Page 68 of Installment Immortality

“She’s all grown up, and people can see her when she’s in a nightclub or at a party, so she went to a party as soon as it was late enough for things to start,” he said, voice dull and almost monotone. “I didn’t think you were going to come back. Why did you come back? Did you find Martha and Agnes?”

“Maybe,” I said, hedging. How was I supposed to tell this child that his friends were probably lost forever, driven past their breaking point by petty bastards who thoughtwewere the real monsters? “Did the others go with her?”

“Aoi did. They can be visible to the living when they want to. Ican’t, unless you’re standing right near the pieces that used to be my house, and even then, people can generally see right through me. Makes it hard to make friends.”

I needed to introduce this kid to the local ever-lasters. There had to be some, unless Heitor had taken the Cunninghams to an elementary school. If he’d done that, I was going to kill him. I might have to do that anyway—a rogue umbramancer is nothing to sneeze at, especially not one who’s willing to sell their services to the highest bidder. But if he’d intentionally taken the Covenant to target kids, rather than just stumbling over them while targeting random hauntings, there was no way I could let him live.

“All right,” I said. “Is the club one of the places you can go?”

He shook his head, then resumed looking at the puppies. “I wish I could pet them,” he said wistfully.

“I’m sorry you can’t,” I said.

“They die sometimes, and I can’t even pet them when that happens. Why?”

“Because they’re too young, and they haven’t had the chance to be truly loved yet,” I said. “Is there a shelter around here that you can go to? A place with lots of grownup dogs and cats?”

Jonah frowned. “I know thereisone, but it doesn’t use any of my bricks. I can’t go there.”

“Maybe there’s a way we can fix that.” I looked at him, small and translucent and alone, and I hated the Covenant just a little more. As if I needed the encouragement. “All right. I’m going to go looking for nightclubs now. You can stay here or go back to City Hall; the Covenant team’s gone to bed for the night, and I don’t think you need to worry about them until tomorrow.”

“Okay,” he said. Then, with a sigh: “If you can’t get Martha and Agnes back, do you think you can show me how to move on?”

I’m not a psychopomp. Never have been. Even the members of my family who’ve died have moved on without my help, by andlarge, and I don’t know how I’d guide someone to whatever comes next. It’s just not part of my skill set. I shook my head. “Sorry, kid. I think moving on is something you have to figure out on your own, not something I can help you with. but if you really want to go when all this is finished, I’ll do what I can to help you.”

Maybe the anima mundi could help us. They had to understand how ghosts moved from this reality to the next, didn’t they? They were in charge of the afterlife as we know it, after all.

I took a step back and vanished, throwing myself into the ether. Now came the hard part. When I’d served the crossroads, I had sometimes been expected to find the greatest local density of living people, because that was where petitioners who’d changed their minds thought they could hide. Sometimes people hid from the crossroads when they realized what their wishes were actually going to cost. When that happened, it had been my job to find them and bring them back again.

I couldn’t locate people who weren’t family members with the precision I brought to my duties, but I could at least make an effort. So I hung in the emptiness between manifestation and silence, and I reached out across the town, looking for ghosts, looking for celebrations, looking for anything that might get me where I needed to go.

One by one, traces of haunting flared into being behind my eyelids. Some of them felt hollowed-out and ancient, like the ghosts that had occupied them were long since gone; others felt recent and bright, sizzling with afterlife. Only one felt like it contained more than a single ghost, and I pulled myself in that direction, dropping back into the world of the living on the sidewalk outside of a nightclub drenched in neon. Music thudded from inside, heavy with bass and electronic shriek.

A living bouncer, human, looked at me without interest as I pulled myself together. I flinched, preparing to vanish again if he started screaming. I didn’t normally appear in front of the living.Then I saw that his eyes were somehow managing to be bright and empty at the very same time, filled with the swirling shadows that only come from certain pharmaceuticals.

“Hi?” I ventured.

“No cover charge for dames, but there’s a dress code,” he said. “You’re wearing too much clothing.”

I looked down at myself. I was back in the black-sweater-and-skirt combination I’d been wearing during my discussion with the still-nameless information tech in the Covenant van. I flickered, and I was in a tarnished silver minidress that gleamed like liquid metal as it ran down my hips to stop barely past the top of my thighs, the neckline so plunging that anyone who looked in my direction could tell that I wasn’t wearing a bra. If my ankles had been flesh and bone, I would have worried about breaking them in my towering stiletto heels.

I felt more exposed than I would have if I’d been completely naked, and had to swallow the urge to cover myself with my hands as I lifted my chin and looked challengingly at the bouncer. “Better?” I asked.

“Better,” he agreed, and unclipped the rope blocking the front of the club. “You have a nice time, and maybe come see me when I come down from this trip. I wanna know if your hair is really that white.”

“You got it,” I said, and walked inside. He was still doing his job, even if he was drugged to high heaven, and while he hadn’t carded me, he was doing everything else correctly, which was damned impressive however you wanted to look at it.

Thoughts of the bouncer flickered and died as the club reached out and swallowed me, dim, glittering lights and pounding bass brushing my thoughts aside like they were barely more than nothing. Everywhere I looked was a teeming throng of bodies, all dancing to a beat that bore very little resemblance to the music. Verity would have loved this place. She would have taken onelook at the crowd and decided that she’d died and gone to heaven, then hit the dance floor already synchronized to the beat.

I had never been a dancer. I was more Sunday school than sock hop when I was alive, and short of toddler dance parties in various living rooms, I’d never seen the point. So I eeled myself awkwardly into the crowd, trying not to bump into people, failing utterly, and replacing the effort with the slightly more successful attempt to not wind up wearing too many random drinks. Sure, they fell through me and landed on the floor shortly after they hit my dress, but I had to stay at least partially solid whenever I was touching someone. I couldn’t count on the whole club being drugged to the point of accepting ghosts.

And there, in the middle of the dance floor, I found her: Benedita in a red dress that made mine look conservative, wearing heels so high they seemed unrealistic, dancing with a brown-haired college boy who looked like he couldn’t believe he could ever be this lucky. He had his hands around her waist, and she was clearly using them for balance as she flung her head back and pranced and slithered all around his body.

She looked like she was having the time of her life, and so did he, and part of me wanted to leave them alone to dance. She wouldn’t hurt him: midnight beauties almost never do. They want to dance and drink and remember what it was like to be alive, not harm their partners. A surprising number of types of ghost are entirely harmless to the living. They just don’t tend to get as much attention as their scarier cousins do.

Sadly, leaving them to their dance wasn’t an option. I threw myself into the crowd, pushing and sidestepping until I was right beside them, then grabbed hold of Benedita’s shoulder as she swung toward me.

“Benny, it’s me,” I said, trying to sound breathless and a little tipsy. The first was easy. The second, not so much. “Did you forget we have a biochem final tomorrow? Sorry, mister.” I turned myattention on the man she was dancing with, who just looked even more wide-eyed at the sudden bonus girl in his orbit. “I know you’re having an awesome time—Benny’s always an awesome time—but I have to steal her. I promised not to let her fail any classes this semester.”

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