Page 81 of Installment Immortality

All this happened in a matter of seconds. Elsie was still falling, not yet having made her own impact with the ground. She wasn’t covering her mouth. She was still falling, and I’m not sure she could have covered it if she tried.

People always cover their mouths. They forget about their noses, their eyes, all the other points of entry into the human body.

The smoke whipped around Arthur’s head, surrounding it like a cartoon cloud, and then, abruptly, it was gone. Arthur turned back to his falling sister, moving to grab her hand even as her ass hit the attic floor.

Gripping her hand firmly in his, he pulled her back to her feet and looked pointedly at her wounded shoulder, which was bleeding freely. “That looks like it hurts,” he said, and his accent was wrong, thick Boston instead of relatively neutral Portland. “Think there’s a first aid kit up here?”

Elsie clapped her free hand over her shoulder and narrowed her eyes, glaring at him. “Get out of my brother, asshole.”

“Don’t believe I will, sweetheart, if it’s all the same to you,” said the man in Arthur’s body. “He’s barely anchored to this thing as it is. Seriously, no grip strength at all. I could boot him out of here no trouble, and then it’d bemybody, unless you wanted me to leave it to fall down dead on the attic floor. That your idea of a good time?”

“I saidget out,” said Elsie, all but hissing the words.

“Or what? You’ll bleed on me? Sorry, but that’s not a great threat. Blood smells kinda funny, though, you might want to get that looked at when we get out of here.”

“They took all our weapons. We’re not getting out of here.”

“Nah. They didn’t take them all.” He moved nonchalantly away from Elsie, not sparing her a backward look, and began peering into jars. He studied each of their contents for only a few seconds before moving on, and when he reached my jar, he barely glanced at it before he turned his attention to the next jar in the line. “They left us all the weapons we could possibly need.”

“What are you talking about?”

“See, we’re surrounded by pissed-off ghosts who don’t have anything better to do with their time than help us get revenge, and I can tell without even trying that they’ve warded the house to keep the dead from getting away. So you let me hold onto your brother’s body for a few minutes, I let all these not-so-friendly spirits out of their jars, and then they tear the people who hurt us both to pieces. I just gotta find a ghost who’ll fit your body.”

Elsie blinked. Then, expression hardening, she said, “Mybabysitter’s in here. I felt her. If you need to put a ghost inside me, I want her.”

“Not all ghosts can do the possession thing,” said the ghost in Arthur’s body. “You can’t just break any old jar and expect it to work out the way you expect.”

“Mary will figure it out,” said Elsie. She paused for a moment, closing her eyes as she clutched at her shoulder. “She always figures it out.”

“Right. How long ago was she jarred?”

“I don’t know exactly, but it can’t have been more than six hours, if she was jarred at all. I don’t know for sure that she was.”

He turned to give her a disgusted look. Elsie scowled.

“I felt her before your jar got broken. She was somewhere near where I found you. She’s here, I swear she is, and that means she’s in a jar, because if shecouldappear, she’d have done it already.”

“Last few hours, you say?”

“Something like that.”

“So she’d still be most of the way intact. Hold, please.” He turned to go back to scanning the jars. This time when he reached me, he paused, expression turning contemplative. “What’s your Mary look like, anyway?”

“Late teens, white hair, probably wearing something with no sense of style behind it. On the skinny side. Nice tits, though.” Elsie paused. “And she’s been my babysitter since I was a literal baby, so I probably shouldn’t admit that last part, but it’s true and if it helps you find her, she can be mad at me about it later.”

Oh, honey, like that’s the first time one of the kids I’ve raised has had inappropriate thoughts about the babysitter,I thought. As long as they didn’t vocalize them until they were legal adults, and didn’t try to do anything about it, I didn’t care all that much. People get crushes. People think other people are pretty.

At least that’s what I’ve heard, about the crushes. I know it’s true about the pretty people.

The man in Arthur’s body picked up my jar, moving it gingerly so as not to set the mist swirling again. He squinted at me through the glass. “You fit the profile, but I hope like hell she’s right about you being able to figure things out, or this isn’t going to help,” he said, and dropped the jar.

There was one last rush of stinging mist, and then the glass was breaking all around me, and I was breaking free. I turned toward Elsie, or attempted to, anyway—no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t force myself to take the bipedal form that had been my default since my death. I was a formless cloud of pale, swirling smoke, hovering in the air above my broken jar.

The man in Arthur didn’t look surprised. He also didn’t look particularly sympathetic. “Sorry, princess, but even a little time in a spirit jar scrambles everything,” he said. “You’ll need to resettle, and that’s going to take time. So seize what you can get. Take the girl.”

I didn’t like the way he was talking about Elsie, but if this was going to be how it went for all the ghosts inside those jars, I wasn’t going to sit around waiting to settle. I dove for Elsie, and this time, when I tried to move, I moved, arrowing toward her with a speed and accuracy that felt totally alien to me, and totally right at the same time.

She inhaled as I struck her face, and I was pulled inside her, out of the formlessness, out of the cold. Her body enfolded me, warm and solid and alive—and in agony, the wound in her shoulder still bleeding openly. The shock of the pain almost knocked me loose, but I dug in with everything I had, holding tightly to the shape of her skin.

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