Page 10

“Don’t grow up to be your father. Don’t grow up to be me. Grow up to be yourself. You’re going to be amazing, I’m sure of it.”

—Jane Harrington-Price

On the highway, heading for Boston

F OOD DEFINITELY SEEMED TO HAVE improved Elsie’s driving. She kept her hands on the wheel and her eyes on the road, trusting me to tune the radio to a local classic rock station while Arthur leaned over the seat and commented quizzically on lyrics she and I had heard thousands of times, but which apparently hadn’t been bundled with his new memories. It was a pleasant hour or so of travel before I realized the map in my pocket was getting hot.

Not warm— hot, like it had been replaced with a burning coal. “I think it’s time we start following the map,” I said, pulling it out.

“You sure?” Elsie asked.

“Pretty sure,” I said, trying to unfold the little rectangle without burning my fingers. Normally, while I can feel pain under a remarkably large assortment of conditions, I can’t actually be hurt, what with me being dead and all. When the pain was coming from an enchanted item given to me by the queen of the routewitches and empowered by the Ocean Lady, I had to assume that it could do me actual harm.

I finally managed to peel back an edge of the map and shook it out, unfolding it into a massive sheet of highways, byways, and roughly outlined cities. That part was perfectly ordinary. Less ordinary was the route traced out in ink that gleamed red and gold like a raging fire, showing us exactly where we were supposed to go.

“That’s new,” said Arthur.

“That’s what Apple promised us,” I said, and tapped the map with the tip of my finger. “Looks like we’re heading for Worcester.”

“Worcester?” asked Elsie. She stumbled over the syllables, mangling the name of the town.

“ Woost -er,” I said, purposefully exaggerating the syllables. “That’s not what it says on the street signs, but pronounce it any other way and the locals are likely to eat you alive. It’s not quite as big and old as Boston, but it’s close. Second-largest city in the state. It makes good sense as a place for the Covenant to post up and start hunting, and they’ll be able to get just about anywhere else they need to go from there.”

“Like Boston?” asked Arthur.

“Or Portland, or New York,” I said. “Or any of the little haunted farms in the area. Lots of people died hard in this area. Lots of spirits still hanging around being pissed off about it. You want to go ghost harvesting, this is the place to do it.”

“That’s… charming,” said Arthur. “I don’t like you being here.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “I don’t like me being here either. I don’t like any of us being here. But the anima mundi said I had to do it, and you both volunteered, which means this is where we need to be.”

Grumbling, he sank back into his seat and folded his arms. I moved the map to where Elsie could see it, and we drove on.

Before long, we were passing the Worcester city limits, and driving into the sort of beautifully bucolic New England city that has launched a thousand horror franchises, some more capable of independent flight than others. It wasn’t a small town by any means—the buildings were plentiful and tall, if not quite tipping over into skyscraper territory, and made of the red brick that spoke to me of my childhood, rather than the flexible wood and siding I had grown accustomed to in Portland.

It’s amazing how “normal” can shift with time. Elsie eyed the brick as we drove, looking dubious as only a child of earthquake territory can.

The map continued to gleam and glow, leading us deeper into the city, until we finally turned off into a residential neighborhood where every house was a mirror image of the homes around it, most with two cars in the driveway and several with sporting equipment scattered around the lawns. It looked like an area that could use a babysitter. It just wasn’t going to be me.

The line ended at a small house with white paint on the wooden portion of the walls and a wraparound porch that went all the way around the house. We stopped in front of the house across the street to get a closer look, Arthur leaning forward to peer out the window like he expected the Covenant to just present themselves. Given the map that led us here, maybe he wasn’t wrong to do so. I eyed the house at the end of the map with suspicion.

Someone knocked on my window.

I yelped and jumped, but managed not to vanish as I whipped around to see who was knocking. The redhaired young woman on the sidewalk outside the car answered with a little wave, beaming at me. I motioned for Elsie to turn the car back on, then rolled down the window, looking suspiciously out.

“Can we help you?” I asked.

“Thought I might should be asking you the same thing,” said the woman amiably. “Seeing as how you’re parked outside my house and not moving around too much, and that usually means stalker or police stakeout. Now, I’m cute, but I’m not that cute—never have been—and I haven’t done anything illegal enough to garner that sort of attention from the constabulary.”

She had a rolling Irish accent, which managed to sound both out of place and perfectly reasonable for this random suburban street. It was a neat trick.

“We just got a little lost coming off the interstate,” said Elsie, leaning forward and grinning at the woman. “I’m Elsie. What’s your name?”

“Ophelia, but my friends call me Phee,” said the woman.

Elsie kept smiling at her, eyes very nearly managing to turn heart-shaped. Her voice dropped about half an octave as she continued, and I wasn’t sure she knew she was doing it. “Well, Phee, I hope we can be friends.”

“I don’t know. I’ve not had much luck with Lilu, or with dead people,” said Phee. “Begging your pardon, ghost miss. I’m sure you’re a lovely haunting, and it’s probably not your fault that you’re dead. The ones who aren’t raving and trying to possess people usually didn’t die because of anything they did particularly wrong.”

You could have heard a pin drop in the car. But only for a moment, because Arthur breathed in sharply and started choking on his own spit. I vanished from the front seat—no point in pretending when she already knew that I wasn’t exactly a breath-and-heartbeat kind of a girl—and reappeared behind him, rubbing his back in what I hoped would be a comforting circular motion.

After a few more seconds fighting for air, Arthur calmed down and started inhaling and exhaling normally, shooting me a grateful look.

“Sorry, Mary,” he said.

“S’okay,” I said. “I remember coughing. Coughing was the worst.”

I vanished again, this time reappearing in my original seat. Phee looked at me, clearly amused.

“Guess I don’t need to ask whether you’re a friendly ghost,” she said. “Unfriendly ghosts usually aren’t that quick to help someone who’s choking.”

“My form of haunting is usually considered morally neutral,” I said. “We’re not good and we’re not bad. We’re just loyal, and if you’re not one of the people we’re loyal to, things can go either way.”

“Whoa, whoa, hold up,” said Phee, holding her hands out toward me, palms first. “I’m not trying to start trouble. It’s just that when a carload of nonhumans comes this close to my house, I’ve got questions. Question one: are you here to do me harm. Question two: are you looking for a pot of gold, because I have to tell you, no matter how many of you people show up here, I’m not going to suddenly turn into a leprechaun. I wasn’t one yesterday, I won’t be one tomorrow, and if I were, the dragon Nest over in Boston would already have robbed me for everything I have.”

Elsie frowned and leaned forward, eyeing Phee carefully. “You’re talking like someone who isn’t human either,” she said.

“Takes one to know one,” said Phee brightly. “Not human, never have been, popped out of my mam not human, planning to eventually go to the great rainbow in the sky not human. So are you here to hurt me or nah?”

“Nah,” said Arthur, looking faintly dazed. “We have better things to worry about. How’d you know we were Lilu?”

“The smell,” said Phee. “Lilu reek like everything you might ever want to fall into bed with. Trouble is, I don’t want to fall into bed with anything. It’s never been what you might refer to as an interest of mine.”

“You’re asexual,” said Elsie, sounding almost excited.

“Sure, if that’s the label you want to put on it. I always liked ‘otherwise engaged,’ but yours works too. Anyway, Lilu don’t mess with my head, but I can still smell them. It’s the scent of absence for me, empty rooms and hallways where the dust has time to really settle. Between the two of you, I bet you can get anyone who’s into the pleasures of the flesh to go along with whatever you want them to do—and who decided sex was what got the title ‘pleasures of the flesh,’ anyway? I find a nice cup of tea, a warm fire, a roller coaster, all pretty pleasurable, and all very much engaging of the flesh. I think you lot are being selfish.”

“It’s not like we got to pick our species off of a character creation table,” said Arthur. “And we’re not pure Lilu, anyway.”

“Hey, hey.” I held up my hands. “This is a lot of species-specific shouting in a public place, when we still don’t know what our…” I faltered for a moment, then settled on, “… new friend is. Ophelia? Identify yourself please?”

“Clurichaun,” she said, with visible satisfaction. “Not a leprechaun, and it’s a grand insult to call one of us by that name. Tragically, we’re related, and near enough that people do go getting us confused—once.”

She grinned, and for a moment, her mouth was full of small, sharp teeth, serrated like a ghoul’s, close-fitting as an otter’s or a seal’s. Then she dropped it, and when she spoke again, her teeth were flat as any human being’s. It was a nice bit of camouflage, and it left me unsure which version of her dentition was the real one. Kevin might have been able to tell me more about what to expect from a clurichaun, or Thomas, but neither of them was here, and I was on my own for figuring out my next move.

I sighed and blipped out of the car, reappearing next to Phee on the sidewalk outside. She looked at me with mild amusement, eyebrows lifted in silent question. I folded my arms.

“We’re here because we know the Covenant of St. George has been active in this city, and the map that was supposed to lead us to them appears to have led us to your house, instead,” I said. “Unless you’re sheltering the Covenant for some reason. If you are, you should know, they’re going to kill you when they’re done with whatever it is they’re doing. They don’t forgive nonhumans for existing, even after they’ve been useful. Don’t get confused about that.”

“You done?” asked Phee.

“I’m done,” I said.

“All right, then I’ll give you this bit for free: I’m not working with the Covenant. I’m not that bog-stupid. A leprechaun might be, but I told you, that isn’t what I am. And you, my dead friend, just told me exactly who you are.”

I looked at her flatly.

“Dead girl traveling with two Lilu, getting snippy and protective when I look at them the wrong way? You’re the Price family babysitter, Betty or Veronica or whatever your damn name is. Never thought I’d see the day. Cryptozoologist royalty on my doorstep.” She bowed exaggeratedly to Elsie and Arthur.

I bristled.

“The name’s Mary, ” I said. “And if you know who we are, I’m sure you want to help us.”

“Knowing who you are makes me want to ask how much money it would take to get you out of my city before anyone else knows you’re here,” she said. “Barring that, yeah, I’ll help you. That’s my place.” She indicated the house across the street. “I know boardinghouses are old-fashioned and out of style in this brave new world of Airbnbs and the like, but some of us still need a place that doesn’t come with electronic records and a paper trail. So I rent out rooms as people need them, and I have two open right now, if that suits Her Majesty.”

According to Apple’s map, this was where we needed to be. And while I might not be particularly happy with Apple herself, I trusted her not to actively screw with us. She had too much to lose to think that was a good idea.

At this point, we all did.

I glanced to Elsie and Arthur, waiting for the confirming nods before I returned my attention to Phee and said, “Yeah, that suits us just fine.”

“Wonderful. Fifty dollars a night for the three of you—as a group, not each. If that seems ridiculously cheap to you, be aware that when humans try to rent from me, their rates start at two hundred a night.”

“I was human when I died,” I said.

“You want to pay more?”

“I’m dead. I don’t have any money.”

“No, but you’re the kind of dead who sometimes turns solid just because she thinks it’s funny, and that means you could rob a bank if you wanted to. Don’t make me force you to rob a bank.”

If it came to that, I’d just pop myself back to Portland and snatch some money out of the petty cash that Kevin maintained, or go to Michigan and do the same with Thomas’s stash. I had options, even if I wasn’t particularly inclined to use them when I didn’t have to. I turned to Arthur and Elsie, gesturing for them to get out of the car.

Arthur was the first one out. “Are we really staying here tonight?” he asked.

“And probably the next several days, until we find out where the Covenant is and what they’re doing,” I said. “So let’s be nice to our host, because she’s giving us a place to stay that isn’t either the back seat of the car or the nearest Holiday Inn. The house of a random clurichaun that we met on the street seems marginally less likely to give us bedbugs.”

Elsie made a sour face. “I hate bedbugs.”

“Hatred of bedbugs is the unifying factor of all sapient life,” said Phee airily. “I’d get your things, if I were you. We’re a safe-enough city, but safe and ‘immune to theft’ are two different sentences. You want to be sure you keep having things when you’re done here, bring them inside.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Arthur. He leaned back into the car and retrieved his duffle bag.

Elsie, meanwhile, walked around the car and opened the trunk, extracting her suitcases and giving Phee a perplexed look. Phee smiled sunnily and waved the fingers of one hand in a wave.

“Got a ghost carpet bag, ghost nanny?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I travel light,” I said.

“Grand. We’ll move along,” she said, and turned to cross the street to her house. The rest of us followed her.

The porch was even whiter up close, painted with a meticulous care that spoke of either loving maintenance or a low level of obsession. There were several hanging swings and one egg-shaped hanging chair, which was occupied by a brown tabby cat that looked old enough to have witnessed the Nixon administration. Phee stopped to caress its ears, and it made a weary creaking sound, then rolled over without opening its eyes.

“Mary,” said Arthur. “Mary, that cat has two tails. Two tails, Mary.”

“That’s Maron; he’s a bakeneko,” said Phee. “He’s about three hundred years old, and he’s a lazy old bum who spends most of his time asleep.”

Maron made the creaking sound again, this time opening one eye and flicking one ear flat against his head. He didn’t otherwise acknowledge our presence. I offered him a little wave.

“Nice to meet you,” I said. Bakeneko are originally from Japan, and I’ve never been entirely sure how intelligent they are. I don’t spend a lot of time around four-legged cryptids.

“No, it’s not,” said Phee. She opened the door and strode inside, leaving the rest of us to follow her.

Elsie and Arthur followed her through the door. I took another look at Maron and followed her through the wall, stepping into a pleasant, perfectly ordinary living room, complete with worn brown couch, hanging spider plants, and television that was two sizes too large for the space. I stopped there, turning to take a look at the full space.

It looked lived-in. That wasn’t an insult: rooms should look lived-in, or what’s the point of having them? There was no organization to the bookshelves against the walls, and there were piles of mail and junk magazines on the coffee table. A dark blue cat tree sat in front of the window, presumably for Maron’s benefit.

“This way,” said Phee perfunctorily, and gestured for us to come with her down the hall. We passed several closed doors. She gestured to one of them. “Bathroom,” she said. “Please take cold showers, so you don’t get your pheromones all over everything. I’m immune, not everyone in the house is. If you can’t tolerate cold showers, you can do hot sponge baths or rent a room at the Best Western down the road. Kitchen’s behind us, first door off the living room. Anything unlabeled is fair game, but I ask that you play The Price is Right and replace a roughly equal value in groceries.”

“You don’t want us to hand you money?” asked Elsie.

“More fun this way,” said Phee. “How else would we get experiences like ‘that time everyone replaced everything they ate with cheese’ or ‘why do we have seventeen bottles of olive oil?’ You can track the sales by what appears in the fridge. Makes meal planning interesting. Which reminds me. Breakfast is included in the cost of your rooms, but only if you fetch up between seven and nine. After nine, it’s all hands for themselves, and usual rules apply. I set hours so no one else will try to cook then, and you get what you get. Usually boxty, apple cake, and oatmeal are on offer. Other things come and go as they do. You can complain if you like, but it won’t do you any good.” She had stopped between two doors. Beaming, she opened them both and pushed them open.

The rooms on the other side were small, square, and perfectly genericized, with white walls, beige carpet, and medium brown curtains. There was a twin bed, and a basic IKEA dresser under the single window. Both rooms were identical, if mirrored.

“Here’s the two of you,” said Phee cheerfully. “Ghost can sleep wherever she likes. Do ghosts sleep?”

“Not the way you’re thinking,” I said. “I’ll probably spend the night trying to find the Covenant and find out how much damage they’re doing.”

“Just don’t lead them back to my door,” said Phee.

“I won’t,” I said. “I’m better at my job than that.”

Another door banged open farther down the hall, and a woman emerged. She was tall, solidly built as a professional wrestler, and wearing a pink-and-orange tie-dyed bathrobe. She was also heading straight for us.

“Urk,” said Elsie, eyes going wide, round, and shiny. Unlike her brother and his unending devotion to one woman, she had always been ready to fall in love with the next pretty face to come down the sidewalk, and it looked like love had just managed to strike her again, right where she least expected it.

“Afternoon, Phee,” said the newcomer, with a Boston accent so thick I could almost taste it, butter and maple syrup on the tongue. She paused to eye the three of us suspiciously. “New kids?”

“They’ll be staying with us for a little while,” said Phee. “They’re on a bit of a road trip.”

“Huh. They got names?” She turned on Elsie, perhaps recognizing her as the weak spot in this current conversational tree. “You got a name, sweetheart?”

I thought Elsie was going to swoon at being called “sweetheart.” She managed not to, although her cheeks flushed pink with either delight or arousal—I couldn’t really tell which. “Elsinore,” she said.

“What, like the castle from Hamlet ?” asked the newcomer.

Elsie nodded, and the woman nudged Phee with her elbow.

“Better watch your back, if Elsinore Castle’s coming to you,” she said.

Elsie laughed like this was the funniest thing she’d ever heard.

“Anyway, I’m Amelia, and I live here at this little boardinghouse of horrors. I’m a bit bouncer and a bit keeper of the chore chart, and Ophelia’d be lost without me, wouldn’t you, Phee? Say you would, you know you would.”

“Get off, you great lump,” said Phee, with obvious fondness. “Amelia was one of my first tenants, and she’s never left. People stay anywhere from a night to, apparently, forever.”

“We’ll be somewhere in the middle of all that,” I said. I gave Amelia a harder look, trying to find any sign that she wasn’t human. Amelia obliged me by meeting my eyes, smiling wickedly, and blinking both sets of eyelids at once.

I blinked. Only once. Humans don’t have a nictating membrane. It’s a definite design flaw, but it’s something evolution decided we didn’t really need, and so didn’t bother to equip. A variety of the homo-form cryptids do have nictitating membranes, either due to an aquatic or nocturnal lifestyle, or just because evolution made some different choices when it was putting them together.

Amelia laughed. “Thought that’s what you were looking for. You’re dead, aren’t you?”

I was getting a little tired of being pegged for a ghost on sight. “Caretaker ghost,” I said, curtly. “These two are my responsibility.”

Elsie looked like she wanted to sink into the floor and disappear forever, which meant I was doing my job as her babysitter, even if she was a grown adult who could generally be allowed to flirt without supervision. Still, sometimes it was good to remind people of my role in this little family unit.

“Hockomock Swamp Beastie,” said Amelia, with a toothy smile. “I’m nobody’s responsibility but my own.”

These days, it’s relatively rare for me to encounter an intelligent species I’ve never heard of before. Even apart from all the time I’ve spent with various Prices, when I was working for the crossroads, they were happy to prey on anyone who fell for their brand of bullshit. Humanity didn’t really matter to them. There’s nothing so special about a human that they should get the attention of an entire eldritch entity to themself.

(Of course, we humans do have one thing going for us: numbers. We’ve managed to outbreed everyone else on the planet to the point where we’ve been given ownership of a whole layer of the afterlife, just so we’ll leave the other kids alone and let them rest in peace. There are people who genuinely resent the fact that former servants of the crossroads, like me, are still rooted in the starlight, rather than packing our ectoplasmic bags and getting the hell out of there before they have to force the issue.)

“What’s a Hockomock Swamp Beastie?” asked Arthur, before I finished gathering my thoughts enough to form the question.

Amelia gave him an indulgent look. “It’s not nice to ask for details before you’ve told me your name, hon.”

“Oh. Um, Arthur. Elsie’s my sister.”

“Which explains how a couple of Lilu can travel together and not cause all sorts of issues for each other,” said Phee. She turned her attention back to me. “Around here, since I’ve already told you everyone in the house isn’t human, it’s polite to identify your species, just so everyone can feel at ease. When we do have humans here, I put them up on the second floor, and I warn everyone to make sure they won’t run into unexpected humans in the halls and maybe have an issue that requires tarps and bleach to resolve.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“Lilu, huh?” asked Amelia. “Fascinating. Anyway, as I said, I’m a Hockomock Swamp Beastie. We have our own name for ourselves, but we’re rare enough that I find it easier to just use what the local humans do. Means there’s half a chance in hell you’ll have heard of us.”

“We’re from Oregon,” said Elsie.

“All right, substantially less than half a chance. Anyway. We’re related to the Jersey Devils, but try telling them that. They have just as narrow a habitat as we do, but they got better press when they were discovered, so they think they’re super important.”

“Huh,” I said. Jersey Devils looked less human than this woman did, but their inhuman attributes were almost all defensive or survival-based: they could hold their breath for hours, and had nictitating membranes in their eyes, as well as the ability to stop off their nostrils and prevent themselves from breathing water.

Amelia nodded like she could see my whirling thoughts. “Anything you’re laying on my cousins, we can do that too. I’m also immune to most poisons, resistant to the ones I’m not immune to, and I never get bit by mosquitoes. Also, my skin doesn’t absorb water the way a human’s does—it’s more like a dolphin’s or a hippo’s—and that means I can lurk in the swamp as long as I need to without worrying about my skin sloughing off or rotting.”

“It looks like normal skin to me,” said Elsie.

Amelia winked at her. “Camouflage.”

“Did you need something, Mia?” asked Phee, sounding exasperated.

“Ah, yes!” said Amelia. “Just about to go the grocery run, need your credit card. Unless you’d rather I shop according to my list, instead of yours.”

Phee wrinkled her nose and pulled a card out of her pocket, passing it to Amelia, who made it disappear.

“Cheers,” she said, and winked again at Elsie, then continued down the hall, off to her errands.

I turned to Elsie and Arthur. “All right,” I said. “You two get your stuff settled, and I’ll hang around here until dinnertime. After that, you go to bed, and I’ll go looking for the Covenant.”

“We’re not children anymore,” said Elsie. “We don’t have to go to bed when you tell us to.”

“That’s true enough,” I said. “But you’re not coming out to find the Covenant with me—I need to know where they are, and be ready to come up with a plan, before I’m willing to trust you to the field.”

“You said you needed help,” she said. “I drove all the way here. I’m not sitting on the sidelines while you go after the people who killed my mother.”

“And I don’t want you to,” I said. “But scouting is important, and we need intelligence.”

“Everyone remembers Artie as being so amazing with computers, while I’ve barely touched them,” said Arthur. “Maybe that means I am amazing with computers, and I can start finding information if you just set me in front of a keyboard and wait to see what happens. It can’t hurt anything.”

“And if that doesn’t work, he can email Uncle Drew and get help that way,” said Elsie.

“Great. It sounds like you have a plan that involves staying here and not spiking my blood pressure through the roof for funsies,” I said. I turned to Ophelia. “I know they’re adults and you’re just our temporary landlady, but if you could please not let them leave the house tonight, that would be absolutely amazing.”

“I’ll keep them safe as houses,” she said.

“Great.” I looked back to Elsie. “You leave anything in the car?”

She nodded, and I disappeared to go and get it.