Page 16

“Don’t put that in your mouth, young lady. You have no idea where it’s been.”

—Eloise Dunlavy

Worcester, Massachusetts, in a rented room at a cryptid boardinghouse

E LSIE WAS GOOD AT SOCIAL media. Artie had always been our computer guy, basically from the time that he could reach a keyboard, and so when Sarah had rebuilt him, she’d done it with the memories of a dozen or more people, human, mouse, and other, who believed he was a fantastic computer wizard, capable of doing almost anything.

Trouble was, none of the people who’d been contributing those memories had been computer wizards. So Arthur thought he was great with computers, when in actuality, he didn’t know much more than I did. And because he thought he knew everything already, he was remarkably resistant to picking up a book and learning.

Meaning we effectively didn’t have a tech guy. After ten minutes of watching him fumblingly try to match his sister’s trick, he threw up his hands and slumped in his seat. “I give up,” he said. “It’s impossible.”

“She has her brother’s profile friended, but he’s set to private,” said Elsie mulishly. “Do you think we have time to catfish him for access?”

“We don’t even know whether he’s straight, and coming at him with multiple profiles at the same time would probably tip him off that something was going on,” I said. “No catfishing.”

“But—”

“No.”

Elsie made an exaggeratedly put-upon face, and I knew we were going to be okay. Whether it was because I’d gotten through to her or because she’d just decided it wasn’t worth her time to be mad at me didn’t matter. All that mattered was moving forward.

Arthur had spun around in his chair to put the computer to his back, folding his arms. “Couldn’t we just orchestrate a meeting, if we know where they are? Bump into them at a coffee shop or something? Once we see which one of us she looks at like we’re a chocolate cake with thumbs, we’ll know who should be hitting on her online.”

“Okay, one, gross, and two, that would be exploiting your pheromones, which is not okay,” I said. “You know that. Consent matters, and when you go all incubus at someone, they don’t get to consent properly.”

Arthur looked briefly shamefaced—although not as much as Artie would have. I was starting to recognize the differences in their expressions, and some of them were pretty striking. They were like twin brothers, similar but never quite the same.

“These people are capturing and torturing ghosts,” he said. “As long as I don’t actually take advantage of them getting infatuated with me, I’m not sure I count it as an equal atrocity.”

There was an ethics-measuring contest I never wanted to get involved with. I shook my head. “No catfishing,” I said again. “All right: we know there are four of them, minimum, two fully trained and from Penton Hall, two more local and maybe not fully equipped for the field. I’m not sure the guy I met in the van has any training at all, beyond the technical side of things. Heitor… I get the feeling he’s here mostly for his sister.”

“So he won’t fight with them?”

“Oh, assume he will. Just also assume he won’t be quite as sophisticated, tactically.” I rubbed my eyes with the palm of my hand. “This is such a mess. I don’t even know if they have more team members in town.”

“You can find things, right?” asked Arthur abruptly. “Mostly people, but stuff too.”

“If the stuff is important enough, yes, at least currently,” I said. “The anima mundi gave me some extra freedom while we’re dealing with this. Why do you ask?”

“I think a van full of scared ghosts is pretty important. You could try going to the van, and then look to see if it’s parked where they’re all staying. I know you can’t take a phone with you, but you could pop back over here and we’ll be ready to go.”

I blinked at him. I had been focusing so hard on not splitting the party again unless I absolutely had to that I hadn’t considered my own ability to move freely. “That could work.”

“This would be easier if we had Sarah to keep us all in contact with each other, and to bring us to you once you figure out where we’re supposed to go, but we can make it work,” he said, clearly trying not to look pleased with himself. He wasn’t doing the best job. He didn’t need to be.

“We need a plan beyond ‘find them, hit them, go home,’” I said.

“All right,” said Elsie. “Most ghost hunting happens at night, right?”

“That’s when normal ghosts tend to be the most active.” Neither Rose nor I were good examples of “normal ghosts.” We were active when we needed to be—which for Rose meant daytime, since it was easier to get people to pick up hitchhikers when they could see them clearly, and for me meant whenever the kids I was taking care of were awake. I was nocturnal during their infancy, and then rolled slowly back to a more diurnal schedule.

Whatever the ghosts in those jars had been before they were captured, they were unlikely to have been hitchers or caretakers. Ghosts with jobs are harder to trap that way.

“Okay. Do you think they’ll be done at City Hall by now?”

I paused to consider. “The only ghost that’s still haunting City Hall wasn’t there tonight,” I said finally. “I assume he’ll have to go back around dawn. The people who built the place used the remains of his house in the foundations. It’s why he’s haunting the place. When you have a tethered haunting, it’s hard to stay away past a certain point. But since the Covenant can’t exactly go creeping around the place playing junior ghostbuster in the middle of the day, he should be safe until sundown.”

“And do you think they’ll be going back to City Hall?”

“They know there’s at least one ghost still there.”

Arthur, who was still new enough that he listened to every word spoken by the people around him, rather than assuming he could understand from half-statements and things he’d heard before, frowned. “What do you mean, ‘at least’?”

“What?”

“You said ‘at least one ghost.’ What do you mean?”

Well, crap. I shrugged. “I showed myself to them, to distract them and try to get a better idea of what they were doing there. I had a hat on, it was dark, and everyone was shining flashlights on everybody else. I doubt they’d recognize me by daylight.”

Arthur and Elsie both stared at me. “Mary, these are Covenant people, ” said Arthur. “They’re trained to remember faces, and they’ve been looking for us for decades.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said. “I know you think of me as part of the family, and I am, where it counts, but I’m as much an adoptee as James or Sarah. I don’t look like anyone the Covenant knows to be looking for. Even if I had in the beginning, the crossroads bleached me out so much that I don’t think they’d make the connection.”

Elsie stared at me for a long moment, eyes hard, before she sighed and looked away. “All right, fine,” she said. “They don’t know to look for you. That doesn’t mean we have to like you taking risks.”

“Fair enough,” I agreed.

“But we have the start of a plan,” she said. “We get some sleep, because no one likes going into a fight exhausted, and then in the morning, Mary goes looking for the van. I’ll keep an eye on Chloe’s social media, see if I can figure out anything about their movement, and whether they have anyone else with them. A team of four, we can take. A team of eight might get difficult.”

“Do you think you can sleep?” I asked. “That goes for both of you—I want you rested if we’re going into a potentially dangerous situation.”

“I do,” said Elsie.

“I can try,” said Arthur.

“Well, I don’t sleep,” I said. “But I can go explore the local twilight a bit, or go to the kids if any of them need me. Three children under ten, someone should want a glass of water in the middle of the night, right?”

It had been so long since I had three kids that young to take care of, I wasn’t sure I fully remembered how chaotic things could get. I cocked my head to the side, “listening” with the part of me that had nothing to do with sound. There was nothing. All three kids were sleeping soundly, as were most of the adults. Verity felt like a vast, distant bruise, all sorrow and stillness, which was so out of character for her that it made me want to drop everything and rush to New York.

I couldn’t do that. I was needed here. So I dug deep and mustered a smile for Elsie. “Sounds like we have a plan,” I said. “I’ll see you both in the morning.”

Then I disappeared, removing myself so they could actually get some sleep.

I reappeared in the living room. I didn’t have a room of my own to go to, and I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to explore the local twilight. I’d already met enough of the ghosts in the area; I could find them again if I needed to. As long as I didn’t really have anything to tell them—beyond “your brother is here to hurt you” and “all the missing ghosts are being tortured”—there was no point in rushing.

Of course, both of those were things Benedita would probably want to know, and that was part of what made me hesitate. The last thing I needed to do was trigger a mass haunting of a group of ghost hunters. These people were prepared for spirits in a way that normal living humans weren’t, and they might respond to any action with violence.

The dead can die. I didn’t want to be responsible for that.

With none of my kids calling for me, I had a few minutes to myself, and I didn’t know what to do with them. I walked toward the kitchen. Being dead, I don’t need to eat or drink; being solid enough to serve as a good babysitter, I sometimes enjoy it, and there’s something to be said for a hot cup of tea in the small hours of the morning. We were renting two rooms. Surely Phee wouldn’t begrudge me a little hot water.

There was a proper kettle on the stove, a lot like the one my mother used to use. I stood up a little straighter at the thought, feeling haunted. Everything I’d said to Elsie was the truth, and I’d had decades to get past the worst of my sorrow, but grief never truly goes away. It’s not a wound that can be healed. It’s more like a small, biting animal that lives in your ribcage, ripping and tearing at everything around it, made of teeth and claws and misery. So many parts of me had died in a field in Buckley, but the core of me survived, and the grief was a part of that.

I sniffled, then filled the kettle and placed it on one of the burners, turning it on to heat while I went digging for mugs and teabags. To my delight, Phee had plenty of both, and I was shortly settled at the table to wait for my water to be ready.

“Making yourself right at home, I see,” said Phee. I turned to find her standing behind me in the doorway to the hall, wearing a green robe so bright that it hurt my eyes. “That’s rightly grand. I’d hate for you to go back to all the other ghosts and tell them I’d been a poorly host when you were washed up on my doorstep. Will you be wanting honey, sugar, or milk?”

“None of those,” I said, politely. “They’re all nice things to put in your tea, but they won’t change the flavor much for me at all, and I don’t see the point in pretending that they might.”

“Fair enough.” She pushed away from the doorframe and strolled into the kitchen, smirking and amused. The kettle began to squeal and she took it off the burner, seeming to weigh it in her hand for a moment before she said, “Enough water for two cups. Someone taught you manners, miss ghost.”

“My mother liked her tea.”

“Did she, now? My mam was fair fond of it as well, so you see, we’ve something in common after all.” She turned to take down two mugs from the cabinet full of them, one a novelty Ireland design with a cartoon leprechaun on the side that felt stereotypical and offensive to me, but she would know better than I did if that sort of thing was a problem. The other was an advertisement for a local haunted house, complete with leering red-eyed ghosts in the classic “sheets with holes in” design. I eyed it and snorted lightly. Talk about stereotypical representations.

Phee dropped a teabag into each mug, added hot water to both, and followed it up with honey and a generous splash of whiskey in her own. This done, she set the undoctored mug in front of me and stepped back.

“There. Now the bare minimum is managed, in terms of hospitality, and my mam shan’t rise from the grave to swat me about the head and shoulders with her ladle.”

“That doesn’t sound likely even if you hadn’t fixed my tea.” I wrapped my hands around the mug, letting the heat travel through the ceramic and into my palms.

“How do you know? Have you ever dealt with clurichaun ghosts?”

“Most nonhuman ghosts spend their time on a different level of the afterlife than I do,” I said. “Picture it as sort of like a multilevel apartment building, all stacked together. I can be on the second floor directly above you, and we’ll never see each other. Only it’s more like papier-maché, where every layer is built on top of the one beneath it, so they get gradually bigger as you go along. And if you look at it that way, clurichaun ghosts would be at least two layers down from where human ghosts tend to be.”

“Interesting.” She sipped her tea. “You saying human ghosts inhabit the highest position in the afterlife?”

“Not like that, no. There’s more of us than anyone else, so we have the outer layer, I guess, where there’s the most room. And honestly, it’s good for us to be separated. Keeps us from running roughshod over everyone else.”

Phee nodded gravely. “I can drink to that. You find your Covenant coveys?”

“I found the strike team, yeah. They’ve definitely been catching and confining ghosts—and not just here, unless Worcester is the most haunted city in the world. A lot of local towns are going to be missing their resident hauntings. I’m hoping some of them will be able to go back once we release them.”

“Why only some?”

“Because the Covenant’s been torturing them, and some of the ghosts they have are already past saving.”

Phee sipped her tea again. “Then why are you sitting here having a cuppa, and not off saving your people?”

“My people are the two Lilu asleep in your guest rooms. Not every ghost is my responsibility.”

“Ah, but you feel some responsibility, or you wouldn’t be doing this. So why aren’t you out there playing hero?”

I frowned. “You have some sort of problem with me? Because this doesn’t feel like a very friendly cup of tea.”

“You served the crossroads for decades, Mary Dunlavy, and no one has your whole story, but bits of it have been circulating for years, and I know enough to know that I don’t trust you around my people. You’ve done a lot of damage in your master’s name. You’ve cut a lot of stories short. Now you show up here with two scions of a turncoat family and you call yourself redeemed. I don’t know that I care to buy what you’ve been selling. It seems a trifle too convenient to be worth the cost.”

She sipped her tea again, giving no sign that she was bothered by either the heat or the fact that it was half alcohol by volume. She just sipped, swallowed, and looked at me steadily, waiting for my response.

I sighed, putting my own mug aside. “Right. I guess we’re doing this. Yes, I served the crossroads. They recruited me as soon as I died, and they didn’t tell me what I was choosing when I agreed to work for them. While I’m sorry I served them for as long as I did, I can’t regret taking their original offer. Them grabbing me was what kept me from settling properly long enough that I could become a caretaker ghost for the Price family, and now I’ve been raising them for generations.”

“Oh, so it’s your fault they’re like this.”

“Sure, if that’s the way you want to look at it. It’s all my fault. That’s a blame I’m glad to carry. Because they’re good people. They help people who can’t help themselves, they set things right whenever they can, and they deserve a chance to grow up safe and healthy. I can give them that. I take care of them.”

“What makes them so special, that they deserve that sort of loyalty?”

I paused. “Nothing,” I said. “They were in the right place at the right time, that’s all. Sometimes the world can be kind even when you don’t ‘deserve’ anything. I take care of them because they’re mine, and they’re mine because when I needed something to hold on to, they were offered to me, in the form of one little girl who needed a sitter.”

“And now you’re here, in my space, getting ready to bring the Covenant down on our heads.”

“Not if I can help it.”

She eyed me mistrustfully. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t believe you.”

“That sounds like an order.”

“Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but I don’t believe you either way.”

“Fair enough.” The thought of drinking more tea brought me no pleasure. I stood. “I guess I’m off to track down the Covenant again, now that I have a better sense of where to begin. We won’t be bringing them down on your head. Don’t worry about that.”

Phee gave me a flatly disbelieving look. “Really. And how can you be so sure of that?”

“I can’t. You’ll just have to trust me.”

And on that note, I disappeared, reaching across the silence of the void for the shape of their van. I didn’t normally move around by looking for inanimate objects, but I had some experience. When the kids were little, they’d been forever losing some favored, beloved toy or other, and being able to find them quickly had been the only way I had of keeping the peace. I could find Alice’s taxidermy jackalope or Alex’s favorite plush alligator as quickly as I could find the actual children. Faster, sometimes, since the toys didn’t tend to keep running off when I was looking for them.

I blinked and Phee’s kitchen was gone, replaced by a suburban street a lot like the one outside her place. It was dark, and most of the lights were out in the nearby houses. As far as I could see, I was the only person moving on the sidewalk. That was good. It’s hard to be seen when there’s no one there to see you.

Just to be sure, I flickered, dropping momentarily into the twilight before pulling myself up again. There was no one watching me there, either. Actually, there was nothing there. No suburban street, no dark houses, no sidewalks. Just primeval forest stretching out as far as the eye could see, the memory of a continent as it had once been, sleeping peacefully in the shadows, waiting for the day it would be called to walk the world of the living once again.

When I returned to the sidewalk, the chill of that forest clung to my skin, seeming to worm its way down toward my bones. I shook it off, trying vainly to warm myself, and turned to scan the street for the van. I didn’t find it, which made no sense.

I’d gone looking for the van, and I’d appeared here, which meant logic said that it should have been nearby. I turned again, this time making a full circle, and still saw no sign of it. Frowning, I closed my eyes and tried to move myself toward the van.

When I opened them, I was still in the same place, outside a perfectly normal, boring suburban house. I paused, blinking, and then walked toward the closed garage. I reached out with one hand, cautiously touching the garage door, allowing my fingertips to skate just under the surface of the wood. Nothing tingled or bit at my flesh: there were no traps, at least not as far as I could detect.

I took a deep, unnecessary breath and walked through the door into the garage.

And there was the van, as unremarkable as ever, doors closed and engine off as it idled. I eyed it like I would a dangerous animal, circling it carefully. I could feel the Mesmer cage like static in the air, a containment unit for ghosts whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The garage was empty except for the van. None of the tools or piled-up boxes of holiday decorations that I would have expected to find. I frowned and started for the house. A single wooden step led up to the door, with no welcome mat or attempt to soften the transition. When I got close, I could smell fresh lumber, like someone had sawed off a plank to make the step.

No one lived here, then. This wasn’t even an Airbnb or a boardinghouse like Phee’s; it was an empty home, maybe owned by the Covenant, maybe belonging to some unwitting local realtor who had no idea what they were currently playing host to.

I touched the door to inside, testing it with my fingertips to be sure it wasn’t trapped, then turned intangible and stepped through it into the hall beyond. I was visible for one dizzying, nauseating second before I managed to will myself otherwise. Only then did I begin making my way quietly deeper into the house.

I found Nathaniel in the first room I checked, sound asleep and looking younger than I’d assumed when I saw him before. He snored, but delicately, like he’d been chastised for it so often that he’d somehow learned to control it, refusing to give up even that much control. I looked at him for a moment, wishing it didn’t feel like it was already too late for this to end in any way other than him joining me in death, and then moved on.

Chloe was in the next room. She was snoring substantially louder, passed out on top of her bedcovers with a mason jar clutched in her arms. I moved closer to see what it was, and jumped, almost turning visible, as the ghost inside pressed itself against the glass and screamed silently. I didn’t feel nearly as bad about the thought of killing her. Maybe that makes me a bad person. I think it just makes me a person with an eye for harm reduction.

The room after that had two beds, one occupied by the man from the van, the other empty. All three rooms had this in com mon: they were virtually empty, except for suitcases and, in the case of the third room, computers.

The missing man bothered me, though. I worried over the thought of his location as I left the room and moved deeper still.

I found the fourth member of the team in the living room. Heitor was asleep in an easy chair—or so I thought. I paused to watch him sleep for a moment, then turned away. And as I did, he sighed and said, “I know you’re there.”

Shit. I froze, still invisible, trying to figure out how that could be possible.

“I always know when ghosts are there,” he said. “I knew you were there in City Hall, but you were taunting Nathaniel, and I thought it might do him a little good to be reminded that he doesn’t know everything. He’s so damn cocky because he’s been with the Covenant since he was born, like that matters when he’s never been in the field before? Benedita and I were recruited when we were in our teens, and we’ve been in the field ever since. We were hunting iara and pishtaco when we were sixteen, and we were good. Then my sister’s head was turned by a haunt, and she let herself be hunted. She let herself be led astray. Now she dances to the midnight tempo, and she’ll never come home again.”

He sighed, opening his eyes, and looked right at me. “Are you stupid, little ghost, or simply tired of your existence?”

I gasped, dropping back into visibility in my shock. Heitor looked at me as calmly as if this was something that happened every day. And abruptly, it all made sense. Why he was with a European Covenant team on a ghost hunt. Why they knew so much about catching ghosts.

Why they had a Mesmer cage.

“You’re an umbramancer,” I said, and my voice didn’t shake, and I had never been more proud of anything in my life. “Why didn’t I see it before?”

“You’re an American ghost. You learned your tricks and tech niques from other American ghosts. We do things differently in Brazil. You ward off the dead with salt water, for tears and the sea. We do it with freshwater, for survival and the river, which knows us far more closely than your oceans can ever know you.” He hooked the chain around his neck upward with his thumb, showing me the small vial of water he had dangling there. It was clear, save for half an inch or so of sediment at the bottom. “The Amazon travels with me, and protects me from the eyes of the dead when I don’t want them to perceive me.”

“Do the Cunninghams know?”

“Those children?” He scoffed. “They believe all witchery is the same as their loathed witchcraft. They would call for my destruction as soon as they would work alongside me. No, they don’t know.”

“Then why…?”

“Did we join the Covenant? Money. Boredom. To prove a point. My sister and I loved each other dearly, and our parents were dead, and we needed to protect each other. Then the Covenant came to call, and they told her witches were wicked and evil and deserved to be destroyed. We were afraid, Benedita and I, that these strangers would realize what I was, and we decided the safest place for us was in the shadow of the beast. Their attention turned outward, so we burrowed inward, and we found safety, and we found purpose, and I have never regretted our decisions. Not even here. Not even now.”

“I see.” I wanted to blame him. Him being an umbramancer explained so much about how they’d been able to find and contain the ghosts they were systematically destroying. He had made all this possible.

And yet, hadn’t I done the same thing when I joined the crossroads? Maybe I’d been less aware of what I was doing, since I’d been a dead child at the time, but Heitor had been in the field at sixteen, which implied him having been younger when he was first recruited. He’d put his own survival above the survival of others, and that had been the right choice for him, and for his sister. He wasn’t a malicious man. He wasn’t even necessarily a bad man. He was just a man who’d chosen himself over the rest of the world.

That didn’t mean I could forgive him for the people he’d killed and the ghosts he was killing even now. But it meant I could understand, a little better than I necessarily wanted to.

“Are you going to hurt me?” I asked.

“I should,” he said. “I should put you in my pocket to save for later, suck the marrow from your soul a drop at a time and savor it. But no. I’m tired, and you’re dead, and if you’re stalking us, you must know the other phantoms of this city, so I’m willing to offer you a deal. Bring me my sister and I’ll go. Bring me Benedita.”

“And the ghosts you’ve already captured?”

“You must have seen them by now. You know they’re past recovery. I would say they were past redemption, but all phantoms are.” He leaned back in the chair, looking even more profoundly exhausted than he’d been when I entered the room.

I inched closer, trying to keep my distance and see the vial at the same time. The sediment at the bottle was moving, shifting around like a living thing was burrowed all the way to the bottom of it and still squirming restlessly. It made my stomach churn, another physiological holdover from the days when I’d had a body to harm.

“If you’re ready to leave, why—”

“They put out the word that they needed grunts to handle their dirty work—not them, of course, pampered scions of Covenant royalty; I don’t think Nate had ever washed a dish before he came here, and Chloe’s cooking is better described as the opening stages of chemical warfare—after the destruction of Penton Hall. They’re on the verge of destitution, you realize.”

I blinked. “What?”

“Didn’t you know, with your sniffing around and prodding them for weaknesses? The European branch of the Covenant has been keeping up appearances and living up to their ancestors for generations. They empty the coffers of every field office they open, keeping them running on shoestring budgets, and they lock every penny away behind blood wards. No one can get at their money without a direct bloodline claim. They lost more than lives when their stronghold came down. The whole organization is a year, at most, from total insolvency. They can’t afford their hired help, or their equipment, and they’re having to risk their precious children in the field. This won’t be their last field action, and there will be cells like mine scattered around the world for years, but the head’s off the serpent at this part; the body thrashes before it dies.”

“What?”

“My sister is dead, the people I answered to are dead, and the survivors can’t afford to pay me,” said Heitor. “My time with this organization is coming to an end, little ghost. Bring me my sister and it ends now. Without me, they’ll have the tools to catch and torment the dead, but they won’t have the power to find them. Protect your own kind by bringing me my kin.”

“I…” I’d only just met Benedita, and according to Heitor, she’d been a willing member of the Covenant. But she was dead now, no longer a part of the group she’d served in life, and if death couldn’t absolve her for what she’d done, we were all doomed.

I took a step back, away from him. “I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

“Remember, if you do it, this ends.” He shrugged. “If you don’t, we unspool the haunting of this entire coast, and we leave the barrows empty. It’s your decision.”

It was too big a decision for me. I turned away from him and vanished at the same moment, leaving their little suburban nest behind.