Page 14

“Life isn’t all there is. Everything wants to keep existing, even things that have never been alive. Sometimes you just have to let them.”

—Apple Tanaka

Worcester, Massachusetts, in the back of an unmarked van with a man who doesn’t seem to realize how upsetting this is

“ S EE ANYTHING ?” ASKED THE MAN . He moved to sit in front of the bank of monitors, looking far more relaxed now that we were inside the van. As well he should. He could leave.

And I couldn’t.

Mesmer cages were invented by the spiritualist of the same name, and quickly became popular with umbramancers, who saw them as a way to ward off and contain intrusive spirits. Ghosts are drawn to umbramancers like moths to flame, sometimes with the same self-immolating ends. I remembered how much the general spirit population had harassed Laura before her disappearance, and I couldn’t really blame her for putting up walls to try and buy herself a little peace.

Umbramancers aren’t common. The majority commit suicide before the age of thirty, choosing to pass on into nothingness rather than remain a target for an army of ghosts. But they don’t have a monopoly on Mesmer cages, sadly. And I do mean that “sadly”: this man, this boy, was no umbramancer. He was watching me with the earnest smugness of someone who thought he’d just done something really impressive in front of a cute girl, and I realized he thought I was fixated on the rack of bottled ghosts, not frozen with horror.

Well, that was useful, at the very least.

The Mesmer cage made sense: they contain ghosts. At the end of the day, that’s their primary purpose. And with all those ghosts under glass in here, he had good reason to want to know that they’d be contained if something happened, if there was an accident or an earthquake or whatever. Some of the ghosts barely looked human anymore. They were just agonized, howling faces ringed by the dust kicked up by their panic. That, too, was a bad sign. Ghosts settle shortly after death, taking on whatever form they’re going to inhabit for the length of their afterlife. Not many ghosts settle as poltergeists. These ghosts were demonstrating poltergeist abilities by making the dust hang in the air, and they didn’t even necessarily know that they were doing it.

No wonder the anima mundi had wanted me to get involved. This was horrifying no matter how you looked at it.

“What’s in the jars?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant, like I wasn’t watching human spirits being tortured while I stood inside something that was essentially just a larger jar. I’ve heard stories of ghosts escaping from Mesmer cages by mimicking the living so well that the symbols making up the pattern can’t detect the difference, but I’ve never needed to mimic the living that well. I had no idea whether I’d be able to exit without help, and if I tried and failed, the man who’d invited me inside would realize that he had something more than just a midnight prankster.

“Can’t you see them?” he asked, sounding honestly curious. “I couldn’t at first. Not until Nathaniel started adding iron filings to all the jars. He says it encourages them toward solidity, which doesn’t make sense to me, but then, none of this has made any sense to me, not since the very beginning. You should be able to see something. ”

I frowned and moved closer to the rack of jars, straining like I was trying to see something that wouldn’t quite come in focus.

One of the jarred ghosts abruptly rushed the glass, mouth hanging open in an agonized howl, bits of salt and iron and broken mirror swirling around it like they were caught in a localized wind storm. I didn’t have to feign my yelp, and I jumped backward. The man from the van was there to catch and steady me, placing one hand on my waist and leaving it there.

“Easy, easy,” he said, like he was trying to soothe a frightened horse. “They can’t hurt you. I told you my friends were ghostbusters. Well, this is where they put the ghosts they catch.”

“I can see them now,” I said, blinking rapidly, as if the shock had suddenly brought all the other spirits into focus. Not all of them were screaming. Some were crying, or huddled on one side of the jar, doing their best to avoid the offending items. The truly agitated ones seemed to have incorporated all those bits and pieces into themselves, becoming the things that hurt them.

Even if I could somehow get them all out of here, they might well be past saving.

That was a problem for later, when I knew how I was getting myself out of here—something I’d need to do soon, since the Covenant stooges inside the city hall were going to figure out eventually that Jonah wasn’t there, and they were chasing a hollow haunting. They might recognize me. They might not. Either way, I didn’t want to deal with them right now. I wanted to get back to Phee’s boardinghouse and tell Elsie and Artie that we were definitely in the right place. I wanted to go to Oregon and ask Annie whether any of these people sounded familiar.

I wanted to go to the King Spa in Palisades Park and spend a few hours scrubbing myself, until I felt like the filth of this whole encounter had been removed from my spectral skin. They’re used to ghosts at the King Spa. As long as we pay our way and don’t bother the other customers, they don’t make too much of a fuss about the fact that we’re there. I appreciate people who can show the dead that much respect.

“Impressive, aren’t they?” His hand was still on my waist, holding me in place, barely shy of possessive.

I glanced back at him, trying to figure out how I wanted to play this. I never had a lot of practice flirting. When I was alive, I was trying to keep my father above water, and once I’d been dead, I’d also been busy. Somehow, sorting out the confusing mess of human sexuality had never seemed to matter half as much as keeping the crossroads from swallowing my chosen family whole. I was pretty sure I didn’t like his hand on me, didn’t have any interest in the half-formed thoughts I could see coming together in his eyes; you don’t need to be a telepath to read certain intentions.

My choices were this man, the door I might not be able to get through on my own, or the rack of screaming, desperate spirits. I took a half-step back, so that the back of my thigh was pressed against the side of his, and let my voice get high and anxious as I asked, “ What are they? Those can’t be real ghosts, not really. Ghosts aren’t real. I don’t like them. I don’t like the way they’re looking at me.”

“Maybe ghosts aren’t real. I don’t think they’re the spirits of dead humans. But whatever they are, they’re what we’ve always referred to as ‘ghosts,’ and they exist. My friends have been catching them all along the coast. We go to old places, or places like this city hall that were built with materials taken from old places, and we catch what we find there. I’m new to the organization, so I don’t get to help with the hunting, but I handle the research.” A certain pride crept into his voice there. “I look things up, I find the places with stories we might be able to chase down, and I track construction records to find out where all the stained glass from that demolished church that supposedly had a holy spirit wound up going.”

“But… but if they’re ghosts following the pieces of their homes around, and not hurting anyone, isn’t it wrong to bottle them up like this? Isn’t it like—like torturing people?”

“They’re not people anymore. They gave up the label of ‘people’ when they died.”

“How is that fair? What makes a ghost, anyway? Not everyone can become a ghost, or there would be so many of them that there wouldn’t be any room left for the living.” I stepped away from him, breaking the connections between thighs and waists and hands, and turned to give him my best, time-honed glower. “We have laws against desecrating graves and bodies because those things still represent people, even if they’re not people anymore. Why would we protect ghosts any less, if we knew for sure that ghosts existed? Most people don’t choose to die. So you’re saying that because something happened to them, all these ghosts don’t count as people anymore, and don’t deserve the protection of basic human decency?”

“Not when they might hurt the living,” he replied.

“Oh, come on. There must be thirty jars here! If thirty ghosts were hurting the living every year, we’d know for sure that ghosts are real. There wouldn’t be any question. You know all these ghosts haven’t been hurting anyone.”

I turned again, this time toward the van doors. As I did, I pulled as much solidity into myself as I could, mimicking humanity the way I would when I needed to take the kids to a public park, the sort of place where we’d run into human parents who could see through every weakness.

I don’t borrow life from the living the way a hitcher does. I take my substance from the world itself—from the pneuma, probably, which meant this was probably one of the expensive things the anima mundi complained about me doing. In the moment, I didn’t care. I needed to know whether I could be solid and real and alive enough to trick a Mesmer cage.

I grasped the handle on the van door. I said a silent prayer to whichever of the various deities I knew might be listening. I opened the door.

I stepped outside.

There were no sparks or flashes of light, or anything else that might indicate I’d beaten the Mesmer cage. There was just the Covenant’s data man, looking at me with disappointment but without surprise. Then I closed the door, shutting him inside, and even that was gone.

I vanished, leaving the van at the curb and the roll of toilet paper in the street.

One nice thing about doing fieldwork on the East Coast: for once, the time zones were in my favor. I vanished in Massachusetts, and I reappeared in Oregon. Specifically, I reappeared in Antimony’s bedroom, where I promptly shouted and threw one arm up to cover my eyes.

Annie and Sam were even faster. Sam scrambled away from her, hauling most of the bedding with him, and wrapped it securely around his waist and torso, creating a makeshift toga of sorts. He didn’t bother shifting back toward human. He remained visibly Fūri, with faintly simian features, ears that were slightly larger than the norm, and a sinuous tail as long as he was tall, which he was using to hold part of the toga in place.

Annie tugged her nightshirt back down over her hips and gave me a sullen, baleful look, pulling the remaining sheet around herself and settling back into her pillows, of which there were at least six. She’s always liked her pillows, that girl, and it was a good sign that there were so many of them. When her flames first started manifesting and she started setting the bedding on fire, she’d removed most of the pillows from her bed in the interests of keeping them unburnt. If she had this many, she wasn’t setting things on fire in her sleep.

Of course, from the way she was glaring at me, she was currently contemplating how flammable ghosts might be. Sadly for her, the answer was “not very.” If she tried to burn me to death (killing me for the second time? Or would that be third? I never thought “How many times have I actually died?” was going to be something I needed to keep track of) we were both going to have a very bad night.

“Mary,” she said, voice so cold that it could almost have extinguished the flames she was so close to calling. “There’s this thing called ‘privacy,’ if you’ve heard of it? I’m an adult now. I’m allowed to have some.”

“Sorry,” I said, lowering my arm. “I didn’t see anything I haven’t seen before, if that helps?”

“You changed my diapers. It does not help.”

“She, uh, didn’t change mine,” said Sam. “And the one time she popped in on me while I was in the shower, she was very careful not to see my junk. So I think I’m going to take ‘no new landmarks’ as a win. Hi, Mary. What’s going on?”

“Your dick is not a landmark,” said Annie.

“That’s not what you said last night.”

She hit him with a pillow. He stood there and took it like a man who was already committed to marrying into the family, and understood that dodging every missile just meant more flung objects in the future. Sometimes the people I’ve raised are predictable in ways that make me question what I’ve done to them.

Raised them all to be adults Frances Healy, the Flower of Arizona, would recognize and adore, that’s what. They’re happy, and that’s what really matters as far as I’m concerned.

“I am a grown, mature ghost, and I am not going to join this conversation in any meaningful way,” I said. “I’m here because I need to ask Annie some questions about her time with the Covenant, and I popped into the bedroom because I don’t really want to answer any questions just now. Which you know your parents will probably have for me.”

“You came back from the double-dead, kidnapped my cousins, and fucked off to who-knows-where,” said Annie, sitting up straighter against the pillows. “Yeah, I’ll say we have questions.”

“I didn’t kidnap anyone,” I said. “I needed someone solid, who had hands and could do things I couldn’t always, and Elsie volunteered.”

Annie blinked, then scowled.

“This whole situation involves the Covenant, and you’re burned,” I said. “Timpani having been a member means that Antimony can’t exactly go into the field with me without raising the kind of questions that could end with me on the wrong end of an exorcism.”

“She has a point, babe,” said Sam, tail snaking around her ankle and gripping it loosely, like he needed the reassurance that she was still solid. After the number of times she’d slipped away from him, I couldn’t really fault the impulse. Sometimes, watching them together reminded me of Johnny and Fran more than anything, one of them always running for the dangerous horizon, the other perpetually trying to pull them back to land.

Alice and Thomas weren’t quite the same dynamic. With them, it had only ever been a race to see which one was going to fall off the edge of the world first. Sam wasn’t human, but he’d have been utterly content to stay where he was, patiently watching things go wrong all around him, until he didn’t have a choice about whether or not to get involved.

“As for Arthur, he was a stowaway,” I continued. “Just got in the car without permission, and when we tried to put him out, he argued until we let him stay. He made some really good points. He’s a Price, too, and he has every right to go out into the field.”

Annie frowned, looking profoundly uncomfortable. “I’m not sure that’s true,” she said.

“Which part?”

“Both of them.” She shrugged. “He’s not Artie anymore, Aunt Mary. He’s… someone else. A patchwork person.”

“Your grandfather is a patchwork person,” I said. No one’s sure how many people went into Martin’s construction, just that it was several, collected lovingly by the scientist who originally assembled him. They say time heals all wounds, but sometimes lightning will do in a pinch if you don’t have a lot of time before the angry mob arrives.

“I know,” said Annie. “And Grandpa’s always been very clear about the fact that he isn’t any of those people anymore. He’s someone new, and so is Arthur. Sarah made him from the memories and ideas and opinions of everyone she could reach. He’s not Artie. He can’t even focus long enough to get through a full D I think she would have mentioned if Rose had been a target. Sadly, I think the Covenant is marginally smarter than that. No one who enjoys continued survival messes with a Fury.” I shook my head to hide my shudder. “Regardless, they’re here, they’re hunting, and they’re having a horrifying degree of success. They’ve been jarring the ghosts they capture, and torturing them to make spirit bombs.”

“Wait, what?” said Sam. “How do you torture a ghost? Why do you torture a ghost? What good is that supposed to do?”

Sometimes it was easy to forget how new Sam was to a lot of this stuff, sometimes surprisingly so, considering he was half-human and had been raised by a traveling carnival with a reputation for sheltering cryptids capable of coexistence with humans. But he’d been safe and relatively sheltered there, spared the greater complexity of our world. It had taken Annie to break him out of all that, and I still wasn’t entirely sure that had been a blessing for him.

“You torture a ghost by trapping them in a spirit jar—which is just a normal glass jar that’s been treated to make it ghost-proof, so we can’t get out once you suck us in—that’s been outfitted with things that can harm ghosts. Iron shavings, bits of mirror, rosemary, candle wax, pine splinters. And salt, of course.”

“Of course,” echoed Sam, sounding almost stunned.

“If you really want to torture them, you shake the jar once you have the ghost secured. Force all that nasty stuff through their body, disrupt and unsettle them.”

Sam frowned. “I’d be pretty unsettled if you kept pelting me with anti-Fūri junk.”

“What would you consider ‘anti-Fūri’?” I asked, unable to help myself.

“I dunno. Bananas and human shoes?”

“You are a very understandable man, Samuel Taylor,” I said. “But no, that’s not what ‘unsettled’ means when you’re talking about a ghost. Most of the ghosts you find haunting human houses were human before they died.”

“Makes sense.”

“For human ghosts, they die, and they appear in the twilight as essentially the same sort of haunting—sort of the larval form of whatever kind of spirit they’re going to become. That’s what we call the ‘settling’ phase. During settling, all ghosts are functionally the same. They won’t develop the talents or physical distinctions of their type of spirit until a few days have passed. That’s when ghosts are at their most vulnerable.”

“To what?”

“All sorts of things.” I looked at him grimly, noting that Annie was also paying close attention. For most of her life, I’d been bound by the crossroads, unable to answer even simple questions, much less explain complicated systems like settling. “If something interferes with an unsettled ghost, they can influence what that ghost will eventually settle as. That’s part of how we get haints.”

“What are—?” began Sam.

“A haint is a faded spirit. They don’t really remember who they were when they were alive. Memory is one of the first things an unsettled ghost starts to lose. They forget everything they cared about in life, they forget themselves, and they become, essentially, half-aware cobwebs fluttering through the twilight. But they can hunt and hurt the living if they’re summoned into the daylight world, and they can still manifest under the right conditions. They’re weak, but they move in packs, and it’s hard to fight a ghost that has nothing left to care about. Nothing to care about means nothing to lose.”

“Oh,” said Sam, sounding horrified.

“Haunts are a kind of ghost in their own right. I tend to use ‘haunt’ interchangeably with ‘spirit,’ and I really shouldn’t. The vocabulary is just so limited when you’re talking about the dead.”

“This isn’t Just a Minute, ” said Antimony. “You’re not being graded on hesitation, deviation, or repetition. Keep going.”

“Right. So ghosts settle, and if they’re stopped from settling, they can develop into haints, which is bad. No one wants an infestation of haints.”

“And the Covenant is un settling ghosts,” said Annie, slowly. “Mary, this is not good.”

“No, it’s not,” I agreed. “Better: if a ghost is going to develop poltergeist abilities, it happens during settling. I saw some of the captive ghosts back in Massachusetts. I’d say about a third of them have started to become poltergeists.”

Annie winced. “That’s way too many to be normal.”

“Yeah,” I said grimly. “The Covenant is hunting down ordinary ghosts, catching them, and torturing them until they turn into poltergeists, which makes them ten times more dangerous than they would have been otherwise.”

“And you’re here instead of protecting Elsie and Artie because…?”

“Because you’re the only one of us who’s seen this current generation of Covenant operatives. What do you know about Nathaniel and Chloe Cunningham?”

“They’re loyal, and they’re ambitious,” she said. “They know they won’t inherit, or they did when I was there—that was before Leonard lost me, twice. There’s a chance Reginald is reconsidering who holds the position of ‘favorite grandson.’”

“So Nathaniel may be hungry to move up; got it,” I said. “Isn’t it a little sexist to dismiss Chloe like that?”

“Yeah, but it’s also accurate to how Reggie’s going to look at things,” she said. “He’d never hand the Covenant off to a girl, even if he liked her best of all. It’s just not an option.”

“Asshole,” said Sam reflexively.

Annie leaned over until she was resting halfway against his hip, snuggling up within the limits of propriety while I was in the room. “Yup,” she said. “He really is. Were they alone?”

“Half of a four-person team. One guy, American, was in the van outside, and seemed content to stay there. He said he was doing a lot of the research.”

“New recruit, then,” said Annie with confidence. “They’ll have picked him up to provide a local view on things. Can’t hunt ghosts if you don’t know where to look.”

“That matches with what I was assuming,” I said. “He’s about your age, a little socially awkward, a little too willing to be flirted with by a sixteen-year-old girl who says she’s there to toilet-paper his van.”

“You didn’t, ” said Annie, suddenly grinning.

“Hey, it was an excuse that worked when you were a teenager, and I never had the opportunity to get up to that much mischief,” I said. “It worked. It got me into his van, which is where I saw all the ghosts in jars. They’re not in good shape, Annie. Some of them are too far gone to ever be themselves again.”

She swallowed hard, smile fading as she nodded.

“The fourth man is Brazilian, and I don’t know whether he’s a recruit of convenience or a longtime member who got unlucky; I met his sister before I met him, and she’s a midnight beauty. Whether he believes in this hunt or not, he’s in it to find his sister.”

“I guess you’ll know where his loyalties lie when it comes time to put her in a jar,” said Annie, harshly. “Are you going back?”

“I have to. The ghosts need me, and so do your cousins.” I thought of Elsie and Arthur. It was late in Massachusetts, late enough that they were probably done with dinner and snug in their rooms, either sleeping or waiting for me to come back and report on my evening. Either way, I needed to get back to them. “Thanks, Annie. This is really helpful.”

“Well, it’s mutual, because it helps me to know where you are,” she said. “Knock next time, okay?”

“If I have the time, I will,” I promised, and disappeared, throwing myself back across the continent to where my charges were hopefully still waiting for me.