whistling through a keyhole, but I could hear them clearly. As her companions shouted their agreements, Benedita continued watching me warily.

Right. Well, Phee had known who I was from little more than the sight of Elsie and Art. Maybe I could be equally notorious here. “My name is Mary Dunlavy,” I said. “I’m the last of the caretakers. And six months ago, I traveled to the United Kingdom with some of my charges, where we attacked the Covenant stronghold responsible for recent crimes against the cryptid population of the East Coast. People died, and in response, the Covenant has started hunting ghosts.”

Benedita glared at me, eyes taking on an eerie glow and hair beginning to writhe like it possessed a life of its own. “This isyourfault?” she demanded.

“We didn’t anticipate this being the Covenant response,” I said. “They attacked us first; we just responded in kind. And then they responded to us responding to them, but going for theghosts is such a diagonal move that we didn’t see it coming. I’m not sure what we’d have done if we had. We didn’t really have another avenue of attack open to us, but they’re attacking the dead because they somehow figured out that I was there before the bombs went off.”

Benedita scowled and began to open her mouth for another accusation when another ghost drifted forward, cutting her off.

“Mary Dunlavy,” said the ghost. This one was male, and had the sturdy, windblown look I tended to associate with field hauntings. Sometimes they were farmers, sometimes they were park rangers or naturalists or people who’d done roadwork before they died, but what they all had in common was that they’d been outdoor laborers in life, of one kind or another. Seeing one under a roof was jarring, like I was witnessing something that should have been entirely impossible. “You’re the crossroads’ girl, aren’t you?”

“I was, when they still existed,” I said. “They’re gone now, and I’m nobody’s girl but my own.”

But that wasn’t true, was it? I belonged to my family, and to the anima mundi. I couldn’t think of a time when I’d belonged entirely to myself, not even when I was still alive.

“How can you still be here, with them gone?”

“Like I said, I’m the last of the caretakers. My family provide enough of a tether to keep me in the twilight.” I turned my attention back to Benedita. “Jonah didn’t seem to know much about the hunters, although he mentioned two companions who’d apparently been caught. How long ago were they taken?”

“Martha, a week ago, Agnes, yesterday,” said Benedita. “Agnes got cocky. She thought they wouldn’t do another sweep of the city hall after they’d already managed to nab Martha, and she forgot that she glows to the eyes of the living.”

“She’s a white lady,” said Jonah. “She glows in the dark. It makes her really bad at hide and seek.”

White ladies are incredibly dangerous. They’re one of the raremigratory types of ghost who aren’t tied to the road, being defined by things other than their tendency to move around. Most of them are set on revenge, trying to get payback for whatever killed them. I shot Benedita a concerned look.

She laughed, shaking her head. “Agnesisa white lady, and she’s also a pacifist,” she said. “She was technically murdered, but when she tracked down the man who’d killed her, he was able to prove it had been an accident well enough that she believed him, and she spent the rest of his life with him, haunting his house and helping him come to terms with what he’d done to her. By the time he died, he didn’t have any unfinished business, and he moved right on along to whatever’s next. Agnes didn’t want to leave her garden in the middle of the season, so she stayed to tend it. She still has flares of vengeance when people mess around with things she considers her own, but she’s not really in a hurry to fade away.”

Ghosts who manage to linger past their purpose and change fascinated me. Gosh, I wonder why. This Agnes might be someone I could really get along with, if not for the fact that… “And the ghost hunters caught her?”

“Yeah,” said Benedita. “Aoi saw it happen. They put her right into a jar, just like she was a bunch of preserves in need of canning. I don’t know what they’re doing with the ghosts they catch. None of us do.”

“Martha isn’t a white lady,” said Jonah, more subdued. “She’s a house ghost, just like any house ghost, only she’s the ghost of a maid who died at City Hall. She belongs there. It’s her only and always home. But they took her out of it like she was nothing at all, and it wasn’t fair of them, and she never hurtanybody.She used to vanish fordaysif she even startled somebody who was still alive, she got so flustered! It’s not right!”

A murmur of agreement swept through the other ghosts in the room, distant and unnerving as the creaking of rusty hinges in anold mausoleum. I shivered. They didn’t seem to notice, not even Benedita; they were too absorbed by their own anger over the treatment of one of their own.

“Have any of you seen these ghost hunters?” I asked. “If you can give me descriptions, I can start trying to track them down.”

“Oh, we can do better than that,” said Benedita. “Remember, I said Aoi saw Agnes caught. Aoi, can you come over here?”

Another of the ghosts separated from the group and started toward us. They were slim and a little shorter than I was, with long dark hair and a well-tailored blazer over jeans and a white shirt. They would have looked perfectly normal and possibly even alive if not for one small issue.

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