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“Original sin isn’t real. There’s only so much time you have to spend apologizing for the crimes of people you never knew. At the end of the day, you’re only really responsible for yourself.”

—Enid Healy

Worcester, Massachusetts, in what looks like a basement, because that’s not uncomfortable after what happened in England or anything

W E REAPPEARED IN THE DAYLIGHT , into a dimness that made that label seem more ill-fitting than ever. We were standing in a small, cluttered basement, surrounded by cardboard boxes and the omnipresent scent of something gently molding in the corners of the room. A single overhead bulb cast stark white light throughout the room, its brilliance coaxing sharp-edged shadows out of everything it touched.

And everywhere I looked, there were ghosts.

There were at least a dozen of them sitting on the boxes, all different types of haunt, ghosts that should never have coexisted. Jonah let go of my hand and waved to the room, motioning for the ones who had started to stand and tense to calm themselves.

“It’s all right everyone, she’s with me,” he said. “Everyone, this is Mary. Mary, this is everyone.”

“Uh, hi,” I said, raising one hand in a brief wave.

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. “I do stink 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. I have to 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 crossroads ghost 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 is your fault?” 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 the ghosts 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 rare migratory 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. “Agnes is a 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 hurt anybody. She used to vanish for days if 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 an old 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.

They didn’t have a face. Or rather, they had a face, because everything with a head has a face, but it didn’t have any of the features a face should have. Where their features should have been there was nothing but an expanse of smooth, evenly tanned skin, unbroken. There weren’t even divots to imply the presence of eyes or mouth or other such anatomical standards. I still got the feeling they were looking at me when they turned in my direction, head tilting first up and then down as they took my measure.

“Hey,” they said. They didn’t have a mouth, and speaking didn’t change that, but the sound still seemed to come from where their mouth should have been. “I’m Aoi.”

I stared. Impolite, sure. Understandable, also sure.

The figure’s featureless face rippled and became a mirror of my own, even down to the little scar on my left cheek where I’d run into the corner of the kitchen table at the age of four. I’d bled all over the kitchen floor, and Daddy had laughed himself silly at all the fuss, and Mama had yelled at him for being insensitive, saying a scar on my face might make it harder for me to find a good husband, and I’d grown up with a weirdly mixed feeling about it, especially since it was barely visible most of the time.

But there it was, on the face of a stranger, attached to features I recognized and had no desire to share. The mirrored eyelashes and eyebrows were as white as my own, while the figure’s own hair remained black. They smiled at me with my own lips.

“Hello, caretaker,” they said. Their voice was a curious mix of the one they’d used before, with its bland Mid-Atlantic accent, and my own, still Michigan to the core. “You look surprised to see me. Am I scaring you?”

“No,” I said, recovering my composure as best as I could. “I just didn’t anticipate this multicultural a group of haunts in a New England town, that’s all.”

“We’re right next to Boston, sweetheart,” said Benedita, dryly. “We’re as diverse as it gets. You want a good international haunting, you come to Worcester.”

“Cool,” I said. “Still, noppera-bō aren’t even common in Japan. You can forgive me for being a little thrown when I see one in Massachusetts.”

The stranger used my face to look disappointed. “Aw. I wanted to shock you. It’s only fun when I can shock you.”

“Sorry.” I shrugged. “As we’ve already established, I spent a long time serving the crossroads. That means they could send me all over the world, and they loved sending me to places where I didn’t speak the local language. It meant they could show off the fact that within their boundaries, all languages were the same language, and that language was the language of demanding. They called me to answer the needs of their petitioners, and I went. A few of the people I helped negotiate for became noppera-bō after they died.” In the seventies, asking for beauty had been very common. Noppera-bō most frequently rose when they had felt invisible in life, or when they’d been unusually passionately focused on their appearances. I couldn’t tell which one Aoi had been, and honestly, it didn’t much matter either way. They were dead no matter how you sliced it.

Aoi sulked, which remained eerie when done with my own face. Benedita kicked them in the ankle.

“Stop messing her about and show her the hunters,” she said. “She wants to see them, and maybe she can find them. From there, she either gets rid of them or they waste some time taking care of someone we don’t care about. Either way, we win.”

Aoi scoffed and rolled my eyes before their face began to melt and morph again, leaving mine mercifully behind. First, it settled into the face of a sharp-boned man, pointed chin, long nose, and wide-set, rounded eyes. Color bled into their eyebrows and lashes, turning them a sandy, nondescript brown, and the change flowed further down their throat, producing an Adam’s apple where none had been before.

“We call this one ‘the boss,’” they said, voice once again becoming a blend of their own and the face they were wearing. Unsurprisingly, their accent morphed with it, turning British, even if diluted by the mixture.

“Right,” I said. Their current face wasn’t one I’d seen before, and despite the resemblance, wasn’t the Covenant team lead I’d met when we were all in New Gravesend, Maine: Leonard Cunningham either wasn’t hanging around here or wasn’t in charge of this group after all the failure. Honestly, if his legacy in the Covenant was failure after failure, I wouldn’t be upset about that. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

Aoi’s face shifted again, this time turning feminine but retaining the same basic coloration. They looked enough like the prior face for the two to have been siblings, and both of them looked enough like Leonard that if I hadn’t seen him before, I could have believed they were him.

The third face was male, darker-skinned, with brows and lashes a few shades darker than Benedita’s hair. Benedita made an unhappy sound and looked away.

“Someone you know?” I asked.

“Drop it, crossroads bitch,” she replied.

That felt like a sore spot I shouldn’t palpate until I was willing to deal with the consequences. I looked back to Aoi, whose face was morphing again, remaining masculine but scrawny and pale, with dark brown lashes and brows. They shook their head, and the changes faded, their natural featureless state reasserting itself.

“That’s all I’ve seen,” they said, voice back to its default state. “I didn’t hang around when they started bottling my friends.”

“Understandably,” I said. “Thank you for what you’ve been able to show me. It’s going to be a huge help.” Annie’s report on her time in the Covenant had included every name she could dredge out of the depths of her memory. She’d mentioned Leonard, but also his two siblings, Chloe and Nathaniel. I was pretty sure those were the first two faces Aoi had shown me. The other two were unfamiliar, but I’d know them soon enough. That was the whole point of my coming to town, after all.

I straightened. “Where can I find them?”

“This time of night, probably near the city hall,” Aoi said. “They know they’ve missed at least one ghost, and they’re not going to rest until they catch him. Do you know why they’re doing this?”

“Like I said, revenge. Are you aware of the Ocean Lady?”

Aoi shook their head. For not having a face, they were remarkably easy to read, having learned to compensate for their lack of expression with body language and positioning. “Never heard the name.”

“It’s an old term for the Old Atlantic Highway, which used to be the longest continuous road in North America,” I said. “When the road was broken up and functionally killed, it relocated to the twilight, where it became self-aware, took on female pronouns, and ascended to the rank of goddess. That is the super short, condensed version, and no, I can’t really unpack it much further than that, but the Ocean Lady is part of why I’m here. She’s the patron and residence of the current Queen of the Routewitches, Apple, who asked me to come and see what was going on around here.”

“Okay,” said Benedita. “Your point?”

“My point is that Apple, through the Ocean Lady, knows some of what these Covenant fucks are doing with the ghosts they capture,” I said. “They’re stuffing them into spirit jars filled with salt and iron and other spirit-shredding devices, and they’re torturing the dead to turn them into weapons. And the more ghosts the Covenant removes, the stronger all the remaining ghosts get, until every one of us becomes a ticking time bomb.”

The room fell silent, the sort of deep, palpable silence that’s only really possible when there’s no one living around. In a room full of live people, there will be breath, and shuffling, and even the distant, dampened sound of heartbeats keeping things from going too quiet. But we were all dead. We had no sounds to offer to the void.

Then Jonah shouted, “We have to go get them! We have to save them! It was bad enough when they were just taking them like, like souvenirs, but if they’re torturing them—”

“No,” said Benedita, harshly. “We don’t have any proof this crossroads bitch is telling us the truth about what they’re doing. Maybe they just want to collect ghosts and save them for later. Maybe they think they’re laying us to rest. It doesn’t matter. We’re not running off and putting ourselves in harm’s way on her say-so.”

“I think she’s right about the rest of us getting stronger,” said Aoi hesitantly. “I can’t normally cycle through this many faces, this quickly, but right now, it feels like I could be a one-ghost improv troupe.”

Jonah glared at Benedita. She glared back.

“You found us this place, and we’re grateful,” she said. “You made sure we had a safe hole to cluster up in, and we appreciate you. But you’re still a child. You don’t get to tell us to risk ourselves.”

I blinked, slowly. Jonah was a caddis fly who’d never quite finished forming, and his childhood home had been torn down, probably because it was considered a plague pit, then used to build new structures, like the city hall. I took another look around at the brick walls of the basement where we were hiding.

“Jonah, is part of your house here?” I asked.

He nodded, still glaring at Benedita. “They used my bricks all over the city when they pulled my house down,” he said.

“How much of the city would you say has pieces of your house worked into its walls?”

“I don’t know. Everything they were building that year. The city hall, and the courtyard outside the fountain, and some old stores, like this one—it used to be a general store, and now it’s part of a strip mall. A bunch of houses. The library.”

“And you can go to any of those places?”

He nodded.

“Can you tell what’s happening inside the places you’re connected to?”

I had never heard of anything like this, a caddis being broken up and patchworked across a city, but if I could exist, so could Jonah. He frowned, face screwing up in concentration for several seconds before his eyes went wide and bright with sudden revelation. “Oh!” he said. “Oh, I can hear them.”

“Hear who?” asked Benedita.

“All the people who live in buildings my house is a part of. There are so many. They’re having dinner, and putting kids to bed, and watching television programs, and I could join any one of them if I wanted to—”

“Focus, Jonah,” I said. “What about City Hall? What’s going on there?”

He frowned again, this time in irritation rather than confusion. “There’s a broken window, cold air over glass, and there are people who aren’t supposed to be there inside.”

“Where?”

“Basement.”

“Great. Can you take me to the lobby?”

Jonah looked surprised. “Why would you want to go—”

“I don’t know your city hall well enough to aim for somewhere specific without help, and I want to talk to these people before they realize I’m dead,” I said. I flickered, replacing my clothes with a generic security uniform, buttoned white blouse and tan slacks and a heavy black belt around my waist. My name tag said I was Eloise and that I worked for the city. Mom wouldn’t mind me borrowing her name for something this important. My hair was shoved up under a police cap that felt like a good affectation for the role.

White hair would have been a major tip-off twenty years ago, or even ten, but now, with fashionable hair colors on the rise and dye available in every corner store, it would just make me look too young for the job I was pretending to have, na?ve and easy to manipulate. That was all part of the plan.

I offered Jonah one hand, pulling the flashlight from my belt with the other. “Come on, kiddo,” I said. “You can get me there.”

He took my hand, glancing anxiously at Benedita. She turned her face resentfully away, refusing to acknowledge us, and then she couldn’t acknowledge us, because we were gone.