Page 15

“I try not to mess with the divine when I can help it. I’m the ghost of a high school student from Michigan. The divinities people like me have access to are the ghosts of gods .”

—Rose Marshall

Worcester, Massachusetts, in the hallway of a cryptid boardinghouse

R EMEMBERING HOW DISTRESSED A NNIE HAD been by my sudden appearance, I tilted my return toward the hallway of Phee’s boardinghouse, appearing outside the room assigned to Arthur. I looked around to be sure I hadn’t just scared the life out of a boarder, then leaned to the side and looked at the bottom of the door. A thin line of light greeted me there: Arthur was still awake, or had fallen asleep with the lights on. I raised my hand and knocked lightly.

A few seconds later, Arthur called, almost timidly, “Come… in?”

I walked through the door.

Arthur’s suitcase was open on the bed, still packed, and his backpack was open on the floor next to the chair where he was seated, body half-turned toward the desk where he’d set up his laptop. Nosiness is a hard habit to break when it comes to the people in my care: I took a quick look at the screen before he could catch on and close the lid, and blinked at the sight of a familiar forum page. Cryptid teens need peers as much as human ones, and some of them get really good at network security, really early on. They have their own secure websites and forums, and if they’re a little more early 2000s internet than the modern stuff, well, I don’t hear any of them complaining.

I wasn’t as subtle as I thought I was. Arthur saw me looking and sighed, cringing a little as he turned back toward the laptop.

“I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help myself,” he said.

I moved closer, taking his position and failure to shut the lid as a tacit invitation. The user name at the top of the screen was an unfamiliar one, but the thread he had open had been started by a user named “MidwichGirl.” I frowned, giving him a hard, sidelong look.

“Are you stalking Sarah?” I asked.

“I don’t think I am,” he said. “I know her user name because she gave it to me, and this forum doesn’t require disclosure of real name, age, or species. If she thinks I’m a bogeyman from Iowa, that’s her business.”

“Honey, you know that’s not the way.”

“Do I?” he asked, with a sudden spike of swift anger that wasn’t Artie, wasn’t Artie at all. That boy had always been sweet and steady, trying his best, never losing control when he could help it, even a little. Artie had been my helper on so many occasions, the child it was easiest to buy off with gold stars and extra peanut butter cookies. This anger, though: I knew this anger. I recognized it. It belonged to his mother, who never stopped wanting, not even when she fell. It belonged to his sister, who wouldn’t thank me for calling her the best parts of Jane. It belonged to so much of his family, but it had never been his, and it hurt, hearing it from his lips, even if I knew someone else was speaking.

He wasn’t done. “I don’t think I know anything, except how much I miss her. She took herself away because she decided I couldn’t make my own choices, and now I’m trying to hold on, but I have those blank places crumbling all through my mind, and if I want to spend some of the time I still have keeping track of the woman I was made to love, I think that’s allowed.”

“Would Sarah agree?”

He didn’t answer. Just stuck his chin out at me and glowered, waiting for me to offer a response.

“How was dinner?”

“Good, except that it was all tomato-based, and that made me think of Sarah, and that’s why I’m on the forums again. I keep promising myself I won’t go back, because you’re right—it’s a little creepy that I know who she is and what she’s doing when she doesn’t know it’s me. But I keep logging in, every time I can’t stop thinking about her.”

“I’m sorry.” I meant it, too. Arthur didn’t deserve any of the things that were happening to him.

“Yeah, well. Watching Elsie flirt with that swamp-beastie lady the whole time didn’t help. She makes fun of me for getting tongue-tied, and I swear she could barely talk for half the meal.”

“I hope Amelia was flirting back?”

“She was,” said Arthur sullenly. “Big fun, being the third wheel at a table full of strangers. Did you find the Covenant team?”

“I did.” I sat down on the edge of the bed. “There are four of them that I know of so far, two from Penton Hall, one a local recruit, one semi-wild card. He’s got a Brazilian accent, and I know they’ve been able to get their claws into South America, so he could be a loyalist. He could also be a casual ghost hunter who got swept up in their mission. It’s hard to say. I don’t know how much institutional support they have for what they’re doing.” What I’d seen so far felt more like one of the family’s field missions than a proper strike team. But without knowing how much damage we’d done to the organization as a whole, I couldn’t say what that meant.

“Do you know anything about the ones from England?”

“Their older brother, Leonard, is the one who shot your mother,” I said. “He’s not here, or I’d be in Elsie’s room, begging her not to go on a suicide run.”

He looked thoughtful. “Maybe they can tell us where to find him. I look forward to asking.”

“They’ve been catching and torturing ghosts. They have at least two dozen of them currently captive. It’s not safe to go anywhere near them until we know how to neutralize all those spirits.” I shook my head. “They’re keeping them in a mobile Mesmer cage right now, which means they’re mobile, but also means they’re contained.”

“I guess that’s good.” Arthur frowned, looking at me. “You shouldn’t go out alone. If they caught you, we’d have no way of knowing it had happened. I look enough like Dad that I don’t think I’m much of a security risk, and Elsie doesn’t look like anyone except for Elsie. Never has.”

“I wasn’t planning to go out alone again unless I have to,” I said, trying to reassure as best I could. “I just wanted to see how many of them we were dealing with, and vaguely where they were. Now that we know, we can get started with the real work. Did Elsie’s flirting reach the point of anyone inviting anyone else back to their room?”

“Not quite.”

“Great. I’ll be right back.” I stood, walking toward the wall his room shared with his sister’s.

I was almost there before he called, “Mary?”

I stopped and looked back to him. “Yes?”

“You’re not going to get hurt again, are you?”

This was something we were all going to need to work on. I’d been dead long before any of these people were born, and it had led to a certain understandable tendency to think of me as indestructible, the one person none of us would ever need to worry about. Annie had been disabused of that impression when the crossroads had decided to punish me for helping her, a nasty, withering decay that still sometimes ached in the spaces where my soul believed I had bones. The rest of them had lost that soft self-deception in a blast in the basement of Penton Hall, when their beloved, immortal babysitter had been blown to bits for six long months of nothingness. He was just learning how to worry about me, while I had a lifetime of practice worrying about him.

So I looked over my shoulder and I did what babysitters have been doing for centuries, when their charges asked questions they didn’t know how to safely answer. I lied, with a smile on my lips and a bright twinkle in my eyes.

“Of course not, silly. These are amateurs. There’s no way they’re going to catch me in a box I don’t want to be in. We’re going to catch them, free the ghosts, and stop the hunt, and then we’re going to go home and make things right again. Now wait here. I’m going to get your sister.”

Before he could ask me anything else, I walked through the wall.

Elsie was in her room. No one else was, which was a pleasant surprise, even after Arthur’s reassurances. Not that I would have judged if she’d been having a little frisky fun time with a cute Hockomock Swamp Beastie—everyone has their own needs—but it might have startled Amelia enough to make this next part difficult.

Instead, Elsie was on her side on the bed, scrolling through her phone with practiced swipes of her thumb, liking pictures so quickly that it seemed impossible she could have fully registered what she was looking at.

Since she was mostly looking at adorable kittens and half-naked women, I guessed she knew enough not to need the details anymore. I circled around behind her, watching the endless scroll of soft, pretty things, and waited until she hit an ad before I said, “I’m back.”

Elsie didn’t jump. She did tense, shoulders going tight as she took more time to identify my voice than she had with any of the bikini models or white-faced Ragdoll cats. After several seconds, she lowered her phone and rolled over, focusing on me. “Mary,” she said, voice cool.

“What? Are you mad at me for not knocking? Because the last time I knocked, it didn’t go very well.”

“No. I’m mad at you for existing, and for going away, and for coming back.” She sat up, pushing her hair away from her face with one hand. “It’s too much, and it’s all stupid, and I just want to be alone and angry for a while. This is more time than I’ve spent with anyone since my mother died. I flirted with Amelia at dinner. Flirted, like my mother wasn’t rotting in the ground. Like I deserved to flirt. Like I deserve to do anything at all other than atone for letting her die when I wasn’t there.”

“Elsie, where is this coming from?” I moved to sit on the edge of the bed. She pulled her legs in, away from me, as she scooted herself into a more-upright position. That hurt, just a little, like she was moving away from me on purpose and not because it made conversation more convenient.

“My mother died, ” she said, like I didn’t know. “She went out into the field, without me, and she died. Someone shot her in the chest, and she died. ”

“Not ‘someone,’” I said. “Leonard Cunningham, heir apparent to the Covenant of St. George. He’s not here, but his brother and sister are. Their mother died too.”

Elsie paused, blinking. “What?”

“Their mother? She died when we set off the bombs in the basement of Penton Hall. Does that make this feel any better? Does it make it easier to breathe?”

“How do you know how this—?”

“I wasn’t always dead and rootless,” I said. “Once upon a time, I was a teenage girl from Buckley Township, just the same as your grandmother. Well, not just the same. I raised her, but I don’t think we’d have been friends if we’d been alive at the same time. She was too busy for me. She never liked to sit still. I was very good at sitting still. It was one of my best skills. And I wasn’t big on playing with dead stuff, unlike Alice, no matter how cool or interesting or whatever it looked. I was just a girl. I went to class, I did my homework and my chores, and I loved my mother very much.”

“I never thought…”

“Why would you? She died decades ago. Cancer. I sat with her in the hospital almost every day, and I prayed and I prayed and nobody answered me. She didn’t get a miracle. She got a headstone, and my father withered into nothing without her. I buried him, too. Technically I died before he did, but since no one noticed, I don’t really know how to measure that specific tragedy. But I was alive when my mother died, and it took all the air out of the room. Every room I walked into, for months, the air would just whisk away, like it had never been there to begin with. Naughty little girls with dead mothers don’t deserve to breathe.”

Elsie nodded, expression telling me that she understood exactly what I was saying.

“I blamed myself right up until I died. If I’d just prayed a little harder, or believed a little more, or hadn’t been late getting to the hospital so many times. If I hadn’t resented her for getting sick when I was trying to have a social life. If I’d agreed to go out with that boy she tried to hook me up with.” I didn’t even remember his name anymore. Somewhere in the gulf between my mother’s death and the moment, so many things had fallen away. “And then I died, and she wasn’t there to welcome me to the afterlife. I learned the rules of being a ghost, and more, I learned that spirits linger when they have unfinished business. When they want something so badly that death isn’t enough to make them stop reaching for it. So what did it say that my mother died and couldn’t even stay for me? How much was I worth if I was so easy to walk away from?”

Elsie didn’t move or speak, but her eyes were too bright, and I knew that she was listening.

“And then, after I’d been dead a while—it wasn’t overnight; I think Alice was your age when it happened—I realized that moving on hadn’t been about me. It was about her. She was at peace, she knew she’d done everything she needed to do, and she didn’t want to make my life about her death. She didn’t linger because it wouldn’t have fixed anything. It would just have meant I never got the chance to move on. She would have become my unfinished business by holding on too tightly to her own.”

Elsie sniffled, tears starting to roll down her cheeks.

“My mom lived a good life, and it ended too soon, and she never got to see me grow up. I never got the chance to disappoint her, and I guess that means she never got the chance to show me she wasn’t perfect. But she moved on rather than burden me with everything that might have been and didn’t get the chance to be, and that was perfect of her.” I turned my focus more fully on Elsie. “Your mom wasn’t perfect. She was petty and mean and she held a grudge like she was going to win a cash prize for keeping it the longest. She was also smart and quick and funny—fuck, she was so funny that sometimes she made me grateful I didn’t need to breathe. I loved her from the day she was born until the day she died, and I know she didn’t stick around because she didn’t have any unfinished business, and she didn’t want to burden you with all the things her death was going to mean. She moved on so you could be free, just like she was going to be. She loved you so, so much, Elsie. Watching her fight not to hurt you the way her mother hurt her was hard and painful and inspiring. She made me believe we could be better than our upbringings. It’s okay to mourn her. She was your mom. I grieved mine for decades. But you can’t stop living while you do it. You have to breathe and plan and eat and flirt and fuck around and fuck up and get on with things. That’s the way you show her she was right to trust you to carry on while she was gone. You live. That’s all you need to do.”

“I don’t know how, ” said Elsie, voice gone thick with snot and tears and grief. “She never told me how I was supposed to live in a world without her. She just told me how much she’d always hated living in a world without her own mother, and she didn’t want me to even think about doing it. So I don’t know how.”

“One day at a time,” I said. “One hour, one minute, one second at a time. You keep moving forward, because standing still isn’t even for the dead. You go to parties and laugh until beer comes out of your nose. You meet someone who makes your heart beat faster and you kiss them until your lips hurt. You dance and you sing and you scream and you keep moving. And then one day, something wonderful will happen, and your first thought won’t be about how you should call her. And you’ll probably feel guilty when that happens, and that’s okay, because you’ll keep moving forward. You live. That’s all you have to do.”

Elsie wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand, phone forgotten on the bed. “You were always there. No matter what happened, you were always there. So I guess I just assumed that if any of us died, it would be the same. And it isn’t. It isn’t the same at all.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I lost my mother and my brother and I hate everything about this. I’m supposed to have them forever. They’re not supposed to leave me.” She looked at me defiantly. “I don’t want anyone else to leave me.”

“Then you’re going to be disappointed,” I said. “People in this family may come back sometimes, one way or another, but people will always leave you. That’s what it means to be a person.”

“Don’t you mean ‘to be alive’?”

“No,” I said. “Don’t be vitalist. I’m not alive, and people leave me all the time.”

Elsie mustered a chuckle.

“Now, can we get back to the less-depressing reason I came in here? I told you I found the Covenant team. Two of them are siblings of the man who killed your mother. They’re here because their mother died in the collapse at Penton Hall, they know a ghost was involved, and they’re taking out their aggressions on the entire phantom population of the East Coast.”

A sick idea was starting to grow in my mind, telling me what they might be doing here. Every enraged, unsettled phantom they had jarred up was essentially the equivalent of a small bomb, getting steadily stronger and less controlled. Take as many as they had in that moving Mesmer cage, and you were looking at a spiritual explosive easily the size of the one we’d set off in their basement. Enough of those ghosts had poltergeist powers manifesting that I had no doubt they could—and would—tear a building down around themselves, and even if they didn’t do that, they could possess and confuse, they could scream their dead misery into the ears of the living and cause riots, or worse. They had so many potential targets that it was almost dizzying.

This wasn’t just about saving the dead from the living. It was also about saving the living from the dead, and always had been.

“Mary?” Elsie snapped her fingers in front of my face.

I blinked, snapping back into the moment. “Sorry. Just… thinking.”

“Cool. Did you know that when you’re thinking about something really unpleasant, the graveyard comes back to your eyes? They went all unfocused, and then they started getting gray and spooky like they used to be.”

“I did not know that.”

“These Covenant jerks. You said their last name was Cunningham. Did you get a first name at all?”

“Nathaniel and Chloe. Why?”

Elsie grabbed her phone, beginning to type. “How old would you say they are?”

“Your age. Maybe a little older, for him, and a little younger, for her.”

“Cool.” All her focus was on the screen now. She stopped typing and began to scroll again.

“Elsie, maybe this isn’t a great time for—”

“Got her.” She turned the phone toward me, looking smug. “Artie’s not the only one who understands how technology works. I was always better at social media. Mom made me show her every new thing that came along, so she could monitor where the cryptid communities were moving. It’s pretty interesting stuff, and you can tell when a platform’s going to break big by when the bogeymen start setting up there. Anyway, most people aren’t as good at it as I am, so they’re not prepared to hide their tracks.”

She shoved the phone closer to me. I looked at the screen, and there was a picture of Chloe Cunningham flashing a cheery V in front of the turtle fountain, the sun bright behind her, a wide grin on her face. The caption read: Spicy statuary here in the States! Love and kisses (not from the turtle). #adventures #tourism #massachusetts

“We already know she’s in town,” I said. “I saw her.”

“Yeah, but now we know she didn’t think to lock her Insta, and I can keep an eye on her. Learn more about her. Scroll back and see what kind of person she is.”

“Careful,” I cautioned. “She’s the kind of person who carries a spirit jar in hopes of catching the ghost of a child. Anything else is incidental.”

“Still, know thine enemy, right?”

“Right,” I said. “Arthur’s next door, if you want to come and plan next steps with us.”

“I think I can handle that,” she said, sliding off the bed.

Since I was walking with someone who wasn’t dead, I followed her to the door and let her open it before stepping into the hall. We left the room—

—and nearly ran right into Amelia, who was standing outside, looking like she was preparing herself to knock. She blinked and took a step back, clearly confused.

“Hi,” said Elsie, shutting the door behind us. “Did you need something?”

“Just your number,” said Amelia. “How am I supposed to send you suggestive text messages if I don’t have your number?”

“You’re not,” said Elsie. “I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong idea at dinner, but I’m not looking for anything serious.”

“Did I say I was?” asked Amelia. “A few teasing texts do not a relationship make.”

“I know,” said Elsie. “I really am sorry. I need to go and talk to my brother.”

She ducked her head as she pushed between us, heading to Arthur’s room. I refocused on Amelia.

“We didn’t really get to talk much before,” I said. “Elsie’s a grownup, but she knows what she wants and what she has the time for, and if she says no, she means no. I appreciate you picking up on how awesome she is, though.”

“If she thinks this is about her pheromones, you can tell her she’s wrong— please tell her she’s wrong,” said Amelia. “I had a cold all last week, I’ve got so much Vicks VapoRub on my chest and sternum that I won’t be able to smell anything else for the rest of the year. It’s all menthol and regret. So she doesn’t need to worry about influencing me.”

“I don’t think that’s her concern, but I’ll pass it along,” I said.

“I really appreciate it.”

“Okay, two things before I go. First, you realize I’m her babysitter, right? I’m not her sister or her friend, I’m her dead babysitter who tries to keep her from getting into the kind of trouble people don’t get out of while they’re still alive.”

“I know that.” Amelia frowned. “You think I don’t know a ghost when I see one? Please. Hockomock Swamp Beasties aren’t as big on lines between the living and the dead as humans tend to be. One of my uncles has been married to his current wife for twenty years, and she died nineteen years ago. They just figured it was a bump in the road and kept on going about their business. It works for them.”

“Huh.” Mixed marriages like that aren’t unheard-of, but they don’t tend to work out in the long run. Something about one partner remaining exactly the same while the other ages and grows tends to put a damper on true intimacy.

“What was the second thing?”

“ The— Oh .” I shrugged. “We’re here for a reason, and the job has to come first, for all three of us. If Elsie thinks she doesn’t have the time for something meaningful right now, she’s probably right, and it’s less about her pheromones than it is trying to be fair to you. If you really want to get to know her better, wait until we’ve done what we came here to do.”

“What are you here to do?”

I shrugged. “Save the world,” I said, and walked through the wall into Arthur’s room, leaving her behind.