Page 67 of Installment Immortality

“You must have seen them by now. You know they’re past recovery. I would say they were past redemption, but all phantoms are.” He leaned back in the chair, looking even more profoundly exhausted than he’d been when I entered the room.

I inched closer, trying to keep my distance and see the vial at the same time. The sediment at the bottle was moving, shifting around like a living thing was burrowed all the way to the bottom of it and still squirming restlessly. It made my stomach churn, another physiological holdover from the days when I’d had a body to harm.

“If you’re ready to leave, why—”

“They put out the word that they needed grunts to handle their dirty work—not them, of course, pampered scions of Covenant royalty; I don’t think Nate had ever washed a dish before he came here, and Chloe’s cooking is better described as the opening stages of chemical warfare—after the destruction of Penton Hall. They’re on the verge of destitution, you realize.”

I blinked. “What?”

“Didn’t you know, with your sniffing around and prodding them for weaknesses? The European branch of the Covenant hasbeen keeping up appearances and living up to their ancestors for generations. They empty the coffers of every field office they open, keeping them running on shoestring budgets, and they lock every penny away behind blood wards. No one can get at their money without a direct bloodline claim. They lost more than lives when their stronghold came down. The whole organization is a year, at most, from total insolvency. They can’t afford their hired help, or their equipment, and they’re having to risk their precious children in the field. This won’t be their last field action, and there will be cells like mine scattered around the world for years, but the head’s off the serpent at this part; the body thrashes before it dies.”

“What?”

“My sister is dead, the people I answered to are dead, and the survivors can’t afford to pay me,” said Heitor. “My time with this organization is coming to an end, little ghost. Bring me my sister and it ends now. Without me, they’ll have the tools to catch and torment the dead, but they won’t have the power tofindthem. Protect your own kind by bringing me my kin.”

“I…” I’d only just met Benedita, and according to Heitor, she’d been a willing member of the Covenant. But she was dead now, no longer a part of the group she’d served in life, and if death couldn’t absolve her for what she’d done, we were all doomed.

I took a step back, away from him. “I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

“Remember, if you do it, this ends.” He shrugged. “If you don’t, we unspool the haunting of this entire coast, and we leave the barrows empty. It’s your decision.”

It was too big a decision for me. I turned away from him and vanished at the same moment, leaving their little suburban nest behind.

Sixteen

“We’re not our parents. We’re ourselves, and if that means we’re the sum of our own choices, well, there are worse things we could be.”

—Jane Harrington-Price

Worcester, Massachusetts, the basement of a strip mall of some kind, I don’t know, I haven’t seen it from outside the basement

IREAPPEARED IN THE BASEMENTwhere Jonah’s bricks had been lain, standing in the strange, shadowy space and trying to convince my memory of a body that my chestdidn’thurt, my heartwasn’tbeating too hard. My heart wasn’t beating at all. I’d been prone to mimicking basic functions of the living ever since I’d died, but it had been getting worse since the crossroads were destroyed, like my spirit was remembering all the things it should have finished working through decades ago.

It was honestly annoying, and even if it hadn’t been, there was no room in my schedule for having a heart attack. What was it going to do, anyway? Kill me?

The pain subsided. I exhaled and straightened, looking around. There was no one there. I was alone in the basement, which would normally have been a good thing. Normally I was trying to avoid the living. Here, I’d been hoping to catch thelocal dead, and the fact that they weren’t here was a little worrisome.

I looked around to make sure I hadn’t somehow missed a cluster of ghosts in my hurry to get away from Heitor, then started for the door on the far wall, heading toward it with the slow, uneasy steps of an ingenue in a horror movie. Whether the ghosts were in hiding from the Covenant or had already been captured, there was nothing good waiting for me on the other side of that door. But there was nothing good waiting for me on this side of it, either, and all I’d do by putting it off was give it more time to get really bad.

The door was locked. That didn’t matter. I walked through it, into the dim concrete hallway on the other side. Bare bulbs lit the space, illuminating every crack and cobweb and making it look dauntingly like the backstage area of a carnival haunted house. Multiple metal staircases led down from the floor above me, presumably connecting the various street-level stores in this strip mall. This was the underground passthrough for maintenance and stock transport, and no one was ever going to find me down here. Fun.

It was still the golden period between midnight and morning, when the living were largely asleep in their beds, not thinking of ghosts trying to get around their places of business. There might be cameras, but I could handle those if I needed to. I cautiously approached the first set of stairs, squinting upward.

The problem with the whole “ghosts can generally pick up on the presence of other ghosts” thing is that it doesn’t have a very clean proximity cutoff. I knew there were ghosts nearby. That just meant they were probably within a mile of me. Maybe they were upstairs in the shops, and maybe they were down the street haunting the local Denny’s equivalent.

Only one way to find out.

I climbed the stair to find myself in a pet store, the independent kind with close-set, overstuffed shelves and the omnipresent smell of sawdust from both rodent bedding and accident cleanups. I paused, then smiled, feeling for the first time like something had broken in my favor.

Modern chain pet stores don’t usually stock puppies and kittens, except during the day when they’re brought in by reputable rescue organizations and placed in sunlit temporary shelters to serve as the animal equivalent of impulse shopping. Older pet stores, on the other hand, will often have a close relationship with the local backyard breeders, leaving them with cages and cages of puppies and kittens slowly marching toward “no longer cute enough” to sell to every child who comes through the doors.

It’s not a good thing. I would never call it agoodthing. But where there are puppies and kittens, there will be children. I started for the back of the store.

And there was Jonah, kneeling next to the pen of sleeping puppies. They were fluffy golden things, all ears and tail, piled up together like they didn’t have a care in the world. And maybe they didn’t. They were puppies. They didn’t know they were in a shabby, potentially predatory pet store, or that they’d age out of adorableness soon. They just knew they were puppies, and they were together, and they had full bellies and a warm place to sleep.

There’s something to be said for being a dog. I walked up behind Jonah. He didn’t look at me.

“Hey,” I said. “You know where Benedita is?”

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